Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  “Exactly. For years his brother went from one boy to another, and the King pretended not to notice. As if it were perfectly normal for him, too.”

  The question was in the air now. Atto anticipated it:

  “Well,” he said in a grave voice, “with regard to His Majesty, may God forgive me, similar abominations have also been whispered. But they were just attempts to convert him – sorry, to pervert him. They did not succeed, fortunately.”

  Sodomy, observed Atto, is the direct offspring of beauty: was it not born in ancient Greece, when philosophers considered the company of young men sublime, because they were even more beautiful than maidens? Well then, amid that whirl of forbidden games, secret passions and unmentionable experiments into which the whole of Paris had flung itself, Eugene always found himself alone: he was ugly.

  It was that time of life when young people blossom: their eyes open, their lips become tumid, their breasts plump and firm, their shoulders robust, girls’ hips grow round and those of boys solid. Poetry becomes flesh, and seeks other flesh.

  Eugene’s face, which had never been attractive, opened out like a piece of dried, cracked mud. His nose turned up, while his mouth sagged; his cheeks, neck and body wizened like an old biscuit; his eyes, instead of tapering, remained round and dark. His hair, amid all his friends’ soft fair curls, remained flat, lifeless and corvine. And lastly he was small: the puniest of the whole gang.

  “Have you ever seen Eugene close up?” asked Abbot Melani.

  “No. Cloridia told me that his face is a little strange, not very attractive.”

  “Not very attractive, you say? As a boy his nose was so short that his two upper fore-teeth were always uncovered, like a rabbit’s. He always huffs through his open lips, because he can’t close them.”

  When Eugene’s transformation was complete, a new name was ready for him. With that misshapen face, he now became Dog Nose to his friends.

  And it was a double humiliation that they inflicted on him, when they took advantage of his lack of strength and sodomised him in the kitchen or on the service stairs, with the serving women pretending not to see; they would then run away, mocking him with that atrocious nickname. He too had joined the race of women-men.

  “Look carefully at the portraits of Eugene you see around the place. Yes, they’ve flattered him. The eyes aren’t his, nor the nose or the mouth. But the painters and engravers knew nothing of his vice, and that’s why they made no attempt to eliminate that look of a hysterical old hen: the raised eyebrows, the disgusted expression, the over-rigid, upright bust. All typical marks of the invert,” said Abbot Melani with a note of ostentatious disgust.

  “As is the often the case with inverts, his character, torn between guilt and shame, grew duplicitous like that of a woman. He learned the feminine arts of dissimulation, oblique language and allusion. He is sullen and harbours grudges for ages. You yourself have had a clear demonstration of this: the old coin from the siege of Landau. He must have procured it from one of the participants at the siege, since he had to leave the field free for Joseph, and did not take part in the final assault. He preserves it secretly like a dagger steeped in poison: it reminds him of the day when military laurels were snatched from him by the young Joseph. An isolated event, but still a sign that his glory as a general is fragile and subject to the whim, but even more to the worth, of his sovereign.”

  I listened in astonishment and thought: Eugene, the castigator of the Turks at Zenta; Eugene, the conqueror of Northern Italy; Eugene, the victor of the massacre of Höchstädt . . . What abyss of vice and perdition had spawned the greatest man of arms in Europe? I now understood why days earlier, during our first conversation, Atto had let slip the cruel name, Dog Nose, which Eugene’s companions had saddled him with: the Abbot never lost sight of the dark past of the Most Serene Prince of Savoy.

  “To save our hero from bad company, as I have already told you, it was decided he should be launched on an ecclesiastic career: on a trip to Turin, his mother had him receive the priest’s tonsure.”

  It was the official act of renunciation of the world and of all earthly passions. But when Dog Nose returned to Paris and saw his friends again, he fell into his old ways. The planned ecclesiastic career was abandoned?

  “In that period he earned new nicknames,” said Atto with a malicious little smile, “all very witty: Madame Simone, or Madame L’Ancienne, which is to say, Madam the Elderly – perhaps because, when he dressed up in female clothes, his wrinkled face made him look like a little old woman.”

  “He dressed up in female clothes?” I stammered.

