Veritas

Day the Ninth

FRIDAY, 17^TH APRIL 1711

Midnight: three hours till the first cry of the night guard. The city sleeps.

An immense fracas, a grandiose and oppressive dirge, a primeval abyss of male voices exploded in the moor of Simmering. It came from all around and was directed everywhere. It set vibrating every clod, every plant, every stone, every one of the sharp-pointed stars that dotted the dark canopy of the sky. A piercing noise assaulted my ears, and I had to cover them with my hands to prevent them from being shattered by this scorching gale of screeches. It was if the throat of the whole of creation were growing agitated, as if the earth itself, the heavens and the waters had struck up a colossal counterpoint and were chanting in Turkish. Yes, this terrible and deafening litany was in Turkish, and as Ciezeber triumphed over Simonis, this faceless choir invoked the name of Allah, almost as if a new titanic Mahomet were shouting his own wild joy before sweeping away Vienna and its lands. And then I remembered what the students had learned during their investigations into the Golden Apple, and I understood; as Dragomir Populescu had told us, this was the chorus destined to repeat itself every Friday, and it recited “Woe to you, Allah, Allah!” as on that night when the forty thousand martyrs of Kasim had died. That harvest of blood was now being repeated, and the forty thousand were invoking vendetta. As the whole universe seemed to close in on itself above us, I learned that this was the night when the fate of the world would be sealed.

Then it was as if the horizon flared up, and the sound became so lacerating that it was not enough even to cover one’s ears. Staggering with the pain tormenting my ears and head, I tried to stand up and I saw that at that very moment my assistant was dropping into the lions’ cage.

Just so as not to deliver himself up to Ciezeber, he had surrendered his life. Simonis the humble chimney-sweep, Simonis the student with the foolish air, Simonis the Greek, had decided to end his life in heroic fashion. Better to be torn apart by lions than to confess his own secrets under torture. I gazed in terror at the darkness and with the eyes of imagination beheld the black panther, grimly mindful of the blows that had offended it the previous day, sink its jaws into my assistant’s neck and chest, and inaugurate the orgiastic banquet in which he was torn to pieces and flayed, his human blood drunk, his veins sucked, his joints shattered, his muscles frayed, as if nature were seeking to indulge in the caprice of reversed butchery, and the blood of the forty thousand had to be avenged on Simonis alone. On his poor mangled body the wrath of two entire armies was being vented — one from the past, led by Kasim, and one from the present, led by the grim panther of the Place with No Name.

Meanwhile the dervish — he, too, covering his ears to defend himself from the deafening chorus, awkwardly jerking his elbows and pointlessly yelling — signalled to his men to come to his aid and protect him in his terror-struck flight from the Place with No Name.

My ears were still hurting, but it was time to act. While the dance between Ciezeber and his henchmen continued, I went back to the Flying Ship. Shocked as I was by Simonis’s end, I had almost forgotten Abbot Melani. Although hampered by having to press my hands to my ears, I managed to pull myself aboard the aircraft just in time to feel its wooden frame vibrate and shake rhythmically. It was what I hoped: the only way to escape. Atto was also clamping his hands to his ears, but he removed his hands when he felt this phenomenon, almost a familiar one by now: we were rising.

But the ship, for the first time, was struggling. It lifted just enough to fly over the walls of the ball stadium and to take us out of the Place with No Name. However, its journey was not an easy one. It proceeded in jerks, tossed by powerful gusts, which swelled the sails and lifted it, and undertows, which dragged it downwards again. The amber stones, instead of chiming in their usual harmony, oscillated confusedly and buzzed in acrid concert, producing a metallic din, as in a battle from an earlier age. The light they emitted was grey and livid this time, like the face of someone confronted by horrific visions. Maybe it came down to that, I thought; too much horror had unfolded itself around the ship: Simonis’s end, the wickedness of Palatine and the new age. . Death weighed down its keel like ballast. It swayed awkwardly for a while and finally sank down, as if exhausted, in the dark countryside of Simmering. Atto and I stayed sitting in the ship, overwhelmed by the cries of the forty thousand.

But suddenly, just as it had started, the yelling of the martyrs of Kasim ceased. In those long minutes in which I had left him alone, Atto had realised what it was, and on his lean face I could see his amazement at this overpowering phenomenon. So what Dànilo Danilovitsch and Dragomir Populescu had recounted was not nonsense: the Turkish legend of the forty thousand was true — or at least it had become so that night, and so perhaps the legend of the Golden Apple was not wholly invented either. But Abbot Melani was constrained by the pride of one who has always thought he held the key that unlocks the labyrinth of existence.

