I fear that there will be no more time for making claims. Atto Melani, Counsellor to the Most Christian King and Abbot of Beaubec, is (or would today be) seventy-six. I look around and see that few, very few men of his age are still on their feet, still healthy and vigilant; or even so much as alive. The dangerous life he has lived can only have left its mark on his weary bones. It remains only for me to hope.
Now, the present worries me even more than the future. Maria did well to warn her Louis that the forged will would resolve nothing. Now that the cannon are firing, I too am all too well aware that all those intrigues, all those efforts to resolve the Spanish succession by deceit, while avoiding war, were in vain. Philip of Anjou mounted the Spanish throne, as the Sun King wished, but France was dragged into a conflict with the other powers from which the whole world may never recover. "A great fratricidal struggle, a new Peloponnese war," the Connestabilessa had prophesied.
In those July days at Villa Spada, I had believed I was making myself useful to my little daughters. Instead, I had aided and abetted a plot which was driving Europe to destruction. Was that the reward for all that effort on my part, for climbing the cupola of Saint Peter's in the dark?
Two days ago, I went to look for the answer in the place which in the past had furnished me with more answers than I had found anywhere: the Vessel. I needed solitude, and at the same time, I needed someone to talk to. Cloridia was out assisting with a childbirth. Melani and Buvat were in Paris - the Devil take them. I wondered whether the curious individual might still, however, be where I had left him. Two years had passed, but there are times when nothing is impossible.
King Solomon said: "In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."
As though not a day had passed, I found him in his usual place, perched on the cornice of the Vessel and - need I say it? - playing the folia on the violin.
He had at once greeted me with the usual quotation from the Bible, as though he had read in my eyes what it was that I sought. How could I fault him for that? To the Vessel, one came only as a seeker.
"And he also said that in wisdom, and in knowledge, is vanity and vexation of spirit," the Dutchman added.
It was true, so true. Now that I knew, I suffered. As when I met Abbot Melani nineteen years ago and my young boy's illusions fell one after the other under the hammer blows of reality.
"That is precisely what folly exists for," the violinist added, speaking loud and clear to make himself heard as he pressed on the bow, his face melting into a broad smile. "Folly gladdens the heart and, as Hildegarde of Bingen preached so well, converts the tristitia seculae into coeleste gaudium or, in other words, it transforms pain for the world into the joy of heaven!"
After two years, I was once again hearing the folia. The notes played arpeggiato drew Albicastro's words and his very limbs after them, remoulding them to the proud accents of the dance. In counterpoint with his words, those concepts became unfamiliar, ineffable music.
For a few minutes, he seemed intent only on playing, and I decided to move on a little further. Once again, I entered the park of the Vessel, walking quietly; my thoughts, however, were soon racing, fluttering to the burning rhythm of the folia.
Illuminated by the resonant lightning flashes of that music, the events I had lived through took on a thousand facets, ogling me and letting me run after them, then suddenly letting their commotion fall silent, so that sometimes I would think, "There, I have them," only for them to start swirling in some quite different guise. When at last they'd foiled my green certitudes, they seemed to suggest to me new ways of knowledge.
Outside me were the thousand worlds of the folia. Within me, in my thoughts, there were, however, two worlds. In one of these, Atto and Maria were squalid spies in the service of the King of France, who in their letters, in order to trouble the waters, pretended to weave an amorous intrigue. In the other world, however, Abbot Melani was the faithful, gallant messenger of love between the Connestabilessa and the Most Christian King, taking advantage of politics to court as they had done forty years before, still using the same pseudonyms, Silvio and Dorinda, as in their readings from the time when they were living out their love.
Which of the two worlds was real, and which illusory? Had I seen only masks, or men and women of flesh and blood?
While the music filled all the space around me, I sharpened thought's scalpel. What had Atto said to me on the day when he took flight? "If the King of France's separation from Maria Mancini were now to bring Bourbon blood to the throne of Spain, the two would not have been separated in vain."
Then I understood. Those two worlds, the world of the spies and that of the lovers, were not mutually exclusive. They coexisted and even fed one another.
Maria and Louis had been separated because of Spain. Forty years later, they were still writing to one another, and still because of Spain. Their passion had had to give way to reasons of state, with which it was nevertheless firmly interwoven. Maria spied for Louis, but out of love. The secret code was The Faithful Shepherd, once their favourite reading. And Atto acted as go- between, then as now.
If Maria had not loved Louis, perhaps she would not even have obeyed his orders. This was clear from her letters. "I understand the point of view shared by Lidio and yourself, but I repeat my own opinion: it is all pointless." She would never have wished to bring the forged signature of Charles II to Madrid; a useless piece of deceit, she thought, and one that would turn against its author.
