He was young, not very tall, and rather gauche; far from ugly, but with little eyes that seemed still unsure of where they were meant to be in the oval of his face; his lineaments were elastic, his nose too large and swollen. He was of that unripe age when the body, held hostage by disorderly springtime forces, is expanding from within and almost bursting the tender cocoon of childhood.
His nervous, uncertain gait betrayed an artificial attempt at gallantry and, at the same time, a well brought up sixteen-year- old's overwhelming desire to be able at last to act freely.
Then there was the maiden. From that angle (with our noses pressed against the window panes, but a little too far to the left) we could see her only obliquely; but I knew her all too well from the encounter the day before.
At first he took her arm, then suddenly let go of it, stood facing her and walked backwards, accompanying some pleasantry with animated gesticulation. He placed his hand in jest on the hilt of his sword, miming acts of heroism or evoking duels.
She laughed and let him play on; she was walking lightly, almost like a ballerina dancing on her toes, turning a little pink lace parasol, a magic calyx in which she captured his words. Her hair was in slight disarray, betraying the many kisses just given, or the burning desire to receive them soon, at once, behind the next corner.
Of the conversation, there reached us only a few fragments.
'I would like… if only you knew…' I managed to overhear him say, amidst the rustling of the foliage.
'Majesty, when do you… can happen…' was all I heard of her reply.
I turned to Atto.
He had stepped back and distanced himself from the window. He stood there like a stone idol, looking on with his eyes glazed, his jaws clenched, his lips tightly closed.
When I turned to observe the pair, they were disappearing behind the nearest hedge.
We remained a few moments longer, with our gaze fixed on the place where the couple had vanished from our sight.
'The maiden was… very like the portrait of the Connestabilessa when young,' said I, hesitantly. 'But the young man's face was familiar, too.'
Atto remained silent. In the meantime, the melody of the folia became audible once more.
'Perhaps I have seen him portrayed in a statue… Is that possible?' I added, not daring to utter my impression more openly.
'He does indeed resemble a bust on the external facade of the Vessel, out there in one of the niches. But above all, he resembles one of the portraits you have seen here in the house.'
'Which one?'
At first, he did not answer. Then he drew in breath and released the inner burden which had been weighing him down until that moment.
'There are things in this accursed place which are beyond my understanding. Perhaps the subsoil gives off unhealthy vapours; I know that does occur in some places.'
'Do you mean to say that we could be the victims of hallucinations?'
'Perhaps. Whatever the case may be, we are here for a specific purpose and we shall allow no one to stand in our way. Is that clear?' he exclaimed, suddenly raising his voice, as though someone within those walls were listening.
Silence fell once again. He leaned against the wall, muttering some obscure imprecation.
I waited until he was calm, then I put the question to him.
'It really did look like him, did it not?'
'Let us go upstairs,' said he, tacitly assenting.
Despite the many tales of phantoms, apparitions and manifestations of spirits which we all learn of from our most tender childhood and which, thanks to the power of suggestion predispose us to encounter such phenomena sooner or later, I had never witnessed so odd an occurrence.
As we climbed the spiral staircase to the first floor, I was turning over in my mind the absurdity of those visions: first, Maria Mancini, in other words, the Connestabilessa when still young, or whoever it may have been; now in gallant converse (and this was ridiculous, quite unimaginable) with the same royal lover whom Atto had attributed to her in his narration. I had first seen him in marble effigy, then in portraits (there was more than one in the Vessel) and now in flesh and blood: if the shy and absent-minded youth I thought I had seen in the garden really was made of flesh and blood.
I should have liked blindly to believe Atto's hypothesis that these were mere hallucinations due to the unhealthy air around the villa. Instead, I felt the solid marble of the stairs under my feet and, at the same time, the evanescent and perilous atmosphere of those visions. Willingly would I have escaped into dreams; instead, I found myself stuck fast in some shape-shifting marsh in which the past seemed blessedly to stagnate and, for a few instants, to weave before my confused eyes, in what seemed almost a play of light — an ignis fatuus — the broken threads of history.
There was, however, no time in which to find the answers, given that we were at that moment on the traces of a very different spectre: the phantom of Mazarin's terrors.
The staircase which led to the first floor was in the great hall, at the opposite end from the entrance and on the side facing east. At the top of it, we met with a surprise.
We had entered an enormous gallery, which I estimated to be no less than thirty yards long and four and a half yards wide. The floor was all paved with fine majolica tiles in three colours, each of which looked like a dice showing its sides in relief. The walls were covered in stucco work, all richly painted and gilded and, through the subtle interplay of volutes, naturally drew one's gaze upwards. Here, on the immense vault, we saw a marvellous fresco representing Aurora. Atto himself could not contain his stupefied amazement.
'The Aurora of Pietro da Cortona…' said he with his face turned upwards, briefly oblivious of the purpose of our search and the disquieting figures whom we had encountered.
'Do you know this painting?'
'When it was completed, over forty years ago, all Rome knew that a marvel had been born,' said he with restrained emotion.
After the Aurora, in the next portion of the ceiling there followed a representation of Midday, and then an image of Night. The three frescoes thus followed suggestively the progress of daylight, from the first rays of dawn to the penumbra of sunset. The niches and smaller panels of the frieze were decorated with chiaroscuros, seascapes and many delightfully executed little landscapes.
In the spaces between the windows, one could on the long sides admire an impressive armoury: twelve great trophies of various arms both ancient and modern made of stucco modelled in bas-relief with metal enriched with gold, with a moral attached to each one of them, each referring to the value of defending body and spirit. In these admirable warlike cornucopias, there were swords and cannon, visors and cuisses, gorgets and scimitars, as well as spears, iron breastplates, mortars, slings, iron maces, pikes, arquebuses with ratchets, riding whips, standards, arrows, quivers, morions, battering rams, kettledrums, torches, military togas and much more still.
'Sfasciamonti would love all this ironmongery,' observed Abbot Melani.
Every single object was decorated and completed with a Latin dictum: ''Abrumpitur si nimis tendas' ''If you draw it too far it will break',' translated Atto, reading with a little smile the inscription carved into a crossbow.
''Validiori omnia cedunt '.' ''All yield to the strongest',' I echoed him with the saying carved on a cannon.
''Tis incredible,' he commented. 'There's not a corner, not a capital, not a window in the Vessel without a proverb carved on it.'
The Abbot moved off without waiting for me, shaking his head, a prey to who knows what cogitations. I followed him.
'And the most absurd thing of all is that between these walls covered in wise maxims, what music do we hear?' he called out in a loud voice, 'the folia… folly!'
He was right. The melody of the folia, played, so it seemed to me, on a string instrument, was following us ever more closely, almost as though it were accompanying our reading of the inscriptions.
The sudden revelation of that paradox set in motion in my head a disorderly whirl of questions and thoughts of which I myself could not yet glimpse the meaning.
'So you are no longer of the view that we imagined all this?' I asked.
'Far from it,' he hastened to correct himself. 'Even if in all probability that music is coming to us from some