Trying to gather my ideas and to recover lucidity, I told him what had happened to Simonis. I hoped that the excessive emotions the Abbot was once again exposed to would not endanger his life; I had not yet realised that it was my spirit that had been wounded most cruelly.

“It is not a coincidence that I arrived in Vienna just a day after the Turks arrived and after the Emperor fell ill,” he suddenly said.

“What are you saying?” I said, turning pale.

Atto gave a faint smile.

“I knew nothing of it, have no fear. The truth is that we are at a crossroads in history, and at such moments the strangest things happen.”

“Yes, it’s a crucial turning point.”

“I thought I was the one who could bring about this turning point, but I have been brushed away like a fly.”

“The new forces. .”

“New? They are ancient, they have just changed their strategy, and this pays better. Shall we name some names from the past? The Fuggers, for example, who financed the ascent to the throne of Charles V and then of Maximilian through their henchman Ilsung. But it is not important. What counts is their method. Their code of behaviour is not what we were accustomed to — the code of kings, their ministers, of diplomacy, of the old conventions — but another one, unknown to anyone but them. No general will do as Melac did during the siege of Landau and offer not to fire on the tent of the enemy’s emperor. Those days are forever gone. Checkmate is abolished. From now on the enemy king will be killed as well — the dervish explained it clearly to your Simonis.”

On hearing my assistant’s name I saw his eyes again, gazing at me in his last instants of life. I felt myself shaking.

“He died torn to pieces by the wild beasts, like a Christian martyr,” murmured Atto suddenly to himself.

“What?”

“Simonis. You’re thinking of him, aren’t you? So am I. His courageous end confirms it: he was part of the resistance against the new order that is about to emerge victorious from this war. Your assistant was, to use Penicek’s words, on the side of Christ. And like an ancient Christian he was torn to pieces. But by now you too have understood that he was working as part of a network of which you knew and will always know nothing. Simonis, too, like the new faceless lords, is a sign of the approaching times. Do we know who he really was? No. Penicek? Again no. And Ciezeber-Palatine-Ammon? Even less. And yet they, and other equally anonymous beings, are playing dice with the world. The future is in the hands of shadowy networks of individuals with no names, no identities and no faces. Fortunately I am at the end of my career, boy: there is no room for people like me. I was the King’s advisor, and His Majesty listened to me and then made his decisions, exposing himself to the judgement of his subjects, of the entire world and of history. The world was made of men. But soon it will be led by governments that function like this ship: if necessary, even without human beings on board. I didn’t understand until now, do you realise? The shadow-man I was seeking everywhere does not exist. The new Abbot Melani does not exist. We were fighting against the void. There is just a group, up there, a collective intelligence, like an anthill. They are not individuals with independent mentalities. Taken singly they are puny beings, pipsqueaks. Only in a pack, like hyenas, are they to be feared.”

“The Age of Man is over, the agony of the world has begun: the Last Days of Mankind,” I said, repeating what I had thought when we found Opalinski’s corpse.

“They have succeeded in setting fire to the world, these devils incarnate,” Atto went on in a voice now quivering with rage. “And to think that I ingenuously came to Vienna on a peace mission. Peace, indeed! This war is just a lucrative affair of blood to quench the thirst of Beelzebub. And it will not end in the rebirth they have promised us, no, but in the greatest bankruptcy the world has ever seen.”

His words dismayed me. I needed to hope, I desperately needed to hope. Otherwise I could not cope. It was all too much for me.

“But once there’s peace — ” I began.

“Then the war will begin,” Atto interrupted me with a snarl of repressed fury.

“But all wars have ended with a peace!” I protested, clutching with all my strength at the banal optimism of my words.

“This one will not!” the Abbot snapped back with all the breath in his body. “This war did not take place on the surface of life. No! It raged within life itself: the world perishes and no one will know! Everything was yesterday, it will have been forgotten. Today will not be seen, and tomorrow will not be feared. It will be forgotten that the war has been lost, forgotten that it was begun, forgotten that it was fought. That is why this war WILL NE-VER END!”

“But once there is peace?”

“People will never have enough of war.”

