Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

Having left our passenger at a crossroads, we did not think twice. We had got him to explain, eventually, where and what the Two Hanged Men were: a clearing in the Viennese woods, to the north. It was called that, he explained, because they had once found the swinging corpses of two men executed on a gallows there, probably two brigands.

  We arrived at our destination after a journey of almost two hours, first in a carriage and then on foot, in the neighbourhood of the charming village of Salmannsdorf. We reached our objective by following a steady stream of inquisitive onlookers through the woods. Our journey had been considerably lengthened by a detour: we had deposited Atto, too tired for any further activity, at the convent of Porta Coeli. On my return, free from Simonis’s company, I would tell him what Cloridia had discovered at Eugene’s palace.

  Ugonio’s body was lying on the rain-soaked grass. His appearance was not (and could not have been) much worse than usual. While the four or five greyish hairs on his head were covered by his hood, his face still presented the same wrinkled grey skin, and from his filthy overcoat peeked his black collar and his hooked, stained hands. Invincible and nauseating, the same cowshed stench still enveloped him. His half-closed eyes, yellow and gummy, still glittered dully with the bloodshot sclera of his rotten corpisantaro blood. Only a trickle of greenish slaver daubed his chin and testified to what had happened. If we had not known, we might have thought he was sleeping.

  Suddenly there came a break in the clouds and a ray of sunlight, penetrating the foliage, touched the basket that Ugonio had brought with him and which still lay beside him. From the basket protruded various objects which had probably emerged at the moment the corpisantaro fell to the ground: two glass ampullae and a small pannier. The ray of sunlight transformed the two ampullae, making their respective liquids gleam: one golden, the other a fine ruby red.

  Simonis and I pushed our way through the crowd of onlookers casually discussing the discovery of the body. In no way are Rome and Vienna more different than in their attitudes towards death. In Rome everyone thinks that talking of death brings bad luck; in Vienna the Great Liberator and all that accompanies it (the causes and circumstances of death, funerals, division of the inheritance, the subsequent rich banquet) are the subject of casual and spontaneous conversations. The Romans make fun of the Viennese: how the devil can they converse cheerfully about bereavements and corpses? They forget that in the city of the popes, death, especially violent death, is less widely discussed but more commonly perpetrated.

  Ugonio, in a life spent between Rome and Vienna, had blended Italian and Austrian customs: he had died in the Viennese woods at the hands of an Italian. I could put a name to the murderer. It was all too obvious: Al. Ursinum, as was written in Ugonio’s memorandum. Which is to say, Alessium Ursinum, the castrato Gaetano Orsini, who sang the role of Sant’ Alessio. Farewell Ugonio, farewell for ever my friend, may God be with you. You have taken to the tomb the secret that bound you to Orsini. And farewell to the words of the Archangel Michael: now that Atto and I had finally understood the meaning of the Agha’s phrase, it would not be much use to us. But I was still curious to know what message the Archangel had engraved with his sword at the top of the spire of St Stephen’s, on the pedestal that had once held the sacrilegious globe of Suleiman the Magnificent and which, according to the prophecy, was still awaiting the real Golden Apple.

  I stole a look at Simonis’s face, wan with anguish. Another murder was rending our souls and further entangling the snarled thread of events. With my mind on the thousand homicides that steeped the Eternal City in blood every year, I looked at Ugonio’s lifeless face and pondered again on his strange destiny. “After running every sort of risk in Rome,” I repeated to myself, “you got yourself killed in Vienna.”

  “Poor wretch!” a couple of old people commented at a short distance. “He got the wrong herb.”

  “True. These things happen . . .” echoed another.

  Got the wrong herb? Defying the scandalised voices of the onlookers (mostly octogenarians with little to do but poke their noses into other people’s business), I approached the corpse. I picked up the ampulla with the golden liquid and held it against the light.

  “It looks like oil,” said Simonis, who had joined me.

  I pulled the cork out of the ampulla and spilled a drop onto my thumb and sucked it. He was right.

  At once we checked the other ampulla, which, as one might have imagined, was vinegar. The pannier was full of herbs. A salad, that is to say, and freshly picked.

