Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  Koloman immediately turned round, struggling to contain his disgust. Simonis and I were almost hypnotised by this spectacle of senseless ferocity. Who would ever dream of so absurdly mangling a virile member?

  Meanwhile Abbot Melani, to whom Cloridia was repeating over and over that it was not his blood and that he was perfectly fine, was gradually recovering from his fright.

  “Hell,” remarked Koloman, his spirit reviving, “I knew it’s better not to joke with these Teutonic misses. Dragomir must definitely see this stuff,” and he went back towards the chapel where Populescu, like all the other couples, had clearly been too preoccupied to be distracted by Cloridia’s agitated cries.

  We remained standing around the little cage with its revolting contents. Everyone was too upset to speak. Cloridia could not take her eyes off the macabre container with its severed pudenda. She grew thoughtful. Suddenly, to the surprise of everyone, she found the door and opened it. Then she lifted the container and stroked its bottom, as if her fingertips might catch something that the darkness concealed from our eyes.

  The Hungarian reappeared almost immediately, his face deathly pale, his eyes staring wildly.

  “We must get away, at once, all of us,” he said in a strangled voice.

  “What’s the matter, Koloman?” I asked him.

  “Dragomir wasn’t . . . We thought he was . . . there was nobody there with him, nobody, nobody . . .” he said with the first tears streaming down his face.

  Our inspection took just a few moments.

  Cloridia had cleaned up Abbot Melani’s head as best she could, and he, leaning on his stick and on my wife’s arm, looked at the corpse without saying a word. I stared balefully at the old castrato. Nothing could shake my feeling that he knew more about this than he was letting on.

  “Away, come away from here,” I said. I looked around and took Cloridia’s hand and gripped Abbot Melani under the armpit, while Simonis seized Koloman by the arm, ordering him to stop crying, or else we would be noticed.

  We began to walk down Mount Calvary Street, resisting the temptation to run and trying not to show our faces when we met the rare passers-by.

  Until some couple in heat discovered it, Dragomir Populescu’s corpse would remain there, as we had seen it shortly before: the trousers lowered, his torso leaning forward. Underneath his lustful body, however, there was no concubine, but three pointed candlesticks, the sort they stick Easter candles on. Some robust hand had thrust them hard into the chest and heart of the poor Romanian student from the Black Sea.

  More black blood was slowly soaking his thighs and trousers, seeping from the stump of lacerated flesh where once his sex had been.

  We joined Penicek again, who had been waiting for us at the bottom of the street. While the cart set off, Simonis told him briefly what had happened.

  “Half-Asia!” the Greek muttered by way of conclusion.

  “And suppose it had been the Turks?” I asked.

  “Asia or Half-Asia, it’s all the same.”

  “Signor Barber, if I may be so bold, we must get rid of Populescu’s body,” intervened Penicek, “otherwise the guards will find this whole story a little too atrocious. A Bettelstudent does not die like this. They might carry out some serious investigation.”

  “You’re right, Pennal,” agreed Simonis, “we can’t run the risk of being involved. We also knew Dànilo. We saw him die.”

  “You’re talking as if you were the murderers,” objected Cloridia.

  Simonis responded with silence, staring at us with his slightly foolish eyes. Was it not he who had set his friends off on the trail of the Golden Apple? And was it not Cloridia and myself, I thought, who had started off the whole story, alarmed by the strange embassy of the Agha? Furthermore we had said nothing to Simonis’s companions about Ciezeber’s plot. If they had learned in time that the Turks wanted someone’s head, and especially that this someone was in all likelihood the Emperor himself, at this hour they might still be alive.

  I decided that the moment had come to tell Koloman Szupán about the dervish. Obviously I omitted to say that I had known this for days and had said nothing. The Hungarian was terrified. He knew well, coming from where he did, what the Infidels were capable of.

  Penicek interrupted us, offering to get rid of the remains of Populescu with the help of two cart drivers, unlicensed like himself, whom he could trust.

  “You won’t make it in time. Some couple will spot something first and raise the alarm,” I said, shaking my head.

