Dulcibeni's voice had grown higher and his expression ever stranger.
"What do you think of it?" he cried out suddenly. "Would you like to be aunt and sister-in-law to your son-in-law?"
In a furious rage, he swept away the few objects placed on the chest (a book and a candle) so that they struck the wall and the floor. The room fell silent.
"But has it always been like this?" the woman's voice stammered at last.
Dulcibeni resumed his usual stern pose and made a sarcastic grimace: "No, my dear," he went on pedantically. "In the distant past, the reigning families assured their posterity by marrying their offspring with the best of the feudal nobility. Every new king was the purest quintessence of the noblest blood of his own land: in France, the sovereign was the most French of Frenchmen. In England, he was the most English of Englishmen."
It was at that juncture that my excessive curiosity caused me to lose my balance, and I pushed against the door. Only by a miracle did I manage to hold onto the doorpost, thus avoiding falling any further forward. Consequently, the opening widened only a little. Dulcibeni had heard nothing. Sweating and trembling with fear, I glanced to the right of the gentleman from the Marches, where the woman should be.
It took me many minutes to overcome my surprise: instead of a human figure, on the wall there was but a mirror. Dulcibeni was talking to himself.
In the instants that followed, I found it even more difficult to follow that paroxysm of anger and scorn vented against kings, princes and emperors. Was I listening to a madman? With whom was Dulcibeni pretending to speak?
Perhaps, I thought then, he was beset by the memory of a dear one (a sister, a wife) who was now dead. And it must be a most painful memory to inspire that sad and disquieting scene. I felt at once embarrassed and moved to pity by that fragment of intimate and solitary suffering which I had stolen like a burglar. I realised that, when I had attempted to persuade him to talk about the same topics, he had drawn back. Perhaps he had preferred the company of a dead person to that of the living.
"And so?" resumed the
Marchigiano
, mimicking the little voice of a young girl with an innocent, troubled tone.
"And so, and so..." intoned Dulcibeni. "So... all gave way to the lust for power, which impelled them to intermarry with all the sovereigns of the earth. Take the house of Austria. Today their fetid blood defiles the sepulchres of valiant ancestors: Albert the Wise, Rudolph the Magnanimous, and then Leopold the Brave and his son Ernest I the Iron-willed, all the way down to Albert the Patient and Albert the Illustrious. Blood which, three centuries ago, began to putrefy, when it generated the unfortunate Frederick Fat-Lips and his son Maximilian I, both of whom died of a wretched bellyful of melons. And it was precisely from these two that there arose the insane desire to reunite all the Habsburg lands, which Leopold the Brave had so wisely divided between himself and his brother. These were lands that could not be brought together: it was as though a mad chirurgeon were attempting to force upon the same body, three heads, four legs and eight arms. In order to assuage his lust for lands, Maximilian I married no fewer than three times: his wives brought him as their dowries the Netherlands and Franche-Comte; but also the monstrous chin that disfigures the countenance of their descendants. His son, Philip the Fair, in the twenty-eight years of his life, annexed Spain by marrying Joan the Mad, daughter and heir to Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile, and mother of Charles V and Ferdinand I. Charles V both crowned and undid the plans of his grandfather Maximilian I: he abdicated and divided his kingdom, on which the sun never set, between his son Philip II and his brother Ferdinand I. He divided his kingdom, but he could not divide his blood: among his descendants, madness was by now unstoppable, brother lusted after sister and both desired to marry their own offspring. The son of Ferdinand I, Maximilian II, Emperor of Austria, married his father's sister and with his aunt-wife produced a daughter, Anne Marie of Austria, who married Philip II of Spain, her uncle and cousin, being the son of Charles V; from these inauspicious nuptials, Philip III of Spain was born, who married Margaret of Austria, daughter of his grandfather's brother, Maximilian II, and from her begot Philip IV and Maria Anna of Spain, who married Ferdinand III, Emperor of Austria, her first cousin, being the son of her mother's brother, and they in turn brought into this world the present Emperor Leopold I of Austria, and his sister Maria Anna..."