  At this point our inspection was interrupted by three members of the city guard who had come to examine the corpse. They snatched the ampullae and salad from our hands. They examined them meticulously, shaking their heads as if deploring an accident that could have been avoided.

  “Another one who’s made the old mistake,” said the tallest of the three, examining the leaves attentively. “Lily of the valley instead of ursine garlic.”

  “Ursine garlic?” I asked the gendarmes.

  The three looked at each other and then burst out laughing, as if there were no corpse at their feet.

  “Italiano, be careful! Or salad turns into poison,’ one of the three answered mockingly.

  Now everything was clear. After I had heard some explanations in dialect from the gendarmes (in Vienna the employees of the urban institutions almost always speak in the vernacular, unfortunately), it was Simonis who explained it all to me, as we made our way back to the cart.

  Allium ursinum was the scientific Latin name of ursine, or wild, garlic: the long-leafed herb with its pungent taste which, in early spring every year, thickly carpets the soil of the Viennese woods with a brilliant shiny emerald green and spreads its spicy perfume everywhere. In Vienna it is normal to pick wild garlic to make salads with, or to cook with other dishes, a custom that has long died out in Rome. Ugonio evidently preferred it raw, and that was why he had brought a little oil and vinegar with him. That was what the annotation “Al. Ursinum” meant in Ugonio’s note: not Sant’ Alessio and Gaetano Orsini, but ursine garlic: an innocent harvest of fresh herbs. That therefore was the “urgentitious and appeteasing” affair that the corpisantaro had hinted at, not any plots with Orsini under the cover of the Chormaestrin’s music! The subsequent words in Ugonio’s note, the name of the Two Hanged Men, indicated the spot where the corpisantaro knew that he would find it in abundance. But instead, it was where he had found his death: wild garlic, as one of the gendarmes had explained to me, was almost identical to another plant, lily of the valley, whose leaves contain a swift and fatal poison. Even expert herb pickers had sometimes made mistakes and paid with their lives, just like Ugonio. Oh, how fragile a thing is a human being, if the life of a reckless relic hunter, hardened to all labours and all dangers, can be broken by a puny little wild plant!

  That was why Gaetano Orsini, when Simonis and his companions had asked him, amid their pummelling, about the two hanged men, had said in bewilderment that he hardly ever left the city walls! He knew the name of the place and could not understand why they were talking to him about it.

  It had all been pointless. The last tenuous thread that seemed to link us to a possible solution had frayed to nothing in our hands. If Ugonio had not been plotting with Gaetano Orsini, then our suspicions about Camilla de’ Rossi’s musicians remained no more than suspicions – or even fantasies, since they were based on nothing concrete. Ugonio’s only business had been to provide Ciezeber with a false head of Kara Mustafa, as part of his customary trade as a hunter of fake relics.

  The disappearance of the corpisantaro was another painful rupture for me. I had run into Ugonio twenty-eight years ago, in Rome, at the very same time that I, an inexperienced servant boy in a modest Roman inn, had first met Atto Melani, and through him the great capricious world outside the walls of my little inn, and the mad wheel of fortune that governs it.

  Even then I had stared death in the face. Now the death of Ugonio closed the circle that had begun in those distant Rom
an days. The sense of completeness (not of perfection) that the events of Vienna brushed over my distant memories, like painters silently coating frescoes with a fresher glaze, took on a new tonality. A harsher, sadder and more ruthless one.

  At least I had the consolation that Ugonio had not died at anyone else’s hand: indeed, he had gone by gorging himself. I cast a last glance at his lifeless body. The shades and mephitic airs of the Roman sewers had bestowed on him the features of a burrowing mole. His passing now allowed him to be benignly caressed by the fresh Viennese breeze and by the April sunlight, which filtered tremulously through the foliage and rested maternally on his face, almost as if it wished to show me the divine breath that lies hidden in every man. More than a death, it was almost an elevation from the subhuman to the superhuman, this demise of the haggard old corpisantaro, I thought as I walked away. I made the sign of the cross and recited a short prayer for his twisted soul.

  On our way back I called in at the imperial chamber to report the escape of the wild animals from the Place with No Name. The clerk took note without batting an eyelid.

