— so I suspected — to make the visitor's steps uncertain. The space was quadrangular, with two pillars in the middle, perhaps supports for the little balcony. We were just next to one another and it was comforting in that strange place to feel Atto's by my side. Then we heard the Dutchman once more.
Whoever sees with open eyes
Cannot regard himself as wise,
For he shall see upon reflection
That humans teem with imperfection.
A disembodied voice, quite impossible to place. True, those verses were typical of Albicastro's usual inane ramblings, yet it was as though, in order to reach us, they had passed through some alien dimension in which sound is drained, washed free of its very properties. It was (to give the reader a fair idea) the voice of Albicastro's ghost. It seemed to come from the left.
We therefore turned to the left, and we saw.
It was there, or rather, they were both there looking at us. What cruel comedy there was in that sharp vision, I thought in a sudden flash of humour, as I beheld the being both one and double, and he looked at us. After Albicastro's ghostly voice, the Tetrachion overwhelmed us with the evidence of its utterly carnal presence, its stolid bestiality.
They stared at us as one, both with that dazed expression which only the Habsburg chin, that monstrously protruding jaw, can confer upon a human visage. Moreover the eyes were mismatched, the one sticking out, the other caved in, while the neck was twisted, the bodies deformed: one was stunted, as so often happens to beings ill-favoured by nature, the other, bloated. The flanks fused together, the legs wavering and horridly twisted one against the other, almost like the tentacles of some marine monster, gave that being the miserable destiny of twins who share the same body.
Incapable of opening my mouth, I raised my hand to shield my sight, and saw that the wretched creature (or one of them, but which?) gestured towards me, greeting me or begging perhaps to be left in peace. Then their features, as though made of quicksilver, became even more distorted, so that the chin of the one protruded absurdly, while the other collapsed on itself, and one chest was contorted in a horrendous spasm, while the raised hand of the other became a paw, a hoof, a stump. What nauseous and horrifying force dominated that flesh, those skins, those bones, and deformed them with the same cruel mastery as a taxidermist exercises upon the cadavers of the beasts which he stuffs?
Without a care for the sad spectacle of the monstrum Tetrachion and the horror it inspired, Albicastro's voice rang out as mockingly and ferociously as those paintings in which Death, a walking skeleton shouldering a scythe, walks calmly amongst the plumed knights and ladies whom he is about to harvest:
He's stirring at the dunces' stew;
He thinks he's wise and handsome too,
And with his mirror form so pleased
You 'd think he had a mind diseased;
Indeed he cannot see the ass
That's grinning at him from the glass!
Then there remained nothing, only horror, folly and desperation, my scream, our disorderly, precipitous flight down the stairs and then down the road, each paying no attention to the other, and at last the pain of having found in the mysterious abyss of the Vessel a second abyss peopled by monsters, sad morbidity, incest and death.
'Do you know who Ulisse Aldrovandi is?'
'No, I do not,' I heard my distant voice reply, as pale and empty as my face.
We were in Atto's apartments at Villa Spada, where Buvat had summoned Cloridia. My legs were still trembling, but I had come back to myself sufficiently to hear others' voices, or at least to pretend that I heard them.
'But what ails you, husband?'
'Nothing, nothing,' I answered, indicating Atto's frowning forehead with my glance and gesturing that only later would I be able to explain. 'Now, tell us.'
Cloridia had found out at once. She had found, not the book, but something better: now, at last, she could explain to us what the Tetrachion was.
''Tis a very curious business indeed that your secretary has asked me to advise you on, Signor Abbot Melani,' she began.
'Why curious?'
'It is something reserved for the very few, a matter that's almost obscure, I'd say. These are things which midwives are in fact not even obliged to know; even if we do, in the end, learn a little of everything: medicine, anatomy, natural philosophy…' said she with a knowing grimace.
'And what is this subject that's so unusual?'
'It is the science of abnormal foetuses and the generation of prodigies and portents: the science of monsters.'
'Monsters?' asked Atto, on whose face I could for an instant descry the same terified expression as it had taken on when faced with the Tetrachion.
Cloridia then explained that the literature on the subject was most extensive. Among the most exhaustive works, one must mention the Deux livres de chirurgie by Ambroise Pare, first chirurgeon to the King of France, published over a century ago, and the more recent Monstrorum historia by the learned Bolognese Ulisse Aldrovandi, which listed the most famous cases of monstrous births and unnatural features.
'There is, for example, the celebrated case of an Ethiopian born with four eyes, one next to the other, or that of a man who came into this world with the neck and head of a crane, and there was another born with a dog's head…' said Cloridia, apparently savouring our reactions.
The list of monstrous births, in nature and in man, continued with hairy little girls, infants with horse's legs, new-born babes like fishes enveloped in a monk's habit, creatures in the form of scorpions, with two hands on each arm and huge asses' ears, or with the face of a wolf; or others with the features of a goat-like biped, raptor's talons, flaccid breasts, demon's wings, eagle's claws and canine chest; with mermaid's characteristics (but masculine) and with a devil's head, horns, goat's ears, great bestial fangs, protruding tongue, hands with thumbs but no other fingers, crested fins on the arms and back, seal's tail; or again, creatures with a woman's belly, one foot a pig's trotter and the other made like a hen's, or with the whole body covered in feathers; even gruesome entities formed like fish-pigs, with webbed and clawed fins, human eyes emerging from their scaly sides and a mouth full of fangs; and, to end with, a fine exemplar of the monstrum cornatum amp; alatum: with a bear's head, no arms, an enormous spindle-shaped penis ending in a point, one leg feathered, eagle's wings, an eye on the knee and the left foot webbed.
'Enough, enough, that will do for me,' Atto protested at length, as disgusted by the descriptions as I. 'So, what then is the Tetrachion?'
'The Tetrachion, Signor Abbot Melani,' replied Cloridia in a subtly sarcastic tone of voice, 'might prove somewhat indigestible for you, like some of those poor beings of which you have just heard, almost all of which miscarried or were stillborn.'
'And why is that?'
'It is another kind of misfortune of nature. In the language of the specialists, it concerns a well-known case that occurred in Paris in 1546: a woman six months pregnant gave birth to a creature with two heads, four arms and four legs. Doctor Pare, who carried out the autopsy on the child, found that it had only one heart. From this he concluded, on the basis of Aristotle's well-known statement, that it must really be one infant, not two. The malformation was probably caused by a material defect, or by something wrong with the womb, which was too small, so that the seed was hard pressed and coagulated into a globe, producing two infants connected and united.'
'And those two beings, or rather, that being, had… four legs?' asked Atto.
'Two heads, four arms and as many legs.'
Atto lowered his eyes and scratched his forehead, while with the eyes of thought he returned to the infernal vision he had shared with me.
'But,' continued Cloridia, 'there have been less grave examples of a Tetrachion.'
