Imprimatur am-1

by Rita Monaldi

  "You are right. Whoever has done this is a monster," said Atto, for the first time completely in agreement with Ugonio.

  It was not difficult to explore the islet upon which destiny (or rather, our carelessness and lack of the fear of God) had so kindly deposited us. The little strip of ground could be covered on foot in a few instants and I would not have said that it was any bigger than the modest little church of Santa Maria in Posterula.

  It was, however, the middle of the island which caught the attention of Atto and Ugonio: it was there that several objects of varying sizes were gathered, and which I had difficulty in distinguishing clearly.

  I felt my clothing: I was soaking wet and shivering with cold. I shook myself, striving to revive my inner heat, and in my turn disembarked, diffidently testing the cindery soil of the isle with my outstretched foot. I joined Atto and Ugonio who were searching here and there with expressions at once thoughtful and disgusted.

  "I must say, my boy, that your talent for fainting is growing ever more refined," said Atto in welcome. "You are pale. I see that our recent encounter has terrified you."

  "But who were they? Good heavens, they looked like…"

  "No, they were not the guardians of the Inferno. It was only the Societas Orationis et Mortis."

  "The pious confraternity who bury abandoned corpses?"

  "The very people. Do you not recall how they came to the inn to collect the body of poor Fouquet? Unfortunately, I too had forgotten that when they meet in procession, they wear tunics and cowls and bear torches, skulls and so on. Rather picturesque, really…"

  "Ugonio too was terrified," I observed.

  "I asked him why and he did not want to answer me. I am under the impression that the Societas Orationis et Mortis is one of the rare things that the corpisantari fear. The Company was proceeding along an underground gallery in which there is an opening above the sewer at exactly the same moment, alas, as we arrived on the scene. They heard us passing and leaned over to look, and panic played an unpleasant trick on us. Do you know what happened after that?"

  "I… recall nothing," I admitted.

  Atto briefly explained to me what had taken place: he and Ugonio had fallen into the water and the bark had suddenly lost its balance and capsized. I had remained imprisoned underneath the boat, with my body under the water and my head above it, which was why my screams had been stifled, as though under a bell. Terrified by the cataclysm, the rats which infested the waters had jumped onto me, running over my face and fouling me with their excrement.

  I touched my face. It was true. I wiped myself with a sleeve, with my stomach turning in disgust.

  "We were fortunate," continued Atto, while he guided me around the island, "for, between one scream and another, Ugonio and I managed to free ourselves of those disgusting beasts."

  "Rats, not beasties," Ugonio promptly corrected him, while he gazed at a sort of cage which stood at our feet.

  "Rats, mice, what you will! In short," Abbot Melani finished explaining to me, "we succeeded in bringing you and the bark out of that accursed sewer and finding our way into this underground lake. Fortunately, the three hooded ones did not attempt to follow us, and here we now are. Courage! You are not the only one to be cold. Just look at me: I too am soaked to the skin and covered in mud. Who could ever have imagined that I should ruin so many magnificent clothes in your wretched hostelry… But, come on now."

  He showed me the bizarre workshop which occupied the centre of the isle.

  Two large blocks of white stone lay on the ground and served as pedestals for two tables of dark, rotting wood. Upon one, I discovered a great array of instruments, pincers, pointed little knives and long butchers' knives, scissors and various blades without handles; bringing our lantern closer, I noted that they were all caked with congealed blood, of all shades from carmine to black. The table stank horribly of rotting carcasses. Among the knives were a couple of large, half-consumed candles. Abbot Melani lit them.

  I moved to the other table, upon which lay other more mysterious objects: a ceramic vase, complete with its lid, decorated all over and with a number of holes in its side, which seemed strangely familiar to me; a little phial of transparent glass, the appearance of which also did not seem new to me; next to it, a voluminous orange-coloured earthenware basin about an arm's length in diameter, in the middle of which stood a strange metal harness. It was a sort of tiny gallows.