“But the people, through error — ”

“They unlearn. Indeed: they UNLIVE!” the old castrato ended with a shrill cry, finally giving way to tears and sobs, hunched over in a corner of the ship, striking his breast like a soul in Purgatory.

Atto himself had made a decisive contribution to the outbreak of this war, this endless war, eleven years earlier. He, who had always believed he held the reins of the world in his hands, had been no more than a pawn in the hands of those like Ciezeber. He had only fully realised this now, and it had plunged him into despair.

The empty basin of the sky was illuminated only by a weak moon, almost entirely covered by clouds. The cold gnawed at us from head to toes. I curled up trembling at the bottom of the ship next to Atto. I should have taken the Abbot and left the ship where it had come to ground, but I felt broken inside, lost in a black night of the spirit that robbed me of all my strength.

I felt I had gone back to the days of our first adventure in Rome, where aboard a frail boat, in company with Ugonio, we had sailed the subterranean rivers beneath the Holy City, armed with just a paddle and our intuition. But this, as I had seen, was just one of many parallels between our present situation and the vicissitudes I had shared with Abbot Melani in the past. Now, just like twenty-eight years earlier in the little inn where I had been working when I first met Atto Melani, there was a case of a sick man who had perhaps been poisoned — and on that occasion too there had been an attempted murder by means of a deliberately produced contagion. Once again, I was pervaded by the sense of a cycle coming to completion; as similar events repeated themselves, I felt as if the real meaning of what I had lived through was about to be revealed.

Abbot Melani, meanwhile, passed from weeping to a dark dreamless sleep, as I could tell from the expression on his face. I held him in an embrace, so as to warm him with my body and prevent any risk of death by exposure.

Lying like this on the hard planks of the ship, my eyes gazing at the stars, I recalled Simonis’s last words, and the daring action that he had clearly signalled to me with them. The task I yearned for was almost impossible, but I felt that I owed it to Simonis, poor Simonis, mysterious Simonis, to make an attempt. I stared straight ahead, trying to forget those instants in which I had seen him smile feebly to me and then drop among the beasts, to his death. If we were to tell the palace staff about the plot that was afoot to assassinate Joseph, they would take us for dangerous madmen. We would have to try some other method. Oh, if only the ship would take flight again! I could put into action what I had haphazardly attempted during the previous flight. I could fiddle with the ropes holding the amber stones and so manoeuvre it. I dreamed of guiding the Flying Ship towards the imperial palace, where I would carry out my desperate plan. Using my skills as a chimney-sweep, I would drop down into one of the great chimneys with the iron ladders typical of the imperial residences and make my way to the apartments of His Majesty Joseph the Victorious. There, on the sofa of some sitting room, in plain view, I would leave an account of the plot hatched against His Caesarean Majesty, imploring them not to subject him to the inoculations prescribed by Ciezeber; or I would try to get one of Joseph’s butlers to listen to me, if I should meet one; or. . well, I didn’t really know what, but something had to be done.

At that moment the ship, with a final effort (or so at least it seemed to my confused spirit) took off again. I jumped to my feet and with renewed vigour prepared to handle the ropes in order to guide it towards the Caesarean Palace, but at once I felt the ropes jangle weirdly beneath my fingers, and the ship judder uncontrollably. A sudden unsettling jerk forced me to drop the reins (if they could be called such) of my winged steed, and so I left it free, as on the first flight, to guide itself. At once it appeared to me that the solidity and stability of the vehicle improved, and I felt relief. But it did not last long, alas. The Flying Ship was aiming — or so it seemed to me amid the purple nocturnal mist — for the spire of St Stephen’s. And indeed it was. As the roofs and squares of the city glided beneath us, I saw the top of the cathedral tower getting closer and closer. I prayed that none of the city’s fire-watchers, who always keep an eye on the cathedral, would spot the outline of our ship and raise the alarm.

“Not here, you wretched thing!” I shouted, beside myself. “You know where you have to go!”

As our craft got closer and closer to the spire, Simonis’s death suddenly came rushing back to me. The roaring of the lions and the panther had been drowned out by the yelling of the forty thousand martyrs, and the beasts’ jaws, hidden by the darkness of the night, had had seized hold not only of Simonis’s helpless limbs but also of my spirit. The Last Days of Mankind, which had announced themselves with Opalinski’s death, had swallowed Simonis and were now breathing down my neck. For a moment I stood there full of anguish. It was then that I saw it.

