Veritas

Vienna

DECEMBER 1720

After Abbot Melani’s death I left Paris, as did Domenico.

The War of the Spanish Succession is over. It has left behind it thirteen years of famine, devastation and death. In 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht was signed, in 1714 the Peace of Rastatt and that of Baden.

Everything has gone as Atto foretold: the English merchants have grabbed the most appetising booty. England has snatched Gibraltar and the monopoly of slaves from Spain, and the North American colonies from France.

But it is not only the instigators but also the accomplices of these new times who have been rewarded.

Emperor Charles VI, brother and successor of Joseph, has been awarded the Spanish Netherlands, Milan, Mantua, Naples and Sardinia. In Spain, on 11th September 1714, the Franco-Spanish troops of Philip of Anjou, now King Philip V of Bourbon, entered Barcelona and put a bloody end to the independence of the city Charles had abandoned in his haste to ascend the longed-for imperial throne.

The Savoys have been raised from the rank of double-dealing dukes, as Atto described them, to that of kings, and have been awarded Sicily: all thanks to Eugene. And so the Italian peninsula is caught in the Savoyard vice: to the north Piedmont, to the south Sicily. The perfect prelude for the other project of the dervish’s friends: that one day Italy will have a king.

In 1713 Landau was besieged once again, but this time by the French, as it had remained under the Empire since 1704, when Joseph reconquered it for the second time. Yet again the garrison commander, Prince Karl Alexander von Wüttemberg, had to coin money using his own gold and silver dining service. A repetition, though in reverse: this time the French won. It was Prince Eugene’s fault: if he had not gone on with the war to the bitter end, the Empire would have kept Landau.

Atto’s prophecy about Eugene has come true: Charles VI made him (and makes him) do what he wants. Delivering the forged letter to the Queen Mother has proven totally useless.

But on the horizon, clouds are gathering for the Caesarean dynasty: as the dervish foretold, the House of Habsburg will soon peter out and Germany will have its own king. Charles VI has no male children, just two girls. And the heir to the imperial throne can only be male. To tell the truth, Charles’s firstborn was a son, born four years ago, in 1716, but he died just a few months later: exactly what happened to Joseph’s little son. What a coincidence.

Charles VI’s heirs should be Joseph’s daughters. But obviously he does not relish the idea. This was made clear in 1713 when, even though he still had no progeny after five years of marriage, he issued the Pragmatic Sanction: on his death his own children, if any — not Joseph’s — would ascend the throne. Therefore it will be his elder daughter, Maria-Theresa, born three years ago, who will inherit. An arbitrary act, in every sense. The other countries in Europe refuse to accept it, and so for years Charles has been pleading with them, one by one, imploring them to recognise the Pragmatic Sanction. In exchange he makes endless promises, even the surrender of territory. Anything to prevent a daughter of his hated brother from sitting on the throne.

But Charles’s hatred is weakening the Empire. The German princes are chafing: the moment is coming when Germany will secede (as Palatine predicted) and will have its own sovereign, no longer in Catholic Vienna.

In short, as Atto feared, this war has marked the end of the world, but has not replaced it with a new one; no, the agony of humanity has simply begun. Now it is an oligarchy that coldly decides the destinies of lands thousands of miles away: the colonies of the New World and the Italian territories were reorganized from Utrecht. Political alliances are no longer the fulcrum of international diplomacy, but just token operations: they are decided by the financial backers of the crowns. And those, like the Most Christian King or Joseph the Victorious, who will not let themselves be manipulated, are rendered impotent, along with their descendants. Dynastic rights or military conquests no longer count for anything; only just money, or rather finance matters. Wasn’t it during the war of succession that coins began to be replaced by paper?

From the friends we still have in Paris, I have heard that life has got harder there; even harder than in Rome, and that is saying something.

Five years ago, in 1715, the Sun King died: of gangrene, exactly as Palatine had foretold. And he died almost without heirs. Between 1711 and 1712 all his legitimate children and grandchildren died (this, too, was predicted by the dervish), except a child aged two, Louis, saved by his nurses, who locked themselves up with him in a wing of the palace, preventing the doctors not only from touching him, but even from seeing him. They were convinced that the other members of the royal family had not died from their sicknesses but from their treatments. .

