The Prague Cemetery Page 8

  These aspiring national liberators generally gathered at the Osteria del Gambero. In a dark narrow street, over a still darker doorway, a sign with a golden prawn read Osteria del Gambero d'Oro, Good Wine & Good Food. Inside was a room that also served as kitchen and wine cellar. Amid smells of salami and onions, customers drank and sometimes played morra. More often than not we passed the night, conspirators without a plot, dreaming of imminent insurrections. I had learned to enjoy good food at my grandfather's house, and all that could be said about the Gambero d'Oro was that you could satisfy your hunger, provided you were not too fussy. But I needed to get out into society and escape from our Jesuit guests, so the Gambero's greasy food and my jovial friends were preferable to somber dinners at home.

  We would leave toward dawn, our breath heavy with garlic and our hearts filled with patriotic ardor, losing ourselves in a comforting mantle of fog, excellent for avoiding the attention of police spies. Sometimes we crossed the Po and climbed up to look back over the roofs and bell towers floating on the mist that covered the plain, while the faraway Basilica of Superga, already glinting in the sun, seemed like a lighthouse in the middle of the sea.

  But we students didn't just talk about the nation to come. We talked, as happens at that age, about women. Each in turn, eyes gleaming, recalled looking up at a balcony and catching a smile, touching a hand while passing on a staircase, a dried flower dropped from a missal and picked up (the braggart claimed) while it still held the perfume of the hand that had placed it between those sacred pages. I feigned annoyance, and acquired the reputation of being a Mazzinian of strict and upright morals.

  Except that one evening the most licentious of our companions announced that he had found in a chest in his attic, well hidden by his shameless, dissipated father, several of those volumes which in Turin were known (in French) as cochons, and not daring to lay them out on the greasy table of the Gambero d'Oro, he had decided to lend them to each of us in turn. When it came to me, I could hardly refuse.

  * * *

  Apart from the pleasures of coffee and chocolate, what

  I most enjoyed was appearing to be someone else.

  * * *

  Late one night, I leafed through those volumes, which must have been precious and valuable, bound as they were in morocco, spines with raised cords and red title labels, gilt page edges, gilt fleurons on the covers and some with coats of arms. They had titles such as Une veillée de jeune fille and Ah! monseigneur, si Thomas nous voyait! and I shuddered as I turned the pages and found engravings that sent streams of sweat trickling from my hair down my cheeks and neck: young women who lifted their skirts to reveal buttocks of dazzling whiteness, offered for the abuse of lascivious men — nor did I know whether to be more disturbed by their brazen rotundity or by the almost virginal smile of the young girl, whose head was turned immodestly toward her violator, her face illuminated with mischievous eyes, framed by jet-black hair parted into two side-knots; or still more terrifying, three girls on a couch with their legs open to display what should have been the natural defense of their virginal pudenda, one of them offering it to the right hand of a man with ruffled hair, who at the same time was penetrating the girl lying shamelessly beside her, while the third girl had her crotch nonchalantly exposed and with her lefthand was parting her cleavage with subtle prurience through her ruffled corset. And then I found the curious caricature of a priest with a wart-covered face, which on closer inspection was made up of naked men and women variously entwined, and penetrated by enormous male members, many of which hung in a line over the nape of the neck as if to form, with their testicles, a thick head of hair that ended in heavy ringlets.

  I do not remember how that turbulent night ended, when sex was presented to me at its most dreadful (in the biblical sense of the word, like the crash of thunder that arouses a sense of the sublime as well as a fear of devilry and sacrilege). I remember only that I emerged from that disturbing experience mumbling repeatedly to myself, like a litany, the phrase of some writer or other of sacred texts that Father Pertuso had made me learn by heart many years earlier: "The beauty of the body is only skin deep. If men could only see what is beneath the flesh, they would be nauseated just to look at women: all this feminine charm is nothing but phlegm, blood, humors, bile. Consider all that is hidden in the nostrils, in the throat, in the stomach . . . And we who are repelled by the very thought of touching vomit or ordure with the tips of our fingers, how can we ever want to embrace a sack of excrement?"