At first I thought it was a hallucinatory effect of my sad lucubrations. Although it seemed alien in substance to the world of humans, the object was such that it was also visible to Abbot Melani, who had re-awoken and risen in the meantime, and who now stood gaping by my side.

It was a golden globe, suspended in the air, the size of an apple. No description could ever fully convey its appearance; a reminiscence of it has stuck with me, albeit blurred and impenetrable. Certain dreams are difficult to remember, not because one’s memory is weak, but because they can only live in the distorted state of mind of the oneiric world; like jellyfish dragged onto the shore, as soon they are transported to a state of wakened awareness they dissolve. In the same way, owing to my desperate and tormented state of mind at that time, I was granted an experience that I cannot now fully repeat and describe. All I can say is that the substance of the golden globe, suspended at a short distance from the prow of the Flying Ship, seemed midway between vapour and metal, as if the magic breath of an alchemist had transformed a sphere of gas into gold, and this latter once again into an aeriform substance.

It was then, enraptured by this arcane and fantastic vision, that I remembered: among the many prophecies about the Golden Apple that we had heard during the last few days, there was the one Ugonio had recounted. The War of the Spanish Succession, which was raging throughout Europe, would be won by the Empire only if the original Golden Apple of Justinian, which assures supremacy over the Christian West, were to be placed on the highest spire of the most sacred church in Vienna: the Cathedral of St Stephen, where one day the Archangel Michael had appeared, he who, according to tradition, holds the Imperial Orb in his hand as he drives out Lucifer with his sword in the form of the holy cross.

The ship gave a start. The wind had risen, and the swaying craft had knocked against the tip of the spire of St Stephen’s. Out of the corner of my eye, even though enraptured by the vision of the golden globe, I glimpsed the coils and spirals that adorn the highest point of the glorious cathedral.

“What’s happening? First that shout. . now the Apple. .” stammered Abbot Melani in a trembling voice, clinging onto my arm: he too had realised what the golden globe was.

But I was no longer listening. I now remembered that, according to Ugonio, on the pinnacle of St Stephen’s were the seven mysterious words carved by the Archangel Michael.

It is from this point that my memories are overpowered by the shades of oblivion, and everything merges in a blurred magma: my attempt to lean out to try and see, despite the darkness, the inscription engraved by Archangel Michael’s sword, the ship swaying with a new gust of wind, my body losing its balance, Abbot Melani tottering by my side and collapsing onto the floor of the ship, and I, with the help of my elbow, just managing not to fall out of the ship into the void. And then those long seconds half-hanging head downwards, with the unreal vision of the bell tower of St Stephen’s, an immense humpback whale of stone, looming beneath the imposing roof of the cathedral. And again, the Golden Apple suddenly increasing in luminosity, and then, as I save myself from falling and manage to pull myself back into the ship, the Apple disappearing in a wispy trail of refulgent powder.

The epiphany was over and the Golden Apple had not returned to St Stephen’s: Spain was destined to fall into French hands. The night in which the fate of the world was sealed had completed its parabola. The outcome of the war was already decided — that was what the Flying Ship wished to tell us — and with it the events of the years to come.

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.

10.15 of the clock

Then Roland feels that death is now upon him

As from his ears his brain comes oozing forth.

Then Roland feels that he has lost his sight,

He struggles to his feet with all his force;

The colour now has vanished from his face.

Then Roland feels that death is clutching at him,

It passes from his head down to his heart.

Then Roland feels his time is fully over,

With one hand he has struck upon his chest.

He offers up his right-hand glove to God:

The Archangel has seized it from his hand.

Above his arm he keeps his head low-bowed,

With hands close-joined he’s come now to the end.

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.

In his last moments His Majesty had been shaken by a violent convulsion: black blood had spilled from his eyes and ears; mucus and bits of brain had come dripping from his nose; derma, tissues, vessels, capillaries and lymphatic ducts had burst under the action of a thousand mines bursting silently. It did not seem to be — it was not — a simple illness: Evil itself, with its wicked arts, had torn the body of Joseph the Victorious asunder, and had taken pleasure in so doing.

When the Queen Mother, present throughout, approached and knelt to kiss her son’s now upturned hands, we all knew that it was truly over.

I hid no longer. Still dressed as a page, amid the crowd of courtiers attending the imperial death in the antechamber, I made my departure unobserved.

