Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  I held my breath: now we had the answer to our questions. The smallpox that had struck His Caesarean Majesty and the heir of Louis XIV was indeed an illness, but caused artificially, as if by poisoning!

  Ugonio had told me that the instruments in Ciezeber’s ritual were used to inoculate, but I had misunderstood the true meaning of “insanitary” and believed that their aim was therapeutic, not criminal.

  “For you it’s the ideal solution,” remarked Simonis. “No one will suspect. It’s not the first case of fatal smallpox in the House of Habsburg. Ferdinand IV, the elder brother of the previous Emperor Leopold, was carried off by smallpox fifty years ago. He was too clever, too cultured, too sharp, at the age of just twenty-one. Just like Joseph, no?” continued my assistant with bitter sarcasm. “Two annoying exceptions among the Habsburgs, who are emperors precisely on account of their mediocrity and malleability. As soon as one of them causes any trouble, away with him! Bring on the second-born. And all the better if he’s a coward, like Leopold.”

  “Leopold, with his mildness, reigned for almost half a century,” retorted Palatine inscrutably.

  “But he himself was the source of one or two disappointments for you. It wasn’t enough that he fled from Vienna when the Turks arrived in 1683: the Christian armies won all the same. Despite all your efforts, Palatine, your wishes are never quite fulfilled – it’s your destiny.”

  “You think so? Everyone knows, and you yourself know it: the death of Ferdinand IV made this war possible,” smiled the dervish.

  “All of this – why?” asked Simonis in a cutting voice.

  “That’s the real question,” answered the dervish. “But only those like you, like me, know it. Why. How and who are just distractions for the rabble. Maybe one day someone will suspect that Joseph the Victorious was assassinated and will wonder: who gained from it? Who had the power to cover it all up? Was it smallpox, or poison . . . Always who and how. We’ll keep the people busy as in a game, preventing them from asking the most important thing, why.”

  “And yet it’s not very hard to guess,” said Simonis. “First of all the war: Joseph is thinking of dividing Spain with the French, and leaving Catalonia to his brother Charles.”

  I started. That tallied with what Atto had told me: the Emperor wanted to divide the Iberian peninsula, leaving his brother with just Barcelona and the surrounding area.

  “That settles the Spanish question,” continued Simonis, “and peace begins. But you want the war to go on, to reduce Europe to total ruin, and then impose an armistice on your conditions, so that you can do whatever you want.”

  Ciezeber kept silent, as if in agreement.

  “Then there’s trade,” persisted my assistant. “War is bad for business – at least, for small-scale business. But your people are engaged in selling arms, building ships, designing fortresses: war is highly profitable for you. And it’s big money. With peace, things dry up.”

  Ciezeber-Palatine answered with an amused whimper.

  “Finally you want to get rid of dangerous rulers and replace them with more malleable ones. It’s always been your strategy, but now you’ve perfected it. For centuries you have been busily laying waste to the world, conquering one city after another. By manipulating the Infidels you conquered Jerusalem. Then you moved northwards, taking Constantinople in 1453, then Budapest as well. It took centuries for you to obtain all this: enormous sums were squandered, armies were sent to wholesale slaughter, whole nations were annihilated. Only Vienna said no to you: despite the invention of Luther’s schism with which you made Europe rot in the Thirty Years’ War, your Ottomans lost the siege in 1529, and then the one in 1683. It was the last holy city before Rome, the final target. And so you had to reconsider your projects. Instead of attacking the Christian kingdoms directly, you concentrate on internal action: exterminating the kings directly. Then you take possession of the minds of their sons, the future sovereigns, by means of court tutors: tormenters of the spirit, whose only task is to crush the characters of the young princes and destroy all their good qualities. It’s a technique you have known for centuries: here in the Empire, Rudolph, son of Maximilian II, was subjected to it. But from now on it will be your speciality.”

  And I remembered: had not my assistant told me that Rudolph the Mad, son of the creator of Neugebäu, had been bullied by his educators? Simonis and Ciezeber were referring to a subterranean conflict whose protagonists were such individuals as Ilsung, Ungnad and Hag, the conspirators who had plotted against Maximilian.

