slothful we are, and that is why He offers us paradise on a golden platter, in exchange for vile copper coin. In His infinite love for us His children, He is satisfied by our little act of faith and goodwill: we make a small, wavering step towards Him and lo, the Merciful Father runs to us and gathers us up in His arms.'
I waited for Don Tibaldutio to continue his discourse and to come to the long-awaited revelations; but he had said all that he had to say. He opened the door of the sacristy and again accompanied me to the foot of the statue of Our Lady of the Carmel, where he had first spoken to me. After bestowing a silent benison on my forehead, he left me there, moving away serenely and without a word.
Only then did the full import of the chaplain's teaching become clear to me. It was for me to draw my conclusion on my own: Divine mercy granted the Jubilee indulgence even to those in a state of mortal sin; all the more so would it lend an ear to the prayers of innocent pilgrims, even if they had been drawn to the Holy City by others' lust for lucre.
The truth which Don Tibaldutio had revealed to me was indeed great, as I had expected, but not secret; and yet, so humble and plain that it might have troubled certain august ears. It was therefore wiser to deliver it in the subtlest of whispers behind well closed doors.
I left the chapel calm and reconciled. I was about to continue on my way towards the theatre when I heard an echo of hurried martial footsteps coming towards me.
'Here Maestro, please come this way.'
It was Don Paschatio, all out of breath, who was showing the way to a tall, thin individual, all dressed in black, with a forelock of pepper-and-salt hair adorning his forehead rather artistically, under which darted two flashing eyes set in a grave and irascible visage. The pair was followed by a musician (whom I recognised as such because he was attired like all the other members of the orchestra) who was carrying two violin cases and, under his arm, a capacious valise which one could imagine to be full of all manner of musical scores.
I followed them for a while until we reached the theatre. Here, the musicians had already taken their places and it was then that I had a surprise: it was no orchestra, it was a veritable tide of humanity. All in all, I estimated, they must have been over a hundred strong. They were busy tuning their instruments but they fell silent when Don Paschatio and the two individuals who were unknown to me arrived at the great amphitheatre. The man dressed in black evoked around his person an impalpable sense of devout reverence, perhaps even awe. I observed with pleasure that the stage for the players and the benches for the public, of fine polished wood, had all been completed on time. There were only two carpenters hammering a loose floorboard; they vanished in response to a severe nod from Don Paschatio, as soon as the taller of the two strangers mounted the platform in the middle of the orchestra.
It was then I realised that this was the celebrated Arcangelo Corelli, composer and violinist of great renown, whose participation at the festivities I had heard bruited abroad during the preceding days. He was to conduct music which he himself had composed.
Nothing had I heard of him until the year before, isolated as I was from the world by my daily coming and going from the Villa Spada to my little field and thence to the conjugal home. It had been a cantor at the Sistine Chapel who had come to buy grapes who had first spoken to me of 'the great Corelli'. And now I had been told by Don Paschatio that he was not just a great musician but the Orpheus of our times, whose glory now spread over half Europe and would one day make him immortal.
Like a military formation, the orchestral players grasped their bows in the same gesture and pointed them in identical fashion, as though 'twere an image reflected by a thousand mirrors, each at the same angle, with the same inclination and pose, at the strings of their instruments: the violins all alike, thus too the viols. For a few moments absolute silence reigned.
'Not only does he want them to play as one man but to look like one; even today, when they are but rehearsing,' whispered Don Paschatio, sitting down by my side.
From his voice, I detected the triple sentiment of excited curiosity about Maestro Corelli's performance, contentment at serving as his Amphitryon, and weariness at the size of his task.
'He truly has a dreadful temper,' continued Don Paschatio. 'He never talks, he looks straight in front of him and thinks only of music. He deals with clients through the musician whom you saw arriving with us. He is his favourite pupil and it is said that he is also his… Well, Maestro Corelli is seen only in his company and never with a woman.'At that moment, the music closed our mouths. As though moved by an invisible, ethereal force, and not only Corelli's gesture setting the music in motion, the musicians attacked in perfect, divine unison a concerto composed by their maestro. To my great astonishment, I soon recognised a folia.
