Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  “So you too read the column with . . .”

  “My dear Domenico, who also knows German,” he said, gesturing towards his nephew who continued to remain silent, “sometimes illuminates the darkness into which God has chosen to plunge me,” he recited, alluding to the fact that it was now Domenico who served as reader for him.

  Atto Melani’s arrival in the city really was quite incredible: coming from the enemy city of Paris, he had managed to penetrate the capital of the Empire with impunity. And the border controls were extremely strict! There had always been a rigorous mechanism for checking up on new arrivals and on dangerous individuals: foreigners, spies, saboteurs, bearers of disease, gypsies, beggars, rogues, dissolute characters, gamblers and good-for-nothings. Ever since the Turkish threat had become a constant one, and particularly since the last siege in 1683, Emperor Leopold I, father of the present Caesar, had tightened all controls. There were regular censuses on all those living within the walls, excepting soldiers and their families. Everyone who had anything to do with travellers and visitors was subject to careful checks. Owners of apartments, landlords, hotelkeepers, hosts, coachmen: nobody could transport, host or feed anyone without reporting all data on the person to field-marshals, burgomasters, magistrates, commissioners for streets or districts, security commissions, culminating with the fearful Inquisitorial Commission. Anyone who secretly took in strangers, even for just one night, risked serious trouble, starting with a hefty fine of six imperial Talleri. To prevent foreigners from getting through the city gates unchecked, by simply changing from a long-distance carriage into a city wagon, coachmen, postillions and trap-drivers were all subject to checks. And that was not all: to deter hardened offenders, two secret stations were set up for anonymous denunciations against suspicious travellers and their accomplices, one in the Town Hall in Via Wipplinger, the other at Hoher Markt, the High Market.

  Despite all this, Abbot Melani had quietly entered Vienna.

  “How on earth did you elude all the checks?”

  “Simple: they made me sign the Zettl, that sheet where they register your details, and I passed through. And I signed in my usual way: I had no intention of changing my name into Milani. I know I sometimes write hastily, but it was they who read it wrongly. In these cases the best strategy is not to hide at all.”

  “And no one suspected anything?”

  “Look at me. Who is going to suspect a blind, 85-year-old Italian, obliged to travel in a litter?”

  “But an 85-year-old blind man surely can’t be a postal intendant!”

  “Yes, he can, if he’s retired. Don’t you know that here in the Empire you keep your titles until you die?”

  Then he began to touch my face, as he had done when we first met, to rediscover with his fingertips what he still preserved in his memory.

  “You have been through a good deal, my boy,” he remarked, feeling the furrows delved in my forehead and cheeks.

  He gripped my hands, still hardened by the calluses and chilblains I had brought from Rome. He said nothing.

  “I’m sorry, Signor Abbot,” I managed to say without taking my eyes from his face, while all the words of gratitude – and even of ardent filial love for the decrepit old castrato – died in my throat at the sight of those two impenetrable black lenses.

  He stopped fingering me, tightening his lips as if to repress a grimace of sadness, at once concealed by the cup of coffee that he raised to his lips and by an affected little gesture as he adjusted his black lenses on his nose.

  “You will be wondering why I am here, apart from the pleasure of seeing you again, a pleasure which, at my age and with the serious ailments that trouble me, would not have sufficed to over-rule the doctors. To the very last they tried to prevent me from leaving Paris to face such a long and dangerous journey.”

  “So . . . you came for some other reason,” I said.

  “For some other reason, yes. A reason of peace.”

  And he began to explain while the coffee, sweetened with a touch of perfumed lokum (a sort of gelatinous Turkish nectar, which unlike honey does not spoil the taste of beverages), flowed through my stomach and veins and I was finally able to enjoy the warm sensation of having rediscovered the scoundrel, impostor, spy, liar and perhaps even murderer, to whom I owed not only my present prosperity but also a thousand teachings that had lightened my existence, either through my acceptance or – more often – through my rejection of them.