  Simonis first looked up, towards the sky, then shot a meteoric and imperceptible glance at me, and finally down, towards the lions that were quivering and slavering, enraged by the prey that was so close but unattainable.

  “Good. You know a great deal, and you suffer because you cannot do anything about it,” replied the dervish. “So listen now: I tell you that Louis XIV, King of France, will die from poison. It will look like gangrene in the leg, but it will be an artificially induced illness. The doctors, who are the most ignorant of men, will be in the dark. Before the Sun King, it will be the turn of the Dauphin, the Duke and Duchess of Bourgogne, and their son the Duke of Berry: they will all end up the same way, with a skilfully induced false illness. The late King of Spain, Charles II, whose inheritance has set all the nations of Europe at each other’s throats, even though he had just months to live, was poisoned in the same way. Now you know: the Emperor, Joseph the Victorious, is about to die. This evening the decisive inoculation will be administered.”

  I started again: Ciezeber was talking about the medical treatment that Cloridia had heard about that morning at Eugene’s palace: but instead of curing, it would kill him. So Joseph had been betrayed by his own Proto-Medicus! And by countless others along with him. Abbot Melani was right.

  “The Emperor will die – how can I put it? – poisoned by smallpox,” continued the dervish. “It is a fitting end for one who thought himself so powerful that he could do without us: the only man alone on earth.”

  “Ah yes, soli soli soli,” recited Simonis.

  “Exactly. With that phrase the Agha announced to Prince Eugene how things are: either with us or against us. The Emperor thought he could do as he wished: finish the war in his own way, divide up Spain with the French, as if we did not exist. But the war will end on our terms, as and when we say. For Joseph thinks he governs the Empire, but actually he is a man all alone, who cannot even decide for himself: the Turks came soli soli soli, ‘to the only man alone on earth’. Eugene of Savoy, who understands oblique phrasing, understood perfectly, and has chosen to abandon his sovereign and join us. There is your valiant general, your great hero: another traitor, like all the others.”

  I was listening in utter amazement. Thanks to Atto we had guessed the real meaning of soli soli soli; now we were learning why the phrase had been said by the Agha to Eugene of Savoy.

  “You say ‘we’. But who are you? Ottomans? The English? Dutch? Jesuits?”

  “Are you so ingenuous? No, I don’t believe it. You just want my confirmation, but you already know. We are everywhere and we are everyone.”

  I looked around: a pair of henchmen were standing stiffly by as their master talked away in a language incomprehensible to them.

  “We are the real power,” continued Palatine. “He, the Emperor, is as outcast and isolated as the most miserable beggar. The Turkish Agha said nothing but the truth to Eugene, which is there for all to see, but which no one does see. This is our power. We are everywhere, omnipresent but invisible, we eat at your table, sleep in your beds, rifle through your purses, and you do not see us. We seem to be very few and isolated, but we are in fact legion. You think you are many, and yet you are all the same person – a man alone.”

  “You feel omnipotent: that’s why you had the Agha pronounce his phrase in public.”

  “We never hide anything from you. It is you who have no eyes to see.”

  “No, Ciezeber, the people have eyes to see, but faced with
your inhumanity no one believes what they see. And this is your real strength.”

  “Now be silent,” the other man said. “The House of Habsburg will soon be extinct. Thanks to Joseph’s death, Italy will have its own king, as will Germany.”

  “And that is why you had a poor child, just one year old, killed by your doctors – Leopold Joseph, the Emperor’s little son.”

  “Italy has been broken up for centuries into a myriad of principalities,” continued the dervish without replying, “and Germany into electorates for just as long. And yet both will become great nations, while the Habsburgs must come to an end once and for all, because we wish it, and history is in our hands.”

  “Yes, and after killing the kings and their sons and grandsons, you’ll put the new heirs on the throne – all still children or mere youths – in the hands of tutors faithful to you, who will turn them into imbeciles, cruel and ridiculous,” said Simonis, repeating what had just been said.

