Veritas

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.

Veritas is written on the cover of this book [. .]

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.

I looked it up in various anthologies of Latin sayings, including the dated but excellent one by De Mauri published by Hoepli. I found nothing, not even a vague resemblance.

But I repeated that motto over and over again, in private, like a secret, heretical rosary, or those words of mysterious power that Tibetan monks are said to mutter monotonously for an entire life in the silence of their monasteries.

And then that Unicum. ., that truncated conclusion which alludes to something that is left: what remains in the wilderness of uncertainties to which we are condemned by the unknowableness of truth? The answer, as I had not realised, was already dancing in the air. The song of the nuns, the music that came constantly from the stereo not far from my desk: the Quem queritis, from the medieval liturgical repertoire with Russian performers, a memory of my exile in Tomi — Mitbringsel, as the Holy Father would say.

The title, Quem queristi, is not an affirmation. It is a question. The Latin text, a dialogue, goes:

— Quem queritis in sepulchro, christicole?

— JESVM Nazarenum crucifixum, o celicole.

— Non est hic, resurrexit sicut predixerat, ite nunciate quia surrexit de sepulchro.

Quem queritis? JESVM. Jesum, Jesus, that sweet name whispered something to me. Something I already knew, but that was not clear to me. But what? After hours of vain concentration, on impulse, I tried writing it down: JESVM, in the Latin form, with V instead of U.

The next step suggested itself. Underneath, I transcribed the words of the mysterious message:

Imprimatur

Et

Secretum

Veritas

Mysterium

It was an acrostic. And this acrostic revealed the name of Jesus, IESVM. In the accusative: it was the answer to my questions. IESVM unicum. “Only Jesus”; Jesus is the only certainty.

That was what the Quem queritis wanted to tell me. It is one of the final scenes in the Gospels, which in the Middle Ages was simplified for the people to sing and recite. The images are very simple, almost primitive. Mary Magdalen and Mary go to the sepulchre of Jesus. An angel, of dazzling appearance and in snow-white robes, announces himself with a tremendous commotion and the guards of the sepulchre fall down as if dead. Then the angel (or the angels, depending on the version) reveals to the women that they will not find Jesus there, because He has risen again as he had predicted, and he invites the women to spread the word among His disciples.

In medieval musical performances the Gospel passage (Matthew 28: 1–6; Mark 16: 1–8; Luke 24: 1–7; John 20: 1-18) is reduced to a few basic lines:

— Whom are you seeking?

— Jesus of Nazareth crucified, O angels.

— He is not here, he has risen again as he foretold, go and announce that he has left the sepulchre.

IESVM is accusative, because it is the object of something, it answers the question: whom are you seeking? We are seeking Jesus. It therefore answers the question, the only real question for those who have faith. Whom are we really seeking, whom must we seek, if not Jesus? Who remains if not He?

Quem queritis? The answer is Jesum, which in certain paleo-Christian epigraphs on tombs (recalling the episode of the angel announcing Christ’s resurrection) was written ISVM, with V to indicate U, and omitting “e” or in certain cases writing it as I^eSVM, with the “e” in superscript. Alongside it, on the same tomb, one would find the symbol ATTΩ, which means that the alpha and omega of life, its beginning and end, are under the temple of God, represented by the double “T”. But it can also be read “Atto”.

We are all Atto, or rather, ATTΩ: whether we like it or not, we are all under the great roof of the Lord.

I know that two words are missing of the seven that form the message: let us hope the whole thing is not simply the fruit of Ugonio’s frightful imagination. .

Go in peace

Card. Lorenzo dell’Agio