'I… I do not…' I stammered, still prone, while my head seemed to be on the point of exploding. I coughed several times. There was a smell of burning, and smoke everywhere.
'Return among the living,' Melani chanted to me. We must leave here before we are asphyxiated. First, however, let me present you Beelzebub. You will, I think, be surprised to find that you have already met.'
Still trembling, I sat up. The bluish light no longer pervaded the cavern. Now all was yellow, red and orange: a torch had been lit, which illuminated the surroundings. I looked at my hands. I too no longer emitted that arcane phosphorescence.
'I have reloaded,' I heard Sfasciamonti announce.
'Good,' replied Atto.
I opened my eyes wide. The scene moments before, faced with which I had believed myself to have bid life farewell, had changed utterly.
In his right hand, Sfasciamonti brandished the dagger with which I was on the point of being put to death. He was pointing it at a little group of hooded demons, all huddled oh so quietly against the wall, without giving the faintest sign of resistance. Such discipline was not without cause: in his left hand the catchpoll held his ordnance pistol. Atto, for his part, grasped an improvised torch: a cone made up of sheets of paper which he had lit with the incandescent dagger and which now illuminated the narrow space in which we stood, while however spreading fumes that rendered the air unbreathable.
'Up, you wretch, and get us out of here,' said Atto to the chief of the demons, placing a handkerchief across his nose in order not to breathe in too much smoke.
It was then that I recognised the leader of the infernal company. That foul, oversized covering, the odours of filth and decay spreading all around, those clawed hands…
The cowl shifted a little. Once more I beheld that crumpled parchment of a face, that miserable patchwork of bits of skin held together only by inertia, that tumescent cankered nose like a mouldy carrot, the evasive eyes, bloodshot and deceitful, the few broken yellow-brown stumps of teeth, the wrinkles deep as ploughed furrows, the skeletal cranium and the yellowish scalp from which hung resignedly a few rare tufts of rust-coloured hair.
'Ugonio!' I exclaimed.
It is necessary that I should at this juncture make clear the nature and history of the personage in question, as well as his companions, with whom it was my fate to share no few adventures many years ago.
Ugonio was a corpisantaro, one of those bizarre individuals who spend their lives searching Rome's subterranean innards for the relics of saints and of the first martyrs of the Christian faith. The corpisantari are truly creatures of darkness, whose time is spent grubbing with their bare hands underground, separating dirt from shards, earth from stones, splinters from mould, and exulting whenever this stubborn and meticulous labour of filtering reveals a mere fragment of a Roman amphora, a coin of the imperial age or a piece of bone.
They are wont to sell for a high price the relics (or corpisanctorum, whence their name) which they find in the subsoil, exploiting the good faith, or better, the unpardonable ingenuousness of buyers. The piece of amphora is sold as a fragment of the cup from which Our Lord drank at the Last Supper; the little coin becomes one of the thirty pieces of silver for which Judas Iscariot betrayed the Son of God; the sliver of bone is palmed off as part of Saint John's collarbone. Of all the vile substances that the corpisantari glean under the ground, nothing is thrown away: a half-rotten piece of wood is sold dear as an authentic splinter of the True Cross, a feather from a dead bird is auctioned as a plume from an angel's wing. The mere fact of spending a lifetime grubbing, piling up and archiving all that disgusting material has endowed them with a reputation as infallible hunters after sacred objects and thus guarantees them a large number of readily hoodwinked customers. Over a long period of time and thanks to the astute bribery of servants, they have accumulated copies of the keys to cellars and store rooms throughout the whole city, thus gaining access to all the most recondite recesses of subterranean Rome.
Surprisingly enough, the corpisantari combine their execrable practices with a genuine, intense, almost fanatical religiosity, which surfaces at the most unexpected moments. If my memory does not betray me, they have asked several pontiffs for the right to form a confraternity; but there has never been any response to that request.
