"The madwoman then invited me to step forward, and handed me the music. I already knew what she had asked me to sing, and there was no need to rehearse it even once. The accompaniment on the guitar was elementary and even the lunatic's modest musical ability was quite sufficient."
"What did you sing?"
"A little song by an anonymous poet that was quite well known at the time: the ' Passacalli della vita^' or 'Passacaglia of Life'."
"And was it well liked?"
Atto made a face which betrayed all the bitterness of that memory with the icy fear induced by a bad presentiment.
"Not one bit, alas. Indeed, it was from this that all the trouble began."
"What trouble?"
In lieu of a reply, Atto chanted to me with a sure but discreet voice the passacaglia which, accompanied by a visionary madwoman, he had intoned some forty years before in the presence of the King of Spain's bastard son:
Oh, how wrong you are to think That the years will never end -
We must die.
And our life is just a dream And as good as it may seem It will very soon have passed
Die we must.
Just forget the medicine You 'll have no use for quinine All those cures are just a lie -
We must die.
Oh, when singing you can die Or when playing lute and fife Leave your love and lose your life -
We must die.
And when dancing you may die, Drinking ale or eating pie,
Dust can but return to dust,
Die we must.
Maidens, youths and little babes, All men move towards their graves -
We must die.
Sick or sound, brave or poltroon, Death will have us late or soon
We must die.
If this you will not contemplate, It already is too late All your senses you have lost, And you've given up the ghost -
Die we must.
Then he wiped a veil of perspiration from his brow. He seemed to be living a second time the remote, chilling moments in which he realised that he had been made the instrument of some oblique warning to Mazarin.
At the end of the song, Atto cast a furtive glance at His Eminence. The Cardinal was as white as a sheet. He had in no wise lost control of his emotions, nor had he betrayed any annoyance, yet the castrato, who knew every wrinkle in his face, had clearly discerned his unexpressed fear.
"You see," Abbot Melani instructed me, "if you would truly know great statesmen, you must needs have spent no little time in their close retinue. That is because whoever governs a state needs to be a master of dissimulation, so that no one can fathom his nature. However, through the position which I had occupied, I was able to observe His Eminence from close quarters for quite some time. The Cardinal, who was by nature rather fearless and determined, feared only one thing: death."
"But how can that be?" I asked, astonished; "I thought that cardinals, princes and ministers, who are so close to the secrets and machinations of states, were… how can I put it?…"
"Somewhat more distanced from these things because distracted by the high demands of affairs of state, is that not what you thought? Absolutely false. You must know that the power which such eminent personages exercise in no way saves them from the same phantasms as beset the humble. That is because human beings are always and quite invariably made of the same substance, and indeed the fact of rising among the learned and influential exposes one to the risk of imagining oneself to be godlike, so that it becomes hard to resign oneself to the fact that Our Lady Death will sooner or later come and make us equal to the least of her subjects."
Thus, Cardinal Mazarin had for some time been engaged in a vain struggle with the spectre of death, against which every effort must in the end prove in vain. The macabre song which Capitor had made Atto sing seemed chosen to perturb the Cardinal's already unquiet conscience.
"Myrrh was one of the Three Magi's gifts to Our Lord," I observed.
"Precisely. It is a symbol of mortality, since it is scattered on corpses," remarked Melani.
The second present too concealed a recondite message. The incense which it contained, whose penetrating odour Capitor had spread through the air, is indeed used in holy places and the Three Magi gave it to the Christ Child in acknowledgement of his divinity.
Many, then, were the aspects of His Eminence evoked and honoured by those gifts: his charge as a Cardinal and ecclesiastic, represented by incense, and his nature as a mortal man, of which the emblem was myrrh.
"Lastly, the pedestal of the globe, which was in solid gold, was a sign of regal power: a homage to that of Mazarin, the Queen's lover and the absolute master of France, the most magnificent and powerful state in Europe and in the whole world," Melani commented gravely, "like unto Our Lord, who is called King of Kings."
The three objects, in sum, symbolised the three gifts which Our Lord received from the three Magi: gold, incense and myrrh; or the symbols of royal power, divinity and mortality.
"Capitor, His Eminence is grateful to you," said Queen Anne, dismissing her with benevolent ease, seeking to change the subject and to save everyone from embarrassment. "Now, let us invite the orchestra in," she concluded, gesturing that the doors should be opened.
Outside the room, a small crowd of musicians had indeed gathered, whose services Monsieur had commanded, together with a little table so laden as to relieve the guests' stomachs, once their ears had been catered for.
The doors were duly opened and the crowd of players began politely to take their places in the room, filling it with a growing hubbub. At the same time, groups of valets, panting at the effort, were bringing in tables already laid to satisfy the royal appetite. A little further off, there followed the obsequious multitude of courtiers, pressing forward keenly as they waited to be allowed to enter and partake of the remainder of the entertainment.
Louis, Mazarin and the Queen Mother were already distracted by this coming and going when Capitor, who was on the point of making way for the concert and the banquet, fixed her gaze one last time on the Cardinal.
"A virgin who weds the crown brings death," she declaimed, smiling, in a loud and clear voice, "which will be accomplished when the moons join the suns at the wedding."
Then she bowed and disappeared with her faithful retinue of birds into the human clouds of musicians and servants now bursting into the room in joyous disorder.
"Only then did Don John set aside his haughtiness," said Atto. "He turned to the Cardinal and the Queen begging their pardon on behalf of the madwoman. He admitted that her performances were supposed to be an entertainment, yet sometimes they were practically incomprehensible and, even when she seemed to overstep the limits of decency, she did not do so out of discourtesy but drawn by her bizarre and inconstant nature, et cetera, et cetera"
A madwoman could be forgiven for some madness, Abbot Melani reasoned, but Capitor's eccentricities that evening seemed all too much like threats; and Don John did not want to be thought of as having commissioned those hostile words.
The mad clairvoyant had made Atto sing a song that spoke of death and its ineluctability. Before that, she had offered the
Cardinal three costly objects, which alluded to his being a Cardinal — which was true — to his being a King, which was almost true, but inopportune, Mazarin being the Queen's secret lover; and lastly that he was destined to die: undeniably true, but no one likes to be reminded of that twice in the same evening.
The sonnet even contained oblique references — to the inconstancy of fortune, the weight of failures — which no one would have dared to mention in the presence of the First Minister of the most powerful kingdom in Europe.
In the end, taking advantage of the arrival of the orchestra and of the valets bearing in the banquet, Capitor had escaped, leaving His Eminence a last menacingly allusive message.