Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  “I’m very sorry, I hope you recover soon,” my assistant answered laconically.

  “But the greatest burden is my age,” added Atto, “and the piles that torture me ceaselessly. Especially the other night, when I thought I was going to die.”

  Poor Simonis, I thought, now it was his turn to listen to Atto’s endless whining about his aches and ailments. I hoped that Penicek would arrive soon.

  “A few years ago,” Melani went on, “the change in the weather and the thaw caused a great revolution in the humours of my body, just like now. I went out one morning to pay my respects to a dear friend in the country and I was forced to go back home without seeing him.”

  Atto was repeating to Simonis what he had already told me during the rehearsal of Sant’ Alessio, but this time he omitted the name of the minister Torcy and anything else that would betray him as a French spy.

  A grim-faced fat woman, who usually sat at the cash desk, came to take our orders.

  “A pity,” whispered Atto when she had gone. “From the voice I think she’s not the nice waitress we had last time, who so kindly gave me the chocolate scoop with marzipan. Is that right, boy?”

  “No, Signor Atto. I don’t think she’s here today,” I answered, after looking around in search of the girl’s raven hair.

  It’s really true, I thought with a smile, old people turn into children again. Ten years ago Atto would never have been softened by a scoop of chocolate offered by a simple waitress.

  The grim-faced cashier came back almost immediately and served us first with a scowl and then with coffee, cream and the classic Viennese brioches.

  “The bleeding from the piles kept me stuck to my seat for the rest of that day,” Melani continued, sipping his hot coffee and nibbling at a pink lokum to sweeten the bitter Asiatic beverage, “and I would almost have suffocated had I not reached the seat in time and so not had the chance and the freedom to abandon myself to the effort that nature was making to heal me. And when nature had finally taken all the blood it thought necessary from me, I recovered. The doctor almost proclaimed it a miracle, attributing it to the effect of my good constitution, because, although I can no longer read or write with my own hand, God has granted me the great gift of preserving my mental faculties at the age of eighty-five, which is what I turned on the 30th of last month.”

  While Atto harangued us on his haemorrhoids and on the miracles of his longevity, I whispered into Cloridia’s ear:

  “I beg you, my love, try and persuade the Abbot to go to bed as soon as possible. I don’t want him in the way.”

  “Are you afraid of falling into his net again?” she smiled. “Don’t worry, this time he can’t fool you: I’m here! He won’t catch me out, the dear Abbot. What is important is that you must never be left alone with him.”

  I grew morose. Great confidence my wife had in me. Although I had to acknowledge she had good reason for it, I had never been able to bear that annoyingly maternal way she had of rubbing my nose in my shortcomings. I withdrew into myself and said not a word.

  “What is this thing, a croissant?” asked Atto, placing his hand on the tray next to his cup and fingering the warm brioche.

  “Here, in the Archduchy of Austria, below and above the Enns, it’s called Kipfel,” Simonis expounded learnedly. “They say it was invented about thirty years ago by an Armenian coffee house owner, a certain Kolschitzki, on this very spot, at the Blue Bottle, to celebrate the liberation of Vienna from the Ottoman Half-Moon. That’s why they’re shaped like crescents.”

  “Are we in an Armenian coffee shop?” asked the Abbot.

  “Here all the coffee houses are in the hands of Armenians,” answered the Greek. “They were the ones who first started trading in it. They have an exclusive imperial privilege.”

  “Have you ever seen them? A most singular people,” I said provocatively to Melani, thinking back to his secret encounter with the Armenian.

  “I’ve heard about them,” he said, hastily thrusting his nose into his warm infusion.

  Armenians and coffee: gazing at Abbot Melani’s aquiline profile adorned with the dark glasses that gave him the appearance of a bewigged old owl, I thought back to the past.