Once again, that simple, almost elementary motif surprised me, showing me its agile, insinuating and subtle second nature. It was like a beautiful and opulent peasant girl, ignorant of the world but well versed in the human soul, who arouses the desire of a rich gentleman far more than his consort, with all her money and her pretences. Such was the nature of the folia, at once simple and capable of anything. Eight clear, robust measures, from D to F (or so I was to learn only later) and then again back to D; a seemingly innocent little motif, yet one capable of unleashing the most unheard of and lascivious fantasies.
At the outset, each folia, being a daughter of the people, seems to be all too simple: from D to F, from F to D. Corelli's was like this too: within the brief span of that eight-beat double modulation, the melody at first took the form of simple chords. The accompanying chords then uncoupled. In the second variation, they dissolved into triads, with a French-style rhythm. In the third, they broke down into arpeggios, in the fourth, they transformed into scales, in the fifth, into tremolos, progressively complicating the game with amusing embellishments, proud staccatos, lamenting legatos, a thousand artifices of adornment which ended up by casting the listener into a state of vertigo. Every now and then, a slow variation, in which the motif was reprised languidly, indolently, at last afforded both audience and players a chance to catch their breath.
After variation upon variation, the indistinct mist of the initial theme had by now dispersed. A whole landscape, once concealed amidst the few notes of the original motif, now emerged for the listener. It was as though the sense of the theme itself had at last become clear, the very meaning of the folia, a voyage from one tonality to another, not from D to F and back but from one world to another. And what worlds were these if not the world of sanity and of folly? One must needs journey from the one to the other because both, mutually illuminating one another, were imbued with meaning. From D to F from F to D: no melody could so conquer the heart and the mind without that perennial fluctuation from one tonality to the other. And for no one can there ever be wisdom, or so that music seemed to suggest, without that sacred pilgrimage towards folly.
Maestro Corelli played the part of first violin; to guide the whole symphonic ensemble he needed only sharp and brief movements of the head, as an experienced horseman needs only a tap of the heels or ankles to steer his well-beloved mount. It was as though he were saying: 'Now, stop and listen, you'll not leave empty-handed, for I know what you're looking for.'
Shining through that music, almost as if the notes wanted to comment on my thoughts (while in nature, 'tis the contrary that's common) I sensed all the bittersweet flavour of times past, of things that had happened and things yearned for, yet which had never come to pass, of the seventeen years which had separated me from Atto, of the lessons on diplomacy and government which I had received from him; teachings which, like the work of that magician of a painter whom he had invoked for me on our visit to the Vessel to immortalise the features of the Connestabilessa when young had been imprinted in me forever…
Perhaps himself enraptured by the power of his creation, Corelli had ceased to conduct. He was playing almost in meditation upon his violin, with the bow caressing the third string, then the first with a suaveness that seemed almost careless, playing for his own ears only. But this was no self-love. The orchestra was following him with eyes closed, casting sudden oblique glances at its conductor, minuscule pulls on the oars keeping the barque of the folia in exquisite and perfect balance in its passage from a calm episode to a somewhat more lively intermezzo, then once again to another slow movement. The musicians really were playing as one man, I thought. They and Corelli formed one thing, and that thing was Corelli.
And then I remembered: the first adventure I had lived through with Atto, his lessons of (theoretical) morality, the great but forgotten music of Seigneur Luigi Rossi, which he had shown me…
While the notes to which I was listening spread over my head and shoulders the warm blanket of memories, while the silvery shadows of the past rained down on me, it seemed that from Euterpe's merciful hands there slipped into my lap the ultimate and true sense of my being in that place at that hour, my face barely touched by the perfume of the nasturtiums in a nearby flower bed, and I glimpsed the end to which that sublime caravel of sound was tending: after seventeen years, a man and no longer a boy, fate was calling me to Atto's side in a new
