Imprimatur

by Rita Monaldi;Francesco Sorti

  Contrary to all expectations, I still had eyes to see, ears to hear and flesh with which to feel the warm and holy dawn which utterly pervaded me. So I raised my eyelids and before me appeared the di­vine symbol of Our Lord, used centuries ago by the first Christians: a magnificent silver fish, which observed me benevolently.

  At last, I looked up towards the light, but I had at once to raise my hand and cover my eyes.

  It was day and I was under the sun, lying on a beach.

  I soon understood that I was alive, although not in the best of condition. I sought in vain the two angels (or whatever they were) who had busied themselves about me. My head ached terribly and my eyes could not bear the light of day. Suddenly, I realised that I barely able to rise to my feet. My knees shook and the mud on which I walked threatened to make me to slip perilously.

  Narrowing my eyes, I nevertheless looked around myself. I was no doubt on the banks of the Tiber. It was dawn and a few fishing boats sailed placidly on the waters of the river. On the far bank stood the ruins of the ancient Ponte Rotto—the Broken Bridge. To my right, lay the indolent profile of the Isola Tiberina, anointed by the two branches of the river which have for aeons caressed its banks. To my left, the quiet hill of Santa Sabina stood out against the quiet dawn sky. Now I knew where I was: a little further to the right was the outfall of the Cloaca Maxima, which had vomited Atto and me into the river. Fortunately, the cur­rent had not taken us downstream. I had a confused memory of having dragged myself from the water and cast myself down dejectedly upon the bare ground. It was a miracle to be alive; if all this had happened in winter, 1 thought, I should certainly have rendered my soul to the Lord.

  Instead, I was comforted by the September sun, once more rising into a limpid sky; but hardly had my mind grown clearer than I real­ised that I was all filthy and numbed with cold, and an uncontrollable fit of shivering began to shake me from head to foot.

  "Leave me, villain, leave me! Help!"

  The voice came from behind me. I turned and found my way ob­structed by a clump of tall bushes. I crossed it rapidly and found Abbot Melani lying on the ground, he too all covered in mud, and by now no longer in a state to cry out; he was vomiting violently. Two men, or rather, two dubious-looking individuals were leaning over him, but hardly did 1 approach than they took to their legs, disap­pearing behind a slight rise which dominated the beach. From the barks which were sailing in the vicinity, no fisherman seemed to have witnessed the scene.

  Shaken by tremendous convulsions, Atto was throwing up the wa­ter which he had swallowed during our disastrous shipwreck. I held his head, hoping that the liquid expelled would not suffocate him. After a while, he was again able to speak and breathe normally.

  "The two bastards..."

  "Do not overstrain yourself, Signor Atto."

  "... thieves. I shall catch them."

  I had not then, indeed, I never had the courage to confess to Atto that in those two thieves I had recognised the two blessed angels of my awakening. Instead of caring for us, they had carefully inspected us with a view to robbery. The silvery fish which I had found by my side was no sacred epiphany, only some fishmonger's refuse."Anyway, they found nothing," Atto continued between one ex­pectoration and another. "The little I had on me, I lost in the Cloaca Maxima."

  "How do you feel?"

  "How do you expect me to feel, in this condition and at my age?" said he, opening his filthy doublet and shirt. "If it were up to me, I would remain here in the sun until I feel a little warmer; but that, we cannot do."

  I gave a start. Soon Cristofano would be beginning his matutinal rounds.

  Followed by the curious glances of a group of fishermen who were preparing to disembark nearby, we moved away.

  We took a little road parallel to the river bank, leaving Monte Savello to our right. Filthy and desperate as we were, the few passers- by looked upon us in dismay. I had lost my shoes and walked with a limp, coughing uncontrollably; Atto looked thirty years older and the clothing which he wore seemed to have been robbed from a tomb. He kept quietly cursing all the rheumatic and muscular pains pro­voked by those tremendous nocturnal labours and the soaking he had received. We were about to walk towards the Portico d'Ottavia, when he turned brusquely.

