Veritas (Atto Melani) (108 page)

They are nothing but machines, these newspapers, which feed upon the life of men. The life that these machines devour is naturally no more than it can be in such an age, an age of machines;
production that is stupid on the one hand, and mad on the other, inevitably, and both bearing the stamp of vulgarity.

Paper rules the military and has crippled us even before there were any victims of the cannons. Had not all the realms of fantasy already been stripped bare when that sheet of paper imprinted by
the press declared war on the inhabited land? It is not that the press set in motion the machines of death, but it drained our hearts, so that we can no longer imagine how things would be without
newspapers and without war. It is to blame for that. And all the people have drunk of the wine of its lust, and the kings of the earth have fornicated with it, and we fell because of the Whore of
Babylon, which – having been printed and propagated in all the languages of the world – persuaded us that we were enemies and that there must be war.

There, it is done. As far as writing goes, I have written. I have done my duty, to the very end. Have I been fed to life? Well then, I feed my life to pen and paper. My books
combat the gazettes. It is good. No one can deny that I have attained my perfection. “The stone the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone,” recites the Psalm, as Simonis said
to the dervish that night at the Place with No Name.

Like the chariot of the sun careering at a dazzling gallop, other words from Simonis pierce my thoughts: the game is never really over, the world is a test bed that the Almighty has prepared for
souls and so we are all a part of his plans, even His enemies. I forgot those words too quickly, even though they sent a shiver down the dervish’s spine. I’m sorry, Simonis, my despair
– unbridled Cassandra of the Last Days of Mankind – prevents me from letting them germinate within me, at least for now.

Meanwhile I find my salvation, all alone, in my silence, with my silence, which has made me so – as the age wishes – perfect.

Only Cloridia has gradually understood; she smiles serenely and our embraces have the warmth of earlier days. My two good sons-in-law, however, do not wish to understand, and every day they come
to try and shake me out of this silence of mine, now absolute. They would like me to cry, so that at least with my eyes I should appear afflicted or enraged, so that I too should believe that life
is out there, in the superfluity of the world. I do not bat an eyelid. I replace my quill in the inkwell and gaze at them, rigid and motionless, and I make them run off again, infuriated. On my
account my daughters study these new treatises of nervous pathology, so fashionable among young doctors, who only know how to hold a scalpel to dissect corpses, but can no longer compose a small
poem. As if science could exist without letters . . . My daughters propose injections and balsams, they hover around me to persuade me to get my vocal cords examined by some renowned doctor.

No, thank you. Thank you, everyone. Enough now. I want to stay as I am. This is our age; this is life; and in the meaning I give to my work, I want to continue like this – dumb and
impassive – to be a writer.

Is the stage ready?

Raise the curtain!

Pistoia
1644

The carriage groans, the horses foam at the mouth while the dust that enters our compartment envelops us like a cloud of misapplied rouge. We will eat a good deal of this stuff
on our way to Rome. We have only been travelling for a quarter of an hour, and my poor limbs are already creaking like the axle of our coach.

I lean out of the window, gaze back and in the morning mist I see the roofs of Pistoia gradually become veiled. Soon they will vanish. Then I look ahead, towards the invisible, distant zenith
where the embrace of the Holy City awaits us.

My young lord, the eighteen-year-old Atto Melani, stays in his seat. His eyes are closed. He opens them every so often, looks around himself and then closes them again. It almost seems that the
great journey is of no interest to him, but I know that it is not so.

Atto’s baptismal godfather, Messer Sozzifanti, before entrusting him to me, had given me profuse advice: “His nature is impulsive. You will have to keep an eye on him, advise him,
temper him. Such refined talents must be made use of: he will have to obey the master we found for him, the great Luigi Rossi, in all things, and win his sympathy. Let him avoid bad company, behave
righteously, and never give scandal if he wishes to acquire honour. Rome is a nest of vipers, where hotheads always fall into error.”

I nodded and thanked him, before bowing, without asking any questions. I already knew what I had not been told: the essence.

I have in my care the most talented castrato that has ever been seen in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In Rome the greatest teachers will transform him into the greatest soprano of our age. He will
become rich and celebrated.

It is easy to guess that it will not be simple to make him behave sensibly. He comes from a poor family (his father is the humble bell ringer of the Cathedral of Pistoia) but the Grand
Duke’s brother, the powerful Mattias de’ Medici, already holds him in the palm of his hand. I just glance at him, the young Atto, I see the cleft in the middle of his chin tremble a
little and I understand everything. While he keeps his eyes closed, and pretends to be asleep, I can almost hear his chest swelling with pride at the protection he is being afforded by the
powerful, and his eyes flickering under his eyelids, trying to grasp the dreams of glory that are dancing before him like crazy butterflies. Instead of thinking of petticoats, like young men of his
age, his head is filled with dreams of glory, honour and social ascent. No, it will not be easy to bridle him.

