Veritas (Atto Melani) (58 page)

“Signor Master, we . . . we’re flying! Like a bird – or rather, like an angel,” Simonis said at last, his voice choking, making the sign of the cross over and over
again.

As the wind whipped through my hair, I admired the boundless view over the plain of Simmering, and in the distance I could see, as on an architect’s drawing board, the suburbs of Wieden,
the Danube, the Leopoldine Island, even the distant Josephina, with their almost invisible inhabitants, and I laughed and cried in a mixture of fear and madness: perhaps the same folly that, they
say, unhinges the mind in the high mountains, when the air is too thin.

Between one prayer and another I murmured those famous lines of the Divine Poet that refer to a magic air vessel: I did it for Cloridia and our children. As I saw the gardens of the Place with
No Name become as small as a kitchen garden, its towers shrink to childish toys, the great fish ponds contract to miserable wells, Frosch’s lions turn into mice, I asked the Poet for
protection, and recited under my breath:

And then I saw the clouds sailing below us, and, much as father Dante had done, I wished that my wife and our children were on the ship, and that we could always remain together
with those dearest to us.

“Look, Signor Master, look at the city!”

The Caesarean city, its ramparts, its towers, its steeples, the spire of St Stephen’s: even at that distance, everything seemed to be flattened on the ground and to become our slave.
Simonis, as white as a sheet, was torn between his desire to gaze out and enjoy the view, and his instinct to crouch down in the middle of the ship in order not to fall.

Meanwhile we had ceased to rise.

“Maybe we’ll go down now,” I muttered in a hoarse voice, desperately gripping the seat.

But I was wrong. No sooner had I uttered those words than my cheeks and forehead felt the cold rush of air coming straight at me. The Flying Ship was now proceeding, as a sailor might have put
it, full speed ahead.

“It’s going towards Vienna,” I shouted, torn between dismay and exaltation.

As fields with fruit trees, cottages and vineyards slipped beneath us, I realised I was trembling from head to foot. The temperature was freezing up there, as if we had climbed
a mountain. Powerful gusts of wind lashed through our chimney-sweeps’ overalls, and also through the ship, which offered us no shelter. Goaded by the wind, the craft juddered and creaked.

“How can this be, Signor Master? What’s keeping us up?” asked Simonis repeatedly, and I could answer with nothing but dumb amazement.

Then, once the crazy exaltation of the first minutes of flight had died down, we noticed a strange phenomenon. Above our heads, in the ship, were the four guy ropes I had observed the first time
I visited the Flying Ship. From the ropes, as I remembered, hung numerous fragments of amber, but now the precious yellow stones were completely transformed. They were no longer dead matter: the
gems vibrated, as if an invisible energy were stirring them, and they were resonating in harmony with it. A light rustling noise came from the amber stones, a sort of faint poem of sounds.

I touched one. It immediately stopped vibrating. Then, just an instant later, it started again. I touched the rope with the tip of my finger. The cable was completely motionless, and showed no
sign at all of agitation. It was as if it were secretly transmitting some form of invisible vitality, coming from the tail of the Flying Ship, which was transmitted to the fragments of amber, and
the intense impulse that it conveyed made them chirp with the celestial music. Was this the force that made the ship fly? And if so, how? What sublime engineer and musician had managed to compel a
secret force to serve an equally secret motor, and to turn it into a prodigy? He must have been greater than the famous Leonardo, than Bernini, and even than Heron, who had succeeded in forcing the
doors of a temple open by lighting a fire somewhere else entirely.

But other details seemed inexplicable. As I have already mentioned, the hull of the Flying Ship did not consist of simple planks with smooth surfaces, but of polished tubes, which formed a huge
bundle whose extremes were, at the stern, the tip of the tail, and at the prow, the bird’s head, which acted as figurehead. Well, those wooden pipes, which had seemed lifeless and inert when
I examined the Flying Ship on the ground, now seemed to be the channel for a current of air, an interior gust or flow, which, like that of the pieces of amber, radiated from the tail of our
aircraft towards the prow. Whether this current was of air or of some fluid, it was impossible to say: all that issued from the tubes was a kind of lowing noise, like the sound that can be produced
by rolling up a sheet of paper into a tube and shouting into it.

At the prow, enigmatic and impassive, the Flying Ship’s hawk’s head cleft the air of the sky above Vienna like a real and living bird. Above the cabin, and therefore above the ropes
that held the pieces of amber, the bellying sail that gave our ship almost the appearance of a sphere, flapped cheerfully as it was buffeted by the wind. At the stern, the flag of the Kingdom of
Portugal, lashed by the gusts of the upper air, flapped proudly and seemed in a hurry to get somewhere.

“Why?” I asked the aged airship, fingering its age-blackened boards, “why did you choose this day after all this time? Why with us on board?”

The bird’s head, at the prow, continued on its way undaunted.

“Maybe, Signor Master, I don’t know . . . but . . .” shouted Simonis, trying to outdo the din coming from the tubes of the craft.

“Go on,” I urged him, terrified and at the same time disheartened, while the Flying Ship described a great curve to the right, and seemed to want to head towards the bends of the
Danube. Then it resettled towards the left. For a moment we slightly lost our balance and had to hold on to our seats. My heart pounded with the force of a fusillade.

“It’s as if the ship took off just to grant us our wish!”

“I would have been happy to stay on the ground!” I replied.