Like Croesus, King of Lydia, before him, who wanted to hear Solon tell him that he was the happiest of men, the Most Christian King wanted to demonstrate to the Connestabilessa that she would by means of that false signature be bringing him the crown of Spain on a silver platter. Then he would be the most powerful of kings and thus the happiest of mortals. Atto had announced it to Maria: "What you will receive when we meet will convince you . .. You know what value he sets upon your judgement."
But she, like Solon, had shaken her head. Had she not written it clearly? "What today may seem good will tomorrow turn out to be a disaster. For oftentimes God gives men a gleam of happiness, and then plunges them into ruin."
She did not believe that false will could, by fulfilling the Most Christian King's lust for power, make for his happiness as a man. But for the sake of her old love, she had given in: "I shall come. I shall do as Lidio desires. So we shall meet at the Villa Spada. This I promise you." Louis expected of her a double obedience, to love and to the state.
So, said I to myself, what the Abbot had delivered had been far more than a mere token of love. That sheet of paper bearing the words yo el Rey had changed the world's history.
Yet Atto had entrusted it to me, a humble peasant and servant to the Spada household. He had not handed it in person to Maria. Why?
So as not to dirty his hands and to deliver through an ignorant messenger that false signature which burned hotter than a thousand bonfires; that, I had thought two years earlier, in the full spate of my anger. Yet, the Abbot had accompanied me to the very door of the convent: an imprudent move for one supposed to have premeditated everything.
No, the law of the two co-existing worlds, that of feelings and of vile politics, applied also to Atto. At the last moment - this I realised only now - his heart had given way. He had lacked the courage to stand before the woman whom he had loved for thirty years without ever having seen her. He had not dared to appear to her with his shoulders weighed down by too many winters; nor, perhaps, to behold her as she now was. Were not Atto's eyes perhaps the very eyes of the Most Christian King? If Maria did not wish to show herself to the King, then perhaps it was as well that Melani should not see her either. He would not have wished to betray her or to lie to Louis. Sooner or later, the day would have come when the Sovereign would have put the inevitable question: "Tell me, is she still beautiful?"
I, who had seen her, could have told the Abbot that perhaps she had never been more beautiful, that never woul
d I forget her, the white luminosity of her face and hands, the ardour of her great chestnut eyes when they met mine, the scarlet ribbons skilfully woven into her curly tresses.
But that had not been possible. Atto had gone.
Meanwhile, the folia continued inexorably, and my cogitations with it. Atto had sealed the fateful letter to Maria negligently, too great a lapse - this, I realised now only with the calming of my anger - for it not to have been deliberate. He had not had the strength to keep lying to me to the bitter end; he had wanted to confess all the deceit to me, but after his own fashion. This was followed, quite inevitably, by his precipitous flight. He himself could not stand the truth.
And Maria's letters? Was it an accident that I should have found them in Atto's chambers and secretly read them? Oh no, with Atto, nothing was left to chance. What would those words yo el Rey have meant to me if I had not read Atto and Maria's letters? Little or nothing, ignorant as I had been at the outset of the succession to the throne of Spain and the will of Charles II.
This could mean only one thing. He knew that I had read the letters. Indeed, he had wanted me to read his correspondence with the Connestabilessa. And I had fallen into the trap.
How ingenuous I had been. And how clever I had thought myself when I found those letters among the Abbot's dirty linen. Atto had put them there deliberately, certain that I would soon remember how he and I, seventeen years before, had found the answer to our investigations in a pair of dirty under-drawers. To use me effectively as an informer and then to be able to make use of my help, he needed me to be well informed about the question of the Spanish succession. He who does not know is like one who cannot see, and I was there to notice and report back. Yet Atto could not instruct me openly: I would have put too many questions to him which he could not answer. So he had come up with that trick. And when he had not wanted me to read his letters (the last of which truly did contain too many inconvenient truths) he had concealed them elsewhere, in his wig.
He had not, however, expected me to overcome that obstacle. In the end, I had, after all, succeeded in reading them, thus coming very close to the truth: I had learned that Atto had lied to me about the three cardinals. But then the poetic supplications to Maria, who still had not arrived at Villa Spada, had confused my mind.
Yet, even as he wrote those lines of love, the Abbot knew full well that she would never be attending the festivities! And the fact of having penned those heartfelt verses was not caused by surprise at her delays but by the pain of knowing her to be so near, so very near, yet out of reach because of the very mission that had brought them both to Villa Spada. The two worlds continued to co-exist side by side.
I would have preferred not to discover any of these things, I thought to myself in the now declining late afternoon light. If the Abbot had not given in to tardy and pointless scruples of conscience in regard to me (after having put my life in peril time and time again!) he would not have felt impelled to flee and, as he had promised me, we should have gone together to the notary for the donation of my little daughters' dowries.
I wanted to go and flush him out him in Paris, the renegade. In an involuntary gesture, my fist hit out in the void in search of Atto's jaw.