  “But they live just round the corner,” insisted Penicek. “Trust me.”

  Having said that, without even waiting for any sign of assent from me or from his Barber, he pulled up the cart and climbed down, slipping into a doorway with all the speed that his crippled leg would allow him. When he came back, two shadowy figures emerged with him, who set off quickly in the direction of Mount Calvary.

  “Don’t get worked up, Dragomir, keep calm! Coolness and . . . sang-froid!” chortled Penicek with a macabre humour that was quite out of place, while his colleagues prepared to carry out their melancholy offices.

  “Shut up, you filthy Pennal!” Simonis snapped indignantly, whacking him on the neck.

  Once we had started moving again, Penicek now driving quietly on the box seat, conjectures started to fly freely.

  “It’s clear to me,” began my assistant. “The girl Populescu had arranged to meet was the death of him.”

  “It’s the same one Dragomir had asked about the Golden Apple. But it can’t have been her,” objected Koloman. “She wouldn’t have had the strength to skewer him with those candlesticks.”

  I looked at Atto Melani. He was sitting beside me, with his head leaning backwards. He had been well wrapped up by Cloridia, who was talking encouragingly to him in a low voice, asking him how he felt, but getting no answer. The Abbot’s eyes were half closed; he seemed half asleep, but I knew the old fox of a castrato. I knew that he was listening to everyone and pondering within himself.

  “Say it, I dare you: you think this death is just another coincidence?” I whispered into his ear.

  Atto gave a slight start, but kept quiet.

  Koloman meanwhile went on: “I would say that it’s the work of at least two men, probably her relatives, and also to hide that little cage so high up –”

  “It’s a tandur,” Cloridia interrupted him.

  “What?” I asked, not remembering where I had heard that name.

  “I’ve examined it carefully. The container of your companion’s severed pudenda is an Armenian tandur.”

  “Armenian?” I said with a start.

  “Yes, it’s a kind of little stove for warming yourself.”

  Now I remembered. Cloridia had mentioned it to me when she came back from the audience with the Agha. It was a little stove full of cinders and burning coal to be placed under a table covered with woollen drapes that hung down to the ground. The Armenians would pull the blanket up around themselves and put their hands and arms underneath to keep warm.

  “So it must have been the Ottomans!” I exclaimed. “You yourself, Cloridia, told me that some of the Armenians in the Agha’s retinue insisted on lighting a tandur to sit around, at the risk of setting the palace on fire.”

  On hearing the Agha’s name again, Koloman Szupán grew pale with terror and, wringing his hands, asked Cloridia in a stammering voice whether she was sure of what she said and what the devil a tandur was exactly.

  While my consort replied, I thought back to the Armenian who had met Abbot Melani, and the obscure traffickings between the two of them and the little bag of money that the castrato had put into his hands at the end.

  “It was the Armenians, Signor Atto,” I repeated to him in a low voice so as not to be heard by the others, looking at him with spite, “the Armenians of the Agha, to be precise. Doesn’t this tell you anything? Perhaps they have an accomplice: someone who gave them money, a lot of money, for this murder.”

  The old
Abbot remained silent.

  “At last we have the proof that it was those cursed Ottomans. And if they did away with Dragomir, they also murdered Dànilo and Hristo,” I insisted.

  Melani did not move a muscle. He seemed to be dozing. I started up again:

  “You wanted to talk to me to proclaim your innocence: you’ve been chasing me all evening. Now I’m here to listen to you, come on! How come you have nothing to say to me now?”

  Atto turned towards me and behind his black lenses I saw him furrow his brows, almost as if he wanted to strike me down with his blind stare. He pursed his lips, perhaps to hold back words that were ready to burst from his mouth.

  He was so stubborn, the old castrato. He just refused to accept the evidence: I was no longer the simpleton he had left at Villa Spada eleven years earlier, whom he had been sure of finding again in Vienna. But above all he could not resign himself to the fact that he had lost that edge, that dialectic agility, and that promptness of response that had always enabled him to fool me. And so he preferred to shut himself up in obstinate dumbness.