  Once again Vienna took me back to Rome. Once again the Habsburg city shot forth a shaft which plunged deep into my memory, into my recollections of twenty years earlier. Everything led back to my youth, to that inn near Piazza Navona where, as a modest scullion, I had first met Abbot Melani and my Cloridia. The inn had often hosted parties of Armenians, accompanying one of their bishops on a visit to the Eternal City. Shy as I was, I used to observe those exotic prelates and their retinue without daring to ask any questions, hovering about them curiously and deferentially, but I knew that on their way to Rome they must have stopped off in Vienna. And I remembered very clearly their long black vestments, their manner both circumspect and devout, their olive skin, their ash-grey eyes and the strange perfume that wafted about them, rich in spices and coffee.

  In Vienna I then discovered that the black Asiatic beverage and the Armenian people were inseparable. I loved now and again to thrust my nose into those dark but welcoming places, where they read gazettes, smoked, played chess or billiards. Sometimes, grateful to the Lord for the financial comfort I was enjoying in Vienna, I would treat myself to a steaming cup, absent-mindedly leafing through the gazette (the Italian one) in the hope that no one would address me, forcing me to resort to my pitiful German. Every so often I would look up and cast a fond glance at the Armenians, individuals with Turkish features who were reserved, industrious and silent; I was grateful to them for inventing the coffee shop, the unique and ineffable boast of the august city of Vienna.

  There was no sign of Penicek yet. The delay was beginning to unnerve us.

  “This little ring here, they say it’s good for the piles,” I heard Melani say at the end of my cogitations, as he showed Simonis his be-ringed hand. “Putting it on the little finger of my right hand and clasping it continually with the other hand. A niece of mine sent it to me . . .”

  Niece, indeed, I thought with a little laugh; during the Sant’ Alessio he had told me that the Grand Duke of Tuscany had given it to him. He was getting more and more prudent, Signor Abbot . . .

  “I hope it works,” Atto went on. “It’s also good for toothache and headaches, if you put it on the little finger of your left hand.”

  “Megalleh Tekuphah.”

  We turned round. It was a little old man with wild eyes who had spoken; he was sitting hunched over a nearby table.

  “You’ve been struck down by the Megalleh Tekuphah, the cursed blood of haemorrhoids,” he repeated, addressing Melani. “You are a cursed being.”

  We looked at one another in astonishment. Atto gave a start.

  “Tekuphah means rotation, like a spinning ball, or the sun completing its orbit from morn to eve, until it comes round again in the morning.”

  With some relief, we exchanged meaningful glances: our interlocutor was clearly a touch deranged.

  “His blood shall be on us and on our children, says Matthew the Evangelist. Jesus Christ was crucified, they used four nails to fix him to the cross, and the blood of the Tekuphah is none other than the blood of Our Lord that gushed from his holy wounds: in fact it gushes out four times a year.”

  “My God, the man is blaspheming,” exclaimed Abbot Melani in a muffled voice, making the sign of the cross.

  While Cloridia administered a glass of water to Atto to calm his agitation, we turned our backs on the moonstruck orator and tried to resume our conversation. But none of us could think of anything to say. I looked around for another free table, but the café was packed full.

  There were four Tekuphah a year, the imperturbable old man continued, one every three months. The first in the month of Tischri, when Abraham on Mount Moriah was to sacrifice his son Isaac at the will of God. He already had the knife in his hand and was about to slit Isaac’s throat. And so God saw that Abraham would do an
ything to obey him, and the angel of the Lord came straight from heaven and said: ‘Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him.’ Abraham did not kill his son, but he had made a cut on his neck from which a few drops of blood fell.

  “For this reason every year in this month the drops of blood that fell from Isaac’s neck spread throughout the world, and everyone must take care to drink no water unless they have first put an iron nail in it.”

  The other Tekuphah was in the month in which Jephtha was to have sacrificed her only daughter, and for this reason every year all the waters are turned to blood. But if you throw in an iron nail, the Tekuphah will do no harm. The third Tekuphah was in the month of Nissan, when according to the Scriptures the waters of Egypt were turned to blood. For this reason every year at this time it is believed that all the waters become blood, but if you throw in an iron nail, nothing evil can happen. The fourth Tekuphah was in the month of Tammus. At this time God ordered Moses to speak to a rock so that water would gush from it. The rock did not obey and Moses struck it with his stick. Because the rock only let out a few drops of blood, Moses struck it a second time, and at last water came out.

