Veritas (Atto Melani) (100 page)

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?