  “That Populescu was Romanian,” he whispered at last. “If you weren’t so ignorant of those lands, you would know that Romania too is under the dominion of the Sublime Porte. At any rate, Turks, Armenians, or Romanians, it makes no difference to me. I have nothing to do with it.”

  “We’re dead, we’re all dead.”

  Mortifyingly silenced by Abbot Melani’s reply, I reflected on my ignorance and on the unexpected prospects that were opening up before me. At that moment Koloman began to repeat the same words of terror over and over, his eyes staring, his hands compulsively clutching the celery stalk between his thighs, almost as if he were afraid that by some evil trick it too might end up as a chopped ingredient in a tandur stew.

  “Just a moment,” Cloridia stopped him, “we can’t be sure that it was the Agha’s Armenians. Populescu’s girl was Armenian herself.”

  My wife’s statement, pronounced in a tone free from all doubts, pulled me from my cogitations and threw us all into amazement.

  “How can you say that with such certainty?” I asked.

  “Because Populescu boasted he knew the Turkish harems.”

  “Right, and you called him a eunuch,” I recalled, thinking with a shiver that Cloridia had proved prophetic: on Mount Calvary Dragomir had indeed been emasculated.

  Thinking back to it, she went on, Dragomir Populescu’s talk about the harems could only have come from an Ottoman woman, but not a Turkish one.

  “First of all, Dragomir couldn’t have seen a harem because, as I said, men are not admitted, except eunuchs; secondly his description could only have come from someone who had lived in a harem, not just visited one.”

  In addition, Cloridia added, the Armenians were a people subjugated by the Turks and so were often servants, and they told the simple truth about the harems because they hated their masters. The details of the rouge also made it clear that Dragomir’s source was a woman, and the contempt for the negro servant women suggested she was Armenian. The Armenians, in fact, despise the negroes, whom they consider subhuman, and they detest having them as workmates.

  “Populescu’s pudenda,” concluded Cloridia, “could have been placed in the tandur as a warning to leave Armenian women in peace.”

  “It’s not possible,” I protested. “Dànilo, Hristo and now Dragomir. They were friends and all three of them have died within a short space of time. It is not just a coincidence.”

  “But it’s a fact,” objected Simonis, “that Dragomir had announced that he wanted to carry out some tests to see if his girl was chaste or not.”

  “What were these?” asked Cloridia.

  “He was going to make her drink water with armoniacum salt and inhale powdered ephen roots. If she wasn’t a virgin, she would pee herself.”

  “Your friend was just asking for it!” exclaimed my wife scornfully. “I’m not surprised his girl emasculated him!”

  “Clear proof that the girl was not chaste,” remarked Penicek.

  “Shut up, Pennal!” Simonis rebuffed him with irritation.

  “What an imbecile Dragomir was! How could he trust an Armenian?” gasped Koloman, his voice choked with apprehension.

  “Why?” I said in surprise.

  “They’re not people to be trifled with. Don’t tell me you don’t know: their coffee shops should be avoided like the plague. All of them. Even idiots know that Armenians are the most treacherous and lurid individuals of the whole human race. They’re two-faced double-dealers, children of Satan, snakes in human form.”

  Koloman recalled a historic event he had told me about earlier: during the great Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, a week before the final battle, there was a serious act of treachery. From inside the city someone had informed the Ottomans that Vienna was at the end of its tether and could be conquered immediately. The army wanted to resist but there were only five thousand soldiers left. The citizens were ready for an armistice with the Turks, to put an end to the hardships of the siege and to ward off the risk – in the event of defeat – of being massacred. The controversy between soldiers and civilians had not yet been resolved and on 5th September it was a highly delicate moment when either side might end up prevailing. Amid the general confusion the city guard on the ramparts was slackened. It was just then that the traitor carried out his dirty work: he sent the Turks a package of confidential letters containing descriptions of the split between civilians and soldiers, so that the Turks could easily deduce that this was the best moment for their attack. The villainous spy was the servant (whose name nobody knew) of a merchant, known to the Viennese as Doctor Schahin. Fortunately, despite this valuable information the Turks decided to wait a little longer. In the meantime reinforcements joined the Christian armies, which then triumphed gloriously in the decisive battle of 12th September.

