Veritas (Atto Melani) (79 page)
Read Veritas (Atto Melani) Online
Authors: Rita Monaldi,Francesco Sorti
“Oh my God! And now what? I certainly can’t give the paper back in this condition!”
“Maybe, with a little trimming at the edges and some smoothing . . .” I stammered.
Thrusting the paper into her apron pocket, without another word Cloridia stormed out of Atto’s room.
At that moment the pantry sister entered with dinner for Abbot Melani and Domenico, who was still ill. Atto did not want to move: we were waiting for Ugonio. But he was late.
On the pretext of going to eat something myself, and in order to let uncle and nephew dine in peace, I asked their permission to join Cloridia in our rooms. We were just a few yards away: if
Atto needed us, he could call for us.
I found Cloridia busily fixing the Agha’s sheet of paper. She was painstakingly trimming the singed edges. With the iron she would then smooth out the creases the water had produced.
Abbot Melani, Cloridia told me while she worked, had told her what had happened with Ugonio that morning – that the head craved by Ciezeber the dervish was the wizened one of Kara Mustafa,
and not the one on His Caesarean Majesty’s youthful neck. He had also told her about the ambiguous appointment that the
corpisantaro
had with Gaetano Orsini and how this was
connected in some way with the two unidentified hanged men. Now that we were alone, I told her what had happened that morning after she had brought us the pamphlet with the news of the Grand
Dauphin’s suspected smallpox: Atto’s confession and all the rest that I had learned from him, including Eugene’s tremendous jealousy of His Caesarean Majesty. When I touched on
the disconcerting revelations about the Most Serene Prince’s intimate habits, my sweet spouse was less surprised than I had expected; indeed, she made a few salacious comments that cannot be
repeated here.
“Bah,” she remarked doubtfully at last, “however badly I might judge the Prince, do you know what I think? I’m sure he would not go so far as to wish for the Emperor to
die. As for the rest, I already suspected he was a smart one,” she concluded with a smile. “I bet it was he who had the Pálffy woman set up just here in Porta Coeli Street,
almost opposite his palace.”
“Gaetano Orsini said it was the Emperor in person, because of its closeness to the convent, where Camilla is.”
“Perhaps both. In any case I wouldn’t trust Orsini until Ugonio makes it clear just what his relationship is with him. And on that subject, what time is it? Wasn’t he supposed
to be here at five?”
It was almost six. The
corpisantaro
was late. Cloridia, however, could not be late: the time had come to give back the Agha’s piece of paper. She urged me to keep an eye on Abbot
Melani’s requirements and left for Prince Eugene’s palace.
A short while later, Simonis and my son came back from the eating house where they had dined. Cloridia’s words on Orsini gave me an idea. I sent both of them to the Coppersmiths’
Slope. They would knock at the door of Anton de’ Rossi. Cardinal Collonitz’s former chamberlain had asked Gaetano Orsini to arrange for his flue to be repaired. I was waiting for Ugonio
and could not leave, but Simonis, with his vague air, could manage by himself to get information on the young castrato.
Having given my assistant and apprentice all the necessary instructions and sent them off, I was about to settle in my armchair when Doctor Abelius’s handbook on the artifices of students
slipped from my belt.
As I picked it up my eye ran over the titles of some of the mini chapters on the page where it had opened. It was not the part we had read and used for the Agha’s paper. The pages were
densely annotated in the margin; I recognised Simonis’s unintelligible handwriting. Alas, it was written in Current, that German cursive which to the eyes of a Latin might just as well be
Arabic. Growing curious, I glanced at the passages that seemed to have drawn my assistant’s closest attention:
Do you wish to see if a wounded person will get better or die? Take rue juice and put it in his nose; if he sneezes he will get better, otherwise it means he is
fatally wounded.
It was just what Simonis had tried with Dànilo when we had found him dying on the ramparts. So my assistant had taken the trick from Doctor Abelius’s handbook.
After this there was a description of another technique to see if a wounded person was destined to die or not. Then there were remedies to make someone drunk without any harm, and other remedies to
make a drunk person immediately sober, like drinking a lot of vinegar or putting a wet cloth on their pudenda. I had heard this from Simonis as well. Like his methods for not falling asleep:
carrying a bat around with him, exactly as he had done the night of the Deposition and the night we had wandered round all the bowling alleys in Vienna in search of Populescu. When I came across
the methods for testing the virginity of girls, I thought of poor Dragomir . . . I went on reading where the Greek seemed to have lingered with most attention:
To make someone sleep for three days in a row, take bile of a hare and make him drink it in wine: he will fall asleep at once. When you want to wake him pour vinegar
into his mouth. Or take a sow’s milk and place it where he sleeps. Or take bile of eel and mix it in a drink: he will sleep for three days. To wake him up, pour rosewater into his
mouth.
To make an animal stay with you, take a piece of bread and put it under your armpits. When it is soaked in sweat, give it to the animal to eat.
To make an animal run with you wherever you want, give it a cat’s heart to eat: it will follow you wherever you go.
Doctor Abelius had written every student’s gospel!
How to make sure that a dagger, sword or knife can cut an adversary’s weapon: take the noble herb known as Verbena, crush it and mix it with mullein and urine,
boil them together, leave the weapon in them for a while and you will soon note the difference!
To make a pair of pistols that look the same as others, but which with the same charge of powder and balls can fire further and more powerfully than others: have pistols made with a
more resistant and heavier butt than usual. Apparently they will be the same as ordinary pistols. At the rear screw have a little tripod welded to insert into the barrel with a tube in the
middle, through which the powder can fall on the ignition hole. Load the pistols as usual: they will fire further and more powerfully. The reason is this: the powder charge is lit at the
centre and so more powder is burned.