  Perhaps at that age I still believed in divine justice, and attributed what happened the following day to holy vengeance for that tempestuous night. I found my grandfather sprawled gasping in his chair, holding a crumpled sheet of paper between his hands. We called the doctor. I took the letter from him and read that my father had been fatally wounded by a French shell while defending the Roman Republic, in that June of 1849 when General Oudinot had been sent by Louis Napoleon to free the papal throne from Mazzini and Garibaldi's army.

  My grandfather was not dead, though he was already over eighty, but he shut himself up for days in a resentful silence, and no one knew whether this was out of hatred of the French, or of the papal troops who had killed his son, or of his son for having dared so irresponsibly to challenge them, or of all the patriots who had corrupted him. From time to time he let out plaintive sighs, alluding to the responsibility of the Jews in the events that were shaking Italy, just as they had devastated France fifty years earlier.

  Perhaps to feel closer to my father, I spent many long hours in the attic on the novels he had leftbehind, and I managed to intercept Dumas' Joseph Balsamo, which arrived by post when he could no longer read it.

  This wonderful book, as everyone knows, recounts the adventures of Cagliostro, and how he had plotted the affair of the queen's necklace, managing in a single stroke to morally and financially ruin Cardinal de Rohan, compromise the sovereign and expose the entire court to ridicule. Many believed that Cagliostro's fraud had so contributed to undermining the prestige of the monarchy that it contributed to the climate of disgrace that led to the Revolution of '89.

  Dumas goes further, and sees Cagliostro, alias Joseph Balsamo, as someone who intentionally organized not just a fraud but a political plot under the protection of universal Freemasonry.

  I was fascinated by the ouverture. Scene: Mont Tonnerre— Thunder Mountain. On the left bank of the Rhine, a few leagues from Worms, a range of desolate mountains begins — the King's Chair, Falcons' Rock, Serpent's Crest and, highest of all, Thunder Mountain. It was here, on the 6th of May 1770 (almost twenty years before the outbreak of the fateful Revolution), as the sun was setting behind the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral, almost dividing it into two hemispheres of fire, that a Stranger from Mainz climbed the slopes of the mountain, abandoning his horse at a certain point, until he was seized by several masked beings. After blindfolding him, they led him through the forest to a clearing where three hundred phantoms awaited him, wrapped in shrouds and armed with swords. They began to question him most carefully.

  What do you wish? To see the light. Are you ready to swear an oath? And a series of tests began, such as drinking the blood of a traitor who had just been killed and pointing a pistol at his head and pulling the trigger to prove his obedience, nonsense of that kind, reminiscent of Masonic rituals of the lowest order, well known to regular readers of Dumas, until the traveler decided to cut things short and turned disdainfully to the gathering, making it clear that he knew all their rituals and tricks, and that they should therefore stop play-acting with him, because he was something more than all of them, and was by divine right the head of that universal Masonic congregation.

  And he called for the members of the Masonic lodges of Stockholm, London, New York, Zurich, Madrid, Warsaw and various Asiatic countries, all of course already assembled on Thunder Mountain, to bow to his command.

  Why were Masons from throughout the world gathered there? The Stranger explained. He asked for the hand of
iron, the sword of fire, the scales of diamond to banish the impure from the earth — in other words, to humiliate and destroy the two great enemies of humanity, the throne and the altar (my grandfather had indeed told me that the motto of that despicable man Voltaire was Écrasez l'infâme). The Stranger then described how he, like all good necromancers of the time, had been alive for thousands of generations, since before the time of Moses and perhaps even Ashurbanipal, and had come from the Orient to proclaim that the hour had arrived. The peoples of all countries form one vast phalanx that is marching relentlessly toward the light, and France was the advance guard of this phalanx — let the true torch be placed in her hands on this march, and let her bring new light into the world. An old and corrupt king reigns in France who still has a few years to live. One of those present (Lavater, the great physiognomist) tried to suggest that the faces of his two young successors (the future Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette) revealed a kind and charitable disposition, but the Stranger (which the readers would probably have recognized by now as Joseph Balsamo, whom Dumas had not yet named) reminded him that there could be no concern for human pity when advancement of the torch of progress was at stake. Within twenty years the French monarchy had to be wiped offthe face of the earth.