Suddenly, I was seized by disgust. That orgy of incest had given me vertigo. The revolting interweaving of marriages between uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, brothers and sisters-in-law and cousins had something monstrous about it. After discovering that Dulcibeni was speaking to the mirror, I had listened distractedly. But in the end that lugubrious secret oration both intrigued and sickened me.
Dulcibeni, overexcited and purple in the face, remained standing there with his gaze lost in the void, as though the excess of ire had strangled his voice.
"Remember," he managed to groan at last, turning once more to his imaginary companion, "France, Spain, Austria, England and Holland: for centuries jealous of peoples of other races, are now all under the yoke of one single race with neither land nor loyalty. This blood is
autadelphos
, twice brother to itself, like the children of Oedipus and Jocasta: blood alien to the history of any people, yet which dictates the history of all peoples. Blood without land and without honour. Traitorous blood."
Excremental brew: once in the kitchen, I remembered the terms with which Pompeo Dulcibeni had labelled my culinary efforts and their seasoning of precious cinnamon.
Once I had recovered from the disgust which the elevated and solitary considerations of the gentleman from the Marches had provoked in me, I turned my mind to the nausea which I myself had generated in the stomachs of the guests at the inn. I resolved to remedy this.
I went down into the cellar. I continued to the lower level, quite under the ground, and there spent, I think, about an hour, at the risk of catching some illness from the sharp cold that always reigned down there. I examined that space with its low ceiling from end to end, exploring by the light of my lantern the most hidden corners, where I had never yet ventured or stopped, and the shelves all the way to the top, and delving into the cases of snow until I almost reached the bottom. In a wide crevice, hidden behind rows of jars filled with wines and oil, there lay all sorts of dried legumes and seeds, candied fruit, green vegetables in gallipots and bags of macaroni, gnochetti, lasagne and zeppoli, resting under great jute covers and, in the cold amidst the snow, a great variety of salted, smoked, and dried meats and meat in jars. There, Signor Pellegrino, like a jealous lover, kept tongues in pottage and sucking-pigs, as well as pieces of various beasts: sweetbreads of deer and of sucking-kid; tripe of sucking-calf; hedgehog's paws, kidneys and brains; cows' and goats' teats; boars' and sheep's tongues; haunch of doe and of chamois; liver, paws, neck and throat of bear; flank, sirloin and fillet of venison.
And I found hare, black grouse, turkey, wild chicken, chicks, pigeons and wood pigeons, pheasants and blackcock, partridges and woodcock, peacocks, peahens and peachicks, ducks and coot, goslings, geese, quails, turtle-doves, redwings, hazel-hens, ortolans, swallows, sparrows and garden-warblers from Cyprus and Heraklion.
With beating heart I imagined how my master would have prepared them: stewed, roast, in soups, in consommes, spitted, fried, in simple or crusted pastry, in arms, in broths, in snacks, in cakes, with sauces, with vinegars, with fruit and in great centrepieces.
Drawn by the strong odour of smoked meat and of dried seaweed, I continued with my inspection; and under yet more pressed snow and jute sacking, as I expected, salted and packed in little casks, or hanging in small bunches from nets and hooks, I discovered: barbels, dories, razor fish, striped mullet, red mullet, sea-perch, sea-snails, tusk-shells, mushrooms, shrimps, trough-shells, crabs, shad, lampreys, sand-smelt, sole, snails, pike, hake, bass, black umber, limpets, fillets of swordfish and gurnard, turbot, plaice, angler-fish, frogs, pilchards, sea-scorpions, mackerel, sturgeon, turtles, clams and tench.
Of all that abundance, I had hitherto seen only such fresh produce as was from time to time delivered by the tradesmen for whom I had opened the back door. Most of the provisions, I had, however, glimpsed only briefly when (alas, all too rarely) my master ordered me to fetch victuals from the cellars, or when accompanying Cristofano.
