"It is absurd. My boy, I forbid you to tell this to anyone," said Atto, without removing his eyes from the looking glass. "I mean, of course, not until we have made clear all that remains obscure," he prudently corrected himself to cover up the cause of his peremptory command: shame.
He again touched the gibbous surface of the deforming mirror, admiring how it alternately swelled up, hollowed out, curved or straightened his fingers, knuckles, palm and wrist.
"I saw something rather like this in Frankfurt a long time ago, when Cardinal Mazarin sent me there for some secret negotiations. But it did not have such a… tremendous… effect as this."
We had seen no Tetrachion. At least, so it seemed. Witty Benedetti, the ingenious creator of the Vessel, had for the greater amusement of his guests placed a number of distorting mirrors along the wall of the little penthouse which, thanks to the dim light and the dark, grim atmosphere of the place and the fact that they reflected one another, transformed the visitor's image into something like a monstrous being.
When I scratched my nose, I noticed that the presumed Tetrachion imitated my gesture with inordinate promptness. Likewise, my other little movements were mimed by the monster with quite incredibly exact timing. It could not be anything other than my own image reflected in some unknown distorting surface.
During our first incursion into the penthouse, our minds were full of the image of Capitor's dish, with Albicastro's voice, transmitted up there who knows how, and with the tales which Atto himself had recounted about Capitor. Faced with the absurd and alien features of a creature with four legs and two heads (in reality, myself and Atto, standing closely side by side) we thought we saw the Tetrachion. Instead, we were merely surrounded by curved mirrors. I heard Atto repeat:
This work I call a looking-glass
In which each fool shall see an ass.
The viewer learns with certainty;
My mirror leaves no mystery.
"Those are the verses we heard Albicastro's voice declaiming," said I.
"Quite. He knew of the distorting mirrors and he was taunting us," Atto replied, as he continued reciting:
Whoever sees with open eyes
Cannot regard himself as wise,
For he shall see upon reflection
That humans teem with imperfection.
"But where did his voice come from?" I asked dubiously.
Instead of replying, Atto began to feel the walls where there were no mirrors.
"What are you looking for?"
"It should be here… or a little further along… Ah, here we are!"
With his face full of the cheer engendered by his regained sagacity, he showed me a brass tube which ran vertically down the wall and then curved towards us, ending in a trumpet.
"How idiotic not to have thought of that earlier," he exclaimed, slapping his forehead in frustration. "Albicastro's voice, which we heard on that occasion, and which seemed like that of a phantom, came from this: the old tube used to pass orders to the servants on other floors and which I showed you on the ground floor. That mad Hollander must have been on one of the lower floors near to one of the mouths of the tube. When he realised that we might be in this wretched place full of distorting mirrors, he began chanting the verses of that damned Sebastian Brant and his Ship of Fools and froze the blood in our veins," Atto concluded, revealing how frightened he had been last time.
Atto's conclusions were incontrovertible. The "mirror of folly" cited by the bizarre Albicastro fitted in perfectly with the perverse game whereby the Tetrachion mentioned by the madwoman Capitor relived in the mirrors of the Vessel. What was more, did not the Dutchman's little song warn that what appears in a looking glass is not always worthy of our confidence? At that moment, Atto recited:
He's stirring at the dunces' stew;
He thinks he's wise and handsome too,
And with his mirror form so pleased
You'd think he had a mind diseased;
Indeed he cannot see the ass
That's grinning at him from the glass!
"Do you understand those verses now?" he asked. "Albicastro made idiots of us, and took great pleasure in so doing. I really want to look him in the face, that insolent Dutchman, and demand an apology," he added, with a warlike expression on his visage, as he motioned me to follow him downstairs.
Armed to the teeth, we had been defeated by a few mirrors and our imagination. Now Abbot Melani wanted to unload his anger and shame on the only other occupant of the Vessel. The only flesh and blood one, at any rate.
Of course, we could not find him. Albicastro belonged to that rare class of persons who appear by surprise ("to make a nuisance of themselves," Atto added) and never when one looks for them.
Atto insisted on searching bath chambers, store rooms and the like, but it very soon became quite clear that there was no trace of the Dutchman in the whole of the Vessel.
"We fear what we cannot understand," I recited, reminding the Abbot of his own philosophising two days previously when I had taken the little dog in Borromini's perspective gallery for a colossus.
"Shut up and let us return to Villa Spada," he muttered, his face dark with anger.
We made the brief journey without exchanging a word. I was thinking. Every single one of the mysteries which we had encountered, and which had caused Abbot Melani or myself (or both) to tremble, had become clear in the end: the Dutchman had been walking on a cornice hidden from our view; the flowers from the mythical gardens of Adonis had turned out to be common plants like garlic and castor bean; the gallery of the Vessel which seemed to extend as far as the Vatican Hill was just a clever trick with mirrors; the infernal tongues of flame and the faces of dead souls which we had seen in Ugonio's den at the Baths of Agrippina, and which had succeeded in convincing me that I myself was dead, were the mere product of camphor vapours; the roaring monster which I feared was about to devour me at Palazzo Spada was in reality nothing but a lapdog, whose dimensions had been made to appear gigantic by the false perspective of the Borromini gallery; and, last of all, we had taken our own reflections in distorting mirrors for the Tetrachion. For one thing only we had found no explanation: the apparitions of Maria, Louis and Fouquet in the gardens of the Vessel. The Abbot had invoked his theory of corpuscles and hypothetical hallucinogenic exhalations, but nothing more; unlike all the other mysteries, we had found no concrete solution to this one.
While these thoughts were turning around in my mind, Abbot Melani continued to hold his peace. Who knows, perhaps he too was asking himself the same questions, I thought, glancing at him out of the corner of my eye.
Flere, my reflections were brought sharply to an end. I saw Abbot Melani grow pale, paler than the ceruse on his face. We had come by now to the gates of the Villa Spada and Atto was staring at something in the distance.
Amidst the perfume of the flower beds, there reigned a great confusion of valets, porters, secretaries, with trunks and travellers' baskets of provisions being hauled onto departing carriages, and a going and coming of eminences and gentlemen amiably taking their leave of the master of the house, making appointments to meet at a degree ceremony at the Sapienza University, at some consistory, or at a mass for the repose of somebody's soul.
I was just wondering what could have so altered the Abbot's humour, when I saw one of Sfasciamonti's catchpolls pointing out a stranger to us. The shock to my heart was tremendous. I could already see myself accused by the parish priest of Saint Peter's of breaking into the basilica, identified by the Bargello's men, tried and cast into a dungeon for twenty years. Terrified, I looked at Atto. I did not even attempt to flee. At Villa Spada, everyone knew where I lived. The stranger's face was tense, tired, quivering. Soon he confronted us.