on the Sovereign.
Arguelles did not need to be asked twice. In a chapel, he summoned one of the sisters whom he had earlier freedfrom a diabolical possession. He made her place her hand upon the altar, then recite the spells suitable for that purpose.
From the mouth of the sister, he heard the Evil One speak thus. The voice revealed that King Charles had been the victim of a spell at the age of fourteen, cast by means of a bewitched beverage. The purpose was ad destruendam materiam generationis in Rege et ad eum incapacem ponendum ad regnum administrandum: in other words, to make him sterile and incapable of reigning.
Arguelles then asked who had cast the spell. Through the nun's mouth, the Devil replied that the potion had been prepared by a woman called Casilda, who had extracted the malefic liquid from the bones of a condemned man. This juice had then been administered to the King mixed with a cup of chocolate.
There was, however, a way of curing the diabolical infection: El Rey was once a day to drink half a quart of holy oil on an empty stomach.
Action was taken at once. Only, the first time that Charles swallowed a little oil, he was at once convulsed with such dreadful bouts of vomiting that the little group of monks and nuns, exorcists and physicians feared for his life. Thus, they were compelled to use the oil externally, on his head, chest, shoulders and legs; after which the relevant formulae, litanies and antidotes were recited.
Just a year ago, however, Rocaberti died suddenly. Obviously, everyone feared that this might be revenge on the part of Satan. Froilan Diaz, the King's confessor, had to go ahead on his own. Help arrived from an unexpected quarter: in Vienna, the Emperor Leopold had also taken an interest in the question, for something unheard of had occurred in the Imperial capital In the Church of Saint Sophia, a young man, possessed by evil spirits and subjected to exorcism, had revealed that the Catholic King was a victim of witchcraft. The boy (or the spirits which spoke through him) had even explained that the magical instruments employed were concealed in a certain place in the Spanish Royal Palace.
In Madrid, a furious search began. Squads of workmen unscrewed planks, drilled through panels, demolished party walls, tore away marble plaques, and in the end something was indeed found: a number of dolls and a pile of paper scrolls.
There could be no doubt about it: dolls are fetishes used for the casting of spells. On the scrolls, however, no one knows what was written.
The Emperor then sent a Capuchin Father to Madrid, a famed and feared exorcist, to eradicate the influence of the Evil One from the apartments of El Rey. There, however, matters became more complicated: not a day passes without rumours of the discovery of some other malefice, which some priest is said to have been taken on to combat, and so on and so forth. The situation is beginning to get out of hand. It even happened that a madwoman entered the Pcdace screaming and shouting; yet, so obscure and tormented is the atmosphere these days that no one had the courage to stop her, for fear that she might be a messenger of powers supernatural.
The madwoman succeeded in getting past the guards and even entering the royal apartments, screaming that El Rey was the victim of black magic, that the spell had been cast by means of a snuff box, and that the person behind the sorcery was none other than his wife.
The revelation was immediately accorded much credit, because the King's second wife, Maria Anna of Neuburg, is very ill-tempered and has sometimes behaved as though she were out of her mind.
Whenever Charles denies her some little favour, she tells him that this was in fact destined for someone capable of casting the evil eye (of which El Rey is terrified) and, if the King does not give in to her, the mysterious person will take revenge; not condemning him to death or sickness, but making him evaporate into nothingness, like a withered flower. Trembling with fear, the Catholic King invariably gives in to her.
When the rumours of sorcery and exorcisms got around, the Queen decided to act against the person responsible for all that chaos, who in her view was none other than poor Froilan Diaz. In short, he has been arrested.
Now, in this Jubilee Year, every day in Madrid new lunatics emerge, witches and maniacs overcome by their own nightmares. They scream and tear their hair out or roll on the ground, crying out in public places, under the anxious gaze of the populace, supposed revelations about the ensorcelment of the royal family. There seems to be no way of defending the Catholic King and his consort, and above all the honour of the Kingdom, from the defamatory attacks of those possessed by demons.
