procession of which we knew neither where it was going nor why. In the middle of that cortege, a group of old men were fighting over a flask of wine. One of them, obviously drunk, came face to face with Atto and belched loudly. Melani turned away in disgust and rummaged instinctively in his overcoat in search of his lace handkerchief, then realised it would be wiser not to seem finicky.
Suddenly, the procession of cerretani, by now distinctly the worse for drink, struck up a bizarre song:
Doing nothing at all is the very best trade.
And when winter comes,
You just lie in the sun,
While in summer, you lie in the shade.
With a branch in your hand, you chase flies away
And the fat meat you eat
And you toss out the lean…
A tramp, bare-chested and all covered in bruises, with filthy bagpipes hanging around his neck and bare feet with long black nails, encouraged by the little chorus, began to sing loud and clear, caring not to keep time with the others:
By lies and by tricks You can live half a year; By tricks and by lies, Live the other half too!
I recognised this: it was the same cerretano doggerel Don Tibal-dutio had taught me.
Suddenly, an icy cold, sliding presence came between the cassock and my neck. I turned sharply
I nearly fainted. A slimy serpent, held in the hand of a disgusting wretch with a fat, greasy, ill-shaven face had licked my defenceless neck. The cerretano roared with coarse laughter and gave me a slap on the shoulder that almost knocked me over. It was all a joke. He then put the serpent in a wicker basket and began to sing in a chorus with three or four of his mates:
We are scum, we are scum,
'Tis for wenching we have come,
From the house of Saint Paul we descend.
We were born, we were born
Far away from this land
With a snake on the bum,
On the bum, on the bum,
And a snake in the hand…
So this was a sanpaolaro, a healer and handler of serpents, like the one I'd seen at work a few days before. To make the meaning of his doggerel quite clear, he put his hand on his privates and accompanied the last verses with obscene rhythmic thrusts of the hips. If he and his companions were not drunk with wine, they surely were with bestial gaiety. A middle-aged tramp had seized a fiddle and was making it moan and whine like a cat on heat. But there was no time to stop and stare. New participants kept arriving in the amphitheatre, multitudes of cerretani were crowding into the arena. Choruses, chaotic ballets, screams and coarse belly laughter resounded everywhere. When we arrived, it was a meeting, now it was one of the circles of hell. The procession had become enormous: there were hundreds and hundreds of vagabonds, almost all bearing torches, and it had begun simply to turn on itself in the arena, imprisoned by the amphitheatre like a mole whose nest has become too tight for it. Curious eyes focused on us. Although well covered by Ugonio's cassocks, we did not have the agile, bestial movements of the corpisantari, nor did we seem to be playing any great part in the carousing. But we had no time to worry. Our attention was distracted by a new development. Other swarms of beggars had gathered around the little procession of the Maggiorenghi, overcrowding the end of the arena where we stood. Elbows, backs and legs struggled like gladiators in agony. It was hard to keep close to Atto and Buvat and not to get dragged off into the crowd.
The chaos was such that, fortunately, no one seemed to be paying much attention to anyone else, and thus, not to us either. In the background, the whining of the fiddle was joined by the whistling of a group of rustic flutes and the nasal complaint of bagpipes.
'Look: just take a look at that one,' said Atto, pointing out a gaunt-looking young man with a bushy beard and sunken eyes.
Standing on tiptoe, I could just make out this character's face.
'Does that face not seem familiar to you too?'
'Well, yes… I do seem to have seen him before, but I don't recall where. Perhaps we've seen him begging somewhere.'
Just next to the young man, almost in the very middle of the throng, three Maggiorenghi suddenly appeared. They had mounted a platform, or perhaps some other kind of dais, hurriedly erected by a group of scruffy half-naked youths. The Maggiorengo in the middle was the head of the Mumpers. The other two raised his arms heavenward and the crowd cheered. We needed no interpreter to understand that this was the new Maggiorengo-General.
Beside the trio appeared the Grand Legator. He was holding a book in his hand. Both Atto and I recognised it: it was his treatise on the Secrets of the Conclave.
'Tut, tut, another Dutchman, what a coincidence.'
'What do you mean?' I asked.
'Use one Dutchman to hunt the other,' he replied with a wicked little smile.
While I was trying to understand the Abbot's enigmatic words, a fifth being mounted the platform: Ugonio.
'Take care not to lose us, we must stay close to the platform,' Atto warned me.
Then silence fell — or almost.
'My wily, artful friends, you guys and you heels, hear me out, prick up your bells!' began the Maggiorengo of the Mumpers, speaking in a stentorian voice. He was, it seems, beginning his enthronement speech as the new Maggiorengo-General: a speech in Saint Giles' Greek, of which we would probably understand next to nothing.
Buvat, kneeling, well wrapped in his bedraggled caftan so as to avoid being seen, began rapidly to turn the pages of the glossary of cant. Atto and I did our best to shield him from unwanted attention.
The Maggiorengo-General asked the Grand Legator to pass him Atto's book.
'This breviar is by a froggy autem cull,' the Maggiorengo continued, waving the book in the air; 'an angler, and his falcon with the harness of little tapers, he wanted to make a razzia: to make up like a carp and whitewash the damned one.'
A scandalised and hostile hubbub arose from the crowd.
'I think he said that the book which he's holding in his hand is by a foreign ecclesiastic who wanted to cause trouble and discover the language,' Buvat muttered to Atto, continuing to leaf frenetically through the book.
'To discover a language?' repeated Atto. 'The Devil, I've got it! The stupid, ignorant jackasses, may God curse them…'
At that moment, I noted with alarm that a young cerretano, barefoot and emaciated, almost completely bald and with his face horribly scarred, bare-chested and with the rest of his body covered only by an old blanket knotted around his waist, was staring perplexedly at Buvat and his little book. Atto, too, became aware of this and fell silent.
'Baste the cull, baste the cull!' screeched a horrendous old man in the crowd, with his face all covered in pustules.
'Siena! Si-e-na! Si-e-na!' the crowd responded, swaying with enthusiasm. Another round of applause followed and many bottles emptied by the mass of cerretani were hurled into the air in jubilation.
'Baste the cull means… Well, they're saying this foreigner should be punished, in other words, he should be killed,' whispered Buvat worriedly, still feverishly turning the pages of his glossary. 'Siena means yes.'
'What a clever idea,' commented Atto sarcastically, as he pulled the grimy cowl down more closely over his head, taking care to touch it only with his fingertips.
The half-naked cerretano drew a companion's attention to us. By pure luck, at that moment the movement of the crowd blocked their view. Were they approaching us?
Meanwhile, the Maggiorengo of the Mumpers waited for the applause to die down a little. Moved by an almost primordial instinct, I checked our distance from the entrance, which I supposed must also be the way out. It was still very near.
'And now, my goodly heels,' said the orator, 'whereas We, Sacred Majesty, great and glorious Emperor, have duly been elected Emperor, King, Chief, Condottiere, Prince, Rector and Guide of the Canters; and whereas such