  “Of course! Don’t you remember what I said a few days ago? Even when he escaped from France to come and place himself at the service of the Empire he disguised himself in female clothes,” sneered Atto. “His mother and his aunt, too, when they fled from Rome to abandon their husbands, dressed up as young men. But a woman dressed as a man is by no means as twisted and ridiculous as a man in petticoats.”

  “I don’t understand. If Eugene really is effeminate, how do you explain that he became the great general that he now is? War isn’t for sissies. The Prince has fought the toughest and bloodiest of campaigns, he’s been in the thick of assaults, gunfire and cavalry charges. He’s led sieges, attacks, retreats . . .”

  There’s nothing surprising, answered Atto, about a famous general belonging to the race of women-men. There have been scores of them among the great French military leaders: Turenne, Vendôme, Huxelle, Condé and many others. In these cases, the soldier’s manly virtue was deliberately transformed into that kind of coarseness that loves to treat men as women, because it is only in them (in their beards, in their muscles, in their stench) that they find their own rough inspiration reciprocated and satisfied. The Marshal of Vendôme, a descendant of King Henry IV of France and a war hero, was an inveterate drinker and smoker, a filthy overbearing braggart, who shared his bed with his dogs and thought nothing of pissing in it. Even as he talked and gave orders to his subordinates he would calmly defecate in a bucket, and then, after passing it in front of his adjutants’ noses, he would empty it and use it to shave. The hardships and atrocities of war were perfectly in keeping with his bestial nature. Such men became lovers of men precisely because they were soldiers. Eugene’s case was quite different, however.

  “Dog Nose is not depraved because he’s a soldier. On the contrary: he became a soldier because he’s depraved.”

  Then he cleared his throat, as if his very vocal chords were reluctant to tackle such a difficult argument.

  “He is one of those sodomites who have not freely chosen their wretched condition. Had he been able, he would willingly have avoided being effeminate. But something, while he was still at a tender age, threw Eugene unceremoniously into the ranks of women-men.”

  Now the Abbot was finding it hard to talk. Until now, from the height of his eighty-five years, he had chosen to forget that he himself had been of that unfortunate stock. However, now that he had to talk of the carnal violence that Eugene had been subjected to as a child, he could dissimulate no longer: such acts were all too similar to the painful castration that had been inflicted on Atto Melani’s childish flesh. And the memory made his voice tremble.

  On the brink of twenty, Dog Nose felt useless, dirty and empty. His siblings and his youthful companions had derided, humiliated and raped him. These people, the only friends he had in the world, loved to abuse him because he was the smallest and ugliest in the whole group. To escape this condition, Dog Nose had only one option: to turn things on their head. He came from the lowest perversion: to save himself, he had to switch to the greatest virtue. The hardest and most dangerous.

  “He stopped dressing up as a woman and dressed up as a soldier instead. In that way he would become someone else, someone he probably would rather not have been, but he was forced into the role, in order to cease being Dog Nose or Madame l’Ancienne. So he couldn’t take religious vows? Then he would take military ones: Dog No
se became a Priest of War.”

  He asked Louis XIV for the command of a regiment. The King, who despised him, refused. And so Eugene fled from France and went over to the enemy. He placed himself at the service of the Empire, where he obtained the command and soldiers he desired. From that moment on his religion became war, and only war.

  He would grow merciless, unfeeling and brutal: more masculine than a real man. No one would ever know his true nature. He would not write private letters. Ever.

  “His missives have often been intercepted, but they are always disappointing. His correspondence deals exclusively with political and military matters. Eugene does not know feelings, human relations or the impulse of passions: only duty.”

  And duty, as he conceived it, was simple: to kill as many enemies as possible. In war he would always refuse armistices, in peace he would seek conflict. In his wish to be sent to the most dangerous fronts, to obtain means and money for his armies, he did not hesitate to argue bitterly with the Emperor: first with Leopold, then with his son Joseph the Victorious.

  Time wrought another transformation. The Priest of War became the Captain of Death. When he was in command, the fight was always to the death. In this way, his name would never be associated by anyone – least of all by himself – with tranquillity, love or peace. He had known peace at the Hôtel de Soissons, and had seen that it led to vice.

  He would never have lovers of the female sex; if they came his way, he would use them as a smokescreen. Women did not in fact disgust him, but the Captain of Death had very different things on his mind. In the meantime the perverse tendencies of his youth would be forgotten: his old companions in depravity had every reason to hope so.