  At this point each representative of each lodge from each country came forward offering men or wealth for the victory of the republican and Masonic cause, under the banner of Lilia pedibus destrue— Tread under foot and destroy the lilies of France.

  It didn't occur to me that a conspiracy of five continents might be an excessive way to change the constitutional rule in France. Anyone from Piedmont at that time would, in fact, have said the only powers existing in the world were France, certainly Austria, perhaps Cochin China far far away, but no other country was worthy of note, except of course the Papal States. From the picture created by Dumas (in reverence to that great writer), I wondered whether the bard had not discovered, in describing a single conspiracy, the Universal Form of every possible conspiracy.

  Let us forget Thunder Mountain, the left bank of the Rhine and those events, I said to myself. Let us imagine conspirators who come from every part of the world and represent the tentacles of their sect spread throughout every country. Let us assemble them in a forest clearing, a cave, a castle, a cemetery or a crypt, provided it is reasonably dark. Let us get one of them to pronounce a discourse that clearly sets out the plan, and the intention to conquer the world . . . I have known many people who feared the conspiracy of some hidden enemy — for my grandfather it was the Jews, for the Jesuits it was the Masons, for my Garibaldian father it was the Jesuits, for the kings of half of Europe it was the Carbonari, for my Mazzinian companions it was the king backed by the clergy, for the police throughout half the world it was the Bavarian Illuminati, and so forth. Who knows how many other people in this world still think they are being threatened by some conspiracy? Here's a form to be filled out at will, by each person with his own conspiracy.

  Dumas had a truly clear understanding of the human mind. What does everyone desire, and desire more fervently the more wretched and unfortunate they are? To earn money easily, to have power (the enormous pleasure in commanding and humiliating your fellow man) and to avenge every wrong suffered (everyone in life has suffered at least one wrong, however small it might be). And that is why in Monte Cristo he shows how to amass great wealth, enough to give you superhuman power, and how to make your enemies pay back every debt. But why, everybody asks, am I not blessed by fortune (or at least not as blessed as I would like to be)? Why have I not been favored like others who are less deserving? No one believes their misfortunes are attributable to any shortcomings of their own; that is why they must find a culprit. Dumas offers, to the frustration of everyone (individuals as well as countries), the explanation for their failure. It was someone else, on Thunder Mountain, who planned your ruin.

  On reflection, Dumas had invented nothing. He had merely put into story form what, according to my grandfather, Abbé Barruel had already shown. This led me to think, even then, that if I wanted to sell the story of a conspiracy, I didn't have to offer the buyer anything original, but simply something he already knew or could have found out more easily in other ways. People believe only what they already know, and this is the beauty of the Universal Form of Conspiracy.

  It was 1855. I was already twenty-five. I had graduated in law and still did not know what to do with my life. I spent my time in the company of old friends without feeling much enthusiasm for their revolutionary zeal, always expecting, skeptically, that they would be disappointed within a few months. Here once again was Rome recaptured by the pope, and Pius IX, having been a reformer, became more reactionary than his predecessors. Here all hope was fading, through misfortune or cowardice, of Carlo Alberto's becoming the harbinger of Italian unity. Here was the empire reestablished in France after violent socialist revolts had set all hearts alight. Here was the new Piedmont government sending soldiers offto fight a useless war in Crimea instead of liberating Italy.

