Imprimatur

by Rita Monaldi;Francesco Sorti

  "But was this not an instrument of Satan?" I objected in astonish­ment.

  "Ah, well..." stammered Padre Robleda, "the situation was very complex, and a choice had to be made. By granting the natives greater freedom to use mamacoca, more missions could be built, the better to bring them civilisation, in other words, to win over more souls to the cause of Christ."

  I turned over the little leaf in the palm of my hand. I tore it and brought it to my nose, sniffing at it. It seemed to be a thoroughly ordinary plant.

  "And how could this have come to Rome?" I asked.

  "Perhaps some Spanish ship brought a cargo of it to Portugal. From there, it will have made its way to Genoa, or Flanders. What more can I say? I recognised the plant because a brother showed me some, and I have since seen it mentioned in letters from missionaries in the Indies. Perhaps the person who gave it to you knows more."

  I was on the point of leaving when one last question came to mind.

  "Just one more question, Padre. How does one consume mama-

  Coca?’

  "For heaven's sake, my boy, I trust that you do not intend to use it?"

  "No, Padre, I am simply curious."

  "Generally speaking, the savages chew it, after spreading saliva and some ashes on the leaves; but I do not exclude that there may be other ways of taking it."

  I descended the stairs to prepare luncheon, not without first making a passing visit to the apartment of Abbot Melani to tell him what I had learned from Padre Robleda.

  "Interesting, how very interesting," commented Atto, with an expression of deep absorption. "At present, however, I have no idea where this all leads. We shall have to reflect on the matter."

  In the kitchen, I found Cristofano, as usual, shuttling back and forth between the cellars and the stoves. He attended to the prepa­ration of the most diverse and, to tell the truth, singular remedies for the pestilence which held Bedfordi in its thrall. In those days, I had seen a growing ferment in the Sienese physician's activities with spices; and now, he seemed to be trying almost everything. I had even seen him finish off my master's reserves of game, on the grounds that it would go bad and that concealing its taste with spices, as Pellegrino did, was lethal to health. Yet, during the night, he had seized partridges, stock doves, woodcock, quails and hazel-hens, for the sole purpose of stuffing them with Damascene and Amarena plums, whereupon he placed the birds in a white canvas bag and put it under a press, thus extracting from the delicate meat a beverage with which he hoped to restore the poor Englishman to health. Hith­erto, all his attempts to find an efficacious remediam appeared to have come to nothing. Yet, young Bedfordi still lived.

  Cristofano said that he found the other guests to be in rather good health, with the exception of Domenico Stilone Priaso and Pompeo Dulcibeni: the Neapolitan had awoken with the first signs of a cold sore on his lips, while the elderly Marchigiano was suffering from an attack of the piles, doubtless caused by the dinner based on cows' teats. For both these cases, he explained, the remedy was the same: we would therefore prepare a caustic.

  "It mortifies putrid and corrosive ulcers such as, for example, itch­ing herpes and other rashes and eruptions," he pronounced, and then ordered me: "Recipe: the strongest vinegar."

  He then mixed the vinegar with crystalline arsenic, sal-ammoniac and sublimated quicksilver. He ground the lot and put it to boil in a beaker.

  "Good. Now, we need to wait until half of the vinegar has evapo­rated. Then I shall go up to Stilone Priaso and dry his blisters with the caustic. You, meanwhile, prepare luncheon: I have already se­lected a few turkeys, suited to the needs of our guests. Boil them with parsnips until they are light brown in colour and serve them up with a broth of grated bread."

  I set to work. As soon as the caustic was ready, Cristofano gave me my last instructions before climbing the stairs to visit Stilone Priaso. "I shall have need of you with Dulcibeni. Meanwhile, I shall help you to serve the meal, so that you will soon be free, given the propensity of the guests at this hostelry to chatter with you for rather too long," he concluded meaningfully.

