His blood supplied his last potation.
On earth no ruler comes so high
That termination isn't nigh.
In history, at least my version,
The realms Assyrian and Persian,
And Macedonian and Grecian,
And Carthage and the Roman nation,
They all have come at last to dust.
The verses recited by the Dutchman struck me no little; they seemed closely to echo what Melani had told me of the powerful Cardinal Mazarin's fear of dying.
"Again your Brant. You speak always of folly, you love playing the folia," the Abbot intoned with ill-concealed scepticism.
"Scorn not folly, for 'tis no defect. Do you not, too, concur with my ancient compatriot of Rotterdam that to pardon one's friends' errors by trying to hide them, deceiving oneself about them and doing one's best not to see them - even going so far as to appreciate their vices as great virtues - is all too similar to folly? Is that not the greatest wisdom?"
Atto almost imperceptibly lowered his eyes: Albicastro had struck home. He seemed almost privy to the talks between Melani and me and my musings concerning our tormented friendship.
Meanwhile, the Dutch musician, turning back to rummage among his sheets of music, began to recite to himself:
We don't find friendships like the one
That David had with Jonathan,
Or of Patroclus and Achilles,
Orestes and his friend Pylades,
Like Pythias, to Damon true,
And King Saul's armour-bearer too,
Or Laelius and Scipio.
Self-seeking is our chief est sin,
Ignoring friendship, kith and kin.
No Moses now among our brothers,
Who, as himself could love all others,
No Nehemiahs to be found;
And pious Tobits don't abound.
The Abbot raged inwardly, but uttered not a word.
"And if folly is the highest wisdom," resumed the Dutchman, turning again to us, "where could it find better lodgings than in this Vessel which, as you yourselves acknowledged yesterday, is literally plastered with proverbs of wisdom?"
"Did you spy on us?" exclaimed Atto with a movement of surprise and disdain, beginning to suspect that all Albicastro's uncomfortable allusions to friendship might not be a matter of pure coincidence.
"I heard you when you raised your voices. Your words resounded up into the tower," he replied without any loss of composure. "But you will have other matters with which to occupy yourselves, so permit me now to leave you."
He descended the spiral staircase and within instants we had lost even the echo of his footsteps. Abbot Melani's features were livid.
"Quite insufferable, that Dutchman," he muttered.
"Holland is no country for you, Signor Atto," I could not help observing. "Why, once, if my memory does not betray me, you could not bear even the presence of Flemish cloth."
"Now, thanks be to heaven, that is no longer the case, ever since that people of stingy heretics improved their techniques for dying cloth, at long last attaining the quality of France's royal manufactures. But this time, I'd rather have been assailed by three hundred sneezes than have to put up with that Albicastro's nonsense."
We took the main stairs then to the floor above, where we were setting foot for the first time and where no few unforeseen events awaited us. The first surprise in truth found us even as we were making that ascent. The spiral stairs were carpeted with inscriptions:
So many friends. No friend
Be a friend to your own soul
Correct the friend who errs, but abandon the incorrigible Believe only the friend with whom you've old acquaintance Place not new friends before old
To adulate friends does more harm than to criticise enemies
Amity is immortal, enmity mortal
Attend to your enemies, but fear them
Be slow to form new friendships. Once forged, be steadfast
As I climbed, and those proverbs ran before my eyes, I was once more assailed by the bizarre impression that something in the Vessel, like an obscure and impersonal sense organ, had read my thoughts concerning friendship and was now dictating, if not the answer, at least an acknowledgement of my secret ponderings. I remembered: had I not already, during our first incursion, read sayings about friendship carved on the pyramids in the garden? The series of events that had unfolded was coherent, it was perfectly clear. First, the quarrel with Atto; then Albicastro's words and verses on friendship; the latter were perhaps more a consequence of having listened to the music than some enigmatic manifestation of cause and effect, but here now were new phrases which seemed to be trying to rub salt into my inner wound.
Climbing those stairs, I felt myself like Cardinal Mazarin persecuted by the nightmare of the Capitor: the more I rejected the hints implicit in those proverbs, the more they obsessed me.
So many friends. No friend. With so many at the Villa Spada I exchanged pats on the shoulder; yet I could in truth count none as true friends, least of all the Abbot. Be a friend to your own soul. Atto and I shared the same soul - was that not so? - thought I sarcastically, the Prince of Dupes and the King of Intriguers. . . Correct the friend who errs, but abandon the intriguer. Yes, that was easy enough to say, but was not Abbot Melani the classic exemplar of the friend who is as incorrigible as he is skilled at not allowing one to let go of him? He too, climbing those stairs in front of me, must surely have read all those proverbs. As I expected, he made no comment on them.
