Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  “Not so far as I’ve noticed,” I answered, irritated by the stream of insults that Atto was directing at my adopted city; if he had such a bad opinion of it, I would have liked to say, why had he sent me here?

  “And yet I have looked into the question and at the post station I heard that a little while ago two carriages crashed into one another in a narrow street and the ladies inside refused to agree to reverse and give way to the other, since they were both of the same rank. They spent almost the whole night listing their own titles and merits to prove that the other should reverse and soon enough their yells could be heard in the neighbouring streets. It seems they even woke the Emperor, who had to send his own guards to make them stop, and the only way they could resolve things in the end was by pulling both carriages back at the same time and sending them on their way by alternative routes,” he concluded with an impertinent little laugh.

  All I could do was try the final thrust:

  “Signor Atto, there’s been a murder,” I suddenly said.

  At last Abbot Melani’s chatter came to a halt.

  “A murder? What are you saying, boy?”

  “Last night. A friend of Simonis, my apprentice. Simonis had asked some of his friends, whom I’d met, to look into the question of this strange Golden Apple that the Turkish Agha talked about in his audience with Prince Eugene.”

  “I remember it perfectly. And so?”

  “Last night Simonis and I had an appointment with one of these students, on the ramparts. His name was Dánilo, Count Dánilo Danilovitsch. We found him on the point of death. They had stabbed him several times; he died in our arms.”

  Abbot Melani took his blind eyes off me, turning mournful and worried at the same time.

  “It’s a very sad affair,” he said after a few moments of silence. “Did he have any family?”

  “Not in Vienna.”

  “Did anyone see you while you were tending to this Count Dánilo?”

  “We don’t think so.”

  “Good. So you shouldn’t get involved in the matter,” he said with a note of relief in his voice; if I were to be drawn into the enquiries, someone might follow the thread and arrive at him, an enemy spy.

  “Did you say his name was Danilovitsch? That isn’t a German name. Where did he come from?”

  “From Pontevedro.”

  “Ah, well, they’re not civilised people. Count indeed! Pontevedro! They’re little more than brutes, rough people . . .”

  Abbot Melani seemed to see things just like Simonis, who had coined the term “Half-Asia”.

  “I’ll bet that to support himself in his studies he took on some fourth-rate job,” added Atto.

  “Spying. He denounced anyone who broke the laws on modesty in dress for money.”

  “A spy by profession! And you’re amazed that someone like that, a Pontevedrin what’s more, should end up stabbed? Boy, it’s always sad of course, but there’s nothing surprising about this death. Forget all about it,” Melani said decisively, apparently not remembering that he too was a spy by profession.

  “And suppose it was the Turks? Dànilo was looking into the Golden Apple. While he was dying he whispered some strange sentences.”

  Atto listened with interest to what the poor student had muttered before breathing his last.

  “The cry of the forty thousand martyrs,” he repeated thoughtfully when I had finished, “and then this mysterious Eyyub . . . It sounds like the ravings of a poor wretch in his death throes. Dànilo Danilovitsch may have found out something about the Golden Apple, but it all seems quite clear to me: the Turks have nothing to do with it, your friend ended up just as one might expect a Pontevedrin spy to do.”

  The meal with Atto left me with a sense of sour uneasiness on two accounts. Abbot Melani had avoided my questions about the Turkish embassy too openly, somehow, as if the event were of no interest, and instead had subjected me to an annoying series of irrelevant reflections on Viennese customs. Too cold a reaction, I said to myself, for such a consummate diplomat as Atto, drawn to all intrigues and secrets, to any item of news on the political front.

  The second reason for concern was the way he had dismissed the death of poor Dànilo Danilovitsch. Just why, although he listened with interest to the last words Dànilo had uttered before dying, had he chosen to draw all suspicion away from the Turks?

  Atto announced that in the afternoon he would try to approach Countess Pálffy once again. I made no reply. Let him handle it by himself, I thought.

  I had to go with Simonis to an important meeting: his study companions were going to to get together to report the information they had gathered on the Golden Apple.

  A short while later I was in Penicek’s trap, alongside Simonis. I was beginning to appreciate that my assistant had at his disposal a docile Pennal, even though lame, with a means of transport thrown in. Simonis had a slave: something that not even I, who fed him, could boast.

  We began the journey in total silence. The memory of Dànilo’s last moments weighed on us. It was easy to deduce that the death had been due to Dànilo’s dangerous activity as a sycophant, as Abbot Melani had at once affirmed. But the suspicion that the poor wretch had been killed on acount of what he had learned about the Golden Apple, although not supported by any definite evidence, was in our minds and, drop by vitriolic drop, was injecting remorse into our hearts. I caught Simonis gazing at me absorbedly.

  “You still haven’t asked me, Signor Master,” he said, forcing himself to smile, “what jobs my companions do to support themselves in their studies so that they don’t end up in the academic prison for illegal begging.”

  The Greek was trying to tear down the curtain of doleful silence.

  “You’re right,” I said, “I know hardly anything about them.”