  Melani’s story began with the events of two years earlier: 1709 and its cruel winter had been dire not only in Italy, as I myself knew all too well, but also in France. It had been the most terrible year of Louis XIV’s entire reign. In January all the roads and riverbanks were frozen, sudden deaths were carrying off both the rich and the poor in great numbers. Many of those who ventured forth through the country, on foot or on horseback, died from frostbite. The churches were full of corpses, the King had lost more of his subjects than if he had been defeated in battle. Even the King’s confessor, Father La Chaise, had died of cold, on the short journey from Paris to Versailles. Atto himself had stayed shivering in his bed the whole month. The troops were ill-paid and the officers, unless supported by their families, fought unwillingly. The bankers no longer paid in gold coins and ready silver, but in notes from the mint known as currency notes. All letters of exchange and other payments were made with these notes, and by order of the King, if anyone demurred over them, or wanted to change them into gold or silver (“real money and not waste paper!”, exclaimed Melani), they were only exchanged for half their nominal value.

  In April famine struck. The city was besieged by swarms of poor peasants who were dying of hunger; no one could leave Paris without the risk of being robbed and killed. The people were exhausted, famished and desperate. At the end of the month there was almost a general uprising: in the church of St Roch a pauper, who had been begging in church, was arrested by a group of archers. As the transgressor (even though unarmed) resisted arrest, the archers beat him to death in front of the shocked congregation. The people then rose up and tried to lynch the guards, who only escaped by taking refuge in a nearby house. Meanwhile the flame of revolt had been kindled: hordes of enraged citizens came to St Roch from all over Paris, and the tumult lasted for hours and hours before being finally quelled.

  In May the famine merely multiplied the number of tumults; the only bread available was as black as ink, and cost over a Julius a pound! On market days there was always the danger of the whole city rising up.

  In June the city’s coffers were exhausted, there was no money except for the war, and yet even the soldiers no longer received any wages and had to get their families to send them money.

  When the cold season returned, the frost killed all the olive trees, a vital resource for the south of France, and the fruit trees turned barren. The harvest was wiped out and the storehouses were empty. Corn, which came cheap from eastern and African ports, was continually plundered by enemy fleets, against which France had very few ships. The King had to sell his gold plate for a mere four hundred thousand francs; the richest lords in the kingdom had their silverware melted by the mint. While Paris only ate jet-black bread, in Versailles the King’s table was furnished with humble oat-bread. But in the gazettes not a single word was said about all this grinding poverty, thundered Atto; the newspapers contained nothing but barefaced lies and bombast.

  “You will have wondered what your dear old Abbot Melani was up to in Paris,” he said sadly. “Well, I suffered from hunger, like everyone else.”

  The Sun King had realised by now that he had to make peace with his Dutch, English, German and Austrian enemies at all costs. But his overtures, addressed to the Dutch by diplomatic paths, were scornfully rejected over and over again.

  “No one must know,” whispered Atto Melani, leaning towards me, “but even the Marquis of Torcy humbled himself in an attempt to obtain peace.”

  Torcy, who was considered abroad as the principal minister of France, left
Versailles for Amsterdam under a false name and turned up at the palace of the Grand Pensionary of Holland, who learned to his amused surprise that this great enemy was humbly waiting for him in the antechamber to sue for peace. He turned him down. Torcy then made the same request to Prince Eugene, commander of the imperial forces, and to the Duke of Marlborough, leader of the English army. They too turned him down. The French then tried to bribe Marlborough, again without success. The Sun King was finally reduced to the unthinkable: he sent a letter to the governors of his cities and to the whole population, in which he endeavoured to justify his conduct and the terrible war that was bleeding the land dry.

  “Really?” I said, amazed at Atto’s last words, never having heard anything about the Most Christian King other than how arrogant, scornful, implacable and cruel he was.

  “This war has changed many things, boy,” answered the Abbot.

  “Including the greatest king in the world?” I asked, citing the definition of the Most Christian King that I had heard from Atto thirty years earlier.