Atto Melani had been right: “With a king like the Grand Dauphin, France would finally emerge from its downward spiral of arrogance and destruction; England and Holland want the opposite to happen. The country must continue to degenerate, the court must be hated by the people. It annoys them that the Most Christian King has adult sons and grandsons; the ideal would be if there were no heir, or if he were a baby, which amounts to the same thing.”

The days when the Most Christian King, aged just four, ascended the throne are over. In those days, to defend the country from the interference of other powers there were the Queen Mother, Anne of Austria, and the Prime Minister, Cardinal Mazarin. Now there is no longer a queen, nor a prime minister.

“Louis XIV has taken everything into his own hands,” said Atto. “After his death a regency would leave the country at the mercy of the first scheming meddler, who might just happen to be sent by England or Holland to set off a mine under France’s backside.”

Exactly. The death of the Most Christian King is exactly what Palatine’s friends were waiting for: just a few months later their man dropped in from Holland. It was the Englishman John Law, with his theory of finance, which led France to an economic collapse unprecedented in centuries and centuries of history.

This year the swindler’s treatise was published: Money and Trade Considered. There was a French translation, but I never managed to find it. I do not know English but my son does; Atto knew that England would be the real winner of the war and, although reluctantly, he arranged for him to be taught the merchants’ language, alongside Italian, Latin, Greek, German and French.

And so, finally, thanks to my little boy’s reading (actually he is now a handsome lad) I can see in plain black and white the heresy with which Law delivered the death blow to France: according to him the best incentive for the country’s productive growth is. . loans and property in banknotes! Not the good old coins of old, which were worth their weight in gold. In short, he was a friend of the usurers.

With this cheap huckster’s fib he managed to persuade the Regent Philip II of Orléans to let him found the General Bank in 1716. The war of succession has brought France so low that the Regent hoped to have found the solution to his debts in this man Law. From 1718, under the new name of the Royal Bank, the institute issued gigantic quantities of notes, which it distributed to the French with promises fit for nincompoops, demanding in exchange all the gold, silver and lands they owned. If their goods were worth a hundred, Law would give them a note with the words: “This is worth five hundred”, with the promise they could have their property back whenever they wanted it. The subjects of the Kingdom of France all rushed to entrust their property to him, in exchange for scraps of paper stained with ink.

It is incredible how ingenuous these French are: they feel superior to everyone else and are always ready to glorify themselves, but then they go flocking after the first charlatan that comes along.

In January this year, the Regent even granted Law the post of General Controller of Finances, the job held by Superintendent Fouquet and then by Minister Colbert!

It did not last long. In March Palatine’s friends delivered the final blow: they circulated doubts about Law’s credibility, and all of a sudden the French went rushing to the Royal Bank to ask for the gold, silver and lands that they had pawned for his banknotes. The Regent first halved the value of the banknotes, then stopped all payments. “We no longer have anything,” the bank candidly responded to the French subjects. The bank was closed, John Law fled to Venice and the French were left stony broke.

Atto had foreseen it, the dervish had predicted: the typhoon of financial ruin and popular outcry struck France, and then passed on to the rest of Europe, already prostrated by the war of succession.

Money, for centuries and centuries has always had the same value, but now that there is just paper and no more gold or silver, it is worth less every day. I am among the privileged few who can sleep easily: I still have the vineyard in the Josephina.

And so I went back to Vienna. But the city is no longer what it was. On the bell tower of St Stephen’s is the magnificent bell that Joseph had had cast from the Turkish cannons, which the people soon nicknamed Pummerin. It did not ring for the Emperor’s thirty-three years, as had been planned: death came first. And so they hung Pummerin in October, and inaugurated it in January 1712 to celebrate the arrival of the new Emperor, Charles VI. A few months later, in December, divine wrath fell upon the usurper: the plague broke out, and raged for the whole of 1713, carrying off eight thousand innocent victims. And here was another echo from the past, another circle closing in on itself: the secretum pestis that thirty years earlier had saved Vienna from the contagion deliberately procured by the besieging Turks could do nothing against the scourge of God this time.

I have heard of the bad end of Countess Marianna Pálffy, Joseph’s young lover, whom Abbot Melani had vainly tried to approach. As soon as Joseph had died, the Queen Mother, the ministers and the whole court lashed out at her, even forcing her to give back the presents received from her deceased lover. Fallen into disgrace, banned from the court, she was forced into a lowly marriage, to the despair of her father, the poor Count Johann Pálffy ab Erdöd, one of the most faithful and valiant commanders of the Caesarean house.

