Secretum

by Rita Monaldi;Francesco Sorti

  I understood that they were speaking of the Pope's health and every one of them had his word to put in.

  "We hope, we hope, and we pray; prayer can resolve everything," said another prelate in a sorrowful and in truth rather insincere voice, ending up by crossing himself.

  "How much good he has done for Rome!"

  "The Hospice of San Michele a Ripa Grande along with a hundred and forty thousand scudi every year for the poor. . ."

  "A pity that he did not succeed in draining the Pontine Marshes. . ." said the Princess Farnese.

  "Your Highness will permit me to remind her that the miserable state of the Pontine Fields and the unhealthy effluvia that issue therefrom to oppress Rome are not the fruit of nature, but of the imprudent deforestation practised by past popes, above all Julius II and Leo X," retorted Monsignor Aldrovandi, striving to stifle at once the least allusion to any lack of success on the part of the reigning Pope, "and, if I am not mistaken, Pope Paul III too."

  This last barb was a polite reminder of the fact that the Princess was herself a descendant of Paul III, Alessandro Farnese.

  "The Baccano Woods," she retorted, "were cut down because they were a refuge for assassins and thieves."

  "As is happening today with the forests of Sermoneta and Cisternal" came the heated rejoinder of one whom I was later to recognise as the Prince Caetani. "We should cut them all down and leave it at that. For the sake of public order, I mean," he added, embarrassed by the coolness of his audience.

  The Princes Caetani, and this I had myself learned some time previously, asked every new pope for permission to cut down those woodlands, which belonged to them, so that they could make money from the operation.

  "His Holiness Innocent XII has for years issued decrees for the defence of heaths and woodland," replied Monsignor Aldrovandi imperturbably.

  A murmur of approval flowed down the table, at least among those who were not engaged in close, gossipy conversation with the person seated next to them.

  "A pity that he had the Tor di Nona Theatre demolished," said the same gentleman who had not laughed at Cardinal Durazzo's joke.

  Monsignor Aldrovandi, who had not realised that all his praise of the Pope resembled an obituary, had succeeded in silencing the first, veiled criticism of the Pontiff, but this second one (referring to the unpopular decision to destroy one of Rome's most splendid theatres) he pretended not to hear, turning to his neighbour and showing his back to the person who had addressed him.

  While serving him, I was fortunate enough to hear two ladies whisper: "But have you seen Cardinal Spinola di Santa Cecilia?"

  "Oh, have I seen him!" giggled the other. "With the approach of the conclave he's been trying to put it about that he no longer suffers from gout. In order not to be left out of the charmed circle, he goes around behaving like a young lad. And then this evening, here, eating, drinking and laughing, at his age.. ."

  "He's Spada's bosom friend, even if both of them try to hide

  it."

  "I know, I know. . ."

  "Has Cardinal Albani not arrived?"

  "He will be coming in two days, for the wedding. They say that he is working on a very urgent papal breve."

  The dining table was shaped like a horseshoe. Having almost reached the end of the second branch of the table, I was serving a guest with familiar features, and whom I was shortly to recognise, when I felt a sharp but powerful blow to the arm which was holding the charger. It was a disaster. The figs, catapulted to the left together with the leaves, flowers and snow, landed on the face and clothing of the aged nobleman whom I had just served. The dish crashed to the ground with a clangour like that of a breaking bell. A murmur halfway between amusement and disapproval spread among the nearby guests. While the unfortunate nobleman removed the figs with dignity, I looked all around in panic. How could I make Don Paschatio and the Steward understand that what had just occurred was not my fault and that it had been the guest whom I was just serving who had sent my dish flying? I looked at him, full of mute resentment, knowing well that I could do nothing against him, for the servant is always in the wrong. And then I recognised him. It was Atto.

  Punishment was swift and discreet. Within five minutes, I was no longer holding a charger in my hand, but one of those enormous, immensely heavy, incandescent torches which illuminated the dinner as though it were almost daylight. I was bursting with rage at Abbot Melani and tormented myself with wondering why he should so cruelly have tricked me, getting me punished and imperilling my present and future employment at the Villa Spada. While the dinner continued, I sought his eyes in vain, for he was seated with his back to me and I could see only the nape of his neck.

  Transformed into some new Pier delle Vigne, I must needs bear up: dinner was only beginning and I had better arm myself with patience. The first half of the first hot course had only just been served: fresh eggs drowned in milk with soup under that, butter, slices of lemon, sugar and cinnamon; and boiled head of sturgeon, with its bland savour, served with flowers, herbs, lemon juice, pepper and almonds (one slice for each guest).

  The heat from the torch was unbearable, and under the Turkish turban I sweated buckets. The servants who had gone off a-courting with the peasant girls had done well, said I to myself. Yet I knew all too well that I would never have had the heart to betray Don Paschatio and abandon him at so critical a time. The only relief from the heat and the torment of immobility was to know that I was in the company of seven others like myself, each bearing his torch and, what is more, to be able to be a spectator at this meeting of all those eminences and as many noblemen. The place to which I was assigned near the table was, moreover, singular, as I shall soon have occasion to explain.

