perhaps it was as well that Melani should not see her either. He would not have wished to betray her or to lie to Louis. Sooner or later, the day would have come when the Sovereign would have put the inevitable question: 'Tell me, is she still beautiful?'
I, who had seen her, could have told the Abbot that perhaps she had never been more beautiful, that never would I forget her, the white luminosity of her face and hands, the ardour of her great chestnut eyes when they met mine, the scarlet ribbons skilfully woven into her curly tresses.
But that had not been possible. Atto had gone.
Meanwhile, the folia continued inexorably, and my cogitations with it. Atto had sealed the fateful letter to Maria negligently, too great a lapse — this, I realised now only with the calming of my anger — for it not to have been deliberate. He had not had the strength to keep lying to me to the bitter end; he had wanted to confess all the deceit to me, but after his own fashion. This was followed, quite inevitably, by his precipitous flight. He himself could not stand the truth.
And Maria's letters? Was it an accident that I should have found them in Atto's chambers and secretly read them? Oh no, with Atto, nothing was left to chance. What would those words yo el Rey have meant to me if I had not read Atto and Maria's letters? Little or nothing, ignorant as I had been at the outset of the succession to the throne of Spain and the will of Charles II.
This could mean only one thing. He knew that I had read the letters. Indeed, he had wanted me to read his correspondence with the Connestabilessa. And I had fallen into the trap.
How ingenuous I had been. And how clever I had thought myself when I found those letters among the Abbot's dirty linen. Atto had put them there deliberately, certain that I would soon remember how he and I, seventeen years before, had found the answer to our investigations in a pair of dirty under-drawers. To use me effectively as an informer and then to be able to make use of my help, he needed me to be well informed about the question of the Spanish succession. He who does not know is like one who cannot see, and I was there to notice and report back. Yet Atto could not instruct me openly: I would have put too many questions to him which he could not answer. So he had come up with that trick. And when he had not wanted me to read his letters (the last of which truly did contain too many inconvenient truths) he had concealed them elsewhere, in his wig.
He had not, however, expected me to overcome that obstacle. In the end, I had, after all, succeeded in reading them, thus coming very close to the truth: I had learned that Atto had lied to me about the three cardinals. But then the poetic supplications to Maria, who still had not arrived at Villa Spada, had confused my mind.
Yet, even as he wrote those lines of love, the Abbot knew full well that she would never be attending the festivities! And the fact of having penned those heartfelt verses was not caused by surprise at her delays but by the pain of knowing her to be so near, so very near, yet out of reach because of the very mission that had brought them both to Villa Spada. The two worlds continued to co-exist side by side.
I would have preferred not to discover any of these things, I thought to myself in the now declining late afternoon light. If the Abbot had not given in to tardy and pointless scruples of conscience in regard to me (after having put my life in peril time and time again!) he would not have felt impelled to flee and, as he had promised me, we should have gone together to the notary for the donation of my little daughters' dowries.
I wanted to go and flush him out him in Paris, the renegade. In an involuntary gesture, my fist hit out in the void in search of Atto's jaw.
'You'd like to avenge yourself, young man, is that not so?' asked Albicastro, reappearing before me as he modulated a staccato variant on his folia on the violin.
'I should like to live in peace.'
'So what's preventing you? Do as young Telemachus did.'
'Again that Telemachus,' I burst out. 'You and Abbot Melani
'If you live like Telemachus, whose name literally means 'far-away fighter', you'll live in peace,' chanted the Dutchman, matching his syllables to the rhythm of his music.
''Tis a clever man who can understand you…' I murmured in response to the lucubrations of that bizarre individual.
'Telemachus pulled on the bowstring, but his father Ulysses, in disguise, gestured that he should desist and stopped his hand,' Albicastro recounted, passing on to a new variation on the theme of the folia. 'And then Telemachus said to the suitors: 'It may be that I am too young, and have as yet no trust in my hands to defend me from such a one as does violence without a cause. But come now, ye who are mightier men than I, essay the bow and let us make an end of the contest!' Do you know what that means? Young Telemachus could perfectly well have drawn his father's bow. But vengeance was not his to take. Thus, you too, arm yourself with patience and let the Lord do as He will. Look, my son,' he continued in gentler tones, 'this world of ours, which has gone on since Homer's day and perhaps even long before that, is the world of folly, of the 'far-away fight': the Last Day has not yet come, that in which, amidst laughter and jesting, Ulysses' fatal bow will be drawn. But let us not ask ourselves how far off that day may be,' he warned, and then recited:
Jerusalem fell to the ground,
For whom our Lord had so long waited;
And Niniveh likewise was fated:
When Jonah warned, they quit their debt
And sought no longer term to get;
But later still they lapsed again -
No Jonah came to warn them then.
Thus everything has term and measure
And goes its way at God's own pleasure.
Once again, I found myself listening, two years later, to the rhymes of that poem, The Ship of Fools. The verses seemed to fit every one of the experiences I had lived through, from the Vessel to the cerretani.
'Sooner or later, I shall read that book by your well-beloved Brant,' I reflected aloud.
'While we await the coming of the time,' Albicastro went on, quite unperturbed, 'let us live and love! And may the threats of the suitors be worth less than a ha'penny's worth for us. Go back home, my son, embrace your family, and leave off all those thoughts. The folly of he who loves, said Plato, is the most blessed of all.'
I wondered whether Albicastro, with all those obscure sayings of his, did not perhaps belong to some obscure heretical sect. One true thing he had, however, said: I should bury the past and return home. Avoiding any further comment, I bowed and began to walk away.
'Adieu, my son; we shall not meet again,' he replied, for the first time at the Vessel beginning a piece other than the folia.
He surprised me, and I came to a stop; the music was tormented and nervous, evoking a sense of some imminent menace. With sharp, repeated bowing, Albicastro was wresting from his instrument all the tragedy which these things can sometimes unleash, transcending their laughable dimensions, that little wooden carcass with its four gut strings.
'Will you be returning home?' I asked him.
'I am off to the wars. I am going to enrol in the Dutch army,' he replied, drawing near, while the rhythmic hammering of that hard and almost obsessional motif spoke of cannonades, drums, forced marches through the mud.
'And what then of your far-away fighting?' I asked after a moment's surprise.
'I name you my successor,' said he solemnly, breaking off from his playing and touching my shoulder with his bow in a gesture of investiture. 'Besides…' he laughed before turning his back on me and walking towards the gate, 'you earn good money in the armies of Holland!'
I gave up trying to understand whether or how much he was jesting. He moved off with his violin on his shoulder, then began yet another piece of music: a melancholy adagio, an utterly pure vocal line on which the Flying Dutchman's bow improvised trills and turns, appoggiaturas and mordents, delicate florileges of a melody which, better than any earthly leave-taking (for music is not something merely human) bid farewell at the same time, to me, to the Vessel, to peace, and to times past.
And now I too could be on my way. I made a last tour of the gardens of the Vessel. Once again, the wind rose, uncovering the fiery face of the sun. The weather had suddenly become almost spring-like, and it felt as though someone had turned back the clock's hands by a couple of hours. I was moving towards the entrance, when my attention was caught by a rustling of clothes and trills of light laughter.