I went down the stairs clutching an extinguished candlestick, just to give my hands something to do. And so I strode on, while my heartbeats, which had paused the instant my king had yielded up his last breath, began throbbing once again, beat after beat, and a few minutes later, they were hammering wildly, piercing my chest like a sharp burning dart. The gasping pendulum of flesh and lymph that vibrated in my chest dug and dug into my bowels and then surged back up, to my very eyes. My swollen eyelids pulsated painfully, and I imagined them full of the same ferruginous humours which I had seen, to my horror, pouring from my young Emperor’s half-closed and contorted eyelids, while his pupils had rolled backwards and the heavens had dissolved in universal weeping.

I could barely make out where my legs were taking me. I was staggering, and I thought I would not be able to go very far. I dragged myself painfully until I came in sight of the ramparts. It was then that a new impulse took possession of me. I stopped struggling, my thighs became hard and strong, my heart beat regularly: I began to run. I ran with no restraint or aim, and I yelled with all the breath in my body. I hurled the extinguished candle from me, tearing off my wig, tailcoat, cravat and shirt, yelling and shrieking bare-chested, and my jaws throbbed and I wanted to explode in a thousand proclamations of horror. But no one could hear me: I was shouting all alone and running all alone, convinced that blood, instead of tears, was coursing down my cheeks, and I did not bother to dry it, not caring that it might leave a red trail on the pavement. I saw my fresh red blood being joined by the black blood that spurted from the mangled bowels of the Pontevedrin Dànilo Danilovitsch, and my yell merged into that of the forty thousand martyrs of Kasim; I saw the cold, coagulated blood of the Bulgarian Hristo Hadji-Tanjov, and my yell became a whistling blizzard; and then again the black blood of the Tekuphah invoked upon us by the old man in the Armenian coffee house, which had gushed down Atto’s face from the pudenda of the Romanian Dragomir Populescu, severed like the sex of Uranus from which Venus was born; and the sharp poles soaked in the blood of the Hungarian Koloman Szupán from Varasdin, and again the blood that the iron spits had sent spurting from the beetle eyes of the proud Pole Jan Janitzki Opalinski; and finally, the Greek blood of Simonis, Simonis, my friend, my son, blood of my blood, which had quenched the thirst of the panther of the Place with No Name, whose fatal roar had shaken my chest, drowning out the cries from my own innards and merging with the yelling of the forty thousand martyrs.

The red trail of blood that I imagined marking my progress was now a long trail of death. Thanks to it, I repeated to myself, Cloridia would find me again. My veins were bursting at the thought of all the innocent blood that had been shed, but they also quivered at the notion of other blood, the blood of Judas, cursed in saecula saeculorum, which had flowed in trickles during the ritual in the woods from the wounds of the dervish Ciezeber alias Palatine, the Chaldean or Armenian or Indian traitor, or all these things together. And above all, the unshed blood of Penicek, the foul spawn of Lucifer. On all that blood the sun rose each day, itself tinged with blood soli soli soli, “to the only sun of the earth”, a blood-stained sun, just as my young Emperor had been suffocated in blood, “the only man alone on earth.”

Then I raised my fists to heaven and proclaimed: let the sky darken, the moon and vermilion sun cease their course, women cover their faces, banquets be suspended, every mouth be rendered dumb, all doors be bolted. It is over! The Emperor is no more. Death and injustice have had their dark triumph.

The echo of my bloody folly and no other sound came to me from the wreckage of creation: a sad fanfare with which my dead — but also the millions and millions of soldiers who are dead, dying or about to die from this war, the war without end — accuse me of still living. What have you died for? Ah, if only you had known, at the moment of sacrifice, of the profits of war, which increase despite — nay, with — your sacrifice, and grow fat on it! All of you, victors and defeated, have lost the war: it has been won by your murderers, the usurers of meat, of sugar, of alcohol, of flour, of rubber, of wool, of iron, of ink and of arms, who have been compensated a hundred times over for the devaluation of other people’s blood. That is why you have rotted and will rot for centuries and centuries, generations on generations, in mud and water. You will stay alive until they have stolen enough, lied enough, fleeced mankind enough. Then, away with you! Bring on the next one, under the executioner’s axe. They will go on dancing until Ash Wednesday and Lent in this great tragic carnival, in which men have died under the cold eyes of those like Palatine, and the butchers have become philosophers honoris causa.