  "I have too many acquaintances here. Let us change our route."

  We then passed through the Piazza Montanara and crossed the Piazza Campitelli. More and more people were appearing on the streets.

  In the labyrinth of narrow, tortuous, damp and gloomy alleyways, almost all of them unpaved, I savoured again the habitual alternation of dust and mire, the evil smells, the clangour and the cries. Swine large and small rooted in heaps of rubbish near steaming cauldrons of pasta and broad pans of fish already frying at that early hour, in flagrant disregard of all the notices and edicts of public health.

  I heard Atto murmur something with disgust and vexation, while the sudden thunder of a cart's wheels covered his words.

  Once it was quiet again, Abbot Melani continued: "How is it pos­sible that, like pigs, we should have to seek peace in manure, serenity in rubbish, repose in this shambles of neglected streets? What is the point of living in a city like Rome if we must move like beasts and not like men? I beg you, Holy Father, deliver us from excrement!"

  I looked at him questioningly.

  "I am quoting Lorenzo Pizzati da Pontremoli," said he. "He may have been a parasite at the court of Pope Rospigliosi; but how right he was! It was he who penned this candid supplication to Clement IX some twenty years ago."

  "But then, Rome has always been like this!" I exclaimed in sur­prise, always having imagined a very different and most fabulous en­vironment for the city of the past.

  "As I have already told you, I was in Rome at the time; well, in those days, the streets were repaired, albeit badly, almost every day. And if you consider all the sewers and pipes, too, the roads were always blocked by public works. To protect oneself from the mire of rainwater and refuse, one had to wear high boots, even in August. Pizzati was right: Rome has become a Babel in which people live in a continual clamour. It has ceased to be a city. It is a pigsty," exclaimed the abbot, stressing the last word.

  "And did Pope Rospigliosi do nothing to improve matters?"

  "On the contrary, my boy! But, if only you knew how pig-headed these Romans are. He tried, for example, to plan a public system for the collection of ordure; he commanded the citizens to clean the street before their doorways. All in vain!"

  All of a sudden, the abbot pulled me violently to one side and we flattened ourselves against a wall. Only by a hair's-breadth did I thus escape the precipitous onrush of an enormous and luxurious carriage. The abbot's mood grew even darker.

  "Carlo Borromeo was wont to say that in Rome, to have success, two things are necessary: to love God and to possess a carriage," Mel­ani commented bitterly. "Do you know that in this city, there are more than a thousand of them?"

  "Then it is perhaps they who account for the distant rumble which I hear even when no one is passing through the streets," said I, disconcerted. "But where do all those carriages go?"

  "Oh, nowhere. It's simply the case that noblemen, ambassadors, physicians, famous advocates and Roman cardinals move about exclusively in carriages; even for the briefest of journeys. And that is not all: they are alone in their carriages, and sometimes, alone yet accompanied by several other carriages."

  "Are their families so numerous?"

  "No, of course not," said Atto, laughing. However, cardinals and ambassadors on official visits may proceed accompanied by up to three hundred carriages; with all the choked traffic and daily clouds of dust which that entails."

  "Now, I can understand the brawl over a carriage station," said I, echoing him, "which I recently witnessed on the piazza in Posterula; the footmen of two carriages belonging to noblemen were going at each other hammer and tongs."

  At that point, Atto turned off again.

  "Even here, I could be recognised
. There is a young canon... Let us cut across towards the Piazza San Pantaleo."

  Exhausted as I was, I protested against all these complicated itin­eraries.

  "Be quiet and do not attract attention to yourself," said Atto, unexpectedly tending to his faded white hair.

  "It is a good thing that, in all this bestial confusion, no one is pay­ing the slightest attention to us," he whispered, adding in an almost inaudible voice, "I hate being in this state."

