Imprimatur am-1

by Rita Monaldi

  "To exercise a dirty trade like this," the abbot continued, "you need a couple of characters like those whom you see before you. These tomb robbers are called corpisantari, after the sacred relics of saints for which they are always searching. If fortune does not smile upon them, they sell some rubbish to the next simpleton they meet. Have you not seen them, in front of your inn, selling Saint John's shoulder-blade or the jaw of Saint Catherine, feathers from angels' wings, splinters from the one True Cross borne by Our Lord? Well, the suppliers are our two friends, or their companions in the trade. When they are in luck, they find the tomb of some presumed martyr. Of course, those who reap the honours of translating the relics of Saint Etcetera to some church in Spain are the cardinals, or that old windbag Father Fabretti, whom Innocent X appointed, if I am not mistaken, custos reliquiarum ac coemeteriorum, the Custodian of Relics and Cemeteries."

  "Where are we, Signor Abbot?" I asked, confused by our hostile and shadowy surroundings.

  "I have mentally retraced the way we have covered and asked these two one or two questions. They call it the Archives, because this is where they heap up their ordure. I would say that we are more or less inside the ruins of the old stadium of Domitian, where during the Roman Empire they held sea battles, with ships. To make matters easier for you, I can tell you that we are under the Piazza Navona, at the end nearest the Tiber. If we had covered the distance from the inn to the same point on the surface, at a good walking pace, it would have taken no more than three minutes."

  "So these ruins are from Roman times."

  "But of course these are Roman ruins. Do you see those arches? They must be the old structures of the stadium where they held games and naval battles, above which were built the palazzi which now surround the Piazza Navona, following the old oblong design."

  "As in the Circo Massimo?"

  "Exactly: except that there, everything has remained visible; whereas here it was all buried under the weight of centuries. But you will see, sooner or later, they will excavate here too. There are things that cannot remain buried."

  While he told me of matters that were utterly new to me, I was astonished to see for the first time shining in Abbot Melani's eyes the spark of fascination with art and antiquity, despite the fact that he was at that moment deeply involved in what would appear to be very different affairs. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but this inclination was to have not unimportant consequences in this and later adventures.

  "Well, well, we should so like to be able to mention, one day, the names of our two nocturnal acquaintances."

  "I am Ugonio," said the less runted of the twain.

  Atto Melani looked questioningly at the other one.

  "Gfrrrlubh," came the sound issuing from under his hood.

  "And he is Ciacconio," said Ugonio, hastening to translate Ciac-conio's gurglings.

  "Can he not speak?" insisted Abbot Melani.

  "Gfrrrlubh," replied Ciacconio.

  "I understand," said Atto, reining in his impatience. "We humbly beg your pardon for having disturbed your perambulations. But, now that I come to think of it, may I avail myself of this opportunity to inquire whether you have, by any chance, seen someone pass this way, a little while before our arrival?"

  "Gfrrrlubh!" broke in Ciacconio.

  "He has invisioned a presence," announced Ugonio.

  "Tell him that we want to know everything," said I, butting in.

  "Gfrrrlubh," repeated Ciacconio.

  We looked questioningly at Ugonio.

  "Ciacconio entrified the galleria whence your worships emergen- cied, and was espied there by one who held a lamp-light; whereupon Ciacconio regressed upon his feetsteps. But the lamp-lifter must have entrified a trap-portal, for he disapparitioned like smoke, and Ciacconio sought sanctity here, most alarmified."

  "Could he not have told us himself?" asked Abbot Melani, somewhat taken aback.

  "But he has now descripted and confessated it," replied Ugonio.

  "Gfrrrlubh," confirmed Ciacconio, vaguely piqued.

  Atto Melani and I looked at one another in some perplexity.

  "Gfrrrlubh," continued Ciacconio, becoming animated, and seeming by his grunts proudly to claim that even he, a poor creature of darkness, could render himself more than useful.