  When we got back to Porta Coeli there was no point in trying to confer with Atto: he lay almost lifeless on his bed, too worn out by the day’s adventures. Domenico, who had almost completely recovered at last, begged me not to insist: better to let him sleep through to the next day.

  “Today we will tackle the Fourth Discussion: Of buying and selling,” Ollendorf greeted me, with the usual Teutonic smile that sends a shiver running down our Latin spines.

  With my mind on quite other matters, I passively submitted to the German lesson. Our little boy and Cloridia, fortunately, proved much more attentive to the teachings of our good preceptor.

  “Was für Wahren wollen die Herren haben? Sie gehen herein in den Laden, und schawen, was Ihnen beliebet,” which is to say “What merchandise would your lordships like to have? Pray enter the shop, and see what attracts you,” my little wife recited diligently.

  A little later there came a knock at our door. It was Simonis. He had found a note from Opalinski in his room: he wanted to meet us the next day and fixed an appointment at seven a.m. in a palace near the southern ramparts.

  I went back to the lesson with even less enthusiasm, and when Ollendorf had gone I was finally able to tell Cloridia all about the latest events, Ugonio’s death in primis.

  She was saddened, although less than me, naturally. For her the corpisantaro had only constituted a threat, not someone towards whom she could feel any attachment, however wavering. In any case, we did not talk much about it, so as not to distress our boy.

  I settled down to read the newspaper: the Corriere Ordinario, of course. I had to admit that since these troubles had started, I had felt less and less inclined to take up the customs of my adopted city, and the impenetrable Germanic idiom was one of the first victims.

  Cloridia had meanwhile foraged in the convent’s kitchens for something to eat. I had not yet had any chance to eat and was starving.

  “Mummy’s little boy,” she said to our son, with a tray in her hand. “Come and help me prepare Daddy’s dinner.”

  “Ich gehorsambe”, which is to say, “I obey,” my little apprentice answered comically in German, and at once set out cutlery, a napkin and a glass in front of me.

  The dinner was all based strictly on spelt. I knew who it came from, of course. How could I object? The Chormaisterin’s fixation on the curative powers of spelt was shared wholeheartedly by Clorida, who had inherited it from her mother. In all her years in Rome, my wife had actually made very little use of her mother’s recipes, but now, spurred by Camilla, she too had become a real fanatic. At first it had not bothered me, especially since the noble grain, a favourite food of the ancient Romans, had more than once cured our boy of his ailments, but as time went by I had tired of it. Chewing my way through this meal fit for ruminants, I settled down to read the Corriere Ordinario, which Cloridia had as usual obtained from van Ghelen’s printing house.

  The dispatches from Madrid, which had left there on 9th March, reported the preparations in Portugal (where the Queen was Joseph’s sister) for the campaign against the Duke of Anjou. And so naturally I thought of the Golden Apple and the Flying Ship, which the Queen of Portugal had sent to Vienna. Then I read of the quarrels between the Duke of Vendôme and the Princess of the Orsini, “which are growing daily, the Duke saying loftily, that he cannot understand how the advice of a woman is followed in matters that should not even come to the ears of their Sex.” I could well believe that the Duke of Vendôme might grow irritated with the gentle sex, I thought: had not Atto included him in the list of women-men? The name of Orsini, on the other hand, the famous intriguer known to everyone, reminded me of the homonymous and far from noble castrato, whom I had for a moment mistaken for the killer of poor Ugonio . . . How strange this evening’s perusal of the Corriere was proving, I said to myself in vexation: instead of distracting me, every item reminded me of what I had just lived through. If such coincidences meant anything, what were they trying to tell me? I went on to the dispatches from Rome, which were also far from fresh, from 28th March, but here too the first name my eyes fell on was that of Connestabile Colonna: he had participated with His Holiness, the Supreme Pontiff Clement XI, at the feast of the Most Holy Annunciation. The Connestabile was Maria Mancini’s son. In short, the gazette, wherever my eyes fell, was talking about me.

  I threw it onto the ground impatiently and went on to read the pamphlet which accompanied the gazette. However, it only brought news from places that were distant and wholly unknown to me, like Mietavia, capital of a certain Duchy of Curlandia. Right at the end I found the latest news from Vienna:

  The Most August Emperor having been ill with Smallpox since Wednesday, Prayers have been ordained and published since Sunday . . .