From the day of Joseph’s death the sun no longer rose blood-red: it was truly an omen, famous throughout the city, and was still being talked of today. The almanac of the English fortune-teller, after correctly prophesying Joseph’s death, now sells widely throughout Vienna. It truly is a golden age for the English.

The Italians, on the other hand, so well-loved by the Habsburgs up to the time of Joseph, are no longer popular. The French are arriving, summoned by the man who was their bitterest enemy in Spain: Charles VI. Italian itself, cultivated by Joseph, is being gradually supplanted by French as the court language. As soon as he arrived in Vienna, Charles sacked all the palace staff who had served his deceased brother. The first to fall were the court musicians favoured by Joseph. He replaced them with others, including very few Italians. Obviously Camilla’s services were no longer required, nor have her oratorios been performed since.

Overwhelmed by her memories, Cloridia’s sister asked and was allowed to change convent. She is now at St Lawrence, seeking peace. The good musicians often go to visit her, but she does not wish to see anyone, except my wife.

Despite everything, Vienna, the capital and Caesarean residence, is still the best place to live in these times. In no other city can one live so well if one wishes to be secluded from the world.

I am finally living in the house with the vineyard in the Josephina that the Abbot one day gave me, which fostered so many dreams and hopes in my and in my family’s hearts.

The girls are now in Vienna as well; Examiniert und Approbiert, they have obtained their midwives’ licences and are both mothers. Cloridia has a wine shop selling Heuriger or new wine, with the help of our son and our two sons-in-law, bright young Romans very happy to leave the capital of usury in search of a life worthy of the name. Hands are needed to cultivate the vineyard, and, of course, hoeing in the sun — for my boy too — is healthier than breathing soot. And in winter we can stay inside in the warmth instead of freezing on the rooftops. Even though chimney-sweeps are well paid in Vienna, one cannot put a price on one’s health. And in any case, they no longer need anyone to clean the chimneys at Neugebäu: the new emperor does not want to restore it.

Of course, with the education that my son received at Abbot Melani’s home, he could aspire to something greater. He could continue to study, acquire learning and knowledge: but to know is to suffer. And anyway, as Abbot Melani said, land feeds you and so makes you free. The best choice is still the one Cincinnatus made.

I have finally found the answer to my query. Now, only now, can I hear their voices distinctly. I have not heard the yelling again, nor the song of the folia. I remain in religious silence. But I now hear all those spectres that appeared to me at the Place with No Name whispering among themselves. They have formed a circle around me. I see landscapes and faces that are not unknown to me: the French castle of Vaux-le-Vicomte fades into the Roman Villa of the Vessel and the Place with No Name; and Superintendent Fouquet into Maximilian II and Joseph I. And two dates that I have encountered many — too many — times, come back to me: the 5th and 11th September.

The 5th September was the Most Christian King’s birthday, but also the day when he had Superintendent Fouquet arrested. It was also the day Suleiman died and the day Maximilian, ten years later, succumbed to agony. On that same day, over a century later, Vienna under siege came close, thanks to an Armenian traitor, to falling prey to the Infidels. My wife Cloridia, who sometimes likes to amuse herself with the occult science of numbers, which was her specialty when young, has informed me that the sum of Louis XIV’s birthday is 5, and also Suleiman’s day of death, while that of the arrest of Fouquet is 10, which is to say twice 5.

On 11th September 1683 the Christian troops arrived to free Vienna with the battle that would be fought at first light on the following day. And again it was 11th September when I first met Abbot Atto Melani. The same day in 1697 Prince Eugene defeated the Turks in the famous Battle of Zenta, and in 1709 the French at Malplaquet. On 11th September 1702 Joseph conquered Landau for the first time. The same day in 1714 Barcelona and Catalonia, abandoned by Charles, finally fell into the hands of Philip V with a bloodbath.

Only now do I finally understand: I have returned to where I started from. You have received, you will not receive anymore, I hear them whisper to me. Now you must give. You have learned, now you must teach. You have lived, now you must give life.