I was seized by a doubt: when, and to whom, did Pellegrino plan to serve such food in such quantities? Did he perhaps hope to receive one of those sumptuous trains of Armenian bishops who, as neighbourhood gossip still told, had been the pride of the Donzello in the days of the late Signora Luigia? I suspected that my master might, before his dismissal from his post as carver, have skilfully bribed the keepers of the Cardinal's pantry.
I took ajar of cows' teats and returned to the kitchen. I shook the salt off them, tied the ends together and put them to boil. Then, I cut some into fine slices, which I rolled in flour, glazed and fried before covering them with sauce until I was satisfied with the result. Another portion I chopped up and stewed with aromatic herbs and spices, a little clear soup and eggs. Yet more I roasted in the oven with white wine, sour grape pips and lemon juice, some fresh fruit, raisins, pine kernels and slices of ham. I prepared some, too, diced and mixed with white wine, then closed into pies with soft pastry, together with spices, ham and other salted meats, and bone marrow, with
brodetto
and sugar. The rest, I prepared slightly interlarded with slices of bacon fat and cloves, all wrapped in a net and spitted.
In the end, I was exhausted. Cristofano arrived in the kitchen at the end of my long travail and found me crouching, weary and bathed in sweat, in a corner of the fireplace. He examined and sniffed at the dishes lined up in a row on the kitchen table. Then he turned to me with a satisfied, fatherly expression.
"I shall look after the matter of serving the food, my boy. You, go and take a rest."
Satiated by the repeated and generous tastings which I had allowed myself while cooking, I climbed the stairs to the top of the house, but I did not enter my chamber. Seated on the stairs, I enjoyed my well-deserved success in all discretion: while the guests partook of their evening meal, for a good half-hour, the corridors of the Donzello echoed with clinking, moans of pleasure and satisfied lip-smacking. A chorus of stomachs coughing noisily signalled at last that the time had come to collect the dishes. The victory which I had snatched from the jaws of defeat brought me close to tears.
I then prepared to make my round of the apartments: I did not wish to forego the compliments of the Donzello's guests. However, arriving before Abbot Melani's doorway, I recognised his deeply mournful singing. I was struck by the heart-rending tone of his voice, so much so that I stopped to listen:
Ahi, dunqu'e pur vero; dunque, dunque pur vero...
He was repeating the phrase so softly, and with ever-new and surprising melodic variations.
I was perturbed by those words, which I seemed to have heard already at a time and in a place unknown to me. Suddenly, a revelation came to me: had not my master Pellegrino perhaps mentioned to me that the old Signor di Mourai, alias Fouquet, had, before expiring, with a last supreme effort murmured a phrase in Italian? And now, I remembered: the dying man had pronounced the very words which Atto was now intoning:
"Ahi, dunqu’é pur vero".
Why, I wondered, why ever had Fouquet pronounced his last words in Italian? I recalled, too, that Pellegrino had seen Atto, leaning close to the old man's face and speaking to him in French. Why, then, had Fouquet murmured those words in Italian?
Meanwhile, Melani continued his song:
Dunque, dunqu'e pur vero,
anima del mio cor,
che per novello Amor
tu cangiasti, cangiasti pensiero...*
At the end, I heard him struggle to hold back his sobs. Torn between embarrassment and compassion, I dared neither move nor speak. I felt a stab of pity for that eunuch, no longer in the flower of youth: the mutilation imposed on the little boy's body by a father's greed had brought him fame, while condemning him to shameful solitude. Perhaps, I reflected, Fouquet had nothing to do with it. Those words pronounced by the Superintendent at the point of death might simply be an astonished exclamation in the face of death; I had heard that such things were not unusual among the dying.
The abbot had, in the meantime, begun another aria, the accents of which were even more anguished and lugubrious:
* So it is really true, / soul of my heart, / that for a new Love / you've changed, changed your mind...
Lascia speranza, ohime,
ch'io mi lamenti,