  “Their subjects will rightly hate them, the crowned heads will fall under the axe of the people, which will therefore think it is controlling the revolution while all it is doing is implementing our designs,” concluded the dervish. “A new order will replace the old world. For each new right we concede to the rabble, we will secretly abolish ten. Laws will get better, life will get worse. We will rewrite history: we will make fun of the ancients and convince mankind it is now living in the best of all possible worlds, so as to remove any desire to return to the past. We will spread artificial diseases to weaken the health of entire nations. Indeed, we are already doing so: you see how Joseph has ended up? The remedies we supply will be worse than the disease: the doctors and the propaganda are almost entirely in our hands. We will snatch babies from their mothers’ breasts. The people will not even realise, and their weakness will be handed down to their children, and to their children’s children. The tremendous wars which we will organise in the meantime will serve to destroy the documents of the past, to disperse its memory and to turn the world into a grey prison, to make man sad and reduce him to a state of resignation.”

  “Resignation? It’s hard sometimes,” said Simonis, jerking his head towards the beasts that roared angrily at him from the ditch.

  The dervish did not grasp the irony, and went on as if nothing had happened, happy to humiliate Simonis with that grim and apparently inevitable vision of the future.

  “Everyone will accept suffering as something normal, and those who are happy will be looked down upon. Oh, I ardently hope that envy will guide and illuminate the centuries to come! The imbecilic masses will live in ignorance, but we will allow those like you, those who have understood, to rebel just a little. We won’t kill all of you: quite simply, we will see to it that you are provided with false prophets under our guidance, who will keep you under surveillance and count you one by one, in case it is decided to eliminate you. But take comfort: we actually need you. Your impotent suffering nourishes us, and gives a joyful meaning to our task. What glory would there be, otherwise, in triumphing over a herd of blind, deaf beasts? There is no greatness in agreeing with the laws of nature. True power consists in making water flow against the current, making the mediocre triumph over the virtuous, rewarding injustice, praising ugliness. We will separate man from nature. We will imprison everyone in large windowless hives, people will end up ignorant of how a hen’s egg is laid, what a haystack is, or a common little dandelion plant. Our triumph will come when we can separate the people from God as well, and we will take His place. This is what destiny has in store, and we are destiny.”

  “You may be destiny, but without money, weapons and lies you are nothing,” answered Simonis in a strangely calm tone, as if the dervish’s endless lecture were all too familiar to him, and this last objection was dictated more by duty than from any sense of real utility, like a soldier who wearily fires his last shot against an overwhelming enemy.

  “Money and weapons are useful,” admitted Palatine-Ciezeber, “but we are already very rich. Wealth bores us. Indeed, it no longer exists: we are replacing gold with paper money, payment with promises. Wealth is an idea. And the most powerful weapon is the dominion of ideas. Lies are part of the game, they make it more amusing. Because we are –”

  “. . . you are all mad,” Simonis interrupted him, packing into these few syllables all the paternal sarcasm that the pranks of little children, imbeciles and madmen merited. “No human being agrees to sacrifice his own life just to inflict evil on his neighbour, and to pass on his mission to his descendants. But you do. And if the world succumbs to your vileness, it is simply thanks to the only real weapon you have: madness.”

  Caught by surprise, Ciezeber remained motionless for an instant. Then he nodded to the two henchmen. One of them headed towards the tunnel that led out of the cages. In the meantime the other one, after a good deal of fumbling, had succeeded in reloading his pistol, and he aimed it at Simonis’s legs. It was clear what was about to happen: the first henchman would empty one of the two lion cages, the other one would shoot Simonis in a non-vital spot, maybe his foot. Then my assistant would have to fall into one of the cages, and obviously he would choose the empty one. There he would be at the mercy of the three enemies, who would drag him away by force. With torture they might be able to extort something interesting out of him.

  “We will keep you just for a while,” said the dervish, “then you will be free. Obviously you will go out and recount what happened to you here, but no one will believe you, not even your own people. We will slander you, and we will spread the word that we bribed you. Soon people will suspect that you can no longer be trusted. They will say: why was Simonis spared? You’ll be alone, with no honour, no homeland. But alive.”