On reaching the second floor, we found one other detail that called attention to itself. Above the arch through which one entered that floor was an inscription more singular than all those which had preceded it.
For three good friends, I did endeavour
But then I could not find them ever.
"'Tis just as well this inscription did not escape us," commented Atto to himself.
"What did Benedetti mean?"
"The inscription says I did endeavour' that seems to explain why he built the Vessel."
"Who are the three friends?"
"You should not necessarily think of three persons. They could also be..."
"Three objects?"
Atto responded with a satisfied smile.
"Capitor's gifts!" I deduced excitedly. "Then you are right to seek them here."
"Obviously, it would be excessive to interpret the proverb literally and to regard the Vessel as having been built specifically for the three objects. In my opinion, the phrase means only that the building is, or was, the natural receptacle for Capitor's presents."
"It still remains for us to understand the meaning of 'I could not find them, ever" I retorted.
"That too will emerge, my boy. One thing at a time," he replied as we left the stairs behind us.
The second floor was subdivided very differently from the two lower floors which we had already visited. From the grand staircase we entered a vestibule, which to the left gave onto a terrace facing south, onto the road. This was the flat roof of the covered loggia on the first floor, and the generous gurgling of the fountain at its centre was clearly audible. For an instant we regaled our eyes and our spirits with the view, which encompassed and dominated all the surrounding estates and vineyards and reached in the far distance the silvery shimmer of the sea.
"Fantastic!" commented Atto. "In all Rome I have not enjoyed so generous a panorama. The Vessel is incomparable. So recondite within its walls, so free and airy without."
We returned indoors and followed a corridor towards the opposite, northern, end of the building. In the middle of this floor, there was an oval room, with windows lining its two longer sides. Beyond this room, the corridor continued, leading to a little room with a balcony giving onto Saint Peter's and the Vatican; in a corner was the top of the service stairs. We returned to the oval room.
"This room must have been used for meals during the cold season: there are four stoves in it," observed Atto.
>
"I do not understand why the proportions are smaller than those of the first floor, just underneath. We must have missed something."
"Look here."
My intuition was correct. Atto returned to the first of the two corridors and then to the other one. In each of these were two doors which we had at first failed to notice. We discovered that they led to four apartments, two in each corridor, each with a bedchamber, a bath and a little library.
"Four independent lodgings. Perhaps Benedetti had his friends sleep here, as Cardinal Spada does for his honoured guests at the festivities," I ventured.
"That is possible. However, it is clear now why the main room, here on the second floor, is markedly smaller than those on the two floors below. It is in fact merely the place where the four apartments meet."
While we were exploring those dusty premises, wherever our eyes came to rest, they were amiably assailed by the sentences, maxims and proverbs which Benedetti's extravagant mind had capriciously disseminated on the walls, columns doorposts and window frames. 1 read at random:
Lose not your peace of mind for others' gossip
Nobility 's of little worth unaccompanied by wealth
Not to the Doctor for every ill, not to the Lawyer for every quarrel, not
to the bottle for every thirst
Even above the doors of the four apartments a number of witty aphorisms met the eye:
All things are contained in commodious freedom
Little and good are worth more than much and bad
The sage knows how to find all in little
One cannot call little that which suffices
I sought Atto with my eyes: He had gone off to inspect one of the four apartments. I entered after him.
He was leaning against a doorpost. He greeted me staring, without a word.
"Signor Atto..."
"Silence."
"But..."
"I am thinking. I am thinking, how the Devil is it possible?"
"What do you mean?"
"Your parrot. I have found him."
"You have found him?" I stammered incredulously.
"Here, in this apartment," said he, pointing to a little adjoining room, "along with Capitor's presents."
It was true. They were covered with a fine layer of dust; but there they were. Caesar Augustus was there, too. Time had not spared him. Covered with that immaterial shroud, he had been waiting for who knows how long to be rediscovered and, given his nature, admired.
"My boy, yours is a great honour," said Atto as I entered the little room. "With your hand you are touching one of the greatest mysteries of the history of France: Capitor's gifts."
A picture. We had found a picture. It was big: over four foot six high and six feet wide. It had been placed on the ground in the little room, unbeknownst to all save the walls and inscriptions of the Vessel.