  Overwhelmed by all that happened in the last few days, I had asked my assistant very little about his friends. Given poor Dànilo’s ambiguous occupation, and Penicek’s irregular one, I was both curious and diffident as to the kinds of jobs they might be engaged in.

  “Koloman Szupán is the richest of all,” Simonis informed me, “because he’s a waiter. As you already know, our Pennal here present is a coach driver. Dragomir Populescu has little time to earn a crust of bread; he spends all his time with women. He tries it on with all of them, but with very little success. Koloman hardly ever tries but always succeeds.”

  “Oh yes? And how does he do that?”

  “He has what you might call extraordinary means at his disposal,” said Simonis, with a slight smile. “The word has spread among young Viennese women, who focus on the essentials and who are always very, very satisfied with Koloman. If you’re lucky, Signor Master, soon we’ll have proof.”

  “Proof?”

  “It’s three p.m. and at this hour Koloman is always hard at it. He has extraordinary vigour; every day at this hour he has to give free vent to his energies, otherwise he gets sad. If he doesn’t have a fine wench to hand, he’s liable to climb the first window he sees, wherever he is, and make his way across roofs and eaves to find some willing beauty. I’ve seen him at it with my own eyes.”

  We had reached a modest little house near the ramparts. After ordering Penicek to wait for us outside, the young Greek knocked. A young man opened up, saying at once:

  “He’s upstairs, he’s busy.”

  Simonis answered with a knowing smile. When we were inside he explained that the whole house, a small two-storey building, was rented to a group of students, who were all intimately acquainted with each other’s habits. In the narrow hallway we sat down on an old bench, close to the staircase leading to the upper floor. I had hardly had time to shake the snow from my cloak when a cry came to us from upstairs.

  “Aaaaahhh! Yes, like that, again . . .” cried a girl’s voice.

  “We won’t have long to wait, Koloman knows we can’t arrive late,” whispered Simonis, winking at me.

  “You’re an animal, a beast . . . Again, go on, please!” continue
d the Teutonic woman imploringly.

  But Koloman must have heard we had arrived. We heard his voice offer some tactful objection. The discussion continued for a while and then grew more animated. Suddenly we heard a door slam violently, the same woman’s voice insulting Koloman and then footsteps descending the stairs. We saw the young woman (quite pretty, blond hair gathered at the back of her neck, plain but new clothes) running towards the door, foaming with rage. Before stepping outside, ignoring our presence, she turned back towards the staircase and shouted a last epithet at Koloman:

  “You’re just a miserable Hungarian waiter, you deformed beast!”

  She slammed the door so hard that the whole hallway shook.

  “The usual Viennese refinement,” said Simonis with a soothing smile.

  Just then our friend came downstairs, buttoning his shirt with an expression halfway between embarrassed and amused.

  “Actually I’m a baron, the twenty-seventh Koloman Szupán of my family, to be precise, and I only work as a waiter to support myself while studying,” he said as if the young woman were still there. “Excuse the rather unedifying scene, but the Viennese are like that: when you have an engagement and are obliged to speed things up, they lose their tempers and turn unfriendly. Whereas in Italy . . .”

  “Women are more patient?” I guessed, while Koloman put on his cloak to go out.

  “In Italy I never speed things up,” smiled Koloman, slapping Simonis on the back and walking towards the door.

  The Pennal’s trap set off again slowly, plodding along the road with its soft mantle of snow towards Populescu’s home: the same apartment where two days earlier I had attended the scene of the Deposition. It was here that the group of students had agreed to meet: each of them had sought information about the Golden Apple, and they would undoubtedly have some news to give us. Unfortunately, what might have been an enjoyable get-together among students had become an emergency meeting. Word of Dànilo’s tragic death must have spread throughout the university, but obviously it was his friends who had been most affected by it. Koloman Szupán himself, after that first moment of cheerfulness, grew taciturn. To drive away sad thoughts, just as Simonis had done with me a moment earlier, I tried to strike up a conversation on the journey, and asked him if he was satisfied with his job as a waiter.

  “Satisfied? For the moment, I thank God that Lent is over,” said Koloman, mopping imaginary sweat from his brow.

  “Why’s that? I thought that in Lent waiters in inns worked less than usual, since you can’t eat meat and so the diet must be lighter.”

  “Lighter?” Koloman burst out laughing. “In Lent you have to sweat twice as hard to do all those complicated fish recipes! Roast eel with lard; pike in sour cream; baked crabs with parsley-roots stewed in oil with lemon and oyster sauce; roast stockfish with horseradish, mustard and butter, not to mention roast beaver . . .”

  “Roast beaver? But that’s not a fish.”

  “Tell that to the Viennese! And you have to catch them, the furry wretches. Good job there are also Luther’s eggs.

  “Luther’s?”

  “Yes, the ones Luther will never eat. They’re the Lenten eggs. They call them that as a joke, because Catholics eat them to abstain from meat, while the Protestants laugh and eat whatever they want. Then there’s fish.”