  “Le plus grand roi du monde, the greatest king in the world, yes,” he repeated in a tone that was new to me, adding to the sugary tinkle of those words a dose of vinegary scepticism. “Which is the greatest king in the world? The proud Sun or the sober and patient Jove? The bloody barbarous condottieri or the best Caesars of the Roman Empire? And in truth, whose mind does not marvel at the contemplation of Caesar’s military ardour, Augustus’s royal arts, Tiberius’s profound and arcane mind, Vespasian’s economy, Titus’s amiable virtues, Trajan’s heroic goodness?” Atto proclaimed heatedly. “Who does not admire Hadrian’s various and manifold literature, Antonine’s clemency and equity, Marcus Aurelius’s wisdom, Pertinax’s strict discipline, Septimus Severus’s fierce and versatile simulation? What can I say of Diocletian’s nobility of spirit, Great Constantine’s sublime piety and victorious fortune, Julian’s perspicacious spirit, Theodosius’s tolerance, religion and parsimony and the many virtues and high prerogatives of the other Roman emperors? It was these virtues that made them eternal in the grateful memory of the human race, certainly not the blood spilled in military campaigns!”

  I could not understand what Abbot Melani was leading up to.

  “Much could be said to commemorate the majesty of the laws, the gravity of the senate, the splendour of the equestrian order, the magnificence of the public buildings, the riches of their treasury, the valour of the captains, the number of the legions, the maritime armies, the royal tributaries, and Africa, Europe and Asia held under the will of one single man. But if the sovereignty of the Roman Caesars’ imperial rule lasted a thousand years it was due less to blood and martial valour than to good sense and the gift of reason, of true freedom and of righteous rules of living bestowed upon the subjugated peoples.”

  It had certainly not been, I reflected, the policy of the Most Christian King to bestow freedom and righteous rules of living on his conquered peoples: his first concern was to put everything and everyone to fire and the sword. He had even done so in the Palatinate, although it was the birthplace of his sister-in-law. I had never heard Atto Melani lavish such praise on virtues of government so remote from those of his sovereign; indeed, I had always heard him seek to justify the dubious conduct of the French.

  “In like fashion was Deioces exalted to the throne of the Medes,” continued the Abbot. “Venerated for his rectitude, he was called to settle their differences with fairness. Similarly, Rome, when still unregulated and fierce, called Numa Pompilius from the Sabines as their ruler, his only known merit being the austere and religious severity of his habits. And what other aim did the ancient republic have than the universal peace of its peoples, and the eradication of barbarism and blind brutality, perennial sources of vices, and wasteful ravagers of human concord and civil life? It was thus only fair that an empire founded on reason and on true valour, governed by the rule of honesty, whose aim was peace among its peoples, and in which each member was granted free access to dignities and to honours, should still be universally venerated as legitimate and holy, and its leader be recognised and obsequiously adored as the living oracle of reason and of true valour. The legitimate heir of that ancient Roman Empire is the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation and your Most August Caesar Joseph the First, the Victorious.”

  “Your words surprise me, Signor Atto, but I cannot but agree with you. The wisdom of the Caesars of the House of Habsburg spared Vienna the insult of the famine that raged throughout Europe,” I declared.

  “Remember, boy: no praise is more befitting to an Emperor than that of virtue: true nobility is nothing if not virtue ingrained in a family, passed on from father to son,” Melani pronounced solemnly. “Without virtue the royal family is destined to perish and with it the whole kingdom. The Habsburgs will sit on the throne of the Hofburg much longer than the lineage of the Most Christian King in France.”

  I could not believe my ears. Was this the voice of Atto Melani, the faithful servant of His Most Christian Majesty, the secret agent of the crown of France, whom I had always seen blindly serving his king, even at the cost of tarnishing himself with appalling crimes? Now of all times, in the middle of a war?

  “The French care for nothing but appearance, and at that they are true masters,” he went on. “His Most Christian Majesty has created around himself the grandest, costliest and most magnificent of spectacles. He has outdone every other monarch in the splendour of his court, and the trumpets of glory and fame have sounded for him every day. His cannons have pounded half Europe, his money has corrupted every foreign minister. The tentacles of France have extended everywhere, but to what end? Now its body is like a beached octopus: empty, flaccid and rotten.”

