Other indistinct voices wove into each other and unwove in occult counterpoint.
It was only then, after becoming aware of the existence of other beings around me, that I broke the frail shell of my torpor.
Like a new Lucifer cast down from paradise, I felt a sinister, warm smoke envelop my limbs and engulf me ever more in the viscous belly of the Inferno.
"Let's get him out of there," said one of the voices.
I tried to move an arm or a leg, if I still had any. It worked; I raised a foot. This new and promising development, came, however, mixed with an unexpected sensation.
"What a stink!" said a voice.
"Let's both work together."
"He owes his life to the shit, ha ha!"
I was not dead, nor had I smashed into the hard paving stones of the courtyard, even less been engulfed in helclass="underline" I was being lifted out of a cartful of warm, smoking manure.
As Sfasciamonti was to explain to me afterwards, while freeing my back of a few lumps of manure, I had ended my fall in a colossal mountain of fresh dung parked there during the night by a yokel who intended to sell it in the morning, for use as compost, to the superintendent of Villa Perretti.
Thus, by a pure miracle, I had not broken my neck. But when I had fallen onto the horrid heap of excrement, I had remained in a swoon, showing no signs of life. The onlookers who had meanwhile gathered were worried; someone made the sign of the cross. Suddenly, however, when the pilgrim confraternity passed by, I had moved my head and blinked. "'Tis the Lord's doing," exclaimed a little old man. "The confraternity's prayers have resuscitated him."
Up above, Sfasciamonti, distracted by my fall and anxious about my fate, had allowed our man to get away when, rather than face the catchpoll's wrath, he had let himself drop to a lower rooftop, continuing his flight on the surrounding terraces. My ally who, with his weight, would have run the risk of falling through some skylight, was compelled to abandon the chase. Once down the stairs, he had dragged me out from the manure cart with the help of a market gardener, there to sell his produce on the nearby market of Campo de Fiore, which was just about to open.
'"Tis an accursed mess," said Sfasciamonti, as he led me to a nearby vendor of old clothes to fit me out with clean apparel.
"The Chiavarino had this in his hands — anything but a spyglass."
From a dirty grey cloth he pulled out the device which I had seen him brandishing victoriously when he burst out from the stairs onto the terrace, at the unforgettable moment when I had a knife pressing against my guts.
The apparatus, which had emerged badly from the night's adventures, was reduced to a mass of twisted metal, in which one could with some difficulty discern what had once been a microscope. The only parts remaining in one piece were the base, a vertical cylinder and a pivot joining this with the rest (now lost) of the optical instrument. The cloth contained a collection of glass fragments (presumably, what remained of the lenses), three or four screws, a cog wheel and a half-crushed metal plaque.
"It must have gone like this," said Sfasciamonti reconstructing the events of the night, as we entered the old clothes shop. "This was stolen not long ago. I shall check today on whether any other sergeant knows anything of this. Chiavarino must have done the job himself, or perhaps he bought it off someone else. When he heard us at the door, he misunderstood our explanation, confusing the spyglass with this mackeroscopp."
"Microscope," I corrected him.
"Well, anyway, whatever it is. Then he left the house and went to the Piazza Navona. He must have been looking for some cerretano," said he while, nodding to the old clothes merchant, he led me to the inner courtyard where there was a little fountain, so that I could clean myself up.
"But why?"
"Did you not hear what the Maltese said? Chiavarino works for the German. And the German, as I told you, works with the cerretani," said he gesturing with his head in the direction of the terrace on Campo de Fiore. "The mackeroscopp was supposed to go to the German. Many real beggars spend the night at the Piazza Navona, but there are plenty of cerretani there too. Chiavarino went to one of these."
"You mean the one who was on the point of killing me!"
I exclaimed, remembering Sfasciamonti's scream when he saw that it was not Chiavarino.
"Of course. They met behind the fountain. Then the cerretano heard us and fled. We ran after him thinking it was Chiavarino, whom I know perfectly well and who looks quite different: tall and fair with a broken nose. And he's not cross-eyed, as the little monster whom we followed seemed to be."
So I had risked my life for nothing, I thought, while I took off my filthy clothes and washed quickly, for who could say where Atto's telescope might be, let alone his papers? My bones were all still aching from the fall into the manure, although it had been fresh and soft because of a generous admixture of straw.
Then there was a suspicion which gnawed at me. The Maltese did not know what a spyglass was, and probably did not know what a microscope, a far more unusual object, might be. Nor did Chiavarino know what the two devices were or what they were called, so much so that he confused the one with the other.
"How did you know that this was a microscope?" I asked the catchpoll, pointing to the little packet in which he had placed the fragments of the machine.
"What a question: 'tis written on it."
He opened the little bundle and showed me the wooden base of the apparatus, on which there was a gracefully framed little metal plaque.
MACROSCOPIUM HOC
JOHANNES VANDEHAR1US
FECIT
AMSTELODAMI MDCLXXXIII
"Microscope made in Amsterdam in 1683 by Jan Vandehaar," I translated.
He was right, it was written there. And those few simple Latin words even Sfasciamonti had been able to understand, however approximately.
"Someone will have to explain to me how you shoot with a thing like this mackeroscopp with its barrel full of glass," he muttered to himself, incapable of resigning himself to the fact that the device was not an arm.
Still confused by the breakneck piling up of events, not to mention the physical trials I had had to undergo, only then, while I was drying myself with a piece of cloth and dressing, did I remember to tell my companion of the provocation with which I had tried to confuse the cerretano, warning him that he would die at the hands of the German, and of the man's strange reply which I had by some miracle heard when I was falling from the terrace.
'"The German will kill you…' But you are insane!"
"Why? I was only trying to save my life."
"That's true, damn it, but you went and told an accomplice of the German that his principal would have him killed… The German's dangerous. 'Tis as well that it was, as you said, to save your life."
"Well, that's precisely why I'd like to know what the cerretano said. Perhaps he threatened that they'd come after me."
"What exactly did he say to you?"
"I couldn't understand, 'twas a phrase that made no sense."
"You see, it really was a cerretano. He spoke to you in cant."
"In what?"
"Cant. Gibberish."
"What's that, their jargon?"
"Oh, far more than that. 'Tis a real language. Only the cerretani know it, 'tis their own invention. They use it to talk in front of strangers without being understood. But thieves and vagrants of all kinds use it too."
"Then I understand what you're talking about. I know that criminals, when a sergeant is coming, say 'Madam's coming' or "Tis raining'."
"Yes, but those are things that everyone knows, like that martino means a knife, or a piotta is a hundred Giulio coin. Even many of the words of the Jews are well known; if I tell you that two people are agazim, you'll understand perfectly that I am talking of a couple of friends. But then there's a more difficult level. For instance, what does it mean if I say to you: 'The hunchback isn't corn of the first of May?'"