Maria Mancini was right: it had all been pointless.
As I pen these lines, Italy has for the past year been the scene of a horrible war which will soon spread everywhere. The astrologers have announced that the conjunction of Mars and Jupiter this month presages many battles and calamities.
Last spring, the Empire invaded the north-west, advancing on the Grand Duchy of Milan. In July, the French led by Catinat, a mediocre general, were defeated at Carpi and had to abandon their positions between the Adige and the Mincio. The Austrians then crossed the Po and seized the fortress of Mirandola. They were not even stopped by the entry into the war of Piedmont and the French squadrons of the Marechal de Villeroy, who was taken prisoner at Verona. Events were not turned around until the arrival of Vendome. He fielded eighty thousand fresh and well-equipped troops, regained Modena and saved Mantua and Milan, while the Austrian forces were tired and their reserves used up. At this point, it is possible that by opening up a passage through the passes of Tyrol, the French may advance on Bavaria and join up with their army of the Rhine to move against Vienna and strike a mortal blow at the Empire.
Not even this, however, can bring the war to an end. France is on the point of being attacked by England and Holland, who cannot wait to see her humbled: the Most Christian King has deceived them. He had signed with them a treaty for the partition of the immense Spanish monarchy; then, instead, using Charles II's will, he grabbed everything for himself, reneging on his agreements. Thus, the conflict will soon spread to every corner of the continent.
Curiously, the hero of this war has Italian blood in his veins. He is Prince Eugene of Savoy, the son of the Duke of Savoy and a woman whom by now I know well from Atto's account: Olimpia Mancini, Maria's terrible sister.
Prince Eugene should have become a Frenchman, but when he was still very young, Louis XIV neglected and humiliated him, causing him to leave his kingdom. He placed himself at the Emperor's service and has now become the greatest general of all time. At France's expense. Ah, Silvio, Silvio…
The Connestabilessa thus proves to have really been the woman of destiny: Eugene, her nephew, dominates the conflict which will decide the fate of the world. Her evil sister Olimpia has thus at last found an outlet for her malignity: her son is the military genius who sows terror wherever he turns.
As at every decisive turning point in history, prophecies are coming true. Maria Mancini's father had read in her horoscope that she would be the cause of tumults, rebellions and even a war. He had seen rightly: if the young King had married her and not the Spanish Infanta, he could not have laid claim to the succession of Charles II. And this war would never have taken place.
For two years, I tormented myself with the thought of the plot in which I had perhaps been the precious, decisive pawn. A year ago, I at last made up my mind and wrote an account of these events. I even had a frontispiece printed, with a wealth of decorations, and placed it at the beginning of these pages. I shall send the whole lot to Abbot Melani, seeing that he paid me for it, and shall at the same time claim my daughters' dowries. Now that they are twelve and eight years of age, I still have a good deal of time before it will be too late to find a good husband for them.
Will he answer me? At times I am overcome by floods of rancour against that champion of intrigue and mendacity. Then the scapular of the Madonna of the Carmel comes into my hands, with the three little pearls which he kept for seventeen years in memory of me and returned to me in Ugonio's lair. And then I say to myself that I should perhaps recall Abbot Melani only with feelings of affection.
I fear that there will be no more time for making claims. Atto Melani, Counsellor to the Most Christian King and Abbot of Beaubec, is (or would today be) seventy-six. I look around and see that few, very few men of his age are still on their feet, still healthy and vigilant; or even so much as alive. The dangerous life he has lived can only have left its mark on his weary bones. It remains only for me to hope.
Now, the present worries me even more than the future. Maria did well to warn her Louis that the forged will would resolve nothing. Now that the cannon are firing, I too am all too well aware that all those intrigues, all those efforts to resolve the Spanish succession by deceit, while avoiding war, were in vain. Philip of Anjou mounted the Spanish throne, as the Sun King wished, but France was dragged into a conflict with the other powers from which the whole world may never recover. "A great fratricidal struggle, a new Peloponnese war," the Connestabilessa had prophesied.
In those July days at Villa Spada, I had believed I was making myself useful to my little daughters. Instead, I had aided and abetted a plot which was driving Europe to destruction. Was that the reward for all that effort on my part, for climbing the cupola of Saint Peter's in the dark?
Two days ago, I went to look for the answer in the place which in the past had furnished me with more answers than I had found anywhere: the Vessel. I needed solitude, and at the same time, I needed someone to talk to. Cloridia was out assisting with a childbirth. Melani and Buvat were in Paris — the Devil take them. I wondered whether the curious individual might still, however, be where I had left him. Two years had passed, but there are times when nothing is impossible.