  He adjusted his black glasses on his nose, as if to insert a pause that his impatience barely accepted.

  “How much has all that glory cost France? How many peasants have died of hunger to pay for their king’s cannons and ballets? In France they waste as much as 250 thousand silver scudi on the court, a third of the state’s budget, while in Austria they spend less than 50 thousand. They drove my friend Fouquet from the ministry of finance and slandered him; but it was only then that the public finances truly collapsed, with the court now spending three times as much as it did in the days of Louis XIII, and the kingdom in ruins! So who is the thief?”

  He fell silent and wiped a bead of sweat from above his lips. Then he replaced the handkerchief in his pocket with hasty annoyance.

  “Ah, my dear! I wish I could roll up the surface of the world like a carpet and drag the adversities of Paris right here, before your eyes. Then you would see it all for yourself: people dying of hunger, desperate citizens, bakeries assaulted for a crust of bread, riots brutally crushed. You would see families selling their meagre possessions to survive, war widows prostituting themselves for their family’s sake, children begging in the streets, newborn babies dying of cold. Is this glory? Everything is falling apart in Louis’s kingdom. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are four in number, but only one, the white steed of War, is galloping at such speed. One day you will come and see me in Paris, at Versailles. That is when you will appreciate the greatness of Vienna.”

  “Of Vienna?”

  “The French adore show, and at Versailles everything is show,” sighed Atto. “In that false universe, everything revolves around the Sun King and his radiance. Any mortal being can walk quite undisturbed into the gardens, the royal palace, even the royal apartments: only His Majesty’s little room for private meals is private. You can see him take lunch and dinner or attend his morning levée, when he wakes up with his breath still rancid from the previous evening’s partridges. When he comes out from mass, there are so many people waiting for him you would think you were in some square in Paris. And between the Tuileries and the Louvre there are only supposed to be a few authorised courtiers; instead there’s such a crowd of carriages, idle strollers and domestic servants that one might as well be at the fish market. There are so many peop
le bustling around the royal palaces, both inside and outside, and they behave so shamelessly, that in order to reduce the number of thefts in the Royal Chapel the death penalty is supposed to be in force. Wholly absurd, since no one is ever executed. At lunchtime any parasite can worm his way into the rooms, maybe chatting with His Majesty’s nephew, and sit down at the table of the great master of the house, or at that of the chamberlain, of the almoner, that of the court preachers or the King’s confessors. Amid this drunken bedlam, where idle chat and extravagance have free rein, while you bow in some corridor as the golden salt cellar is carried towards His Majesty’s table, you will be surrounded by gossip about lovers and the sodomitic adventures of this or that person. If you are ill, you can let yourself by touched by the King during the toucher, when he touches invalids with the same hand that throughout his life has penned orders for invasions and the butchering of entire nations. If you have an important friend, you can take part in the débotté, when His Majesty graciously allows his boots to be removed: foolish rituals which he now uses for his own glorification, but which go back centuries, to the days of the Valois. And over these years, while the courtiers have quarrelled among themselves for the most prestigious position, for a higher salary or just out of mutual hatred, and have dared to mock the sovereign who tolerates them, France has been bleeding itself dry with the cost of the war and sinking ever deeper into its present inferno. On the other hand, in Vienna . . .”

  “In Vienna?” I repeated again, amazed to hear Atto praising the enemies of France.

  “Can you not see with your own eyes? In France it is waste that reigns, and in Austria parsimony. There adultery is the rule for every sovereign, and here faith to one’s consort. Only servants enter the Emperor’s bedchamber, and not every passing flatterer. He does not have himself portrayed in a chariot crushing all those that resist him, nor does he order operas from that bootlicker Lulli showing himself dressed up as Perseus, slaying dragons and conquering princesses. Instead, Leopold, the father of the present Emperor, had himself portrayed in the act of bowing down before the power of the Lord, thanking Him for removing the plague from Vienna.”