What happened next took place in a flash. I was completely out of breath. Rather than fall to the ground, I bent over, with my hands on my knees. Then I heard Sfasciamonti's voice, which seemed to come from the floor below.
'Forget it boy, 'tis no spyglass…'
I turned around and saw him. He had hidden behind me; now he faced me. He collared me and thrust me against the penthouse wall, gripping me tightly. His knife was pointed at my belly. It was pointless to move; if I struggled he would stab me.
He was ill-dressed and he stank. He had pitch black eyes and a pockmarked skin. He might have been thirty years old — thirty badly lived years; thirty years of prison, hunger and nights spent sleeping in the open. He looked at me through one eye only. The other squinted like that of a stray cat.
Thanks, perhaps, to faculties unnaturally intensified by closeness to death, I read in his expression… indecision: should he kill at once and face the other, or run yet again? But if so, where? The terrace was in fact a mere corridor running around the penthouse at the top of the staircase. In a lightning flash of intuition, I understood how stupid I had been: I had followed him until he felt forced to kill me.
''Tis an accursed, what do you call the things?…' Sfasciamonti's voice thundered, still coming from the stairs, but now very near us.
The corner of the eye that stared at me had sought an escape route. I could see that it had found none.
Two, perhaps three seconds, and I would know the feeling of a cold blade in my liver. I had an idea.
'The German will kill you,' I managed to say, despite having my neck half crushed in his grip.
He hesitated. I felt his hand tremble.
Then it happened. Under Sfasciamonti's elephantine weight the door swung open with unbelievable violence, like armour- plated lighthouse doors smashed by the force of the raging sea. It struck my assailant's shoulder, and he tottered from the blow. Turning over and over in the air, the knife shot up between our two faces and fell to the ground with a clatter.
'A mackeroscopp!' exclaimed Sfasciamonti triumphantly, bursting onto the terrace and shaking at arm's length a half- broken metal device, while my adversary, shocked by the blow he'd received, prepared to make a break towards the left.
Sfasciamonti saw his face and yelled, with an undertone of indignation: 'But you're not Chiavarino!'
We threw ourselves onto the stranger, but it was precisely in so doing that I tripped over a large brick. I rolled over on the ground and all my strength was not enough to stop my body's slide to the edge of the terrace. I fell into the abyss of the courtyard, thus suffering just punishment for all that night's demented conduct.
I fell backwards. Before being hurled to my death thirty or forty feet below, I had time to behold the dumb stupor stamped on Sfasciamonti's face: in a timeless moment, I thought absurdly that such was perhaps the sentiment (and not pain or desperation) that seizes us at the instant when we witness the imminent death of another man. Poor Sfasciamonti, I thought, just after saving me from being stabbed he again lost me.
Despite the singularity of that instant, my memory retained a detail which the catchpoll failed to notice. While I was falling to my death, just before disappearing into the abyss, the fugitive replied to the threat I had uttered moments before.
'Teeyooteelie.'
Then with the sky, framed by the four walls of the courtyard, swallowing me up ever faster, faster, I offered a heartfelt prayer to the Almighty for the forgiveness of my sins, and, with heart and spirit turning to my Cloridia, I awaited the end.
Day the Third
9th J ULY, 1700
It was the purest and lightest of chants, nor could I have said whence it came; it was, if anything, nowhere and yet all around me.
It had an air of innocence about it, of timid red-cheeked novices, of remote and solitary hermits. It was a tender psalmody and it delighted my ears as I became aware of my new condition.
At last, I realised: it was the chant of a confraternity of pilgrims in Rome for the Jubilee. It was men and women who made up the sublime blend of voices, sweet and robust, silvery and stentorian, manly and womanly; they had risen with the sun, and now they raised a song of thanksgiving to the Lord as they set out on the visit to the four basilicas to seek the remission of their sins.
The rectangle of now azure sky from which I had fallen was still there above, crystalline and immobile.
I was dead and, at the same time, alive. My eyes were full of that rectangle's blue, but I could no longer see. The sky flowed from my eyes like angels' tears. Only the music, only that pilgrims' choir drew me to itself, almost as though it alone could keep me alive.
The last sensory impressions (the precipitous fall, the walls of the courtyard swallowing me up, the air pressing against my back) had been swept away by that holy melody.
Other indistinct voices wove into each other and unwove in occult counterpoint.
It was only then, after becoming aware of the existence of other beings around me, that I broke the frail shell of my torpor.
Like a new Lucifer cast down from paradise, I felt a sinister, warm smoke envelop my limbs and engulf me ever more in the viscous belly of the Inferno.
'Let's get him out of there,' said one of the voices.
I tried to move an arm or a leg, if I still had any. It worked; I raised a foot. This new and promising development, came, however, mixed with an unexpected sensation.
'What a stink!' said a voice.
'Let's both work together.'
'He owes his life to the shit, ha ha!'
I was not dead, nor had I smashed into the hard paving stones of the courtyard, even less been engulfed in hell: I was being lifted out of a cartful of warm, smoking manure.
As Sfasciamonti was to explain to me afterwards, while freeing my back of a few lumps of manure, I had ended my fall in a colossal mountain of fresh dung parked there during the night by a yokel who intended to sell it in the morning, for use as compost, to the superintendent of Villa Perretti.
Thus, by a pure miracle, I had not broken my neck. But when I had fallen onto the horrid heap of excrement, I had remained in a swoon, showing no signs of life. The onlookers who had meanwhile gathered were worried; someone made the sign of the cross. Suddenly, however, when the pilgrim confraternity passed by, I had moved my head and blinked. ''Tis the Lord's doing,' exclaimed a little old man. 'The confraternity's prayers have resuscitated him.'
Up above, Sfasciamonti, distracted by my fall and anxious about my fate, had allowed our man to get away when, rather than face the catchpoll's wrath, he had let himself drop to a lower rooftop, continuing his flight on the surrounding terraces. My ally who, with his weight, would have run the risk of falling through some skylight, was compelled to abandon the chase. Once down the stairs, he had dragged me out from the manure cart with the help of a market gardener, there to sell his produce on the nearby market of Campo de Fiore, which was just about to open.
''Tis an accursed mess,' said Sfasciamonti, as he led me to a nearby vendor of old clothes to fit me out with clean apparel.
'The Chiavarino had this in his hands — anything but a spyglass.'
From a dirty grey cloth he pulled out the device which I had seen him brandishing victoriously when he burst out from the stairs onto the terrace, at the unforgettable moment when I had a knife pressing against my guts.
The apparatus, which had emerged badly from the night's adventures, was reduced to a mass of twisted metal, in which one could with some difficulty discern what had once been a microscope. The only parts remaining in one piece were the base, a vertical cylinder and a pivot joining this with the rest (now lost) of the optical