  As the years went by, he counted whizzing cannonballs in their thousands, he saw soldiers dying like flies, the countryside ablaze, mothers and fathers weeping over their slaughtered children, entire nations reduced to ruins. But if there was ever any chance of achieving peace, or even just a truce, he would reject it with all his might. The Captain of Death had to trample every last trace of Madame l’Ancienne into the mud of the trenches.

  Sometimes he would attract some young night guard into his tent and share moments of reciprocal intimacy. And then, for just a few instants, Eugene no longer knew who he was: Captain of Death, Priest of War, Dog Nose or Madame l’Ancienne? But the next day, with his well-polished marching boots pulled on tight, everything was as it had always been.

  “Now you know the real reason why Eugene of Savoy does not want the war to end,” concluded Atto, exhausted by this unsettling explanation. “I tried in some way to make you understand all this the first day we met again. But now you have – how can I put it? – a more complete picture. Eugene has no idea how to face peace. What could he do without braids on his jacket? He would instantly be turned back into his old self: Madame l’Ancienne. He hates peace, because he is afraid of it. He’s not fighting against Louis XIV, but against himself. And the war continues unabated.”

  “Joseph’s new strategy – peace with the Pope and the Hungarian rebels, the division of Spain with France –”

  “. . . might have driven Eugene to take extreme steps,” the Abbot anticipated me. “Dog Nose would therefore be assassinating the young condottiero who stole the limelight from him at Landau; and also the Emperor who prevented him from winning military glory in Spain; and finally the man who could one day force him to return to Vienna, to cease fighting, and to become Madame l’Ancienne once again. Finally, in his own body, Eugene is suppressing his own childhood companions at the Hôtel de Soissons: those who stole his innocence.”

  “But I still don’t understand: we have too many culprits. England and Holland; Charles, Joseph’s brother; the Jesuits; the ex-ministers; and Eugene of Savoy. Which one of them did it?”

  “It’s not clear to me either. Partly because it is only England and Holland that have a definite interest in the Grand Dauphin’s death, while I don’t see how this could serve any of the others. We need to keep a close eye on these Turks and understand just what this dervish, who plays with his neighbour’s head, is up to.”

  “That reminds me! I was supposed to meet Ugonio half an hour ago!” I exclaimed, looking up at the rich façade of a small palace in front of us, on top of which stood a magnificent blue and gold clock, showing the hour as 9.30.

  The sister had knocked at my door in alarm: the man asking for me had come at nine on the dot. She had never seen him before and he had a menacing appearance. The poor woman did not know where to turn: Cloridia was out, having been urgently summoned to Prince Eugene’s palace. The wife of the first chamberlain was giving birth. And so the nun had asked the strange visitor to come back later.

  Since he had refused to give his name on both occasions, I asked the sister for a brief description; a few words sufficed to tell me who it was.

  After trying to explain things to her in my pitiful German, I asked Simonis, who turned up at that moment with my son to get new orders from me, to tell the nun that there was no need to be alarmed. She could admit the monstrous individual without any fear, since I knew him and he was perfectly harmless, despite his unusual appearance. Then I sent my little boy to play in the cloisters.

  “I humpily offer Your Enormity my most obscene respectables,” Ugonio began unctuously in a subdued and catarrh-filled voice.

  Then he saw that Atto was present and launched into further salutations.

  “I see with the uttermostful pleasuredom that the His Lordliness the Abbey is in excellentitious healthiness. To be more medicinal than mendacious I complimentate Your Highfulness on his most refineried comportment.”

  He now took in the fact that Atto was blind and expressed his sorrow with some perfunctory expressions, assuming a highly affected expression of grief.

  “But I recognised you at once,” replied the Abbot, lifting his handkerchief to his nose in response to the disgusting stench given off by the corpisantaro’s greatcoat.

  On his back Ugonio bore a large bag of filthy and ancient jute, which seemed to be crammed with a great number of vile, stinking objects.

  “No idle chatter,” I said brusquely. “What news do you have?”

  The news was abundant and extremely positive, explained the corpisantaro: as he had promised during our previous encounter, he was now free to reveal the nature of his mysterious relations with Ciezeber.

  “So go on.”