And you, the sacrificed, you have not risen up and will not rise up against this plan. You, down there, murdered and cheated! You have supported and will support the freedom and welfare of the strategists, parasites and buffoons, just as you did your own misfortune, your own coercion. They have sold and will sell your skin at the market, but also ours. You that are dead! Why do you not rise again from your ditches? To call this breed to reply, with the contorted faces you had in death, with the mask that your youth was condemned to wear by their diabolically demented scheming. Rise up then, and go out and face them, wake them from sleep with the scream of your agony: they were capable of embracing their women in the night following the day they flayed you. Save us from them, from a peace that is contaminated by their presence.

Help, slaughtered ones! Help me! So that I shall not have to live among men who ordered hearts to stop beating, mothers to grow old on the tombs of their children. As God is my witness, nothing but a miracle can redress this atrocious affair. Awaken from this rigidity, come forth! May future times listen to you!

But if it were true, as Atto says, that the ages will no longer listen, would a being above them listen? My Jesus! The tragedy composed of scenes of mankind decomposing — carve this tragedy into my flesh as You did into Your own, so that the Holy Spirit who has pity on victims may heed it, even if it has renounced forever all contact with a human ear. May it receive the fundamental note of this age. The echo of my cruel folly, which makes me equally responsible for these sounds, may it count as Redemption.

Redemption, redemption. I repeated this and nothing else over and over. I was now half naked, and I no longer had anything to pluck from my chest. So I began to plunge my nails into my arms, my shoulders, my neck, my cheeks hollowed by that cry, my belly and my navel, which had once bound me to the mother I had never known. I ran bare-chested all day, tearing shreds of flesh from myself, from my ears that I might hear no more, from my tongue that I might speak no more, from my eyelids that I might see no more, from my nose that I might breathe no more, and biting my very fingers, that I might touch no more. I ran through fields and craggy gorges, and my single long cry ran through every clod of earth with me. My eyes were open, but I was running blindly. I saw and did not see, I heard and did not hear. At last a distant melody reached me, enveloped me, confused the soles of my feet, and my feet recognised it and wavered in their mad flight and at last danced to its subtle song. Without arresting their march, my soles swivelled freely and my arms followed docilely and also drew broad figures in the air to the sound that (now I recognised it) was a violin, that violin. And then I saw. . I was at Neugebäu. The cry from my chest gradually died down into the modulation of that old musical motif, which I now called by its name: a Portuguese melody known as folia, or Folly.

My bare feet now trod the gardens of the Place with No Name, but they were no longer uncultivated and abandoned; graceful blue and gold mosaics decorated them, pure fresh water leaped in a jet from the lovely fountain of alabaster in the middle and blessed everything around it with its freshness. It fell on my shoulders as well, washing my wounds of their coagulated blood.

It was only then, for the first time, that I truly saw the Place with No Name. As if my wounds had opened up the Kingdom of the Just to me, my eyes became new and superhuman, and in an explosion of retrospective truth they showed me the true and living face of Maximilian’s creation, the glorious life it had been conceived for, and never attained: the roofs glittering with gold; the garden towers rising capriciously in the Turkish fashion; flower beds and luxuriant bushes teeming with buds; rare plants; trees bearing oranges, lemons and exotic fruits; precious floral creations; generous leaping fountains, whose silvery waters cascaded down onto beds of gleaming inlaid marble; the façade of the mansion decorated with a thousand lintels, sculptures, capitals, all adorned with delicate artefacts in embossed gold; the walls standing proudly with their robust battlements; a great bustle of carriages, servants, labourers, secretaries and footmen, all in the velvet clothes of two hundred years earlier; and finally, in the background, the wild but subdued sound of the animals, while the immense masterpiece of the imagination that was Neugebäu was so consciously harmonious that its bellicose symbols (the towers, battlements and lions) seemed to announce a message of peace, just as its creator, Maximilian the Mysterious, had been a man of peace.