  As his companion was most opportunely to interpret for us, Ciacconio had, after the meeting with the stranger, carried out a second minute investigation of the gallery, because his curiosity was stronger than his fear.

  "He is a great miner of other people's busyness," explained Ugonio, in the tones of one reiterating an old and worn reproof, "which leads him only into troubleness and misfortunity."

  "Gfrrrlubh," broke in Ciacconio, fumbling through his coat in search of something.

  Ugonio seemed to hesitate.

  "What did he say?" I asked.

  "Naught, or only that…"

  Triumphantly, Ciacconio produced a screwed-up piece of paper. Ugonio grabbed his forearm and with lightning speed tore it from his hand.

  "Hand it over to me or I shall blow your head off," said Abbot Melani calmly, reaching into his right-hand pocket in which he had placed the device with which he had already threatened the two corpisantari.

  Ugonio slowly reached out and surrendered to my companion the paper which he had scrunched up into a ball. Then without warning he set to kicking and belabouring Ciacconio, calling him, "You sour saggy old scumskinned, batskinned, sow-skinned, scrunchbacked, sodomitic skinaflinter, you puking mewlbrat, you muddy-snouted, slavering, sarcophagous shitebeetle, you bumsquibcracking sicomoron, you slimy old scabmutcheon-shysteroo, you shittard, sguittard, crackard, filthard, lily-livered, lycanthropic, eunichon-bastradion-bumfodder-billicullion- ballockatso, you gorbellied doddipol, calflolly jobbernol, you grapple- snouted netherwarp, you clarty-frumpled, hummthrumming, tuzzle- wenching, placket-racket, dregbilly lepidopter, you gnat-snapping, weedgrubbing, blither-blather, bilge-bottled, ockham-cockam peder- aster," and other epithets which I had never heard before, yet which sounded somewhat grave and offensive to my ears.

  Abbot Melani did not deign so much as to glance at these painful theatrics and spread out the sheet of paper on the ground, trying to restore it to its original appearance. I craned my neck and read with him. The left side and the right were, alas, badly torn and almost all of the title had been lost. Fortunately, the remainder of the page was perfectly readable:

  "It is a page from the Bible," said I with complete assurance.

  "I think so too," the abbot agreed, turning the paper in his hand. "I should say that it is…"

  "Malachi," I guessed without hesitation, thanks to the fragment of a name in the upper margin which had almost completely survived recent events.

  On the back there was no printing whatsoever but an unmistakable bloodstain (which I had already seen through the page). More blood covered what must be part of a title or heading.

  "I think that I understand," said Abbot Melani, turning to Ugonio who was inflicting his last, listless kicks upon Ciacconio.

  "What have you understood?"

  "Our two little monsters thought they had made a good find."

  He proceeded to explain to me that, for the corpisantari, the most precious booty came, not from the mere sepulchres of early Christians, but from the glorious tombs of saints and martyrs. It was, however, not easy to recognise these. The criterion for identifying such tombs had caused a never-ending dispute, which had dragged no few learned churchmen into endless controversies. According to Bosio, the bold Jesuit explorer of subterranean Rome, martyrs could be distinguished by symbols such as palms, crowns and vases containing grain or flames of fire, carved upon their tombs. But absolute proofs were glass or terracotta ampoules-found in tombs or sealed with mortar into their outer walls-containing a reddish liquid which was generally regarded as the holy blood of the martyrs. This burning question was long-debated and a special commission eventually cleared the air of all uncertainties, ruling that pabnam e
t cas illorum sanguine tinctum pro signis certissimis habendas esse.

  "In other words," concluded Atto Melani, "images of palms, but above all the presence of a small ampoule full of red liquid, were a sure sign that one was in the presence of the remains of a hero of the Faith."

  "So these phials must be very valuable," I suggested.