King Solomon said: "In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."
As though not a day had passed, I found him in his usual place, perched on the cornice of the Vessel and — need I say it? — playing the folia on the violin.
He had at once greeted me with the usual quotation from the Bible, as though he had read in my eyes what it was that I sought. How could I fault him for that? To the Vessel, one came only as a seeker.
"And he also said that in wisdom, and in knowledge, is vanity and vexation of spirit," the Dutchman added.
It was true, so true. Now that I knew, I suffered. As when I met Abbot Melani nineteen years ago and my young boy's illusions fell one after the other under the hammer blows of reality.
"That is precisely what folly exists for," the violinist added, speaking loud and clear to make himself heard as he pressed on the bow, his face melting into a broad smile. "Folly gladdens the heart and, as Hildegarde of Bingen preached so well, converts the tristitia seculae into coeleste gaudium or, in other words, it transforms pain for the world into the joy of heaven!"
After two years, I was once again hearing the folia. The notes played arpeggiato drew Albicastro's words and his very limbs after them, remoulding them to the proud accents of the dance. In counterpoint with his words, those concepts became unfamiliar, ineffable music.
For a few minutes, he seemed intent only on playing, and I decided to move on a little further. Once again, I entered the park of the Vessel, walking quietly; my thoughts, however, were soon racing, fluttering to the burning rhythm of the folia.
Illuminated by the resonant lightning flashes of that music, the events I had lived through took on a thousand facets, ogling me and letting me run after them, then suddenly letting their commotion fall silent, so that sometimes I would think, "There, I have them," only for them to start swirling in some quite different guise. When at last they'd foiled my green certitudes, they seemed to suggest to me new ways of knowledge.
Outside me were the thousand worlds of the folia. Within me, in my thoughts, there were, however, two worlds. In one of these, Atto and Maria were squalid spies in the service of the King of France, who in their letters, in order to trouble the waters, pretended to weave an amorous intrigue. In the other world, however, Abbot Melani was the faithful, gallant messenger of love between the Connestabilessa and the Most Christian King, taking advantage of politics to court as they had done forty years before, still using the same pseudonyms, Silvio and Dorinda, as in their readings from the time when they were living out their love.
Which of the two worlds was real, and which illusory? Had I seen only masks, or men and women of flesh and blood?
While the music filled all the space around me, I sharpened thought's scalpel. What had Atto said to me on the day when he took flight? "If the King of France's separation from Maria Mancini were now to bring Bourbon blood to the throne of Spain, the two would not have been separated in vain."
Then I understood. Those two worlds, the world of the spies and that of the lovers, were not mutually exclusive. They coexisted and even fed one another.
Maria and Louis had been separated because of Spain. Forty years later, they were still writing to one another, and still because of Spain. Their passion had had to give way to reasons of state, with which it was nevertheless firmly interwoven. Maria spied for Louis, but out of love. The secret code was The Faithful Shepherd, once their favourite reading. And Atto acted as go- between, then as now.
If Maria had not loved Louis, perhaps she would not even have obeyed his orders. This was clear from her letters. "I understand the point of view shared by Lidio and yourself, but I repeat my own opinion: it is all pointless." She would never have wished to bring the forged signature of Charles II to Madrid; a useless piece of deceit, she thought, and one that would turn against its author.
Like Croesus, King of Lydia, before him, who wanted to hear Solon tell him that he was the happiest of men, the Most Christian King wanted to demonstrate to the Connestabilessa that she would by means of that false signature be bringing him the crown of Spain on a silver platter. Then he would be the most powerful of kings and thus the happiest of mortals. Atto had announced it to Maria: "What you will receive when we meet will convince you… You know what value he sets upon your judgement."
But she, like Solon, had shaken her head. Had she not written it clearly? "What today may seem good will tomorrow turn out to be a disaster. For oftentimes God gives men a gleam of happiness, and then plunges them into ruin."
She did not believe that false will could, by fulfilling the Most Christian King's lust for power, make for his happiness as a man. But for the sake of her old love, she had given in: "I shall come. I shall do as Lidio desires. So we shall meet at the Villa Spada. This I promise you." Louis expected of her a double obedience, to love and to the state.
So, said I to myself, what the Abbot had delivered had been far more than a mere token of love. That sheet of paper bearing the words yo el Rey had changed the world's history.
Yet Atto had entrusted it to me, a humble peasant and servant to the Spada household. He had not handed it in person to Maria. Why?