  It was wise, and Atto knew it, to traverse the great crowd at the market on the Piazza Navona, rather than be seen as isolated vaga­bonds in the middle of the Piazza Madama or the Strada di Parione.

  "We must reach Tiracorda's house as early as possible," said Atto, "but without being seen by the Bargello's watchmen who are mount­ing guard in front of the inn."

  "And, after that?"

  "We shall try to enter the stables and take the underground galleries."

  "But that will be extremely difficult; anyone might recognise us."

  "I know. Have you any better ideas?"

  We therefore prepared to plunge into the crowd at the market on the Piazza Navona. How immense was our disappointment when we found ourselves facing a half-empty square, animated only by sparse groups, in the centre of which, from the height of a box or a seat, bearded and sweaty orators waved their arms, haranguing and de­claiming. No market, no vendors, no stalls piled up with fruit and vegetables, no crowd.

  "The deuce, it is Sunday!" said Atto and I, almost in unison.

  On Sunday, there was no market: that was why there were so few people in the streets. The quarantine and our too frequent adven­tures had made us lose count of the days.

  As on all feast days, the priests were the lords of the piazza, preachers and pious men who, with edifying sermons attracted, some by the subtleties of their logic, some by the stentorian flow of their eloquence, small gaggles of students, scholars, loafers, mendicants, and even cutpurses, always ready to profit from the distraction of the other spectators. The gay quotidian chaos of the market had given way to a grave, leaden atmosphere; and, as though yielding to that atmosphere, clouds suddenly covered the sun.

  We crossed the piazza stunned by disappointment, feeling even more naked and defenceless than we in fact were. We moved away from the centre of the square to the right-hand side, where we tip­toed along the walls, hoping to attract no attention. I was startled when a little boy, coming out from a nearby hut, pointed us out to the adult who was accompanying him. The latter stared briefly at us and then, fortunately, ceased to attend to our furtive and miserable presence.

  "They will notice us, damn it. Let us try to merge into the crowd," said Atto, pointing out to me a nearby group of people.

  So we mixed with a small but compact assembly, gathered around an invisible central point. We were just a few paces from the Cava­lier Bernini's great Fountain of the Four Rivers in the middle of the piazza; the four titanic anthropomorphic statues of the aquatic dei­ties, almost admonitory in their marmoreal potency, seemed to be participating in the pious atmosphere of the piazza. From within the fountain, a stone lion scrutinised me, ferocious but impotent. Above the monument, however, there stood an obelisk all covered in hiero­glyphics and capped with a little golden pyramid, almost naturally pointing towards the Most High. Was this not precisely the obelisk which had been deciphered by Kircher, as someone had told me a few days earlier? But I was distracted by the crowd, which moved further forward, the better to listen to the sermon which I could hear coming from a few paces beyond.

  In the forest of heads, backs and shoulders I could descry the preacher for only a few brief instants. His hat revealed him to be a Jesuit brother; he was a rotund purple-faced little man wearing a tri- corn too big for his head and entertaining with torrential eloquence the small, tight group of spectators who had gathered around him.

  "... And what is the life of devotion?" I heard him declaim. "I tell you that it is to speak little, to weep much, to be mocked first by this man, then by that, to tolerate poverty in one's life, suffering in one's body, insults to one's honour, injuries to one's interests. And, can such a life not be most unhappy? I tell you, yes it can!"

  The crowd was stirred by a hubbub of incredulity and scepti­cism.

  "I know," continued the preacher vehemently. "Persons who live the life of the spirit are accustomed to these evils and would even wish spontaneously to suffer from them. And if they do not find them upon their way, they go out hunting for them!"

  Another murmur of disquiet traversed the crowd.

  "Think of Simon of Cyrene, who feigned madness in order to be mocked at by the people. Think of Bernard of Clairvaux, who suf­fered from poor health and always took refuge in the iciest and most cruel of hermitages! And do you therefore account them to have been no more than miserable wretches? No, no, listen with me to what the great prelate Salviano said."