  "Of course, and not all of them are handed over to the ecclesiastical authorities. After all, any Roman can dedicate himself to the search for antiquities: all he needs is an authorisation from the Pope (Prince Scipione Borghese, for instance, did it, perhaps because the Pope was his uncle) and he can dig, and all he then needs is to find some obliging Doctor of the Church to authenticate any remains that are brought to light. After that, if he is not consumed by devotion, he will sell it. But there is no test to distinguish the true from the false. Whoever finds some fragment of a body can always claim that it is a relic of a martyr. If this were only a problem of money, one could pass over the matter. The fact is that these fragments are blessed and become objects of adoration, the object of pilgrimages, and so on."

  "And has no one ever tried to clarify matters?" I asked incredulously.

  The Society of Jesus has always enjoyed special facilities for excavating the catacombs, and has arranged the transport of various bodies and relics to Spain, where the holy remains are received in great pomp, and end up all over the world, even as far away as the Indies. In the end, however, the followers of Saint Ignatius themselves came to the conclusion, and confessed as much to the Pontiff, that there was no guarantee that such relics really did belong to saints and martyrs. There were cases, such as the corpses of children, in which proof was difficult. Thus the Jesuits were compelled to ask that the principle of adoremus quod scimus be introduced: only relics which can scientifically or reasonably be proved to have belonged to a saint or a martyr should be objects of veneration."

  That was why, explained Atto Melani, it was eventually decided that only ampoules of blood could provide conclusive proof.

  "And thus," concluded the abbot, "even ampoules are destined to enrich the corpisantari and to end up in some chamber of marvels or in the apartments of some very rich and very naive merchant."

  "Why naive?"

  "Because no one can swear that what the phials contain is the blood of martyrs, or even blood at all. I have examined one, purchased at great cost from a disgusting individual similar to… What is he called? Ciacconio."

  "And what did you conclude?"

  "That the reddish mud in the ampoule, watered down a little, consisted mostly of brownish earth and flies."

  The problem was, explained Abbot Melani, returning to the present, that Ciacconio, after bumping into our thief, had found this page from the Bible stained with what showed every appearance of being blood.

  "And finding, or better, selling the beginning of a chapter from the Bible stained with the blood of Saint Calixtus, to name but a name, can bring in plenty of money. That is why his friend is gently reproving him for having revealed to us the existence of the sheet of paper."

  "But how is it possible," I protested, "that the thousand-year-old blood of a martyr could be found on a modern printed book?"

  "I shall answer you with a story, which I heard last year in Versailles. A fellow in the market was trying to sell a skull which was, he guaranteed, that of the famous Cromwell. One of the would-be buyers pointed out to him that the skull was too small to be that of the great leader, who notoriously had a rather large head."

  "And what did the vendor reply?"

  "He replied: 'Of course, this was the skull of Cromwell as a child!' That skull, I am assured, was sold-and at a price. Think of it, Ugonio and Ciacconio should have no trouble selling their scrap of Bible stained with the blood of Saint Calixtus."

  "Shall we return the page to them, Signor Atto?"

  "Not for the time being," said he, raising his voice and turning to the corpisantari. "We shall hold onto it and we shall return it to them only when they have done us a couple of favours."

  And he explained what we needed.

  "Gfrrrlubh," assented Ciacconio, in the end.

  Once he had imparted their instructions to the corpisantari, who vanished into the darkness, Atto Melani decided that it was time to return to the Donzello.

  At that juncture, I asked him whether he did not find it somewhat strange to discover in these galleries a bloodstained page of the Bible.

  "That page, in my view, was lost by the thief of your little pearls," was his only reply.

  "And how can you be so sure of that?"

  "I did not say that I was sure. But think for one moment: the paper seems to be new. The bloodstain (if it is blood, and I think so) does not seem old. It is too vivid. Ciacconio found it, if he was telling-sorry, if he was gurgling-the truth, immediately after his meeting with a stranger in the gallery into which the thief disappeared. Does that not suffice for you? And if we speak of the Bible, who does that bring to mind for you?"

  "Padre Robleda."

  "Precisely: a Bible smacks of priests."

  "Still, the meaning of some details escapes me," I objected.

  "What are you getting at?"