  Hardly had I resigned myself to my punishment when, all of a sudden, Atto turned to me.

  "Come, my boy, where I am sitting, 'tis so dark that I feel as though I were in a cave, will you or will you not be so kind as to come closer with that torch of yours?" he called out to me in a loud voice, making an ugly grimace as though I were an anonymous servant quite unknown to him.

  I could but obey. I stood right behind him, lighting up his part of the table, which was in any case already perfectly well lit, as well as I could. What the deuce could Atto have in his head? Why had he ill-treated me and why was he now tormenting me?

  In the meanwhile, the conversation between the guests, which was conducted quite freely, had turned to frivolous subjects. Unfortunately, I was not always able to understand who was speaking, since from my viewpoint I could see a good many of the guests, but not all of them. Moreover, on that evening, most of the faces and voices were still unknown to me (while in the following days I was to learn to recognise almost all of them).

  ". . . Pardon me, Monsignor, but only a kennel-man is permitted to bear an arquebus."

  "Yes, Your Excellency, but let me tell you, if you will permit me, that he may have it carried by a groom."

  "Very well. And so?"

  "As I was saying, if the boar is cowardly and dares not fight in the open, it is killed with the arquebus, as was the custom on the Caetani estates, which are the best hunting grounds."

  "No, no, how then are we to speak of those of Prince Perretti?"

  "Pardon me, all of you, and please do not take offence, but all these are nothing compared to the lands of the Duke of Bracciano," corrected the Princess Orsini, widow of the said Duke.

  "Your Highness must mean those of the Prince Odescalchi," said a thin, icy voice. I looked at the speaker. It was the nobleman who had not joined into the laughter at Cardinal Durazzo's witticism about the pope who compared himself with Pontius Pilate.

  For a moment, the table talk froze. The Princess Orsini, in her passion to defend the memory of the family possessions, had all too easily forgotten that, in order to avoid bankruptcy, the Orsini had sold land and more land to Prince Livio Odescalchi and that those estates and the feudal rights that went with them had changed their names as well as changing hands.
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  "You are quite right, cousin," said she condescendingly, addressing the gentleman as do nobles when speaking to persons with whom they have bonds of kinship or amity. 'And 'tis indeed most fortunate that they should now bear the name of your household."

  The person who had contradicted the Princess was, then, Don Livio Odescalchi, nephew of the late Pope Innocent XI. It followed that this must have been the pontiff concerning whom Cardinal Durazzo had told an amusing anecdote only moments earlier, which had however not amused Prince Odescalchi, to whom his late uncle had left his immense fortune. At last I was seeing in person the nephew of that pope about whom I had, seventeen years previously at the Locanda del Donzello, learned things to make one's hair stand on end. I hurriedly dismissed those memories of episodes which had caused such suffering for my wife and my late father-in-law.

  I learned that evening that Don Livio had also owned a box at the Tor di Nona theatre, which he would no longer be able to enjoy, since the present Pope had had the theatre demolished. This explained why Monsignor Aldovrandi had insisted on that topic.

  "By the smithy of Hephaestus, boy, you are roasting my neck. Would you kindly move that way?"

  Atto had yet again turned around rudely to upbraid me, almost shoving me to a new post, further away from him. By means of these two moves he had shifted me almost five yards from my original position, almost to the far end of that branch of the table.

  Dinner was proceeding with singular freedom of manners and speech, a point which even I who was utterly unfamiliar with that most elevated milieu remarked at once. Only from time to time, irrepressibly, did the quarrelsome haughtiness of the great families and the subtle but venomous pride of those at the summit of the ecclesiastical hierarchy show its face. Yet the rigid protocol which those eminences and princes would have had to observe when meeting one another individually had been magically dissolved, perhaps by the amenity and delightful qualities of the place chosen for banqueting.

  "Pray, pardon me, all of you, a moment's silence! I should like to raise my glass to the health of Cardinal Spada, who is, as Your Excellencies well know, absent on account of pressing affairs of state," said Monsignor Pallavicini, Governor of Rome, at a certain point. "He has recommended me to be, if not a father, at least an uncle to his guests tonight."

  A gentle ripple of approving laughter ran through the assembly.

  "As soon as I see him," continued Monsignor Pallavicini, "I shall express to him my gratitude for his political gifts, and in particular for not providing us with a table laid in the Spanish or in the French style, but surrounded instead by Ottomans."

  Another amused murmur arose.

  "And this last reminds us of our shared destiny as Christians," added Pallavicini amiably, while throwing a swift glance at Cardinal d'Estrees, Ambassador Extraordinary a latere of the Most Christian King, always too much in cahoots with the Ottoman Sublime Porte.

  "And as the enemies of heresy," came the prompt reply of d'Estrees, whose call to order alluded to the fact that, although a Catholic, the Austrian Emperor was allied with Dutch and English heretics.