From the day of my arrival in Vienna, in 1711, everything gradually began to talk to me of the past: first just in hints, like the resurfacing of Cloridia’s mother on Camilla’s lips. From the time I finally visited the Place with No Name, the events of the past and those of the present interwove their frantic double gallop: from the Flying Ship to the death of Ugonio, whom I had met twenty-eight years earlier, up to the news in the Corriere Ordinario and the Wiennerisches Diarium, which in one way or another spoke to me of the past.

Life, in imparting its teachings to me, had chosen to repeat old tunes from the past: it indicated that it was time to give back what I had received. It was time to transform myself, from the spectator that I was, into an actor for other spectators; to turn from schoolboy into teacher, for new schoolchildren; to change from a vessel into a source of living water, to be poured into other vessels. As in the parable of the talents, I was called not to bury the money that the Lord had entrusted to me but to risk it, investing it in order to multiply it. In what form? I had already been given the answer: with the past. With the experience accumulated and with the tales that Abbot Melani had told me in the three years spent with him in Paris. Atto’s life would become my life, his memories my memories. Art would be my shelter and my workshop.

And so, that which thirty years ago had been just a pastime for a young inn servant, and seventeen years ago had become a task una tantum given me by Atto, has now become a life choice.

I write of the last century, of time now lost, the last century of mankind. In my books I transfuse what I have experienced with the Abbot, and what I have experienced through his tales. My ear has discovered the sound of actions, my eye the gesture of speeches, and my voice, where it limited itself to repeating, dictates to the pen so that the fundamental note shall be fixed for all time.

It is a lengthy task to pour so much of the past onto paper! At times I ask: “Will I have enough time? Am in a fit condition to do it?” Cradling in my hand the coin of Landau that Cloridia never returned to Prince Eugene’s chest, I fear that I will not have the strength to keep a close hold on this past, which already seems so far away. For the most part I work when everything around me is asleep. I will need many nights, perhaps a hundred, perhaps a thousand or more, to transfer to paper the imprint of time.

Our senses make many mistakes and hence falsify the real appearance of life, if such a thing exists. In my transcription, which I try to make as accurate as possible, I do not alter sounds or colours, I never separate them from their cause, which is where intelligence locates them after hearing and seeing them. I describe the hundred masks that every face possesses; in some personages I represent every gesture, however slight, that was the cause of mortal upheavals and led to variations in the light of our moral heaven, unsettling the serenity of our certainties. In transcribing a universe that is to be entirely redesigned, I do not fail to represent the reader, but with the measurements not of his body but of his years — years that he unconsciously drags about with him wherever he goes in life, a task that is increasingly arduous and which finally overwhelms him.

We all occupy a place, not only in space, but also and above all in time. So, this concept of incorporated time, of the years spent that are not separate from us: this is the truth, the truth suspected by everyone, and which I have to try to elucidate. And on the day that, having “drawn the bow” and separated the wheat from the chaff, the master of my fate will ask me to account for myself, I will pour into His Hands the fruit of my labour.

A quill pen and a piece of paper: I have no other way of communicating with men. I have not regained my voice, I have remained dumb forever. In some part of these notes appear these words: “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.” Well, now it has. I could not present myself more fittingly as servant of the black thread in a white field — an image that reminds me strongly of Hristo’s chess-board, which saved my life.

The pen is my voice, and, apart from occasionally helping my two sons-in-law to hoe the vineyard, writing is the only job that a dumb man can do. A printer in Amsterdam kindly prints and sells my books. I send my manuscripts up there, into free Holland: “Under the sign of the Busy Bee” is the address, and I like to think that it is a metaphor for my humble but unflagging work.

Sometimes the old discouragement seizes me. I, who had eyes to see the world in this way, with a fixed stare that affected it and made it become what I had prophetically seen it to be — if Heavenly Justice was behind this, it was unjust that I had not been not annihilated beforehand; I repeat this to myself from the depths of my soul.

Have I deserved that my mortal anguish should be appeased in this way? What is it that proliferates in my nights? Why was I not given the power to strike down the world’s sin with a single axe-blow? Do my books touch any consciences? Why am I not given the intellectual strength to force violated mankind to start shouting? Why is my shouted response, which I entrust to pen and paper, not louder than the shrill command that dominates the souls of a terrestrial globe?