  After luncheon, we went to feed Bedfordi. Thereafter, we were not a little busy with my master. Pellegrino seemed not to appreci­ate the effluvia of the cleansing meal personally prepared for him by the physician, which did in truth have the appearance of a curious, greyish porridge. My master at least seemed more lively. The slow but progressive improvements of the last few days did not disappoint my hopes that he might soon recover completely. He sniffed at the porridge, then looked all around him, closed his right hand into a fist and then raised it, rhythmically pointing his thumb at his mouth. This was the unmistakeable gesture with which Pellegrino was ac­customed to mime his desire for a good drink of wine.

  I was on the point of inviting him to be more reasonable and pa­tient for at least a few more days, but Cristofano stopped me with his hand.

  "Are you not aware of his greater presence of mind? Spirits call for spirits: we can certainly allow him half a glass of red wine."

  "But he made free with the wine until the day when he fell sick."

  "Precisely. The point is that wine should be consumed in modera­tion: it is nutritious, it aids the digestion, it produces blood, it com­forts and calms, brings joy, clarity of mind and vivacity. So go down to the cellar and fetch a little red wine, my boy," said he, with a trace of impatience in his tone, "For a little beaker will do Pellegrino the world of good."

  While I was descending the stairs, the doctor called after me "Please make sure that it is chilled! In Messina, when they began to use snow to chill wine and food, all pestiferous fevers caused by con­stipation of the first veins ceased forthwith. Since then, a thousand fewer have died each year!"

  I reassured Cristofano: in addition to bread and leathern bottles full of water, we were kept regularly supplied with pressed snow.

  I returned from the cellars with a little carafe of good red wine and a glass. Hardly had I filled it than the doctor explained that my master's failing had been an immoderate consumption of wine, and that could turn a man raving mad, stupid, lustful, garrulous and even murderous. Temperate drinkers included Augustus and Caesar; while winebibbers included Claudius, Tiberius, Nero and Alexander, who, out of drunkenness, would sleep two days in a row.

  Thereupon, he grasped the glass and downed half of it in a single gulp. "It is not too bad; both robust and smooth," said he, raising the glass with the few remaining drops in it and observing its fine ruby colour. "And, as I was saying, the right dose of wine changes the vices of nature into their opposites, so that the impious man becomes pi­ous, the miser, liberal, the proud, humble, the lazy, energetic, the timid, bold: mental taciturnity and sloth are transformed into astute­ness and eloquence."

  He emptied the glass, refilled it and then emptied it in one rapid gulp.

  "But beware of drinking after fulfilling one's bodily functions or after the sexual act," he warned me, while wiping his lips with the back of one hand and pouring himself a third dose with the other. "It is best to drink after consuming bitter almonds and cabbage or, following one's meal, peaches, quince jelly, pomegranates and other astringents."

  He then administered the few remaining sips to poor Pellegrino.

  Thereupon, we repaired to Dulcibeni's chamber, where the lat­ter seemed somewhat irked to see me at Cristofano's side. I soon understood why: the physician had asked him to uncover his private parts. The old man glanced at me and complained. I understood that I had violated his privacy, and turned around. Cristofano as­sured him that he would not need to expose himself to my sight and that he should not be ashamed before a physician. He then requested that he kneel on all fours upon the bed, leaning on his el­bows, so that his sores would be well exposed. Dulcibeni consented unwillingly, not without first helping himself to the contents of his snuffbox. Cristofano made me squat before Dulcibeni, so as to be able to grasp him firmly by the shoulders. The doctor would soon be beginning to anoint the haemorrhoids wit
h his caustic, and a false movement could cause the liquid to flow onto his cullions or his tail, which would be cruelly injured thereby. When the physician warned him, Dulcibeni suppressed a shiver and took a pinch of his indispensable snuff.