  “You’re going too fast. You make it sound as if you’ve already succeeded. Because of you the world is getting worse and worse, it’s true, but according to your plans it should have been ruined long ago. The truth is that you are desperate, because for centuries, for thousands of years, you have been struggling to eradicate Christ from the world, but the fruit of your efforts is always inferior to your hopes. Your problem is always the same: ‘the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’, as the Psalm says. The game is never really over, least of all yours. And so I ask you: are you really sure that it is you who direct the world? Have you never suspected that God leaves you alone – indeed, that He has even elected you for His own inscrutable ends?”

  These were the very ideas that we had heard from Atto before we arrived at the Place with No Name. I smiled bitterly. The Abbot and Simonis were really on the same side: that of the humans, not of those who only appeared to be human.

  “The world is the test bed of souls, Ciezeber,” continued the Greek, “and you are no more than unwitting tools of this divine plan: we are all a part of God’s plans, even damned souls like yours.”

  A shiver ran down the dervish’s spine, making him shudder. Perhaps it was the cold. Or perhaps Simonis’s words.

  “And as for us,” my assistant went on, “are you really sure that things will really go just as you said? Don’t you think that at the last moment someone might spoil your party?”

  At that exact instant Simonis’s eyes sought out mine in the darkness, and he was certain that I was observing him. In the dark I could just make out a weak smile, perhaps a farewell. I realised that he was about to act, and that he expected the same from me.

  “So who’s going to prevent us?” Ciezeber said with a sneer. “Your two friends perhaps? Your little dwarf boss and that mummy Abbot Melani?”

  The bow of possibilities had been stretched taut, the arrow of events was about to be launched. It was at that moment, enormous and deafening, that the noise began.

  Day the Ninth

  FRIDAY, 17TH APRIL 1711

  Midnight: three hours till the first cry of the night guard. The city sleeps.

  An immense fracas, a grandiose and oppressive dirge, a primeval abyss of male voices exploded in the moo
r of Simmering. It came from all around and was directed everywhere. It set vibrating every clod, every plant, every stone, every one of the sharp-pointed stars that dotted the dark canopy of the sky. A piercing noise assaulted my ears, and I had to cover them with my hands to prevent them from being shattered by this scorching gale of screeches. It was if the throat of the whole of creation were growing agitated, as if the earth itself, the heavens and the waters had struck up a colossal counterpoint and were chanting in Turkish. Yes, this terrible and deafening litany was in Turkish, and as Ciezeber triumphed over Simonis, this faceless choir invoked the name of Allah, almost as if a new titanic Mahomet were shouting his own wild joy before sweeping away Vienna and its lands. And then I remembered what the students had learned during their investigations into the Golden Apple, and I understood; as Dragomir Populescu had told us, this was the chorus destined to repeat itself every Friday, and it recited “Woe to you, Allah, Allah!” as on that night when the forty thousand martyrs of Kasim had died. That harvest of blood was now being repeated, and the forty thousand were invoking vendetta. As the whole universe seemed to close in on itself above us, I learned that this was the night when the fate of the world would be sealed.

  Then it was as if the horizon flared up, and the sound became so lacerating that it was not enough even to cover one’s ears. Staggering with the pain tormenting my ears and head, I tried to stand up and I saw that at that very moment my assistant was dropping into the lions’ cage.

  Just so as not to deliver himself up to Ciezeber, he had surrendered his life. Simonis the humble chimney-sweep, Simonis the student with the foolish air, Simonis the Greek, had decided to end his life in heroic fashion. Better to be torn apart by lions than to confess his own secrets under torture. I gazed in terror at the darkness and with the eyes of imagination beheld the black panther, grimly mindful of the blows that had offended it the previous day, sink its jaws into my assistant’s neck and chest, and inaugurate the orgiastic banquet in which he was torn to pieces and flayed, his human blood drunk, his veins sucked, his joints shattered, his muscles frayed, as if nature were seeking to indulge in the caprice of reversed butchery, and the blood of the forty thousand had to be avenged on Simonis alone. On his poor mangled body the wrath of two entire armies was being vented – one from the past, led by Kasim, and one from the present, led by the grim panther of the Place with No Name.