Secretum

'I know what we shall do and what we shall not do, my boy. I am a diplomat in the service of the Most Christian King,' said he, silencing me.

I held back briefly, then decided to answer.

'Very well, Signor Atto, then explain to me why you tore the note from my hand when I had just got hold of it. If Buvat had not performed that clever trick, if he had not fallen on top of me, perhaps we should now have the note in our hands. Instead of which, you took it and allowed it to be snatched from you by the parrot!'

I awaited his response with my chest tight with emotion. As usual, my sallies against Atto caused me a fine bout of anxiety.

For a second he stayed silent, then he answered me with a cruel hiss.

'You really haven't got a whisper of a clue, and what's more, you've never had one. You would never have been able to hold onto that note. Albani was right there in front of you. They would all have seen you, you'd have had to return it to him. Only I and Buvat could have made it disappear, if your idiotic parrot had not been there to ruin everything.'

'In the first place, the parrot is not mine but was left to the household by the late lamented Monsignor Virgilio Spada, Cardinal Fabrizio's uncle, may God keep him in glory. And besides, it was thanks to the parrot that I was able to take the note from Albani.'

'I could have distracted Albani. In the meanwhile, Buvat would have taken advantage of the opportunity.'

'Distract Albani? But you've done nothing except to make an enemy of him. For the second time today you have caused a scandal in his presence with your verbal excesses. They'll all be talking about nothing else at the Villa Spada.'

'Silence!'

I became furious. This was the straw that broke the camel's back. I knew that my outbursts were thoroughly justified. Atto could not reduce me to silence that easily. But this was about something else.

He was looking behind me, tense and on his guard, as though studying a wild beast at close quarters.

'Is he behind me?' I asked, thinking of Caesar Augustus.

'He is moving away. He is dressed in the same way as last time.'

'Dressed?'

I turned.

He was a little over ten yards off. Under his arm, he held a heavy bundle of papers tied with a red ribbon and was walking swiftly, with an absorbed frown, in the direction of a young girl with a complexion as white as ricotta and with thick, curly brown hair. With a bow, to which the maiden responded with a broad smile, he then handed her a purse full of money and some papers.

I just had time to recognise them before they both disappeared behind a large vase containing a lemon tree. There was little room for doubt. It was the same pair again: the mature gentleman and the maiden with whom I had seen him in conversation on the first day when we had entered the Vessel. She was (identical to) Maria Mancini. He, now that I had seen him a second time, reminded me of someone; but who?

Just as they had appeared, the two vanished. Already instructed by the previous apparitions, we made no attempt to follow them or to understand how they had disappeared. I looked at Atto.

'Ahi, dunque'c'e pur vero, ' he murmured.

Now I knew whom we had seen.

It would take too long to go over all the facts to which that phrase — 'Ah, so it really is true' — referred. Suffice to say that seventeen years earlier, it had been uttered at the point of death by a guest at the Donzello, the inn where I was then working as an apprentice and where, in those same days, I came to know Melani.

The dying man who had pronounced those words was Nicolas Fouquet, the former Superintendent of Finances of the Most Christian King, who was imprisoned for life following a palace conspiracy and had, after untold hardships and turns of fate, found refuge in Rome: at the Donzello, to be precise. Atto knew full well that I had a perfect memory of those events, since the memoir which he had taken from me and then paid for in cash recounted them in detail.

'It was the same gentleman as the other day, with Maria…' I murmured, still shaken by that enigmatic manifestation.

He did not reply, letting silence assent in his stead. Our altercation of moments before by now forgotten, we kept looking here and there, sticking our noses between leaves and branches, hiding from one another the fact that we were no longer looking for Caesar Augustus but into the abyss of memory in which the apparition had, through some necromancer's arts, cast us. I was thinking of the time when I had come to know Abbot Melani. He, however, was thinking of yet earlier times, of his friendship with Fouquet, of his tremendous destiny and of his tragic end. That was why, I said to myself, the first apparition we had come across at the Vessel had shaken Abbot Melani even more than the subsequent ones. He had in one moment beheld that apparition of Maria, to whom he was tied by such a tangle of feelings, and of Fouquet, whose terrible death he had both witnessed and had a part in.

Merely by looking at him, I could clearly perceive the powerful clash of opposing emotions which was taking place in Atto's soul. He had seen his old friend, not old and exhausted by years of imprisonment, but in the flower of strength and maturity. The bundle which he carried under his arm must contain working documents which he, an indefatigable worker in the service of the kingdom, even brought home with him — that I knew from Atto — before the machinations of the court of France stripped him of his minister's place, his honour, his liberty and his life.

With erect carriage, determined gait, distinguished features, a frowning expression, but only because his mind was turned towards matters high and noble: such had been Fouquet's bearing when Atto had known him in his own youth. Seeing him again, the Abbot was once more cast back into the depths of a thousand remote events, a thousand motions of the soul and of history, into an agony of infinite pain, and perhaps no less remorse. In that villa, as in a limpid and placid pool, the past was wondrously mirrored and, arranging its hair, almost coquettishly said: I am still here.

I saw Atto walk awhile, no longer with the gay movements of a lively old man, but with the uncertain gait of a young man precociously aged. I felt incapable of confronting those ordeals of the heart and the spirit; if I were in his place, said I, my whole body would be all shaken with sobs. Yet, he was resisting, still pretending to look for the parrot. I could only pardon him, and I thought that his many defects (rashness, duplicity, arrogance) must be forgiven if I truly wanted to call myself his friend. This meant perhaps deluding myself about many things: for example, that he might be capable of sincere friendship and trust. 'You are my truest friend': alas, that phrase, which I had heard during the first apparition of Maria Mancini and Fouquet, I could certainly never have uttered in relation to Abbot Melani. Yet, is not friendship perhaps the constant companion of illusion, an illusion which, nurtured for its own sake, thus prolongs the joys, ephemeral but necessary, which it brings to our lives?

'1 do believe that you are right. Caesar Augustus is not here, or else it is too difficult to find him,' said Atto tonelessly.

'If he does not want to be found, this is perhaps the ideal place,' I completed his reasoning, no less distractedly.

'Yet it is truly curious that he should have flown to this exact spot,' observed Melani. 'The three cardinals, the Tetrachion, your parrot: this place is becoming somewhat crowded.'

'In the case of Caesar Augustus, I think that is fortuitous. He likes tall, leafy trees, and here there are the finest ones on all the Janiculum.'

'Well then, let us try to establish whether all the others came here fortuitously.'

'The others?' I retorted, thinking apprehensively of the apparitions. 'Starting with the Tetrachion,' Melani hastened to make clear, directing his steps towards the entrance of the building.

Once again, however, he had to stop. The sweetest of melodies spread by an utterly aerial violin was softly filling the park. It was impossible to tell whence it came or for whose pleasure it was intended.

'Again that music… the folia,' murmured Atto.

'Would you like to walk around the house and see where it is coming from?'

'No; let us stay here. We have done enough running for the time being. I would not be averse to a little break.'

He sat down on a little marble bench. I thought he was about to justify himself with some pretext like 'We all grow old' or 'I am no longer a boy', but he said nothing.

'The folia. Like that of Capitor,' I ventured.