  Abbot Melani caught my attention by pulling at my sleeve. "The way seems clear, let us go."

  We moved towards the way out from the square nearest to the Donzello, hoping that those last footsteps would not hold any bad surprises for us.

  "The great prelate Salviano may say what he will, but I cannot wait to get changed," complained Atto, nearing the limits of his pa­tience and endurance.

  Without having the courage to turn round, I had the disagreeable impression that someone was following us.

  We were on the point of emerging safely from our perilous cross­ing when the unforeseeable occurred. Atto was proceeding ahead of me, skirting the wall of a palazzo, when from a little doorway I saw a pair of robust and decisive hands dart forth, seize him and drag him indoors by force. This terrible vision, together with my overwhelm­ing weariness, almost caused me to lose my senses. 1 was petrified, unable to decide whether to run away or to call for help, in both of which cases I ran the risk of being identified and arrested.

  Extricating me from the horns of this dilemma, there came from behind me a familiar voice, whose sound was so improbable as to ap­pear celestial: "Get you ultraquickly into the coneyhole!"

  Great though Abbot Melani's scorn for the corpisantari may have been, I believe that on this occasion he had no little difficulty in hiding his gratitude for their intervention. Not only had Ugonio mirac­ulously survived the Cloaca Maxima, but after rejoining Ciacconio, he had tracked us down again and—although the method employed may have been somewhat rough—had brought us to safety. It was, however, Ciacconio who had dragged Atto through the little door on the Piazza Navona, whither Ugonio now urged me to enter in my turn.

  Once beyond the threshold, and without giving us the time to ask any questions, the corpisantari made us pass through another little door and climb down an exceedingly steep flight of stairs which in turn led to a narrow and even more dismal windowless corridor. Ciac­conio produced a lantern which, absurdly, he seemed to have been concealing, already lit, in the folds of his grimy overcoat. Our saviour seemed to be as soaked as we, and yet he trotted along as boldly and rapidly as ever.

  "Where are you taking us?" asked Atto, for once surprised and no longer master of the situation.

  "The Piazzame Navonio is perditious," said Ugonio, "and, to be more padre than parricide, the subpantheon is more salubricious."

  I remembered that, during one of our explorations of gallery C, the corpisantari had shown us the way to an exit which led to the courtyard of a palace behind the Pantheon, not far from the Piazza della Rotonda. For a good quarter of an hour, they led us from cellar to cellar, through an uninterrupted sequence of obscure doorways, steps, abandoned store-rooms, spiral staircases and galleries. Every now and then, Ugonio would bring out his ring laden with keys, open a door, let us through, then lock the door behind us with four or five turns of the key. Atto and I, already exhausted, were pushed and dragged along by the two corpisantari like two mortal vessels whose souls were ready to abandon them at any moment.

  We arrived at last before a sort of great wooden portal whi
ch opened creaking onto a courtyard. The daylight again hurt our pupils. From the courtyard, we emerged into a little alleyway and from there into another half-abandoned courtyard, to which we gained access through a door without any lock.

  "Ultraquickly into the coneyhole!" exhorted Ugonio, showing me a wooden trap in the ground. We raised the lid, revealing a dark and suffocating well. Across the top was laid an iron bar, from which hung a rope; and this we swarmed down. We already knew where it led: to the network of tunnels connected to the Donzello.

  As the trapdoor closed over our heads, I saw the cowled heads of Ugonio and Ciacconio disappear into the light of day. I would have liked to ask Ugonio how he had managed to survive the wreck of our boat in the Cloaca Maxima and how the deuce he had got out from there, but I had no time. While I lowered myself, grasping the rope, for a fleeting instant it seemed to me that Ugonio's eyes met my own. Inexplicably, it seemed to me that he knew what I was thinking. I was happy that he was safe.