  “I must deliver to him a swindlification of excessing rarity and worthfulness.”

  “We know that,” I answered icily, “it’s the head of a man.”

  The corpisantaro seemed petrified: how did we know that?

  Then he gave a quiet grunt, as if by way of confirmation. The story he went on to relate, which I will now try to repeat as faithfully as possible, sounded truly bizarre and implausible. Afterwards, however, my research substantially confirmed it.

  The story began in 1683, during the last and most famous siege of Vienna by the Turks.

  It was the Turkish Grand Vizier, Kara Mustafa Pasha, who had wanted the attack on the imperial capital. He had proposed it to the Great Sultan, had led the army in person and had been disastrously defeated. The responsibility was entirely his; after the debacle, his fate was sealed.

  Before setting out for war, Kara Mustafa had been so certain of victory that he had promised to bring the Sultan the head of Cardinal Collonitz, who had always been one of the most active fomenters of war against the Turks. To win the divine favour of Mahomet, before setting out on the military campaign, the Grand Vizier had had a sumptuous mosque built in Belgrade.

  After the defeat, the Sultan had not forgotten his subordinate’s promise, and took pleasure in turning it against him with savage sarcasm.

  “He played a most abominimous and nauseafull trickery on him,” Ugonio said with coarse glee.

  On 25th December 1683, the birthday of Our Lord and therefore dear to Cardinal Collonitz (this was the first cruel irony), around one in the afternoon, three high c
ourt dignitaries presented themselves in Kara Mustafa’s apartment in Belgrade, led by the Agha of the janissaries, together with some robust individuals. Kara Mustafa, taken aback, asked what they might want at that hour, and whether anything serious had happened. In the midst of the group of dignitaries he saw the severe face of the Capigi-Bachi, the Sultan’s Grand Master of Ceremonies, and he deduced that the dignitaries must bear orders from the Great Lord. The Agha of the janissaries announced that a decree had been issued by the Sultan; as he drew it forth, four brutes leaped at Kara Mustafa’s neck.

  The Grand Vizier was strangled with a rope and then beheaded: the same end (the second cruel irony) that he had sworn for Cardinal Collonitz. Following the ancient Turkish custom, the skin and flesh were then stripped from his face and head. To be certain of his lieutenant’s death, the Sultan had them deliver to him the skin of his face, stuffed with cotton and spices. The stripped skull, along with the body and the rope, was buried (the third tremendous irony of the Sultan) in the mosque in Belgrade built by Kara Mustafa, as a perpetual warning to the subjects of the Sublime Porte who failed in their duty.

  “But then the Sultan was confunded by a most discomboboling and gastflabbering contangency,” concluded the pestiferous scoundrel.

  The Sultan did not imagine that just five years later, in 1688, Belgrade would fall into Christian hands. After a fierce battle, under the command of the Prince-Elector of Bavaria and the Duke of Lorraine, the imperial troops succeeded in breaking into the city and taking control of it. As the Jesuit fathers were the first to intone the Te Deum after the victory, the mosque of Kara Mustafa was entrusted to two of this order, whose task it was to turn it into a Catholic church. The pair were the confessor of the Duke of Lorraine, Father Aloysius Braun, and the missionary father Francis Xavier Beringshoffen.

  One night disturbing noises were heard in the mosque, as of a pickaxe bashing the walls, and objects being smashed. Braun and Beringshoffen, terrified by the thought of ghosts, at once summoned a group of soldiers to find out who could be in the building at that hour. The two trembling fathers entered the mosque with the soldiers, shakily holding a holy water sprinkler and lanterns out in front of themselves, followed by the armed men. They found that it was not ghosts that were disturbing the nocturnal quiet but men of flesh and blood: it was a group of seven musketeers, enlisted in the Christian armies that had just reconquered Belgrade. The musketeers, surprised and frightened by the ambush, explained that they had fought hard during the assault on the city, and some of them had been wounded, but they had missed out on the sharing of the spoils. Winter was on its way, and they did not even have the money to buy warm clothes. However, they had learned from a friend that Kara Mustafa had been buried in that mosque, along with many objects of great value, including luxurious winter garments, which would just suit the seven poor musketeers. They had not thought twice and had broken into the mosque, profaning the tomb of the Grand Vizier.