The short chapters that followed had even more notes and comments penned by Simonis.
Camisole proof against shooting, clubbing or stabbing: take two pounds of the fish called ichthiocolla, shred it and leave it all night in
vincotto
, then
drain the
vincotto
and pour fresh spring water on it, cook until it becomes a thick muddy pulp, put in five ounces of fine leather rubber and leave it to dissolve in this hot pulp.
Then put in four ounces of powdered smir, which has been prepared by heating it and cooling it many times in vinegar, and two ounces of old turpentine. Cook it all together again and spread
this mixture on a thick linen cloth which has been stretched out on a smooth board and fixed with nails. Put another linen cloth on top and spread the mixture on this one too, and continue
until you have placed ten or twelve linen cloths one on top of the other. Leave them to dry (in summer eight days are enough). Before they are completely dry, fold them and give them the
shape you want. With this material you can make camisoles, helmets and such like. A camisole of this sort can be seen at Baron K’s at Labach and also at N. in the Royal
Kunstkammer.
Swords, pistols, fighting clothes. What did my Greek assistant want with all this stuff?
Another material resistant to daggers, maces and guns: take ichthiocolla and fish glue, dissolve and squeeze until they become clear. Cook them ad consistentiam
melleam, until they have the consistency of honey. Dip a linen cloth into this and when it has dried a little, spread the mixture on it with a brush and leave it to dry. Spread it again and
leave it to dry as many times as necessary.
Or, if you want to make a garment proof against a dirk, take a new heavy linen cloth and spread it with fish glue dissolved in water. Leave it to dry on a table. When dry, take yellow
wax, resin and mastix, two ounces of each. Dissolve it all with an ounce of turpentine, mix it well and spread it on the linen until the cloth has sucked in the whole mixture.
And again:
A collar proof against musket balls: take the skin of a racing or game ox that has just been killed, and on the cleaner side cut out a collar that is of your exact
size and stitch it. Leave it to ferment for twenty-four hours in vinegar and dry it well in the open air
.
All of this Simonis had meticulously underlined and commented on in the margin in his abstruse calligraphy.
I thought back to Atto’s sceptical remark on Simonis’s ingenuousness. Clearly the Abbot suspected him. Absurd! In addition, Melani had refused to say another word. Maybe because he
had too little to go on and not even he could be sure of anything now.
And in any case, how could one help suspecting everyone? We were groping in the dark. Years ago, when I had followed false trails with Abbot Melani, sooner or later they would peter out, sending
us back to the correct path towards the truth. But this time, having abandoned our initial false track, we now found ourselves in the dense tangle of a forest where everything shifted, slipped from
our grasp, or turned into its opposite. I had suspected everyone: first Atto and Ciezeber, then Penicek and even Simonis; without counting Ugonio and Orsini, whose relationship was still unclear.
All the others were dead: Dànilo Danilovitsch, Hristo Hadji-Tanjov, Dragomir Populescu, Koloman Szupán, the two mysterious hanged men of Ugonio’s note. All of them apart from
Opalinski. Should we suspect him as well? Whatever the truth was, the question remained the same: why had the students been murdered?
In the shadow of the illness that threatened the Emperor (and the Grand Dauphin), there were too many deaths, too many culprits and no truth.
The only ones not included among the suspects were Cloridia and myself: and now perhaps . . .
The paradox, however absurd it might be, took my breath away. The series of deaths had begun as soon as I had asked Simonis’s companions to carry out research into the Golden Apple, but we
had seen that this research had nothing to do with the murders.
Therefore the only connecting element was ourselves – or rather myself. I had already thought of this, but only now had begun to put two and two together: I was in fact the only real
suspect. After meeting me, those poor students had started to die, just hours apart, like flies.
That was not all. They had been murdered just when they had an appointment with me and Simonis, or when we were looking for them. True, I had been with the Greek each time I had discovered a
corpse, but he had known his university companions for a long time. It was he who had introduced them to me and who had even proposed that I should engage them. Why should he have wanted them to
die just now?
Atto was right. If you are looking for a culprit, he had told me a few days earlier, look in the mirror: anyone who has an appointment with you dies.
Now Ugonio was supposed to come, but he was nowhere to be seen yet. Anyone who has an appointment with me dies . . .
20 of the clock: eating houses and alehouses close their doors.
Like a pack of panting hounds following an agile fox, it was only thanks to their great bravura that the orchestra managed to keep up with the serpentine glissades of the
soprano. In the fiction of the oratorio, Alessio’s mother sang her anguished rage against cruel destiny. On this rage the Chormaisterin had constructed a sprightly and superb edifice of vocal
acrobatics, which, with its sinuous arches, depicted better than any painting, and explained better than any poem, the just anger of a mother grieving over her son’s uncelebrated
nuptials:
Un barbaro rigor
Fé il misero mio cor
Gioco ai tormenti
E il crudo fato vuol
Che un esempio di duol
L’alma diventi . . .
13
While these indignant verses echoed in the Caesarean chapel, a similar resentment filled my own heart, and the hearts of those who were with me.
Ugonio had not turned up. We had waited for him for three hours. It was clear that something must have happened to him. The
corpisantaro
, who had begged for his keys back and had
implored us pitifully to treat them like gold until his return, would never have missed the appointment of his own free will. Fearing the worst, I had gone to the rehearsal of
Sant’
Alessio
. What mysterious thread bound Gaetano Orsini to Ugonio? What obscure threat had yet to be revealed to us? After the tragic deaths of Dànilo, Hristo, Populescu and Koloman
Szupán, what new tragedy awaited us?