  Things I already knew. I read on:

  These days have seen the departure for the Low Countries by Postal Diligence of the Caesarean General Sergeant Count Gundacchero of Althan.

  So Count Althan had already set off: which made it all the stranger that Prince Eugene was still lingering here. Perhaps the next day he really would leave, as he had announced.

  That was the end of the Viennese news. I looked at the page again: there was something odd, like a false or missing note. Missing? Of course! The news of the Augustinian monk arrested for murder and rape! The Italian newspaper said nothing about it.

  “Cloridia! The Diary of Vienna! Where’s the Diary of Vienna?” I exclaimed, leaping from my chair.

  “Here it is, here it is!” my consort said, pointing to the table by my side, where she always placed the paper that she bought at the Red Porcupine.

  I could not find the news in the German-language gazette either.

  Penicek had told me the previous day that it was on everyone’s lips and he was surprised we knew nothing about it. But there was not a word about it in the gazettes. I went over to Cloridia, who had started brushing my work clothes and asked if she had heard anything about it, but she shook her head and looked surprised: at the palace of the Most Serene Prince they were usually the first to hear every little item of gossip – and if a monk had been arrested . . .! That was not the only thing. She had not heard a word about the serious crimes he was supposed to have committed either.

  “Odd!” remarked my wife. “Who told you about it?”

  “Penicek.”

  “Ah.”

  “Do you think he invented it, perhaps to . . .?”

  At that moment, from the pocket of the trousers Cloridia was holding, fell a small object. It was the little box Atto had given to me.

  “What is it?” asked Cloridia, retrieving it.

  I told her that, according to Abbot Melani, it contained the explanation of his meeting with the Armenian. However, he had made me promise not to open it before he left Vienna.

  “And suppose it were empty?” she objected.

  I felt myself turn pale. I shook it slightly. An object of some
sort rattled within. I heaved a sigh of relief.

  “All right, the Abbot has put something inside,” she admitted. “But are you really sure that it will explain his meeting with the Armenian? Maybe it’s just a pebble.”

  I was on tenterhooks.

  “I’m tempted to open it,” I said.

  “You’d be breaking your word.”

  “So what should I do?” I asked disconsolately.

  “I’m almost sure your Abbot was sincere, this time. I’ve still got a few doubts, I’ll admit, but the moment you suspect anything you can always force it open.”

  20 of the clock: eating houses and alehouses close their doors.

  I was sitting in my usual place in the Caesarean chapel: it was time for the rehearsal of Sant’ Alessio. This evening the orchestra was playing with more intensity of purpose than usual, the performance of the oratorio being imminent.

  After Ugonio’s tragicomic death – may he rest with God – the musicians had turned back into the innocent artists I had always really believed them to be. And yet I looked at Camilla de’ Rossi’s back as she waved her arm to coax a more intense vibrato from the violins, or a gentler muttering from the violas, and I asked myself some questions.

  Why had she lied about Anton de’ Rossi? Rossis are not necessarily all related to one another, she had said. But the ex-chamberlain of Cardinal Collonitz was indeed related to her deceased husband Franz. Cardinal Collonitz was the same man who years ago had baptised the Turkish girl who had been rejected by the nuns of Porta Coeli; it was Camilla herself who had told us about it. Franz and Anton de’ Rossi, Franz and Camilla, Anton de’ Rossi and Collonitz, but also Collonitz and Porta Coeli, and finally Porta Coeli and Camilla. What logic, if any, lay concealed amid all this tangle?

  And why on earth, as I had been told by Gaetano Orsini (whom I only now knew to be harmless and therefore trustworthy), had the Chormaisterin never let herself be paid for the work she did for the Emperor? People who do not work for money, I argued, receive some other kind of recompense. What was hers? When Joseph had asked her to give up her job as a healer with spelt, she was no longer able to support herself and, rather than get paid for her musical compositions, she had asked His Caesarean Majesty to be allowed to stay at the convent of Porta Coeli, which was more like a punishment than a recompense.