So, Ugonio was one of their number. Being a native of Vienna, he spoke my language with inflections and accents which often made it difficult to discover any coherent sense behind the verbiage; hence his nickname, the German.
'The German…' I exclaimed, utterly astonished, turning to Ugonio. 'So 'tis you!'
'I recognate not this disgustiphonous appellation, from which I dissocialise myself with my entire personage,' he protested. 'I commandeer the Italic tongue, not as an immigrunter, but as if 'twere my own motherlingo.'
'Silence, beast,' cut in Atto, who had already heard many years before how Ugonio loved to boast about his disastrous gibberish. 'Just to hear you talk gives me nausea. So you have made your fortune with this Jubilee, cheating the pilgrims with your so-called relics, perhaps selling some ham bone at a good price as the tibia of Saint Calixtus. I hear that you have become a big noise. And now you've sold yourself to Lamberg, eh? But, what am I saying? Far from selling yourself, you are a true patriot. After all, you're Viennese and, as such, a faithful subject of His Imperial Majesty Leopold I, like that damned ambassador of yours. Bah, who would have guessed that I'd ever again in my life have to put up with your disgusting presence?' concluded Melani, spitting on the ground in disdain.
I, meanwhile, looked at Ugonio and a thousand memories raced around my head. Certainly, the Abbot's suspicions seemed utterly justified: if the infamous German was in cahoots with the cerretani, it followed that they too would all have been in the pay of Vienna and conspiring against us. Nevertheless, I was content to see the old corpisantaro again, with whom I had shared so many adventures, and I sensed that the Abbot too was not displeased, despite his indignant reaction.
'What have you to tell me about the stab wound in the arm which I got from that cerretano accomplice of yours? Was it perhaps meant for my breast? Speak!'
'I deny, redeny and ultradeny your absurdious inculpations. Nor was I beware that someone had stubbed your member with a messerblade.'
'I see, you don't mean to collaborate. You will regret it. And now, get us out of here,' Atto continued. 'Show us the way. Sfasciamonti, give me the pistol and keep Ugonio covered with the dagger. Anyone who makes a false move will end up with a hole in his belly.'
The group of hooded beings, whom in my momentary panic I had taken for devils, filed back through the niche whence they had come. We followed, keeping them under the threat of pistol and dagger and, obviously, Sfasciamonti's muscular bulk. Thus, we entered a fetid and narrow burrow which led out from what we'd taken for a bolgia from Dante's Inferno, once again towards the unknown.
'But… we are underground!' I exclaimed at one point, as I became aware of a certain strange humidity and recognised the opus reticulatum, the brick structure typical of ancient Roman walls.
'Yes,' Sfasciamonti assented, 'where did the tower end and this begin?'
'We are in some secondary conduit of the Baths of Agrippina,' replied Abbot Melani. 'Who knows, perhaps this was once a corridor on the second floor, with windows and balconies, and one could breathe the fresh air. The rest, I'll explain to you later.'
As will by now be quite plain, the ambiguous arts of the corp-isantari meant that they had de facto much in common with another execrable group, the cerretani. It was no accident that we should have run into them in the course of our search for the famous German.
As we proceeded along the tunnel, faintly lit by Atto's torch (which he revived by adding a little piece of canvas found on the ground) Sfasciamonti began to interrogate Ugonio.
'Why do they call you the German? And why did you order the theft of Abbot Melani's text and of the relic?'
''Tis a vilethy, iniquilous falsehoodie. I am pletely innocuous, this I perjure now and forever, indeed almost never, I mean.'
Sfasciamonti fell silent for an instant, taken aback by the corpisantari's garrulous and ramshackle jargon.
'He said that it is not true. Anyway, they call him the German because he was born in Vienna and his mother tongue is German,' I explained.
Meanwhile, we had passed from the corridor to a stairway. I was still affected by the experiences from which I had just emerged, shaken through and through by having passed from life to death (or so it had truly seemed to