And anyway: why should a young castrato be wise, and behave prudently, given that he has been set on the road to Rome by a mad and atrocious night in his childhood, when he was placed in a
bathtub and had his virtues snipped by a pair of scissors, and, as the water turned crimson and his shrieks filled the room, what stepped from the bathtub was no longer a male but an atrocious
freak of nature?

No, it will not be easy to keep a check on the young Atto Melani. In Rome interesting days await me, I am certain.

In this comforting belief I close my book, which is at the service of truth. I have had to report so much darkness and despair. Lies and prejudice are as thick as fog over my homeland, but we
wish to remain restless and not lose courage . . .
Vincit Veritas!

(Karl Emil Franzos,
From Half-Asia
)

Letter

Vatican City, 14th February 2042

To Don Alessio Tanari

Centrul Salesian

Costantia – ROMANIA

Dear Alessio,

This comes to bring you news of myself. On opening the parcel, you will have realised: I have sent you a copy of the new work I have received from my two friends, Rita and
Francesco. Renewing a now well-established tradition between them and me, they have sent me their third work even before publication.

I am sure that you will enjoy reading it too, just as you were able to put your reading of the two previous books to good use. By the way, did you notice? After
Imprimatur
, their second
book was published under the title
Secretum
. And to think that it was I who sent it to you, just a year ago. At the time I was in Romania – in Costantia, or the ancient Tomi, where
Emperor Augustus had exiled the Latin poet Ovid and where you now are.

Who would have guessed that things would have altered in such a short space of time? With the death of the old pope and the election of this German pope everything has changed. His Holiness has
had the benevolence to appoint me cardinal and assign me to the Holy Office. When I happen to pass in front of a mirror and see my reflected image unworthily adorned with all that purple, I find
myself smiling as I recall that just a year ago, an exile in Romania, I thought I was destined to quite other purple: that of martyrdom.

And you, how do you find your new position as missionary in Romania? How does one feel after laying aside the robes of monsignor and donning those of a simple priest again? It may have struck
you as a demotion, but is it not wholesome for the spirit to consider things as they appear? Don’t you agree?

The Holy Father (who no sooner emerged from the conclave than he took the decision to transfer you and, with equal swiftness, summon me back) told me the other day that he remembers you very
clearly, when you were my pupil at the seminary. A mission to Costantia for an undefined period is, in His opinion, what is required by the powerful ambitions you already nurtured as a young man. I
mean spiritual ambitions, of course.

But let me return to the work I enclose here, and to my two old friends Rita and Francesco. His Holiness has already read it and, as he is originally from the Teutonic lands where the events
narrated take place, he greatly enjoyed the narrative waltz between history and literature, which interweaves quotations from archival sources with allusions to Shakespeare, Proust and Karl Kraus,
finally winking at the reader with burlesque anachronisms transposed from the most famous Viennese operettas, such as Franz Lehár’s
Merry Widow
(from which the imaginary
little state of Pontevedro and much else are taken), Johann Strauss Jr’s
Die Fledermaus
(where Frosch is the jailer),
Countess Mariza
by Emmerich Kalmann and, of course, the
Bettelstudent
by Karl Millöcker.

In the parcel I am also sending you a recording of a chorus: the medieval motif of
Quem queritis
. I was listening to it in the very days when I was reading my friends’ third book.
Before explaining the reason for this dispatch, I must make some preliminary remarks.

Imprimatur Secretum Veritas Mysterium
: this, according to my friends’ work, is the message carved by Archangel Michael on the spire of St Stephen’s. Or is it just a
harebrained invention of the
corpisantaro
Ugonio? As soon as I read it, I suspected that it came from some
Flos sententiarum
, those collections of famous Latin mottoes, like
in vino veritas
or
est modus in rebus
.

As the “narrating I” justly observes, the inscription followed the epigraphic custom of omitting verbs and adverbs, and the entire sentence was
Imprimatur et secretum, veritas
mysteriumst
, where
mysteriumst
obviously stands for
mysterium est
.

The use of the conjunction
et
in the sense of “even”, and the verb
est
, “is”, understood in the second part of the saying, were in keeping with the
tradition. But the whole thing did not lead towards Seneca or Martial, nor to Cicero or Pliny. The use of the term
imprimatur
, “let it be printed”, which among other things
designates the
nulla osta
given by the ecclesiastic authorities for the publication of a book, provided a clear reference to the printing of a text, and therefore indicated a date well
outside the classical period. They were not the words of a Roman writer, nor even of one from the late or Christian empire, but of one from modern times.