In part I was lying; under the mantle of panic I could feel a sense of absurd euphoria at being one of the few, the very few, men (indeed, who else was there?) to have ever flown.

“I meant another wish!” shouted Simonis again. “To find the Golden Apple! Isn’t that what we want, and what we wanted when the ship took off?”

I fell silent, bowing my head, partly because of the strong wind, partly because I was ashamed to admit that I shared that totally irrational thought with Simonis, the foolish student (if that
is what he was). I, too, had thought, or rather I had
felt
, that the Flying Ship had unfurled its wings for us, in response to our wish to discover the secret of the Golden Apple and
settle its final fate. It was as if our own willpower had set in motion some arcane mechanism, some ancient hidden force, which had been awaiting this moment of reawakening for a precise purpose:
was not the Golden Apple, according to Ugonio, the reason the ship had been built?

Penetrating the secret of the Golden Apple, as we wished to do, would probably lead us to solve many other questions connected with it, if not all of them: the outcome of the war, the fate of
the Emperor, and with it the fate of Europe itself and of the world. Supposing that objects had free will, was this what the Flying Ship wanted as well? If so, our fear and the risk we were running
would be of some use. I was overcome by an excess of emotions and I could not restrain myself. “O majestic ship of the celestial air,” I said in a low voice with my hands clasped, while
the freezing wind whipped my forehead and neck, “I don’t know if I will come out alive from your belly. But if I do, and if you really wish what we wish, use your power justly and be
for us the Ark of Truth, of Redemption and of Justice. So arrange things that the Golden Apple shall lead us from the labyrinth where we are lost.”

We were now flying through that portion of the sky over the curves of the Danube. I could see the Prater (and with a sudden pang I saw Hristo’s livid, snow-crushed face again), and the
series of curiously named muddy islets around which the river weaves its way: the Stone, the Walkway, the Valley of Tabor, the Old Stove, the Port of Hunters and finally the Embankment, not far
from that path in the Prater where my life had been saved by a Bulgarian chessboard.

Simonis and I pointed out to each other places and districts in the city. As if we were bending over a geographical map, we competed in identifying the monastery of Porta Coeli, my house in the
Josephina, and then the walls of the Caesarean Palace, this or that rampart in the walls, the city gates, villas and gardens in the suburbs, the great expanse of the Glacis or the little suburb of
Spittelburg. We could clearly make out even the distant gate of Mary Help of Christians in the Linienwall and the road towards Hietzing. The great wall of the Linienwall was so clear that it might
have been visible from much higher up, said Simonis, perhaps even from the moon.

“O Ark of Redemption and of Justice,” I said with tears in my eyes, as I counted one after another the gardens of Lichtenthal, the villas of Rossau and the gate of Währing,
“O Ark of Truth, if you deserve this name, which of my few merits made you choose me for this feat? Were you not deterred by my many weaknesses as a man and a sinner?” And even as warm
tears coursed down my chilled cheeks, I smiled at Simonis, and he was crying himself and smiling at me, and not even his foolish face, his untrimmed fringe and protruding teeth could conceal his
and my perturbation: we wanted a god of the air that we could kneel to, but we were confronted only by a mystery.

“Signor Master, suppose someone down there sees us?”

“Let’s hope not, otherwise they’ll put us in prison as they did with the man who brought the ship from Portugal. If anyone does see us, let’s hope they take us for a
flight of geese, or that they think they’re seeing things.”

“If they take us for geese they’ll shoot us. Goose stew is a favourite dish here in Vienna,” said Simonis with a strained smile.

Then he exclaimed:

“Look, Signor Master, a cloud is coming towards us!”

Instinctively we shielded our faces, as if that vaporous cotton wool could hurt us. Obviously nothing happened, except we found ourselves immersed in its unreal white haze.

In Rome the sky is of gold and lapis lazuli, perfumed and rounded, and the clouds are always high and distant. In Vienna the light and tint of the sky express plainness of spirit, linearity of
thought, a love for things noble and ancient, the typical inclinations of that people. The clouds are almost always low, the firmament is periwinkle-blue. The ship leaned slightly to one side,
tracing a broad semicircle to the left.

“We’re circumnavigating the city,” I deduced.

The Flying Ship was gradually steering its prow back towards the Place with No Name.

We completed the short flight back from the city to Neugebäu without saying a word. When our ship began to descend towards the stadium, we were almost sorry that the secret gods of the
sailing ship had decided to take their leave of us. It all ended in the calmest and neatest fashion, as if the invisible pilot who had been steering the ship by our side wished to round things off
with a neat display of his prowess. We saw Frosch’s little mice gradually turn back into lions and tigers, the puddles of the Place with No Name grow into fish ponds, and the mansion shed its
toy-like appearance and reassume its majesty. The Flying Ship landed without any trouble, as if it were always doing this, right in the centre of the stadium, almost in the exact same spot from
which it had taken off. The ship settled on the ground with a dull thud, as if the vital force that had animated it had suddenly vanished. My little boy had been watching us on our homeward journey
for a while now, and as soon as we stepped to the ground he burst into a welcoming clamour of tears and laughter. My legs, sorely tested, trembled as if I had been fasting for a week; when I leaped
from the ship I almost fell headlong to the ground.

Not knowing what to say, I hugged my child and, as if returning from a simple donkey ride, I said: “Well, that’s that done.”