Veritas (Atto Melani) (99 page)

Then it was time to abandon ourselves to the pitching of the ship, and to its dumb and elusive will: to surrender, yield and turn away, while distant thunder announced a short morning downpour.
Like an outburst of universal weeping, the rain would act as prelude to the new age: the Last Days of Mankind.

Almost as if it wanted to give us a final helping hand, the Flying Ship once again landed amid the vineyards of Simmering, just a few yards from the convent’s buttery. As
soon as we had disembarked, the winged ship rose into the air again and departed, but not in the direction of the Place with No Name but to the west. I saw it sailing off ethereally and silently
until it merged into the horizon and the clouds of the ashen dawn, towards the west, the Kingdom of Portugal, whence it had arrived two years earlier.

With my remaining strength, I dragged the Abbot to the nearby buttery of the convent. I do not know how my poor, short homunculus’s limbs managed to support the weight of the old castrato.
I leaned against the door in exhaustion and realised it was ajar. At that moment it was thrown open.

“My love!” I heard a cry.

I just managed to see Cloridia, and Camilla de’ Rossi who was with her. While the Chormaisterin offered ready support to Atto, Cloridia smiled at me and held me tight, her face streaked
with tears. What was my wife doing there? Why was Camilla de’ Rossi there too? Were they looking for us? And how did they know that we would arrive at that very spot? These thoughts whirled
round my head like bothersome flies. After Penicek and Palatine, I certainly did not have the strength to face the ambiguities and mysteries of the Chormaisterin! I frowned, but Cloridia held my
hands gently and shook her head:

“I know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry. Camilla has cleared everything up.”

I had no time to hear any more. Overwhelmed by it all, I fainted in my wife’s arms.

“But . . . these are portraits of our girls!” were the first words I managed to utter.

I had come to myself just a few moments earlier on a couch next to the fireplace. When I opened my eyes I was at once seized with an attack of vertigo: cruel, stabbing pains tormented my whole
body. Cloridia had taken something from a little box and put it into my hand. I looked. It was a chain, from which hung a pendant in gold filigree, in the shape of a heart. It opened up. Inside
there were the miniatures of two charming girls’ faces: my daughters when small! What were these portraits I had never seen before? Was this another of my dreams?

“No, love. They’re not the girls. Not exactly,” smiled my wife.

Then, as my thoughts ordered themselves with difficulty and my whole being was convulsed with inward turmoil, Cloridia told me the whole story.

When it was all clear, I turned my head in search of Abbot Melani. Sitting by the fire, he was wrapped from head to toe in a woollen blanket, and was talking wearily but intensely with Camilla.
Our eyes met. It should have been a happy moment, that was how he had imagined it; but we could not enjoy it, not now.

The horse pulling the buggy raced swiftly through the night on the way home, back to Vienna. Abbot Melani groaned at each jolt of the wheels. We had to be quick, very quick. We
had to stop the hand that was raised against the Emperor. But how? In the first place, how would we enter the Hofburg?

I could not think, except with immense effort. Of all that I had lived through in the previous hours, only one thing had remained with me: a sound. It was the reverberation of the yelling of the
forty thousand of Kasim. It was no longer present, but its roar still lived within me, like a foot that has left its print, and the vibration in my guts became deafening at times. I found it hard
to discern sounds, even my own voice. I was not deaf, but deafened.

Nonetheless, once we reached Porta Coeli, even before getting out we heard a resounding rumble of carriage wheels. A two-horse carriage had pulled up abruptly in front of us. It bore the
imperial coat of arms. Two footmen got out bearing torches.

“Open up, quickly!” they shouted, knocking insistently at the door of the convent.

“Are you looking for me?” asked Camilla, who had already grasped the situation, approaching the door. “I’m the Chormaisterin.”

“Is it you? Then hurry up,” one of them answered, thrusting an envelope with the Caesarean seal at her, which she opened at once.

“It’s His Majesty,” Camilla informed us with, an anxious quiver in her voice, after reading the note. “He’s summoning me. At once.”

This was the answer to our prayers: I would enter the Hofburg in Camilla’s wake; with her I would get right to the Emperor. We left Cloridia and Atto at the convent.

The Caesarean palace stood out against the gloom, still immersed in the darkness of the night that had decided the fate of the world. We knocked at a side door. Despite the hour, it was opened
at once. I guessed that Camilla must have made frequent and confidential use of that entrance, since the servant who opened up did not protest or ask who we were. They made us wait in a small room,
and a few minutes later a footman with a sleepy face arrived. At once he and Camilla embraced and kissed fraternally.

“How is he?” asked the Chormaisterin.

He answered with a serious gaze, saying not a word.

“Let me introduce Vinzenz Rossi, a cousin of my late husband,” Camilla said then. “He’ll get us what we need.”

Vinzenz came back a moment later with a page’s costume: it was just my size. I changed into it and we set off along the corridors, guided by the footman and the dim light of his
candle.

In addition to the darkness that filled the rooms of the Hofburg, and which also enveloped my tired limbs and exhausted spirit, I recall only an endless series of corridors, staircases and then
more corridors. Finally a large antechamber, and then another one. A silent and velvety bustle of more footmen, doctors and priests. Nervousness, lowered eyes, a sensation of impotent expectancy. I
saw a woman, shaken by suppressed sobs, half covered by a veil, walking away accompanied by two maidens and supported by someone whom I heard addressed as “Lord Count of Paar”. Was this
the Empress? I did not dare ask. We were allowed to proceed quickly, with discretion but no subterfuge: all the service staff seemed to recognise Camilla.

Finally the last great door opened and we entered.

The Chormaisterin talked in a subdued and even voice. Outlined by the light of a candle holder set behind him, I could just glimpse the haggard profile of the invalid breathing
to the rhythm of agony.

When Camilla had approached the bed, no one had dared to go up to her and urge caution. Only Joseph had turned to the new arrival, but without the strength to make any sign of greeting.

The entourage of doctors was made to withdraw to the far side of the room, as did the father-confessor, clutching to his chest the chalice of the Holy Sacrament from which His Caesarean Majesty
had just taken communion. They went to join the Apostolic Proto-Notary, who was still holding the oil of extreme unction, which had just been administered in the presence of the Apostolic Nuncio.
It was for the Nuncio that Camilla had been working on her
Sant’ Alessio
; instead, he now found himself bestowing the Pope’s last benediction on the dying Caesar.

Now Camilla was whispering into the Emperor’s ear; he was simply listening. All around, it was as if the whole room were holding its breath. Camilla could have been infected by the fatal
sickness, and yet she knelt at the bedside as if at a child’s cradle. Then she rose, and it seemed to me (I cannot swear it on account of the gloom) that she dared to caress the head of
Joseph the Victorious.

I guessed that I would never know what she had said to him. I was right.

It was over. His Caesarean Majesty, successor of Charlemagne on the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, had handed his glove to the Archangel and given up his soul to the Most
High. His suffering was finally over. Fever had consumed him like a burning flame, pain had prostrated him until he fainted, vomiting fits had scraped his bowels. Then the disease had flayed,
devoured, and mangled him from within.

Joseph the Victorious died like the Paladin Roland, defeated by the Infidels in the retreat from Roncesvalles.

He had remained lucid to the last. Shortly before ten he had had the strength to ask his chaplain to approach with the blessed lamp and had placed his hands on it in the Christian fashion. The
chaplain, kneeling by the bed, held the lamp up and also the young palms of Joseph the Victorious, which had no strength left in them. And so, gazing eagerly at that light, His Majesty had listened
to the oration for the dying murmured by the father-confessor, who had tottered from the torment of it all and had had to be supported.