  "Let us not speak too much to him of the Sublime Porte or D'Estrees will take umbrage and be off," I heard someone whisper rather too loudly.

  "Gently, gently with all this talk," quoth Cardinal Durazzo, who had missed nothing. "First a janissary would not deign to serve me figs and now that he hears all this murmuring about heretics, he'll get it into his head to set his torch to me and burn me."

  The company burst once more into hearty roars of laughter as soon as they caught the allusion to my initial misadventure with Cardinal Durazzo, while I must needs stay sadly impassive and keep holding my torch quite straight.

  It was precisely in view of such political skirmishing that Cardinal Spada, that most prudent of men, had, as I had learned from Don Paschatio, taken a series of counter-measures. So as to avoid, for example, the possibility that someone might peel fruit after the French fashion or, on the contrary, according to that of Spain, fruit was served already peeled.

  Of course, for some years now there had no longer been any risk of seeing some gentlemen apparelled in the Spanish fashion and others, à la française, for thanks to the splendours ofVersailles, it was now the great mode for all to dress after the manner of the Most Christian King. Yet, for that very reason, it was all the rage to show to which party one belonged by means of a whole series of little details: from the handkerchief in one's cloak (those of the Spanish party wearing it on the right, while the Francophiles wore it on the left), or the stockings (white for the French party, red for the Hispanophiles), so that it was no accident if Abbot Melani had that evening chosen to wear white in the place of his usual red Abbot's hose.

  Nor could the ladies be prevented from getting themselves up with a bunch of flowers on their right bosom if they were Guelphs (that is, of the Hispanic persuasion) or on the left if they were Ghibellines (on the French side). However, in order to avoid the table at which all were to eat being set too much in accordance with the traditions of the one side or the other, in particular as to the placing of the crockery which is, as is well known, the decisive factor for determining the political affiliation of the guests, it had been decided to abandon established etiquette and to do something new: knives, forks and spoons had been placed vertically in the glasses, which had caused no little astonishment among the guests, while avoiding pointless polemics.

  "But with hounds, it is quite a different matter," insisted another cardinal, who was wearing a striking French wig.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "I am only saying that once Prince Perretti had sixty hounds. When the season was over, he'd send them elsewhere for the summer, as hounds suffer from the heat, and thus he economised too."

  It was Cardinal Santa Croce who, overshadowed by his own bulky periwig, sang the praises of hunting to hounds.

  "There was no need to remind everyone that he has money problems," I heard a young canon, not far from me, whisper to his neighbour, taking advantage of the fact that the conversation had broken up in disorder into many little groups.

  "Ah, Santa Croce is all at cross purposes with himself," the other responded with a snigger. "He's so hungry that his tongue hangs out and the very words that he ought to keep in his mouth come tumbling down onto the floor."

  The speaker was another cardinal, whose name I did not yet know; I noticed that he seemed unwell, and yet he ate and drank enthusiastically, as though his humour were sanguine.

  Fate (or rather, another factor, of which I shall speak later) came to my rescue, for at that moment, a servant approached this cardinal with a note.

  "Eminence, I have a note for His Eminence Cardinal Spinola

  "For Spinola di Santa Cecilia or for my nephew Spinola di San Cesareo, who is sitting on the other side of the table? Or for Spinola, the Chairman of Ripetta? This evening, all three of us are here."

  The servant was speechless for a moment.

  "The Major-Domo told me only that it was for His Excellency Cardinal Spinola," he ventured timidly, his voice almost inaudible amidst the gay clamour of the banquet.

  "Then it could be me. Hand it over."

  He opened the note and closed it at once.

  "Go and give it at once to Cardinal Spinola di San Cesareo who is seated on the far side. Do you see him? Right over there."

  His neighbour at table had, meanwhile, tactfully turned his attention to his plate and begun again to eat. Spinola di Santa Cecilia (for now it was clear that it was he) turned back to him at once.

  "Now, can you believe it? That fool of a Major-Domo made me receive a note from Spada for my nephew, Spinola di San Cesareo."

  "Ah yes?" replied the other, his physiognomy lit up by lively curiosity.

  "It said: All three on board tomorrow at dawn. I shall tell A.'"

  "A? And who would that be?"

  "How would I know? Seeing that he wants to go out in a boat, let us only hope that he doesn't drown," concluded
Spinola with a snigger.

  The guests took their leave at a rather late hour. I was exhausted. The flame of the torch which I had held aloft for hours had roasted half my face and bathed my whole body in perspiration.

  We torchbearers had to wait humbly until the last guest had left the table. Thus, despite my burning desire to ask him for explanations, I was quite unable to approach Atto. I saw him move away, accompanied by Buvat, while the servants were already snuffing out the table candlesticks. He had not deigned to accord me so much as a glance.

  Up in the attic, in the big servants' hall, I was so weary that I could barely think. In the dark, amidst the rumble of my companions' snoring, I was a prey to anguish; the Abbot had treated me horribly, as had never before happened between us. Nothing made sense. I was confused, nay, desperate.