So as not to dirty his hands and to deliver through an ignorant messenger that false signature which burned hotter than a thousand bonfires; that, I had thought two years earlier, in the full spate of my anger. Yet, the Abbot had accompanied me to the very door of the convent: an imprudent move for one supposed to have premeditated everything.
No, the law of the two co-existing worlds, that of feelings and of vile politics, applied also to Atto. At the last moment — this I realised only now — his heart had given way. He had lacked the courage to stand before the woman whom he had loved for thirty years without ever having seen her. He had not dared to appear to her with his shoulders weighed down by too many winters; nor, perhaps, to behold her as she now was. Were not Atto's eyes perhaps the very eyes of the Most Christian King? If Maria did not wish to show herself to the King, then perhaps it was as well that Melani should not see her either. He would not have wished to betray her or to lie to Louis. Sooner or later, the day would have come when the Sovereign would have put the inevitable question: "Tell me, is she still beautiful?"
I, who had seen her, could have told the Abbot that perhaps she had never been more beautiful, that never would I forget her, the white luminosity of her face and hands, the ardour of her great chestnut eyes when they met mine, the scarlet ribbons skilfully woven into her curly tresses.
But that had not been possible. Atto had gone.
Meanwhile, the folia continued inexorably, and my cogitations with it. Atto had sealed the fateful letter to Maria negligently, too great a lapse — this, I realised now only with the calming of my anger — for it not to have been deliberate. He had not had the strength to keep lying to me to the bitter end; he had wanted to confess all the deceit to me, but after his own fashion. This was followed, quite inevitably, by his precipitous flight. He himself could not stand the truth.
And Maria's letters? Was it an accident that I should have found them in Atto's chambers and secretly read them? Oh no, with Atto, nothing was left to chance. What would those words yo el Rey have meant to me if I had not read Atto and Maria's letters? Little or nothing, ignorant as I had been at the outset of the succession to the throne of Spain and the will of Charles II.
This could mean only one thing. He knew that I had read the letters. Indeed, he had wanted me to read his correspondence with the Connestabilessa. And I had fallen into the trap.
How ingenuous I had been. And how clever I had thought myself when I found those letters among the Abbot's dirty linen. Atto had put them there deliberately, certain that I would soon remember how he and I, seventeen years before, had found the answer to our investigations in a pair of dirty under-drawers. To use me effectively as an informer and then to be able to make use of my help, he needed me to be well informed about the question of the Spanish succession. He who does not know is like one who cannot see, and I was there to notice and report back. Yet Atto could not instruct me openly: I would have put too many questions to him which he could not answer. So he had come up with that trick. And when he had not wanted me to read his letters (the last of which truly did contain too many inconvenient truths) he had concealed them elsewhere, in his wig.
He had not, however, expected me to overcome that obstacle. In the end, I had, after all, succeeded in reading them, thus coming very close to the truth: I had learned that Atto had lied to me about the three cardinals. But then the poetic supplications to Maria, who still had not arrived at Villa Spada, had confused my mind.
Yet, even as he wrote those lines of love, the Abbot knew full well that she would never be attending the festivities! And the fact of having penned those heartfelt verses was not caused by surprise at her delays but by the pain of knowing her to be so near, so very near, yet out of reach because of the very mission that had brought them both to Villa Spada. The two worlds continued to co-exist side by side.
I would have preferred not to discover any of these things, I thought to myself in the now declining late afternoon light. If the Abbot had not given in to tardy and pointless scruples of conscience in regard to me (after having put my life in peril time and time again!) he would not have felt impelled to flee and, as he had promised me, we should have gone together to the notary for the donation of my little daughters' dowries.
I wanted to go and flush him out him in Paris, the renegade. In an involuntary gesture, my fist hit out in the void in search of Atto's jaw.
"You'd like to avenge yourself, young man, is that not so?" asked Albicastro, reappearing before me as he modulated a staccato variant on his folia on the violin.
"I should like to live in peace."
"So what's preventing you? Do as young Telemachus did."
"Again that Telemachus," I burst out. "You and Abbot Melani
"If you live like Telemachus, whose name literally means 'far-away fighter', you'll live in peace," chanted the Dutchman, matching his syllables to the rhythm of his music.
'"Tis a clever man who can understand you…" I murmured in response to the lucubrations of that bizarre individual.