  Upon a broad tripod stood a vertical stem which ended in two curved arms which, using a screw, could be hooped and tightened at will so as to garrotte any unfortunate homunculus attached thereto. The dish was half-full of water, so that the little scaffold (which was no higher than a jug) was completely immersed, apart from the garrotting hoops at the apex.

  On the ground, however, stood the most singular item of the whole mysterious elaboratory: an iron cage, as tall as a small child, and with rather close, narrow bars; as though it were designed to imprison minuscule, lively and volatile creatures like butterflies or canaries.

  I noticed a movement within the cage and looked more closely. A tiny grey creature was, in its turn, looking at me, fearful and furtive in its nest: a little wooden box filled with straw.

  Atto brought the lantern closer so that I could see what he and Ugonio had already discovered. Now the sole hostage of the isle, visibly scared by our presence, I descried with surprise was a poor little mouse.

  Around the cage, piled one against the other, stood other sinister devices, which we examined with cautious disgust: urns filled with yellowish powder, drippings, secretions, bilious humours, phlegm and mire; little jars filled with animal (or human?) fat, all mixed with ashes, dead skin and other revolting elements; retorts, alembics, glass jars, a bucket full of bones, surely of animals (which Ugonio nevertheless examined meticulously), a lump of putrescent meat, the rotting peel of fruit, nutshells; a ceramic vase filled with locks of hair, another glass one containing a mass of little serpents preserved in spirits; a little fishing net, a brazier with its bellows, old firewood, half-rotten leaves of paper, coals and pebbles; finally, a pair of large, filthy gloves, a pile of greasy rags and other sordid and vile objects.

  "It is a necromancer's den," said I, thoroughly disconcerted.

  "Worse still," retorted Atto, while we still roamed around that mad and barbarous bazaar. "It is the den of Dulcibeni, who lodges at your inn."

  "And whatever would he be doing here?" I exclaimed in horror.

  "It is difficult to say. What is certain is that he is doing something to rats which does not find favour with Ugonio."

  The corpisantaro was still pensively observing the butcher's table, completely undisturbed by the mortiferous stench which emanated from it.

  "He imprisons, he strangulates, he bistourifies. Thereafter, however, it surpasses all apprehension," said he at length.

  "Many thanks, thus far I too had come," said Atto. "First, he captures rats with his fishing net, then he puts them into cages. Then he uses them for some strange sorcery and he strangles them using that strange little gallows. Then he quarters them, and in the end I have no idea what else he may do," said Atto with an acid smile. "All, no doubt, in accordance with the pious prescriptions of the Jansenists of Port-Royal. The one in the cage must be the sole survivor."

  "Signor Atto," said I, nauseated by this triumph of obscenity, "does it not seem to you that there is something here which we have already seen?"

  I pointed to the phial on the table, next to the miniature gallows.

  By way of a reply, Atto extracted from his pocket an object whose existence I had practically forgotten. Unwrapping them from a handkerchief, he exhibited the fragments of the glass phial full of blood which we had found in gallery D. Then he compared them with the phial that was still intact.

  "They are twins!" I remarked with surprise.

  The broken phial was indeed identical, both in its form and in its greenish glass, to that which we had just found on the island.

  "But
we have already seen the decorated vase with a lid," I insisted. "It was, unless I am mistaken…"

  "… in Tiracorda's secret room," added Atto, coming to my help.

  "There we have it!"

  "No, no. You are thinking of the vase in which Dulcibeni was rummaging when his friend had gone to sleep. This one, however, is far bigger and the designs painted on it are far more intricate. The motif of the decoration and the holes in the sides are, I will allow, almost identical. Perhaps they are the work of the same artisan."

  The vase found on the islet also had lateral air-holes on it and was likewise decorated with pond plants and little swimming beings, probably tadpoles which played about between the leaves. I opened the lid, raised the vase to the lantern and immersed one finger: inside, there was greyish water, in which floated fragments of light white gauze; at the bottom, a little sand.

  "Signor Atto, Cristofano told me that it is dangerous to handle rats during a time of pestilence."