  Cristofano set to work. Initially, as expected, Dulcibeni struggled with the burning pain and emitted brief, restrained moans. In or­der to distract him, the doctor tried to engage him in conversation, asking from what city he came, how he had come to the Donzello from Naples and so on, all questions which I had prudently avoided putting to him. Dulcibeni (as Abbot Melani had foreseen) always replied in monosyllables, letting one conversational opening after another die away without supplying a single element of information that might be of use to me. The doctor then turned to the dominant topic of those days, namely the siege of Vienna, and asked him what they were saying about that in Naples.

  "I would not know," he replied laconically, as I had expected.

  "But there has been talk of this for months, all over Europe. Who do you expect to win, the Christians or the Infidels?"

  "Both, and neither," said he with evident distaste.

  I wondered whether, on this occasion too, Dulcibeni might launch into another soliloquy on the topic which now seemed so to irritate him, once the physician and I had left the apartment.

  "What do you mean?" insisted Cristofano, while his manipula­tions drew a hoarse cry from Dulcibeni. "In a war, for as long as no treaty is concluded, there is always a victor and a loser."

  The patient reared up and it was only by grasping him by the collar that I could hold him down. I could not understand whether it was the pain that so irritated him: the fact is that, this time, Dulci­beni preferred an interlocutor of flesh and blood to his reflection in the mirror.

  "But what do you know of it? There is so much talk of Christians and of Ottomans, of Catholics and Protestants, of the faithful and the Infidels, as though the faithful and the Infidels really existed. Where­as, in reality, all alike scatter the seeds of hatred among the members of the Church: here, the Roman Catholics, there the Gallicans, and so on and so forth. But greed and the thirst for power profess no faith in anything but themselves."

  "But I beg of you!" interrupted Cristofano. "To say that Chris­tians and Turks are one and the same thing! What if Padre Robleda should hear you?"

  Dulcibeni, however, was not listening to him. While he angrily sniffed the contents of his precious box (part of which, however, fell on the floor) his voice was sometimes coloured by rage, as though in protest at the painful burning of the sores which Cristofano was in­flicting upon him. While holding him firm, I endeavoured not to look too directly at him, which was no easy thing to do, given the position which I was constrained to adopt.

  At a certain juncture, the austere patient began to inveigh against the Bourbons and the Habsburgs, but also against the Stuarts and the House of Orange, as I had already heard him do in his bitter and solitary invective against their incestuous marriages. When the physician, good Tuscan that he was, uttered a few words in defence of the Bourbons (who were related to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, his prince), he checked him, raging with particular rancour against France.

  "To what a pass have the antique feudal nobility come, they who were the mark and pride of that nation! The nobles who crowd Ver­sailles today, what do you suppose they are now, but the King's bastards? Condé, Conti, Beaufort, the Duke of Maine, the Duke of Vendome, the Duke of Toulouse... Princes of the Blood, they call them. But what blood? That of the whores who happened to pass through the Sun King's bed or that of his grandfather Henry of Navarre."

  The latter, continued Dulcibeni, had marched on Chartres for the sole purpose of laying his hands upon Gabrielle d'Estrees who, before granting her favours, demanded that her father be made governor of the city and her brother, bishop. D'Estrees succeeded in selling herself to the King for her weight in gold, despite the fact that she was a veteran of the beds of Henry III, (from whom old d'Estrees had extracted six thousand ecus), the banker Zamet, the Duke of Guise, the Duke of Longueville and the Duke of Bellegarde. And all that despite the ambiguous fame of her grandmother, the mistress of Francis I, Pope Clement VI and Charles de Valois.

  "Should one be surprised," asked Dulcibeni, "if the great feudal lords of France wanted to purge the kingdom of such abominations, or if they stabbed Henry of Navarre? But it was already too late! The blind power of sovereigns has ever since despoiled and robbed them without mercy."

  "It seems to me that you are exaggerating," retorted Cristofano, raising his eyes from his delicate work and anxiously observing his overheated patient.