Tired and confused by this infernal round, the King is struggling to cope with a sense of guilt, shame and profound sadness. He is visiting the crypt of the Escorial ever more frequently, where he has the tombs of his ancestors opened in order to look upon their faces, thus condemning those regal corpses to immediate decomposition. When they opened the coffin of his first wife, Marie Louise of Orleans, he suffered a fit of desperation, kissing the corpse and wanting to take it away with him, caring nothing for the fact that it was crumbling in his hands. They had to drag him from the crypt by brute force, invoking the name of Marie Louise and screaming that he would soon be rejoining her in Heaven.
In this, El Rey is a true Habsburg, an epigone of Joan the Mad who could not be separated from the coffin of her husband Philip the Fair; or of Charles V who, after abdicating and withdrawing to a monastery, was wont to have himself enclosed in a sarcophagus naked and swaddled in bandages, to listen to his own requiem mass. Philip II slept with his coffin by his bed, with the Crown of Spain surmounted by a skull; and, like his son, Philip IV, was wont to visit the crypt of the Escorial, sleeping every night in a different tomb.
Queen Maria Anna, too, is desperate. For her the one solution would be to become pregnant. If the Monarchy has an heir, there will at long last be some hope amidst its dark future prospects. Only a couple of years ago, the Queen underwent the special cures of a monk of the Order of Jerusalem who was granted free access to her apartments.
It was in fact never clear what these exercises against sterility may have involved. It has, however, come to light that the monk, in the ecstatic fervour of prayer, suddenly made a great leap into the air, whereupon the Queen, who lay under the bedclothes, took fright and in turn leapt out of bed. The ambiguous event caused such a stir at Court that the monk had to be sent away forthwith. No few persons insinuate that the Queen, in her frenetic desire to become pregnant, may have imposed upon her own body acts redolent of the most unrestrained concupiscence.
Everything, alas, is possible. The Queen is weighed down by too much bitterness. Her soul, already sufferingfrom years of conjugal disappointment, is exasperated by the sinister and unsettling atmosphere that pervades the Court. Maria Anna needs sympathy; it is well known that she sends tormented letters to her German correspondents, in which she attempts to explain and justify the madness into which what was once the greatest and most feared Kingdom in the world has descended, becoming the object of universal pity and derision.
But she writes in vain. Suffering poisons her thoughts and makes her unable to express them in writing. It is said that she often confides by letter in the Landgrave of Hessen. The Landgrave, however, hesitates to answer her; from what one can gather, the Queen's letters are a meaningless nonsense, the product of a disturbed mind, in which verbs and subjects wander without rime or reason, like the possessed who go howling through the dark night of Madrid.
Here the Connestabilessa's report, which continues and expands upon the desolate picture of the wretched Catholic King, came to an end.
I tried again to find those two last letters, which the Abbot had evidently placed elsewhere. Why, I wondered, had he done that? Was he perhaps beginning to get wind of my incursions?
I looked briefly among Buvat's papers, but found nothing. Then I looked among his clothes. There I discovered a curious series of sheets of paper, carelessly folded and placed in the pockets of his breeches, each filled with a different letter. One sheet was full of the letter e, another of o's, yet another, the letter y, and finally, a page of l's and one of the letter R. Perplexed, I turned those pages over in my hands. They looked like the kind of exercises one does when learning to write. It was certainly no fine handwriting: the hand was heavy and uncertain. I laughed. It looked like some weird exercise undertaken by Melani's secretary in order to rid himself of the fumes of wine before returning to the Abbot's service. Such overindulgence was, indeed, not rare in those days in which not only the noble guests but those accompanying them were spoiled.
A little later, in a coat, I found without too much difficulty the two letters that I sought. I calmed down: perhaps the Abbot had simply handed them to Buvat to remind him to prepare an archive copy of the reply to the Connestabilessa before sending it. So I sat down to read.
