mysterious as you believe them to be.'
The Abbot started, as though I had stung him.
'And what do you know of that?' he protested, visibly annoyed.
'It may indeed be true,' I replied with all the modesty of which I was capable, 'that ambrosia, nepenthes, panacea and moly were, as you say, all present in the mythical garden of Adonis; that I do not doubt. And perhaps that is precisely why Elpidio Benedetti chose these plants. But it is quite untrue that they do not exist. Of course, I speak only in my capacity as an assistant gardener, and on the basis of such humble experience as I have gained over the years in the plantations of the Villa Spada, as well as from a few manuals on flowers which I enjoy reading from time to time. Nevertheless, I can tell you that ambrosia, if it was once the food of the gods of Olympus on whom it conferred immortality, I know today as a mushroom which the ants are gluttons for. The same with nepenthes: it is described as a carnivorous plant which the Jesuit fathers brought back from China; whether it comes rather from Egypt and, as the ancient Greeks believed, makes the soul serene and enables one to forget pain, that, I'm afraid, I do not know. The panacea may have been sought for centuries by alchemists, but I know it as a medicinal plant that cures warts. As for moly, 'tis merely a form of garlic, which does not of course mean that it could not immunise Ulysses from Circe's magic potions. Everyone knows the infinite virtues of garlic…'
I broke off, when I became aware of the grave humiliation painted in dark tints on Atto's face.
Poor Abbot Melani. In the face of the mysterious apparitions which we had repeatedly witnessed in the Vessel, he had always espoused scepticism, attributing those inexplicable apparitions to corrupted vapours, corpuscles, imaginings and who knows what else. Yet tension and fear had grown in his breast no less than in mine, of this I now had the certain proof.
These had, however, materialised at precisely the wrong moment: before the plants in the flower bed in which the Abbot had thought to see the legendary flowers of the gardens of Adonis, and immediately after that, through a bizarre set of circumstances, before the image of that singular individual Albicastro, musician and soldier, seemingly suspended in mid-air. Atto had, in other words, given in to fear of the unknown just when there was nothing unknown involved. He had deceived himself several times over and now the shame of it was gnawing cruelly at his liver.
'That is what I meant to say,' he commented at last, perhaps sensing my thoughts. 'All this confirms what I have been preaching to you since the very first day we set foot in this place: superstition is the daughter of ignorance. Every single thing in this world can be explained by the science of things and phenomena; had 1 possessed sufficient knowledge of floriculture, I could not have made so dreadful a mistake.'
'Of course, Signor Atto, but permit me to point out to you that, in my modest opinion, we have not yet found a convincing explanation for the apparitions we have seen here.'
'We have not found one because of our ignorance. Just as we thought we saw a flying man, when he was simply walking along a cornice in a strong breeze.'
'Do you think that someone has been playing tricks on us?'
'Who can say? The scope for disguising the truth is infinite.'
A few moments later we had entered the ground floor of the building.
'After the shock which Buvat gave us yesterday, you should have put a few questions to me,' said Atto.
'That is true. How the deuce did Buvat manage to locate and get to us without being either seen or heard? He appeared so suddenly that he seemed to have descended from heaven.'
'I too could not believe my eyes, but then I found the explanation,' said he, drawing me into a little room to the right of the main door.
'Now I understand,' I exclaimed.
The room was in fact the base of a minuscule service staircase. Unlike us, Buvat had not taken the main stairs on the opposite side of the building (in other words at the end and to the left, for those entering it) but these little service stairs. That was how he had appeared unexpectedly just in front of us, at the end of the first-floor salon that gave onto the Vatican. Although we could hear them, we could not understand where his footsteps were coming from, and this was not only because of the echo produced by the high vault of the gallery but because we were quite unable to conceive of the presence of another way up, of which we knew nothing.
So we went up to the first floor by the service stairs which were, like their more spacious counterpart, of spiral construction. We were just climbing the last steps when we were transfixed by a powerful siren, accompanied by a deep and menacing reverberation. Instinctively I brought my hands to my ears to protect them from the powerful shock.
'Damn it,' cursed Abbot Melani. 'Again that folia!”
Upon reaching the first floor, we found ourselves facing Albicastro. He had begun to play just at the top of the little spiral staircase which thus acted as a sound box, amplifying the violin and transforming the bass into gigantic lowing sounds and the treble into vertiginous whistling. The music ceased.
'It seems that the theme of the folia gives you more joy than any other music,' said Melani, plainly enervated by the latest shock.
'As the great Sophocles put it, 'life is more beautiful when one does not reason'. Besides, this music is suited to the Vessel, the stultifera navis, or Ship of Fools, if you prefer,' he replied with Dutch brio, dusting down his instrument and then beginning to tune it, thus emitting a series of mewing sounds at once comical and irritating.
Atto's sole response was to begin to declaim:
On streets or highways you can find
A pack of fools who vaunt their shame
And yet prefer to shun the name.
Thus have I thought this was the time
To launch a ship of fools in rhyme:
A galley, bark, skiff, ketch or yawl -
But one ship wouldn't hold them all.
Atto, with those verses, seemed plainly to be calling Albicastro a madman.
'So you know my beloved Sebastian Brant?' asked the Dutchman, surprised and in no way offended.
'I have been received too many times at the court of Innsbruck or that of the Elector of Bavaria not to have understood your allusion to Brant's Stultifera Navis, the most widely read book in Germany over the past two hundred years. One cannot claim to know the German peoples if one has not read that book.'
Once more I was taken aback by Atto's encyclopaedic knowledge: seventeen years ago he had admitted to having few clear notions of the Bible, but when it came to matters political and diplomatic, he always knew everything.
'You will therefore agree with me that the Stultifera Navis goes well with the villa in which we now stand,' replied the musician, who then recited:
Know, foolishness is ever bold
And fools themselves for wise men hold,
But should a man himself despise,
Why then, at last, a fool's made wise!
And Abbot Melani responded:
But what fools are, we plainly see,
The fools themselves don't want to be.
Whereupon, Albicastro, eying with amusement the thousand pleats, leather embroideries and tassels and decorations on Atto's ceremonial dress:
Right now I will not mention those
Who gad about in foolish clothes;
Indeed, were I to count the same,
I'd anger legions by the name.
They have no taste for wearing twill
Or simple jerkins void of frill
Prefer to wear the Holland stuff
With slitted sleeves and bright enough
With colours woven in, befurred,