  "I know. I thought of that, too, the other night, when we encountered those two moribund rats which were spitting blood. Clearly, our Dulcibeni feels no such fear."

  "The insula is not goodly, not justly, not sanitary," warned Ugonio in grave tones.

  "I know, you brute, we shall be leaving it very soon. Instead of lamenting, you could at least tell me where we are, seeing as it is thanks to you that we came here."

  "It is true," said I to Ugonio. "If, at the fork in the river, you had chosen to take the other branch, we should never have discovered Dulcibeni's island."

  "It is no opera of delight, in as where and what concerns the occupation exercisioned with great artifice upon the altar of the insula."

  Abbot Melani raised his eyes to heaven as though in extremities of distress. He fell silent for a moment, and suddenly cried out: "Then will somebody tell me where and what the deuce this damned insula is!" and his cry caused the whole vast cavern to reverberate.

  The echoes died away. Without opening his mouth, Ugonio invited me to follow him. He pointed at the back of the huge stone block which served as the base for one of the tables, and nodded his head with a grunt of satisfaction, as though in reply to Abbot Melani's challenge.

  Atto joined us. On the stone, a high-relief was visible, in which the figures of men and animals could be distinguished. Melani drew even closer and began impatiently to explore the carved surface with his fingertips, as though to confirm what he had just seen with his eyes.

  "Extraordinary. It is a Mithraeum," he murmured. "Look, look here. A textbook example! There is everything here, the sacrifice of the bull, the scorpion…"

  Where we stood, there had once, long ago, been an underground temple in which the ancient Romans adored the god Mithras. He was a god originating in the Orient who had in Rome come to rival in popularity Apollo, who, like him, represented the sun. That this was indeed an ancient shrine of Mithras was not in doubt: the image carved on one of the stones showed the god killing a bull, whose testicles were held in the claws of a scorpion, a typical depiction of Mithras. What was more, underground sites (always supposing that this place had been under the ground) were favoured by the worshippers of Mithras.

  "We have found only the two large stones on which Dulcibeni places the tables he uses for his practices," concluded Abbot Melani. "Perhaps the remainder of the temple is at the bottom of the lake."

  "And how could that be?"

  "With all these underground rivers, every now and then the terrain down here settles. You have seen it yourself. Underground, there are not only conduits, tunnels and galleries, but grottoes, caverns, great hollows, whole Roman palaces integrated into buildings of more recent centuries. The waters of the rivers and the sewers carve the ground out blindly and every now and then a grotto crumbles, another one fills with water, and so on. That is the nature of the subterranean city."

  I thought instinctively of the fissure which had opened in the wall of the staircase of the inn, a few days earlier, after we had heard a reverberation under the ground.

  Ugonio was again showing signs of impatience. We decided to return the boat to the water and attempt to go back. Atto could not wait to see Ciacconio and to know the success or otherwise of his incursion into the house of Tiracorda. We again launched our humble vessel (which had fortunately suffered no significant damage) and prepared to return up the same narrow channel which had brought us to the subterranean Mithraeum.

  Ugonio seemed in the worst of humour. Suddenly, just when we were about to embark, he jumped down from the boat and, raising a shower of gravel with his rapid little trot, returned to the island.

  "Ugonio!" I called after him, astonished.

  "Be quiet, he'll only be a moment," said Atto Melani, who must have foreseen what the corpisantaro was about to do.

  A few moments later, indeed, Ugonio returned and jumped agilely into the bark. He seemed relieved.

  I was about to ask him what the deuce had called him back, when suddenly I understood.

  "Insula iniquitable," muttered Ugonio, speaking to himself.

  He had freed the last rodent from its cage.

  Our return through the suffocating channel that flowed into the lake was somewhat less dramatic but just as wearying as the outward journey. The going was made all the slower and more painful by our fatigue and the fact that we were moving upstream, however weak the current may have been. No one spoke and in the poop Atto and Ugonio pushed with poles while I held the lantern and provided a counterweight in the prow.