I sobbed at the thought that this timeless vision was being granted to me only this once. I thought back to Rome, to the Villa of the Vessel, which had lived so long and retained so much of its past life; its walls still full of mottoes, it narrated the splendour of an age that would never return and, almost like a Medusa in reverse, imparted its wisdom to anyone whose eyes should fall on those mottoes even for an instant. But Neugebäu, the Infant with No Name cut down along with the womb that had given birth to it, had never lived its moment. Its day had never come; hatred had aborted it before its time. Only the gardens had been allowed a single brief glimpse of life, but those parts of the Place with No Name that were intended not for nature but for human spirits had awaited life in vain. All that the castle of Neugebäu could tell the visitor or the curious passer-by was: “My kingdom is not of this world.” So what had all my existence been until that moment? What was the meaning of those lives that had been cut down before their prime, the lives of Joseph I and Maximilian II, and — eleven years earlier in the Villa of the Vessel — the unrealised destinies of the Most Christian King and his beloved Maria, and — even earlier, thirty years ago, again in Rome, in the Inn of the Donzello — the martyrdom of Superintendent Fouquet and the hatred that despoiled his mansion at Vaux-le-Vicomte, that great swaggering statement in stone that had lived just one night, that of 17th August 1661? What were they all but Beings and Places with No Name, with no history because they had been deprived of the history that was their right, all of them therefore preludes to Neugebäu? Of what had they spoken to me? Why had they approached me, why had they sought out my poor, obscure life and painfully dazzled it with their mournful effulgence?

I do not know how it was that Cloridia found me and took me back to the convent. I lay on the bed, inert. I saw and heard my wife and my little boy bending over me. Next to them, in the armchair of green brocade by my bed, and reduced to a dejected shadow of his former self, sat Abbot Melani and his nephew. My eyes wandered over their faces, lingered on their mouths. They were all saying something to me. Domenico wanted to shake me; Atto, whimpering, blamed himself for everything and proposed calling a doctor; Cloridia, devastated by the disaster that had befallen me, in which she insisted on finding a touch of heroism, begged for a sign of understanding for her and our child, if not from my lips, at least from my expression.

And once more I went back in my mind to eleven years earlier in Rome, to the luxurious Villa of the Vessel built in the shape of a craft like the Flying Ship, and abandoned like the Place with No Name. And yet again I thought back to Giovanni Henrico Albicastro, the strange Dutch violinist dressed in black, who had seemed to fly over the battlements of the villa and, playing a Portuguese melody called folia, or folly, and declaiming verses of a poem entitled “The Ship of Fools”, had taught me about life. I would never find out if he and the unknown helmsman of the Flying Ship were the same person, but that mattered little now: it was time to put Albicastro’s warnings to good use.

In my chest I had started to yell again and had never ceased, but my lips, obedient to those ancient exhortations, had fallen silent. I had become dumb. My wife wept and I wanted to say to her: how can I speak to you with this din in my ears? Can’t you hear it too? Only occasionally did the yelling change to the song of the folia, and then I would moan. I wanted to tell Cloridia that I loved her, but at once my interior yell started up again.

And so, lying as an invalid on that undesired bed, I once more fell prey to my Furies. I suffered from that silence, which was like a place anyone could enter and be sure of a welcome. I ardently wished that my silence would close around me, as in a burial chamber at the centre of which lay mankind, my tragic hero.

Ah, if it were possible to let posterity hear the voice of this age! I tormented myself in my sweat-soaked blankets. Then external truth would give the lie to internal truth, and our descendants’ ears would recognise neither one: that is how time makes essence unrecognisable and prepares people to condone the greatest crime ever committed under the sun and under the stars.

Only in the archive of God is essence safe. No, it is not for your death, all my friends, fallen in war and in peace, those who died yesterday, today and tomorrow, but for what you have lived through, that God will wreak his vengeance on those who inflicted it on you. God will turn them into shadows, the shadows they are within, shadows that have mendaciously clothed themselves with the guise of real men. He will strip them of their flesh, in which they conceal their own empty souls. He will provide bodies only for the thoughts produced from their stupidity, for the feelings of their wickedness, for the tremendous rhythm of their nullity, and he will make them move, like marionettes, on the Day of Judgement, so that the righteous may see what perished under His Hand.

I had embarked on the long road of silence in anticipation of the day when, as Albicastro had taught me, “the bow will be drawn”. But the Dutch violinist, eleven years earlier, had also warned me: it is not in this world that the bow will be drawn. And Christ Himself has admonished us: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

While waiting for the Kingdom of God, where should I take shelter? Albicastro, the Vessel, the Place with No Name: it was as if my adventures alongside Atto were coming together to form a single great design, the key to which would be found during these very days. Life, which had amazed me and taught me much, and before which I had always regarded myself as an empty vessel, receiving and giving nothing back except greater fullness; that life of mine now seemed to fold in on itself, to return to old themes, teachings I had already heard, almost as if it did not intend to teach me any new things. Why?