  In my eyes, too, Dulcibeni seemed to be exaggerating. Of course, he was exhausted by the painful burns inflicted by the caustic. Yet, the doctor's calm and almost distracted objections really did not merit those reactions of boiling wrath. The almost febrile trembling of his members suggested that, in reality, Dulcibeni was prey to a singular state of nervous overexcitement. He was calmed only by re­peated pinches of snuff. I again promised myself that I would report all this as soon as possible to Abbot Melani.

  "If I am to believe you," Cristofano then added, "one would con­clude that there is nothing good at Versailles or indeed at any other court."

  "Versailles, you speak to me of Versailles; where the noble blood of the fathers is daily defiled! What has become of the cavaliers of old? There they are, all herded together by the Most Christian King and his usurer Colbert in a single palace, squandering their inheri­tance on balls and hunting parties, instead of defending the fiefs of their glorious ancestors."

  "But thus Louis XIV put an end to plotting," protested Cristofano. "The King his grandfather died by an assassin's dagger, his father died of poison and he himself as a child was threatened by the nobles in the Fronde revolt!"

  "It is true. Thus, however, he has taken possession of their riches. And he has not understood that the nobility, who once were spread throughout France, may well have threatened the Sovereign but were also his best protection."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Every sovereign can control his kingdom only if he has a vassal in each province. The Most Christian King has done the opposite: he has united the aristocracy in a single body. And a body has only one neck. When the day comes that the people want to cut through it, a single blow will suffice."

  "Come, come! That can surely never happen," said Cristofano forcefully. "The people of Paris will never behead the nobles. And the King..."

  Dulcibeni ranted on without listening to the doctor: "History," he almost screamed, causing me to give a start, "will have no pity for those crowned jackals, sated with human blood and infanticide; evil oppressors of a people of slaves, whom they have sent to the slaughter every time that their homicidal fury has been unleashed by whatever their low, incestuous passion lusted after."

  Every single syllable he pronounced with inflamed rage, his lips livid and contracted, and his nose all covered in powder from his many inhalations.

  Cristofano gave up attempting to answer him: we seemed to be witnessing the outburst of a deranged mind. Besides, the physician had almost completed his painful duty and silently arranged pieces of fine gauze between the buttocks of the Marchigiano who, with a great sigh, let himself collapse exhausted on his side. And thus he remained, sans culotte, until we had left the room.

  No sooner had I informed him of Dulcibeni's lengthy harangue than Atto had no more doubts: "Padre Robleda was right: if he is not a Jansenist, no one is."

  "And why are you so sure?"

  "For two reasons: first, the Jansenists detest the Jesuits; and in that respect I think that Dulcibeni's discourse against the Society of Jesus could hardly have been plainer: the Jesuits are spies, traitors, papal favourites, and so on: the usual propaganda against the Order of Saint Ignatius."

  "Do you mean that it is untrue?"

  "On the contrary, it is all perfectly true, but only the Jansenists have the courage to say so publicly. Our Dulcibeni is indeed
afraid of nothing: he is all the more unafraid in that the only Jesuit in the vicinity is that coward Robleda."

  "And the Jansenists?"

  "The Jansenists say that the Church of the origins was purer, like the torrents near a spring. They hold that several truths of the gospel are no longer as evident as they once were. To return to the Church of the origins, one must submit to the severest of trials, penances, humiliations and renunciations; and while bearing all this, one must place oneself in the merciful hands of God, forever renouncing the world and sacrificing oneself to divine love."

  "Padre Robleda told me that the Jansenists like to remain in solitude..."

  "Correct. They tend towards asceticism, severe and chastened customs: you will have noticed how Dulcibeni boils with indignation whenever Cloridia approaches..." sniggered the abbot. "It goes with­out saying that the Jansenists utterly detest the Jesuits, who permit themselves every freedom of conscience and action. I know that in Naples there is an important circle of followers of Jansenius."