The subject of the picture consisted of various fine objects harmoniously arranged with a clever mixture of order and disorder. In the lower part of the centre of the picture, in the foreground, there was a large golden dish rather richly worked in the Flemish style, placed obliquely on a step. On it two silver statuettes could be distinguished: Neptune, the god of the sea, trident in hand, and the Nereid Amphitrite, his spouse. They were seated one close to the other on a chariot drawn over the waves by a pair of Tritons. I knew already what this was: one of Capitor's presents, that in which she had burned the pastilles of incense.
Further to the right, depicted above the step, was a golden goblet, the stem of which was in the form of a centaur, the equine half of which was in gold and the human half in silver. This was obviously the image of the goblet which Capitor had handed to the Cardinal filled with myrrh.
Behind the first two objects stood a great wooden terrestrial globe with a golden pedestal: the third gift. Before this the madwoman had recited the sonnet on fortune which had so indisposed His Eminence.
In the painting one could also admire other exquisitely fashioned objects, whose images provided the pictorial key to its meaning. In the background, one could descry a table on which were placed a red carpet, a lute, a viol, a cymbal and a book of musical notations, open on who knows what page, perhaps that lugubrious Passacaglia of Life which Capitor had made Atto sing and which had so terrorised the Cardinal. On the far left, elegantly bending its paw, a hound of noble breed was nuzzling the great red carpet with shy curiosity.
But proudly showing off, right in the middle of the whole composition, was quite another animal: a splendid white parrot, its head surmounted by a great yellow crest, perched on the wooden globe, likewise with one foot raised and its head turning towards the dog, almost as though it were mimicking it and marking its own indifferent superiority It was the faithful portrait of Caesar Augustus, perfect even down to the somewhat derisively haughty expression.
"This is the painting that Mazarin had made by that Dutch painter before getting rid of Capitor's three gifts. . ." I remembered, attaching the thread of what Atto had narrated to the web of recent events.
The Abbot fell briefly silent, utterly absorbed by the singularity and significance of the moment.
"Boel. He was called Pieter Boel. Years later he was to become an official court painter. I told you that he was good and now you see that I did not deceive you."
"The picture is... really splendid, Signor Atto."
"I know. They told me of it, but I myself never saw it. You can see that even the description of Capitor's presents which I gave you was faithful. My memory does not betray me," he added with ill-concealed satisfaction.
"I had, however, thought that the painting had remained in Paris. Did you not say that Mazarin kept it with him?"
"I too thought that it was in France. But as we explore the Vessel, I am becoming more and more convinced of one fact."
"And what would that be?"
"That Capitor's gifts are not here, or rather that they are no longer here."
"What do you mean?"
"I too believed that they had been entrusted to Benedetti to be kept here, at the Vessel. The picture was to stay with Mazarin as a surrogate. Instead, here I find the surrogate and no trace of the presents. That is not, of course, what we hoped to find but it is still better than nothing. As one of the maxims we have just read put it, 'The sage knows how to find all things in little'."
Once again, I reflected in astonishment, the Vessel had had the bizarre capacity to foresee (and to respond to) the intimate questionings of persons visiting it.
"The presents must have been sent to some other place," Abbot Melani was meanwhile thinking aloud. "But where? The Cardinal never left anything to chance."
We again turned to the painting, at once sublime, enigmatic and ill-omened.
"It is unbelievable. The parrot really does seem to be Caesar Augustus," I observed.
The Abbot looked at me as though I were an idiot.
"It does not seem. This is Caesar Augustus."
"What are you saying?"
"I did not remember you as being so slow of understanding. Do you think it possible that there could exist two parrots like this, one painted on canvas and a second, identical one, in two almost neighbouring cities without the one being a portrait of the other?"
"But this picture was painted in Paris," I protested, irked by the Abbot's sarcasm.
"It cannot be a coincidence. If you remember properly, I told you that the madwoman Capitor had a passion for all things feathered. She always had a flock..."
"... of birds that kept her company, 'tis true, that you told me. Then you yourself, many years ago, perhaps saw Caesar Augustus! Many years have passed since then, but parrots are rather long- lived."
"Of course, I may have seen him then - who knows? She had so many parrots around her, the madwoman. Besides, I have never been too fond of those beasts. To tell the truth, I have never understood the vogue for keeping them in one's house, as so many do, what with the filth, the stink and the noise they make. I may even have s
een your bird, but my memory would not hold such things today."
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