  “And so every year, at this time, all the waters turn to blood,” concluded the old man. “This is the most dangerous Tekuphah – so much so that some claim that even the iron nail can do nothing against it.”

  “That’s enough now!” I said, seeing the octogenarian Abbot Melani ashen-faced and Cloridia deeply concerned.

  I looked around again for the waitress who had served us a few days earlier, but in vain. However, I spotted the coffee shop owner. I signalled to him that the old man was importuning us. But he pretended not to see me and went on serving the other tables.

  “Never forget to put an iron nail among the food and on the dishes you eat from!” the madman warned us, “otherwise the blood of the Tekuphah will suddenly appear in all sorts of ways: in jars of lard, as happened in Prague to my parents, who were terrified and threw the whole jar into the water; in saucepans of water or in pitchers of butter. And from there it will leak into you and make its departure from your backsides!”

  “Curse indeed. Piles are a natural illness,” gasped Atto, looking at us with a strained smile while his hands trembled visibly. “I confess that it is due to the over-rich food I ate in my youth.”

  “You are lost in the mazes of error!” thundered the other man. “The Jews do not eat unhealthy foods, they are forbidden all dishes that are said to lead to bleeding. This is why with the force of Divine Law they forbid the pig and the hare, whose meat offends health, floods the heart and obscures the intellect. But it is they who are most grievously struck down by the Tekuphah, because they crucified the son of God and his blood is upon them. My father bled every four weeks. I do not, but only because I converted to the True Faith and always carry an iron nail with me.”

  As he said this, with a wild grin he plucked a nail from the cup of coffee he was drinking, and waved it before our amazed eyes.

  At last, like a saviour from heaven, we saw Penicek arriving.

  “The tremendous Tekuphah is about to pour down upon you and your eyes will cake with blood,” the old man hissed as we paid and rose to our feet.

  The image of the patron saint hung in a corner of the courtyard, sitting on a throne. It was illuminated by numerous candles and adorned with green branches. All around was a throng of worshippers: mostly clerks, mothers and old people; the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. Some were singing hymns at the top of their voices, others were mechanically muttering the rosary. We looked around. There was no sign of Dragomir and Koloman.

  We found seats for Cloridia and Abbot Melani, who had not yet fully recovered from the crazy old man’s chilling words and had refused outright to return to the convent. Then we walked away from the statue of the saint. In the rest of the large courtyard, hardly touched by the flickering candlelight, there were the other worshippers, younger and more numerous, who were celebrating the saint’s feast day in very different ways. Moans, not liturgical hymns, filled the air; and instead of the murmured litanies, little grunts.

  “This is just where we should find those two,” sneered Simonis.

  In every corner of the courtyard our eyes beheld unspeakable things going on, things that – although passionate – had very little to do with the faith, and even less with the divine office.

  I had already heard of this. The area around the church of the Kalvarienberg, or Mount Calvary, in the suburb of Hernals, was the favourite place for men and women, under cover of the evening Andachten, to engage in their operations of mutual conquest;- the church itself had come to be known as “The Foyer”, like the foyer of theatres, where young people get up to all sorts of things. It was said that on the Kalvarienberg in Lent the same things happened as in summer in the Aurgarten, the well-known resort of debauchery on the banks of the Danube.

  “Oh, pardon,” the Greek apologised at that moment. Seeking his companions in a gloomy corner he had thrust his nose a little too closely into the manoeuvres of a semi-clad young couple.

  “Populescu said he would come here with his brunette,” I said, “but Koloman Szupán didn’t. Shouldn’t we look for him outside? Maybe he’s waiting for us in the street.”

  “Someone with Koloman’s gifts is not going to forgo an Andacht,” my assistant answered with a complicit smile.

  He was right. Shortly afterwards we found the Hungarian student, hard at work in a dark gap between two bushes:

  “Aaaahhhh! Yes, like that, again . . . You’re an animal, a beast . . . Again, go on, please!” moaned the voice of a Teutonic girl.