  "'-primum ' is all that remains of 'Caput primum while ' Malach? is clearly what remains of 'Malachiae’. This made me think that under the bloodstain there must have been the word 'profetia'. So here we have the chapter of the Bible concerning the prophet Malachi," I observed, remembering the lessons received during my almost monastic childhood. "However, I cannot understand the 'nda' in the first line at the top. Have you any idea, Signor Atto? I have none whatever."

  Abbot Melani shrugged his shoulders: "I certainly cannot claim to be an expert on the matter."

  I found such a profession of ignorance concerning the Bible singular, coming from an abbot. And, when I came to think of it, his affirmation that "a Bible smacks of priests" sounded strangely crude. What kind of an abbot was he?

  Meanwhile, we were returning into the conduit, and Melani had resumed his considerations. "Anyone can possess a Bible, indeed the inn has at least one, is that not so?"

  "Certainly, two, to be precise; but I know both of them well and the page which you are holding could not have come from either."

  "Of course. But you will agree with me that the page could have come from the Bible of any one of the guests at the Donzello, who might easily have brought a copy of the Scriptures with him on his travels. It is a pity that the tear has removed the ornate initial capital that opens the chapter, which surely comes from the beginning of a chapter in the Book of Malachi, and which would have helped us to trace the origin of our find."

  I did not agree with him: there were other strange things about that paper, and I pointed them out to him: "Have you ever seen a page from the Bible printed on one side only, like this one?"

  "It must be the end of a chapter."

  "But the chapter has hardly begun!"

  "Perhaps the prophecy of Malachi is unusually brief. We cannot know, the last lines have been torn off, too. Or perhaps it is common printing practice, or an error, who knows? Be that as it may, Ugonio and Ciacconio, too, will give us a hand: they are too afraid that they will never see their filthy scrap of paper again."

  "Speaking of fear, I did not know that you had a pistol," said I, remembering the firearm with which he had threatened the two corpisantari.

  "Nor did I know that I had one," he replied, looking at me obliquely with a wry grin, and he drew from his pocket the shining wooden metal-tipped barrel, of which the stock seemed to have disappeared inexplicably in Melani's hand when he brandished the instrument.

  "A pipe!" I exclaimed. But how is it possible that Ugonio and Ciacconio did not see that?"

  "The light was poor, and my face was threatening enough. And perhaps the two corpisantari did not wish to find out how much harm I could do them."

  I was stupefied by the simplicity of the stratagem, by the nonchalance with which the abbot had carried it off and
by its unexpected success.

  "And what if one's adversaries should suspect that it is not a pistol?"

  "Do as I did, when I faced two bandits one night in Paris. Yell with all your might 'Ceci nest pas une pipe!"' replied Abbot Melani, laughing.

  Day the Fourth

  14th September, 1683

  Next morning I found myself under the blankets with aching bones and my head in no small state of confusion, evidently as a result of insufficient and fitful sleep and all the adventures of the day before. The long descent into the gallery, the efforts of climbing through trapdoors and up stairways, as well as the horrifying struggle with the corpisantari, all had left me worn out in body and in spirit. One thing, however, both surprised and delighted me: the few hours of sleep left to me were not disturbed by nightmares, despite the dreadful death-filled visions which the encounter with Ugonio and Ciacconio had reserved for me. After all, not even the unpleasant (but necessary) search for the thief of the only object of value that I had ever possessed was worth disturbing my night's sleep.

  Once I opened my eyes, I was-on the contrary-pleasantly assailed by the sweetest of dreamlike reminiscences: everything seemed to be whispering to me of Cloridia and her smooth and luscious countenance. I was unable to compose into a picture that blessed concert of illusory yet almost real sensory impressions: the lovely face of my Cloridia (thus I called her, already!), her melting, celestial voice, her soft and sensual hands, her vague, light conversation…

  I was fortunately dragged away from these melancholy imaginings before languor could irremediably overcome me, giving rise to solitary pursuits which might have robbed me of the little strength that remained to me.