  After a while, I wanted to break the heavy silence, relieved only by the viscous slopping of water in the canal.

  "Signor Atto, concerning this matter of the movements provoked by underground rivers, something bizarre befell me."

  I told him that the astrological gazette which we had taken from Stilone Priaso had forecast for the month of September natural phenomena such as earthquakes and the like. A few days earlier, at exactly the time predicted, there had been heard in the bowels of the earth a sort of abysmal, menacing rumble and a fissure had appeared in the wall of the staircase. Was that only a fortuitous occurrence? Or did the author of the almanack know that in September phenomena of that nature were likely to take place?

  "I can only tell you that I do not believe in such nonsense," said Abbot Melani with a scornful little laugh, "otherwise, I would have run to consult an astrologer to tell me the present, the past and the future. I do not believe that the fact of having been born on the 31st of March can…"

  "Aries," muttered Ugonio.

  Atto and I looked at one another.

  "Ah yes, I was forgetting that you are… that you understand these things," said Atto, struggling to contain his laughter.

  But the corpisantaro would not be intimidated. According to the great astrologer Arcandam, Ugonio imperturbably pronounced, the native of Aries, warm and dry in nature, will be dominated by wrath. He will be red-headed or fair and will almost always bear marks on his shoulders or on his left foot; he will have abundant hair, a thick beard, brightly coloured eyes, white teeth, well-formed jaws, a fine nose and large eyelids.

  He will be observant and curious about the words and deeds of others and concerning every secret. His will be a studious, elevated, variable and vigorous spirit. He will have many friends. He will flee evil. He will be little inclined to illnesses, apart from the grave vexations caused him by headaches. He will be eloquent, solitary in his way of life, prodigal in necessary things: he will meditate upon fraudulent enterprises and will often employ threats. He will have good fortune in all kinds of wars as in negotiating all things.

  In his early youth, he will be very contentious and choleric. He will suffer from inner irascibility which he will barely manifest. He will be a liar, and false; using soft words to cover dissimulation and lies, saying one thing and doing another, making marvellous promises but not keeping them. He will spend a part of his life in a position of authority. He will be avaricious and will therefore take care to acquire and to sell. He will b
e envious and therefore quick to anger, but even more, he will be envied by others, wherefore he will have many enemies and treacherous adversaries. As for misfortune, he may be beset by various calamities, so much so that he will not enjoy a single commodity without discommodiousness and peril for his property. He will possess a mutable inheritance, or he will soon lose what he had acquired and soon acquire what he had lost. But much wealth will be bestowed upon him.

  He will make many voyages and will quit his country and his parents. From the age of twenty-three onwards, he will move on to better things and he will handle money. He will become rich at the age of forty and will attain a position of great dignity. He will succeed perfectly in whatever he undertakes; his good offices will be appreciated. He will not marry the woman who was first intended for him, but another whom he will love and from whom he will have noble sons. He will converse with ecclesiastics. In general, if he is born during the hours of daylight, he will be fortunate and held in great esteem by princes and lords. He will live to the age of eighty-seven years and three months.

  Instead of mocking Ugonio, Atto and I listened to him in religious silence up to the end. Abbot Melani even left off using his boat-pole, while the corpisantaro humbly maintained his rhythm.

  "Well, let us see," reflected Atto. "Wealthy, that is true. Skilful in negotiations, that is true. Fair-haired, at least until it went white, that is true. A great traveller, an observer of others' words and deeds: for sure. Fine eyes, white teeth, well-formed jaw, fine nose: yes, indeed. Eloquent, studious, elevated, variable and vigorous spirit: God forgive my immodesty, but that is not incorrect; on the contrary. What else? Ah yes, the esteem of princes, the company of prelates, and headaches. I do not know where our Ugonio fished up so much information from the sign of Aries, but it certainly is not all unfounded."

  I avoided asking Atto Melani whether he also recognised himself in avarice, irascibility, fraudulence, envy and recourse to lies and threats, as mentioned in the astrological portrait. And nor did I ask