  “And so?”

  “The traitors, Schahin and the nameless servant, the ones who injected into the suffering limbs of the besieged city the deadly poison of treachery, were two Armenians.”

  He explained, in excited tones, that the Armenians originally inhabited a remote kingdom between Turkey and Persia, which was subjugated by the Ottomans. They began their journey westwards from the Crimea, sometimes from Constantinople itself, the capital of the Turkish Empire, and swarming across Poland and Galicia they finally reached Vienna. They hated the Turks, who oppressed their small and ancient kingdom, and from whose yoke they wished to free themselves. For this reason many of them travelled back and forth between Vienna and the Ottoman Porte, acting as spies for the Empire. But as soon as they could, they would take advantage of the trust that the noble Council of War granted them, and would sell themselves to the enemy.

  They were capable of the boldest enterprises, and of unprecedented feats; disguised as merchants, interpreters, couriers, they would undertake to carry out acts of sabotage, defamation and assassination for their masters. They would lead whole caravans into the desert for weeks, without any fear of hunger, thirst or fatigue, and they remained active until old age. They could handle explosives, and were skilled in medicine and also in the secret arts of alchemy. Poison was a docile instrument for them. In exchange for their services, they received by imperial decree the licence to open coffee shops or to practise as court couriers, travelling freely between the Empire and the lands of the East. In the lands between Poland and the Empire there rose villages populated entirely by Armenians, where they governed themselves with their own laws and their own judges. They were not subject to customs duties and, moreover, having the monopoly of the office of translating and interpreting, they actually controlled the flow of trade in its entirety, not only from east to west, but also from north to south. Thanks to these advantages they grew rich on the worst kind of trafficking.

  An Armenian named Johannes Diodato, a great friend of that Schahin who had betrayed the city during the siege of 1683, had rushed into the remains of the Turkish camp the day after the l
iberation of Vienna to sell the abandoned weapons of the losers, and after the conquest of Ofen he had speculated on the slave trade.

  “The notorious Georg Kolschitzky himself, the founder of the Blue Bottle coffee shop,” declared Koloman with concern, “is said to have gone calmly back and forth across the enemy lines during the siege bearing dispatches – he operated as a spy of the imperial forces against the Turks, but almost certainly also vice-versa.”

  In Ottoman lands they purloined silver coins and smuggled them into the Empire. About thirty years earlier, thanks to the protests of the Viennese traders, they had reached the point of expelling almost all of these dubious figures.

  “But the war council always needs them and in the end they managed to get back in,” explained the Hungarian student.

  “And the coffee shops?” I asked.

  They were nothing more, Szupán explained, than places where the wicked Armenians trafficked in secret and sycophantic messages, corruption and intrigues. They seemed to be untouchable: whenever they aroused scandal and the waters grew too troubled, they would go off to Constantinople, but they would come back, with impunity, just a short while later. They married among themselves to cement their business alliances. But since they were evil-hearted, they would sometimes ruin one another, denouncing the treachery of friends and relatives to the Emperor.

  I listened in utter amazement. Those beautiful shops, their ineffable peace, the smell of coffee . . . All this, according to Koloman Szupán, concealed levels of deceit and treachery that the fair face of Vienna would never make one suspect.

  “If there’s any intrigue or speculation to be done,” continued Koloman, “nothing will stop the Armenians.”

  Not only were they as elusive as eels. It was even difficult to identify them: you might have always called one of them by the exotic name of Schahin, the betrayer of the besieged city in 1683, but you would then discover that his real name was Kalust Nerveli, or Calixtus or Bonaventura, and his friend Diodato also answered to the name of Owanes Astouatzatur. Others did not even have a surname, like the mysterious Gabriel, from Anatolia, who in 1686 with a dreadful explosion blew up the powder magazine inside the castle of Ofen, or Buda, so that the imperial forces regained it from the Turks after over a century.