I preserve documents for an age that will not understand them, or which will live so far from what happens today that it will say I was a forger. But no, the time to say this will not come, because that time will not be. In my books I write of a single immense tragedy, the defeated hero of which is mankind, whose tragic conflict, being that between world and nature, finishes with death. Alas, since it has no other hero than mankind, this drama does not even have any other audience. But what does my tragic hero perish of? He is a hero who perishes as a consequence of a situation that intoxicated him, even as it constrained him.

Ah. . if mankind one day, by the grace of God, should emerge safely from this adventure — however afflicted, impoverished and aged — and the magic of a supreme law of retaliation should give it the power to call them to answer one by one — them, the ringleaders of universal crime, who always survive: Palatine, Penicek, and all the other serfs, the henchmen and satraps, Beelzebub’s little slaves. Ah, if we could lock them up in their temples and then draw by lot a death sentence for one in ten, but not kill them; no: slap them! And say to them: what, you didn’t know? You didn’t imagine that following upon a declaration of war, among the countless possibilities of horror and shame there was the chance that children might go without their mother’s milk? What, you didn’t measure the tribulation of a single hour of anguish in an imprisonment that lasts for years? You didn’t measure the tribulation of a sigh of nostalgia, of love soiled, violated, murdered? And you did not realize how tragedy could turn into farce — or rather, given the coexistence of the present monstrous situation, and the old formalist delirium — into comic opera? Into one of those revolting comic operas so popular today, whose texts are an insult to the intelligence and whose music is a torture.

Under the shelter of this new demon from England called finance, hysteria overcomes nature. Its armed henchman is paper. The gazettes have experienced a real boom in these years, one that shows no sign of letting up. And as a young man I wanted to be a gazetteer! Fortunately Abbot Melani, in that distant, so distant 1683, did what was needed to put me off the idea.

They are nothing but machines, these newspapers, which feed upon the life of men. The life that these machines devour is naturally no more than it can be in such an age, an age of machines; production that is stupid on the one hand, and mad on the other, inevitably, and both bearing the stamp of vulgarity.

Paper rules the military and has crippled us even before there were any victims of the cannons. Had not all the realms of fantasy already been stripped bare when that sheet of paper imprinted by the press declared war on the inhabited land? It is not that the press set in motion the machines of death, but it drained our hearts, so that we can no longer imagine how things would be without newspapers and without war. It is to blame for that. And all the people have drunk of the wine of its lust, and the kings of the earth have fornicated with it, and we fell because of the Whore of Babylon, which — having been printed and propagated in all the languages of the world — persuaded us that we were enemies and that there must be war.

There, it is done. As far as writing goes, I have written. I have done my duty, to the very end. Have I been fed to life? Well then, I feed my life to pen and paper. My books combat the gazettes. It is good. No one can deny that I have attained my perfection. “The stone the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone,” recites the Psalm, as Simonis said to the dervish that night at the Place with No Name.

Like the chariot of the sun careering at a dazzling gallop, other words from Simonis pierce my thoughts: the game is never really over, the world is a test bed that the Almighty has prepared for souls and so we are all a part of his plans, even His enemies. I forgot those words too quickly, even though they sent a shiver down the dervish’s spine. I’m sorry, Simonis, my despair — unbridled Cassandra of the Last Days of Mankind — prevents me from letting them germinate within me, at least for now.

Meanwhile I find my salvation, all alone, in my silence, with my silence, which has made me so — as the age wishes — perfect.

Only Cloridia has gradually understood; she smiles serenely and our embraces have the warmth of earlier days. My two good sons-in-law, however, do not wish to understand, and every day they come to try and shake me out of this silence of mine, now absolute. They would like me to cry, so that at least with my eyes I should appear afflicted or enraged, so that I too should believe that life is out there, in the superfluity of the world. I do not bat an eyelid. I replace my quill in the inkwell and gaze at them, rigid and motionless, and I make them run off again, infuriated. On my account my daughters study these new treatises of nervous pathology, so fashionable among young doctors, who only know how to hold a scalpel to dissect corpses, but can no longer compose a small poem. As if science could exist without letters. . My daughters propose injections and balsams, they hover around me to persuade me to get my vocal cords examined by some renowned doctor.

No, thank you. Thank you, everyone. Enough now. I want to stay as I am. This is our age; this is life; and in the meaning I give to my work, I want to continue like this — dumb and impassive — to be a writer.

Is the stage ready?

Raise the curtain!