  “It’s him,” said Simonis without any doubt. “I don’t know how he does it, but Koloman always gives them pleasure in exactly the same way. When you’ve heard one, you’ve heard them all.”

  “There’s no mistaking a real friend,” I said, with awkward irony.

  “No, we won’t find Dragomir in here,” said Koloman, tucking his shirt back into his trousers. “He’ll be in one of the chapels on the Via Crucis, along the main street. That’s the only place where it’s dark enough to disguise his miniscule twig, ha ha!”

  So we rejoined Cloridia and Abbot Melani and went out into the street again – the Kalvarienbergstrasse, or the Street of Mount Calvary. It was lined all along with little chapels representing the Mysteries of the Passion. They too provided opportunities for the two sexes to indulge their base instincts. In order to take advantage of this profane custom, at the foot of the Kalvarienberg were clustered countless little booths selling hot sausages, sugar figurines and croissants with hot cream. After the Andachten the couples would flock into the restaurants in the area or to the south, in the suburb of Neulerchenfeld.

  The first chapels we inspected, peering into their pitch-black interiors, were all, needless to say, occupied. None of them contained Dragomir.

  “He must be of a very religious temperament, your friend,” remarked Atto, hearing that we were passing from chapel to chapel, unaware of what was going on in them.

  Cloridia led him a little further downhill (the road sloped noticeably), so that he would not hear the moans of the couples. I saw them enter and take a seat in a chapel, one of the few unoccupied ones.

  “There he is at last!” exclaimed Koloman, peering into the gloom of yet another aedicule, after we had passed a few empty ones.

  We had found Populescu – or rather, we had caught him in the thick of it. It was lucky Cloridia was not with us: Dragomir was standing with his back to us, his trousers down, his body leaning forward. Beneath him, in the darkness, it was possible to imagine his amorous conquest.

  “He’s hiding here so as not to show how tiny his little pin is. It’s no use, Dragomir, your friend will realise all the same,” sniggered Koloman.

  It was then that we heard the shouts. It was Cloridia, calling for help.

  We all rushed towards her. Abbot Melani was lying awkwardly twisted on the steps of the chapel he ha
d entered just a moment before with my wife, and there was a dark pool spreading around him.

  “Signor Atto, Signor Atto!” I yelled, catching him under his armpits.

  “The Tekuphah, the curse . . .” he suddenly gasped, putting his hand to his chest.

  He was alive, fortunately. But in the darkness to which our eyes had now grown accustomed we were able to see that his head and face were striped with black blood.

  The seconds that followed were, to put it mildly, frantic. What had happened, who had struck him, how could it have happened in front of Cloridia? While Simonis and Koloman helped me to lay Atto Melani down on the floor of the chapel, I looked at my wife, who was paralysed with fear.

  “I . . . I don’t know . . . suddenly, the blood . . .” she repeated.

  In our eyes and in our minds we could hear the prediction of the old madman in the coffee house.

  I suddenly felt a shiver run down from my head to my shoulders, like a warm tingle of horror. Was I about to pass out from fear? I passed my hand through my hair. It was sticky and greasy. I looked at my palms: more blood. I felt faint.

  “Just a second,” put in the Greek.

  He pushed me aside firmly and extended his hands to where I had been standing, as if to see if it were raining. It was indeed raining: thick, black treacly drops were dripping down on us from the chapel’s ceiling.

  “It’s the blood. It’s coming from here,” said Simonis, looking at the palms of his hands, horribly spattered.

  Then he beckoned Koloman, who was thinner than him, to climb onto his shoulders.

  “There’s something stuck up here,” said the Hungarian, running his hands over the ornamental cornice above our heads, along the internal perimeter of the little temple. “Like . . . a little cage.”

  Finally he pulled from the cornice a kind of iron fretwork box. We opened it.

  Inside, immersed in a foul puddle of gore, lay a poor limp rag, reduced to a condition in which no man would ever wish to show it to a woman. Only the two spheres, which God had conceived for procreation, still seemed to preserve a touch of dignity. The rest was spongy, shrivelled flesh, wretched tatters of hair and skin, crudely dissected by some rough blade, all deformed and unrecognisable like a death mask.