"You'd like to avenge yourself, young man, is that not so?" asked Albicastro, reappearing before me as he modulated a staccato variant on his folia on the violin.
"I should like to live in peace."
"So what's preventing you? Do as young Telemachus did."
"Again that Telemachus," I burst out. "You and Abbot Melani
"If you live like Telemachus, whose name literally means 'far-away fighter', you'll live in peace," chanted the Dutchman, matching his syllables to the rhythm of his music.
'"Tis a clever man who can understand you..." I murmured in response to the lucubrations of that bizarre individual.
"Telemachus pulled on the bowstring, but his father Ulysses, in disguise, gestured that he should desist and stopped his hand," Albicastro recounted, passing on to a new variation on the theme of the folia. "And then Telemachus said to the suitors: 'It may be that I am too young, and have as yet no trust in my hands to defend me from such a one as does violence without a cause. But come now, ye who are mightier men than I, essay the bow and let us make an end of the contest!' Do you know what that means? Young Telemachus could perfectly well have drawn his father's bow. But vengeance was not his to take. Thus, you too, arm yourself with patience and let the Lord do as He will. Look, my son," he continued in gentler tones, "this world of ours, which has gone on since Homer's day and perhaps even long before that, is the world of folly, of the 'far-away fight': the Last Day has not yet come, that in which, amidst laughter and jesting, Ulysses' fatal bow will be drawn. But let us not ask ourselves how far off that day may be," he warned, and then recited:
Jerusalem fell to the ground,
For whom our Lord had so long waited;
And Niniveh likewise was fated:
When Jonah warned, they quit their debt
And sought no longer term to get;
But later still they lapsed again -
No Jonah came to warn them then.
Thus everything has term and measure
And goes its way at God's own pleasure.
Once again, I found myself listening, two years later, to the rhymes of that poem, The Ship of Fools. The verses seemed to fit every one of the experiences I had lived through, from the Vessel to the cerretani.
"Sooner or later, I shall read that book by your well-beloved Brant," I reflected aloud.
"While we await the coming of the time," Albicastro went on, quite unperturbed, "let us live and love! And may the threats of the suitors be worth less than a ha'penny's worth for us. Go back home, my son, embrace your family, and leave off all those thoughts. The folly of he who loves, said Plato, is the most blessed of all."
I wondered whether Albicastro, with all those obscure sayings of his, did not perhaps belong to some obscure heretical sect. One true thing he had, however, said: I should bury the past and return home. Avoiding any further comment, I bowed and began to walk away.
"Adieu, my son; we shall not meet again," he replied, for the first time at the Vessel beginning a piece other than the folia.
He surprised me, and I came to a stop; the music was tormented and nervous, evoking a sense of some imminent menace. With sharp, repeated bowing, Albicastro was wresting from his instrument all the tragedy which these things can sometimes unleash, transcending their laughable dimensions, that little wooden carcass with its four gut strings.
"Will you be returning home?" I asked him.
"I am off to the wars. I am going to enrol in the Dutch army," he replied, drawing near, while the rhythmic hammering of that hard and almost obsessional motif spoke of cannonades, drums, forced marches through the mud.
"And what then of your far-away fighting?" I asked after a moment's surprise.
"I name you my successor," said he solemnly, breaking off from his playing and touching my shoulder with his bow in a gesture of investiture. "Besides. . ." he laughed before turning his back on me and walking towards the gate, "you earn good money in the armies of Holland!"
I gave up trying to understand whether or how much he was jesting. He moved off with his violin on his shoulder, then began yet another piece of music: a melancholy adagio, an utterly pure vocal line on which the Flying Dutchman's bow improvised trills and turns, appoggiaturas and mordents, delicate florileges of a melody which, better than any earthly leave-taking (for music is not something merely human) bid farewell at the same time, to me, to the Vessel, to peace, and to times past.
And now I too could be on my way. I made a last tour of the gardens of the Vessel. Once again, the wind rose, uncovering the fiery face of the sun.The weather had suddenly become almost spring-like, and it felt as though someone had turned back the clock's hands by a couple of hours. I was moving towards the entrance, when my attention was caught by a rustling of clothes and trills o
f light laughter.
It was then that I saw her. Behind a thick hedge, as when first we had caught sight of her: a delicate screen which enabled one to see without being seen, to know without knowing.
This time they were old; not mature, old. Wrinkled faces, hoarse voices, hooded eyelids. Nonetheless, they seemed as gay as when Atto and I had beheld them from the first-floor windows, at the age of twenty. They walked side by side, bent but smiling, commenting on some bagatelle; she gave him her arm.
I held my breath. I wanted to draw closer, to understand whether I had really seen what I thought I had. I looked for a break in the hedge, tried to make my way around it, changed my mind again, turned back and looked once more.
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