"Telemachus pulled on the bowstring, but his father Ulysses, in disguise, gestured that he should desist and stopped his hand," Albicastro recounted, passing on to a new variation on the theme of the folia. "And then Telemachus said to the suitors: 'It may be that I am too young, and have as yet no trust in my hands to defend me from such a one as does violence without a cause. But come now, ye who are mightier men than I, essay the bow and let us make an end of the contest!' Do you know what that means? Young Telemachus could perfectly well have drawn his father's bow. But vengeance was not his to take. Thus, you too, arm yourself with patience and let the Lord do as He will. Look, my son," he continued in gentler tones, "this world of ours, which has gone on since Homer's day and perhaps even long before that, is the world of folly, of the 'far-away fight': the Last Day has not yet come, that in which, amidst laughter and jesting, Ulysses' fatal bow will be drawn. But let us not ask ourselves how far off that day may be," he warned, and then recited:
Jerusalem fell to the ground,
For whom our Lord had so long waited;
And Niniveh likewise was fated:
When Jonah warned, they quit their debt
And sought no longer term to get;
But later still they lapsed again -
No Jonah came to warn them then.
Thus everything has term and measure
And goes its way at God's own pleasure.
Once again, I found myself listening, two years later, to the rhymes of that poem, The Ship of Fools. The verses seemed to fit every one of the experiences I had lived through, from the Vessel to the cerretani.
"Sooner or later, I shall read that book by your well-beloved Brant," I reflected aloud.
"While we await the coming of the time," Albicastro went on, quite unperturbed, "let us live and love! And may the threats of the suitors be worth less than a ha'penny's worth for us. Go back home, my son, embrace your family, and leave off all those thoughts. The folly of he who loves, said Plato, is the most blessed of all."
I wondered whether Albicastro, with all those obscure sayings of his, did not perhaps belong to some obscure heretical sect. One true thing he had, however, said: I should bury the past and return home. Avoiding any further comment, I bowed and began to walk away.
"Adieu, my son; we shall not meet again," he replied, for the first time at the Vessel beginning a piece other than the folia.
He surprised me, and I came to a stop; the music was tormented and nervous, evoking a sense of some imminent menace. With sharp, repeated bowing, Albicastro was wresting from his instrument all the tragedy which these things can sometimes unleash, transcending their laughable dimensions, that little wooden carcass with its four gut strings.
"Will you be returning home?" I asked him.
"I am off to the wars. I am going to enrol in the Dutch army," he replied, drawing near, while the rhythmic hammering of that hard and almost obsessional motif spoke of cannonades, drums, forced marches through the mud.
"And what then of your far-away fighting?" I asked after a moment's surprise.
"I name you my successor," said he solemnly, breaking off from his playing and touching my shoulder with his bow in a gesture of investiture. "Besides…" he laughed before turning his back on me and walking towards the gate, "you earn good money in the armies of Holland!"
I gave up trying to understand whether or how much he was jesting. He moved off with his violin on his shoulder, then began yet another piece of music: a melancholy adagio, an utterly pure vocal line on which the Flying Dutchman's bow improvised trills and turns, appoggiaturas and mordents, delicate florileges of a melody which, better than any earthly leave-taking (for music is not something merely human) bid farewell at the same time, to me, to the Vessel, to peace, and to times past.
And now I too could be on my way. I made a last tour of the gardens of the Vessel. Once again, the wind rose, uncovering the fiery face of the sun. The weather had suddenly become almost spring-like, and it felt as though someone had turned back the clock's hands by a couple of hours. I was moving towards the entrance, when my attention was caught by a rustling of clothes and trills of light laughter.
It was then that I saw her. Behind a thick hedge, as when first we had caught sight of her: a delicate screen which enabled one to see without being seen, to know without knowing.
This time they were old; not mature, old. Wrinkled faces, hoarse voices, hooded eyelids. Nonetheless, they seemed as gay as when Atto and I had beheld them from the first-floor windows, at the age of twenty. They walked side by side, bent but smiling, commenting on some bagatelle; she gave him her arm.
I held my breath. I wanted to draw closer, to understand whether I had really seen what I thought I had. I looked for a break in the hedge, tried to make my way around it, changed my mind again, turned back and looked once more.
Too late. If they had been there, they were now elsewhere.
I did not await their return. I knew from experience that there would be no such returning.
I thought one last time of Albicastro. He was leaving that abandoned villa, which in reality was so overflowing with life, to throw himself into the world's turmoil, now nothing but wars and destruction. I remembered what he had told me two years before: just like the Sileni of Alcibiades, the clumsy statuettes which conceal divine images within, what seems death, is living, and correspondingly, what seems life is death.
Leaving the Vessel, I realised that the sky had again taken a turn for the worse: the light had suddenly become opaque and crepuscular.
