Silence fell once again. He leaned against the wall, muttering some obscure imprecation.
I waited until he was calm, then I put the question to him.
"It really did look like him, did it not?"
"Let us go upstairs," said he, tacitly assenting.
Despite the many tales of phantoms, apparitions and manifestations of spirits which we all learn of from our most tender childhood and which, thanks to the power of suggestion predispose us to encounter such phenomena sooner or later, I had never witnessed so odd an occurrence.
As we climbed the spiral staircase to the first floor, I was turning over in my mind the absurdity of those visions: first, Maria Mancini, in other words, the Connestabilessa when still young, or whoever it may have been; now in gallant converse (and this was ridiculous, quite unimaginable) with the same royal lover whom Atto had attributed to her in his narration. I had first seen him in marble effigy, then in portraits (there was more than one in the Vessel) and now in flesh and blood: if the shy and absent-minded youth I thought I had seen in the garden really was made of flesh and blood.
I should have liked blindly to believe Atto's hypothesis that these were mere hallucinations due to the unhealthy air around the villa. Instead, I felt the solid marble of the stairs under my feet and, at the same time, the evanescent and perilous atmosphere of those visions. Willingly would I have escaped into dreams; instead, I found myself stuck fast in some shape-shifting marsh in which the past seemed blessedly to stagnate and, for a few instants, to weave before my confused eyes, in what seemed almost a play of light — an ignis fatuus — the broken threads of history.
There was, however, no time in which to find the answers, given that we were at that moment on the traces of a very different spectre: the phantom of Mazarin's terrors.
The staircase which led to the first floor was in the great hall, at the opposite end from the entrance and on the side facing east. At the top of it, we met with a surprise.
We had entered an enormous gallery, which I estimated to be no less than thirty yards long and four and a half yards wide. The floor was all paved with fine majolica tiles in three colours, each of which looked like a dice showing its sides in relief. The walls were covered in stucco work, all richly painted and gilded and, through the subtle interplay of volutes, naturally drew one's gaze upwards. Here, on the immense vault, we saw a marvellous fresco representing Aurora. Atto himself could not contain his stupefied amazement.
"The Aurora of Pietro da Cortona…" said he with his face turned upwards, briefly oblivious of the purpose of our search and the disquieting figures whom we had encountered.
"Do you know this painting?"
"When it was completed, over forty years ago, all Rome knew that a marvel had been born," said he with restrained emotion.
After the Aurora, in the next portion of the ceiling there followed a representation of Midday, and then an image of Night. The three frescoes thus followed suggestively the progress of daylight, from the first rays of dawn to the penumbra of sunset. The niches and smaller panels of the frieze were decorated with chiaroscuros, seascapes and many delightfully executed little landscapes.
In the spaces between the windows, one could on the long sides admire an impressive armoury: twelve great trophies of various arms both ancient and modern made of stucco modelled in bas-relief with metal enriched with gold, with a moral attached to each one of them, each referring to the value of defending body and spirit. In these admirable warlike cornucopias, there were swords and cannon, visors and cuisses, gorgets and scimitars, as well as spears, iron breastplates, mortars, slings, iron maces, pikes, arquebuses with ratchets, riding whips, standards, arrows, quivers, morions, battering rams, kettledrums, torches, military togas and much more still.
"Sfasciamonti would love all this ironmongery," observed Abbot Melani.
Every single object was decorated and completed with a Latin dictum: '"Abrumpitur si nimis tendas" '"If you draw it too far it will break'," translated Atto, reading with a little smile the inscription carved into a crossbow.
"'Validiori omnia cedunt '." '"All yield to the strongest'," I echoed him with the saying carved on a cannon.
"'Tis incredible," he commented. "There's not a corner, not a capital, not a window in the Vessel without a proverb carved on it."
The Abbot moved off without waiting for me, shaking his head, a prey to who knows what cogitations. I followed him.
"And the most absurd thing of all is that between these walls covered in wise maxims, what music do we hear?" he called out in a loud voice, "the folia… folly!"
He was right. The melody of the folia, played, so it seemed to me, on a string instrument, was following us ever more closely, almost as though it were accompanying our reading of the inscriptions.
The sudden revelation of that paradox set in motion in my head a disorderly whirl of questions and thoughts of which I myself could not yet glimpse the meaning.
"So you are no longer of the view that we imagined all this?" I asked.
"Far from it," he hastened to correct himself. "Even if in all probability that music is coming to us from some nearby villa where someone is perhaps improvising on the theme of the fo liar
After speaking thus, Melani moved on. On each of the long sides of the gallery there were seven windows. From the central ones, one could go out onto two balconies facing the opposite sides of the garden, east and west.
We turned instead to the opposite end of the gallery, facing south, in the direction of the road. The gallery ended in a semicircular loggia whose external facade was articulated by great arched windows. Moving even further, on a projecting platform which rested on the outer wall giving onto the street, there was a fountain. It took the form of two sirens lifting a sphere from which spurted a high jet of water. While enjoying that vision, the eye turned back and there, painted alfresco on the arch of the loggia, was a representation of Happiness, surrounded by its retinue of all the Blessings. The humble plashing of the fountain, careless of its own solitude, dispensed its sweet whisperings to the whole of the first floor. In the side fagades of that first floor, on the wall of the balconies, there were two other artificial springs (one of which I had already heard from the front courtyard below) which, together with the larger and more beautiful one under the loggia formed a lovely magic triangle of murmuring waters, filling the whole gallery with their music.
"Look!" I suddenly exclaimed.
On the panels of the door leading to one of the two loggias with fountains was the whole of Capitor's sonnet on fortune: FORTVNE
Friend, look well upon this figure,
Et in arcano mentis reponatur,
Ut magnus inde fructus extrahatur, Inquiring well into its nature…
"Here is the first clue!" exclaimed the Abbot triumphantly.
"Perhaps Capitor's three gifts which we seek are not far from here," I ventured.
We kept looking all around us. We saw that the semicircular loggia too, as well as the window openings and shutters, were covered in proverbs and sayings. One caught my eye.
'"From the private hatreds of the great spring the miseries of the people'," I read aloud.
Atto looked at me in some surprise. Was that not just what he was teaching me with his tale of the Sun King's misfortune in love, which had ended up by turning into a force of destruction?
"Look," said he suddenly, in a voice stifled by surprise.
Fascinated until that moment by the frescoes, the proverbs, the displays of arms and by the round loggia with its fountain, we at last turned our gaze to the other end of the gallery, facing north.