  During the Lenten penitence, explained Koloman, in the kitchens of Viennese inns you’ll find an unimaginable quantity of fish, and of an even greater variety than in Italy. Even among the mountains of the Tyrol there were those, like the famous doctor Guarinoni (yet another Italian), who advised people not to overdo it with all the things on offer: fish from streams, rivers, lakes and the sea, from the most unlikely places; from the Hungarian lake of Balaton, from Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, Bosnia and the Italian coast of Trieste. From Venice special mail coaches brought heaps of oysters, sea-snails, mussels, crabs and clams, frogs and turtles, and other specialities arrived on special swift convoys even from Holland and the remote North Sea.

  “I know they’re placed under blocks of ice but don’t ask me how on earth they get here still fresh after such a long journey; I’ve never understood it,” added Koloman.

  As it was a tough job to abstain from meat until Easter, and as water is always water, during Lent the menus would contain, alongside the fish and crustaceans, otters and beavers! All served roasted and eaten with great relish.

  Abraham from Sancta Clara was quite right, I thought, when he said that in Vienna no animal of land, air or water can be sure of not ending up on the table.

  “These Viennese,” Koloman added, “didn’t curb their appetites even when the Turks were breathing down their necks.”

  “What have the Turks got to do with it, Koloman?”

  He explained that during the famous, dramatic and glorious siege of 1683, which has gone down in history, the Viennese never lost their appetite and relish for good cooking. While the city risked being conquered and razed to the ground, groups of Viennese, including women and children, would leave the fortress at night, at great risk to themselves and their fellow citizens, to go and buy bread from the Turks.

  “From the Turks? And they sold it to them?”

  “They had some really poor soldiers who needed the money. And in the Turkish camp they were never short of bread.”

  Those found guilty of such trafficking were punished in the respective camps, both by the Christians (three hundred whiplashes) and by the Ottomans. However, Koloman explained, there was no way to put a stop to it. And in Vienna there was also the problem of thirst.

  “Of course, water . . .” I remarked.

  “No, there was always water. It was wine they’d run out of.”

  As the gourmet always prevailed over the soldier in the Viennese spirit, entire cartloads of wine were often intercepted, which had been brought down from the surrounding countryside, and which stole their way into the city at night. Sometimes unthinkable things would happen, like the occasion when the besieged Viennese, while the battle was raging, managed to get hold of an entire herd of over a hundred bullocks, from behind the Turkish lines (how this was managed was a mystery).

  I heard with ill-concealed disappointment this behind-the-scenes insight into the great siege. How far removed from my grave meditations on the heroic resistance of the Viennese! Things had apparently been quite different.

  “Not exactly the unblemished, fearless heroes of legend,” I remarked dazedly.

  “Oh, they were fearless all right. But they had plenty of blemishes: of wine and fat, on their collars and shirt sleeves,” laughed Koloman.

  Just think, he concluded, that during the siege in 1683 there was even someone in the city who had treacherously passed on a very valuable piece of information to the Turks: within the stronghold civilians and soldiers were no longer collaborating; the Viennese were exhausted and wanted to surrender.

  “It was 5th September. Hardly anyone knows this story, which could have changed history. For some mysterious reason the Turks did not attack at once, and what a stroke of luck that was! Six days later reinforcements arrived and the Christian armies won.”

  But I knew why the Turks had not attacked Vienna at once: I had discovered it twenty years earlier in Rome with Abbot Melani. But it was a highly complicated story and if I told it to Koloman, he would not believe me.

  By now we had arrived. Shaking the snow from our boots and our clothes, we were welcomed in by Dragomir Populescu, who was waiting for us with Jan Janitzki Opalinski. They greeted us with an anxious, anguished air. This time Penicek came in with us, and made his greetings, as awkwardly and ponderously as ever, with his ugly little eyes like a bespectacled ferret.

  “I have news,” said Opalinski at once.

  “So have I,” added Populescu.

  “Where’s Hristo?” asked Koloman.

  “He was busy. He told me he’d be a little late,” answered Simonis. “In the meantime we can start.”

  “But Koloman, what are you d
oing here at this hour? Have the good ladies of Vienna all stood you up today?” sniggered Dragomir, with a hint of bitterness in his voice.

  “On the contrary. But you always leave them so horny, with your little sparrow’s twig, that it just takes me three minutes each to make them come.”

  “Don’t get worked up, Dragomir, keep calm . . .” muttered Populescu, clenching his fists.

  “That’s enough joking,” said Simonis. “Dànilo is dead, and we all have to be very careful.”

  They all fell silent for a moment.

  “Friends,” I spoke up, “I thank you for the help you’re giving me on the question of the Golden Apple. However, after your companion’s death, I won’t blame you if you want to go no further.”

  “But perhaps Dànilo was bumped off by someone taking revenge for one of his acts of spying,” muttered Opalinski thoughtfully.

  “It may even have been one of his fellow-countrymen from Pontevedro,” Populescu said in support. “They’re real beasts there, not like where I come from in Romania.”

  “After all, he’s certainly not the first student to end up murdered,” added Koloman.

  And they all competed in bringing up sad cases of students of the University of Vienna who had died violently for the most varied reasons: in duels, surprised while stealing; involved in smuggling et cetera et cetera.

  “And they were all from Half-Asia,” whispered Simonis to me with a significant glance, as if to underline the particular inclination of those people for an iniquitous life.