I felt the skin on my arms grow rough with disquiet. I knew, however, that in that place, time could become a vortex and turn back on itself. So why be surprised if the wind and the leaves, the clouds and the sun accompanied the dance?
"What has happened to you? I've been looking for you for hours!" I was as pale as a shroud. Worried and surprised, Cloridia took me in her loving arms. She had come to meet me on the way home.
Without drawing breath, I explained to her all that I had just seen; she smiled.
"Your Abbot would speak of fantasies, of hallucinating exhalations or even of some trick, and perhaps he'd start quoting from one of those little treatises on physics that are so fashionable now."
"And what do you think?" I asked, thinking of the trick with the camphor in Ugonio's lair, which had made me believe I was dead.
"I think that you've seen, or imagined, what would have happened if the King of France and Maria Mancini had not been separated; they'd have grown old side by side."
"So, once again, I've witnessed in the Vessel the good things that might have happened and never did," said I. "But why did I never see what bad things might happen?"
"I could put it like this. First: this villa provides a refuge only for what should rightly have happened but which did not take place because of… let's call it a 'distortion' of history, a deviation from the natural order of things."
"And the second reason?" I asked, seeing that Cloridia had interrupted her train of thought.
"I could, I repeat, I could use big words and explain to you that the good, all that's right and good, really does exist — just that. It issues from God the Creator, so it exists, in the highest sense of the term. And it continues to exist even when, in the arena of things terrestrial, it must give way to overwhelming malign forces. This is because the good is pure and incorruptible affirmation and it is not possible for it not to exist. Thus it is never annihilated. And you may be sure that, in other times and under other guises, it will reappear."
"And evil?"
"You know perfectly well that I detest philosophy. But, here too, I could quote Saint Augustine of Hippo: Evil is negation. Unlike the good, it does not exist in itself, but only as the destruction of what is right and good. Therefore, when evil that's planned is defeated by the good, it goes nowhere, but disappears utterly. In other words, even its deceitful appearance disappears, the empty husk which misled men. That is why you will never find a place like the Vessel which provides a receptacle for bad intentions or evil plans left unrealised."
I looked at her in some perplexity: she was talking as though all this were the most natural thing in the world. We covered the rest of the way home in silence.
"For you women, everything's so obvious!" I sighed, when we reached the yard of our farm and I removed the shoes given me by Atto, exchanging them for my peasant's clogs. "You'd not be surprised if you saw a donkey fly."
"Perhaps that's because, as you men say, we've less brains than you," said my wife, taking off her coat and removing the blue ribbon from her hair.
"No, I meant that you are always so much wiser than us."
"It was no accident that a woman, not a man, crushed the serpent's head with her bare foot," added Cloridia. "Mind you, I only said that I could tell you all these things…"
"So, what are you telling me then?"
"I'm telling you that you've simply had a hallucination. A product of. Good for a novel, I'd say."
Dear Alessio,
Dear Alessio
Now that you will have reached the end of my two friends' text, kindly permit me a brief leavetaking.
This time, I needed undertake no research to verify the authenticity of the events narrated: along with the typescript, I received a disc containing all the pieces of music mentioned therein and an appendix of documentary proofs. This is just as well: from the place I am in, I should certainly have been in no position to conduct any such investigation, let alone to trace a recording of Albicastro's fascinating but unknown folia, or even an aria from The Faithful Shepherd.
To you, I leave the pleasure of checking on whether the content of what you have just read is true. The task is far less demanding than you might fear. Besides, the unknown performers of the music on the disc will keep you good company.
As you will read in the pages that follow, Rita and Francesco commissioned two graphologists to examine the signature on the will of Charles II of Spain. The result is unequivocal: it is a forgery.
Enough of that, I shall disclose nothing else to you. Rather, you will still be expecting an answer to another question: why did I send this to you? Simply because in Rome, so close to the Holy Father, it will surely be of more use than here, in the hands of a poor bishop reduced to the humble role of a parish priest in far- off Tomi. But do not waste your time whisking your fine soutane through the inner corridors and the back rooms of power: that would lead nowhere. Permit me here to remind you of that warning by Ovid, the Latin poet who is my companion in misfortune, as quoted by Atto Melani:
"Thy lot is mortal, but thy wishes fly / Beyond the province of mortality."
I am confident that your person will in the end bring good fortune to my two friends. "How could that be?" you will no doubt be asking yourself sarcastically, but also — this I know — with some disquiet.
The answer is in the mind of God, quern nullum latet secretum.