  I could no longer read the novels that had taught me more than my Jesuits had ever managed to do — in France, a supreme council of the university, which (for some reason or other) included a bishop and three archbishops, had passed the so-called Riancey Amendment, imposing a five-centimes-per-copy tax on every newspaper that published a feuilleton in installments. This news was of little importance for those who knew nothing about the publishing business, but my friends and I immediately realized its implications: the tax was so punitive, French newspapers would be forced to stop publishing novels. The voices of those who had condemned the evils of society, such as Sue and Dumas, would be silenced forever.

  My grandfather, who was becoming increasingly confused, though at times quite aware of what was going on around him, complained that the government of Piedmont, which had been taken over by such Masons as d'Azeglio and Cavour, had been transformed into a synagogue of Satan.

  "You realize, my boy," he said, "the laws of that man Siccardi have abolished the so-called privileges of the clergy. Why abolish the right of asylum in holy places? Does a church have fewer rights than a police station? Why abolish the ecclesiastical court for priests accused of common crimes? Does the Church not have the right to judge its own? Why abolish prior religious censure on publications? Can anyone now say whatever they please, without moderation and without respect for faith and morality? And when our Archbishop Fransoni invited the clergy of Turin to disobey these measures, he was arrested as a common criminal and sentenced to a month's imprisonment! And now we have arrived at the dissolution of the mendicant and contemplative orders, almost six thousand monks. The state confiscates their property and says it will be used to pay parish stipends, but if you put together all the property from all these orders, you reach a figure that is ten . . . I'd say a hundred times as much as all the stipends throughout the kingdom, and the government will spend the money on schools, to give humble folk an education they don't need, or it will be used for paving the ghettos! And all under the motto of 'A free church in a free state,' where the only one that is truly free to abuse its power is the state. True freedom is man's right to follow the law of God, to be worthy of heaven or hell. And now instead, freedom means you can choose whatever beliefs and opinions you please, where one is the same as the other — and for the state it is all the same whether you are a Mason, a Christian, a Jew or a follower of the Great Turk. And no one cares about Truth."

  "And there it is, my son," he cried one evening, no longer able in his senility to distinguish me from my father, and now he panted and groaned as he spoke. "They are all disappearing: the Canons of the Lateran, Canons Regular of Sant'Egidio, Calced and Discalced Carmelites, Carthusians, Cassinese Benedictines, Cistercians, Olivetans, Minims, Friars Minor Conventual, Observant, Reformed and Capuchin, Oblates of Saint Mary, Passionists, Dominicans, Mercedarians, Servants of Mary, Oratorian Fathers, and the Poor Clares, Crucified Sisters, Celestines or Turchines, and the Baptistines
."

  And having recited the list like a rosary, becoming increasingly agitated and ending as if he had forgotten to take a breath, he ordered the civet to be served, made with belly pork, butter, flour, parsley, half a liter of Barbera, a hare cut into pieces the size of an egg (including the heart and liver), small onions, salt, pepper, spices and sugar.

  * * *

  "And when our Archbishop Fransoni invited the clergy of Turin to disobey these measures, he was arrested as a common criminal and sentenced to a month's imprisonment!"

  * * *

  He was almost consoled, but soon after this meal his eyes opened wide, and he passed away with a light belch.

  The clock strikes midnight and I realize I have been writing almost without interruption for far too long. However hard I try, I can remember nothing more about the years following my grandfather's death.

  My head reels.

  5

  SIMONINO THE CARBONARO

  Night of the 27th of March 1897

  Excuse me, Captain Simonini, if I intrude upon your diary, which I couldn't avoid reading. But it's through no wish of mine that I awoke this morning in your bed. You will have realized that I am (or at least believe myself to be) Abbé Dalla Piccola.

  I awoke in a bed that is not my own, in a strange apartment, with no trace of my cassock or my wig. Only a false beard beside the bed. A false beard?