Imprimatur (25 page)

corpisantari.

Ugonio slowly reached out and surrendered to my companion the paper which he had scrunched up into a ball. Then without warning he set to kicking and belabouring Ciacconio, calling him, "You sour saggy old scumskinned, batskinned, sow-skinned, scrunchbacked, sodomitic skinaflinter, you puking mewlbrat, you muddy-snouted, slavering, sar­cophagous shitebeetle, you bumsquibcracking sicomoron, you slimy old scabmutcheon-shysteroo,you shittard, sguittard, crackard, filthard, lily-livered, lycanthropic, eunichon-bastradion-bumfodder-billicullion- ballockatso, you gorbellied doddipol, calflolly jobbernol, you grapple- snouted netherwarp, you clarty-frumpled, hummthrumming, tuzzle- wenching, placket-racket, dregbilly lepidopter, you gnat-snapping, weedgrubbing, blither-blather, bilge-bottled, ockham-cockam peder- aster," and other epithets which I had never heard before, yet which sounded somewhat grave and offensive to my ears.

Abbot Melani did not deign so much as to glance at these painful theatrics and spread out the sheet of paper on the ground, trying to restore it to its original appearance. I craned my neck and read with him. The left side and the right were, alas, badly torn and almost all of the title had been lost. Fortunately, the remainder of the page was perfectly readable:

"It is a page from the Bible," said I with complete assurance.

"I think so too," the abbot agreed, turning the paper in his hand. "I should say that it is..."

"Malachi," I guessed without hesitation, thanks to the fragment of a name in the upper margin which had almost completely survived recent events.

On the back there was no printing whatsoever but an unmistak­able bloodstain (which I had already seen through the page). More blood covered what must be part of a title or heading.

"I think that I understand," said Abbot Melani, turning to Ugonio who was inflicting his last, listless kicks upon Ciacconio.

"What have you understood?"

"Our two little monsters thought they had made a good find."

He proceeded to explain to me that, for the
corpisantari
, the most precious booty came, not from the mere sepulchres of early Christians, but from the glorious tombs of saints and martyrs. It was, however, not easy to recognise these. The criterion for identifying such tombs had caused a never-ending dispute, which had dragged no few learned churchmen into endless controversies. According to Bosio, the bold Jesuit explorer of subterranean Rome, martyrs could be distinguished by symbols such as palms, crowns and vases con­taining grain or flames of fire, carved upon their tombs. But absolute proofs were glass or terracotta ampoules—found in tombs or sealed with mortar into their outer walls—containing a reddish liquid which was generally regarded as the holy blood of the martyrs. This burn­ing question was long-debated and a special commission eventually cleared the air of all uncertainties, ruling that
pabnam et cas illorum sanguine tinctum pro signis certissimis habendas esse.

"In other words," concluded Atto Melani, "images of palms, but above all the presence of a small ampoule full of red liquid, were a sure sign that one was in the presence of the remains of a hero of the Faith."

"So these phials must be very valuable," I suggested.

"Of course, and not all of them are handed over to the ecclesi­astical authorities. After all, any Roman can dedicate himself to the search for antiquities: all he needs is an authorisation from the Pope (Prince Scipione Borghese, for instance, did it, perhaps because the Pope was his uncle) and he can dig, and all he then needs is to find some obliging Doctor of the Church to authenticate any remains that are brought to light. After that, if he is not consumed by devotion, he will sell it. But there is no test to distinguish the true from the false. Whoever finds some fragment of a body can always claim that it is a relic of a martyr. If this were only a problem of money, one could pass over the matter. The fact is that these fragments are blessed and be­come objects of adoration, the object of pilgrimages, and so on."

"And has no one ever tried to clarify matters?" I asked incredu­lously.

The Society of Jesus has always enjoyed special facilities for excavating the catacombs, and has arranged the transport of various bodies and relics to Spain, where the holy remains are received in great pomp, and end up all over the world, even as far away as the In­dies. In the end, however, the followers of Saint Ignatius themselves came to the conclusion, and confessed as much to the Pontiff, that there was no guarantee that such relics really did belong to saints and martyrs. There were cases, such as the corpses of children, in which proof was difficult. Thus the Jesuits were compelled to ask that the principle of
adoremus quod scimus
be introduced: only relics which can scientifically or reasonably be proved to have belonged to a saint or a martyr should be objects of veneration."

That was why, explained Atto Melani, it was eventually decided that only ampoules of blood could provide conclusive proof.

"And thus," concluded the abbot, "even ampoules are destined to enrich the
corpisantari
and to end up in some chamber of marvels or in the apartments of some very rich and very naive merchant."

"Why naive?"

"Because no one can swear that what the phials contain is the blood of martyrs, or even blood at all. I have examined one, pur­chased at great cost from a disgusting individual similar to... What is he called? Ciacconio."

"And what did you conclude?"

"That the reddish mud in the ampoule, watered down a little, consisted mostly of brownish earth and flies."

The problem was, explained Abbot Melani, returning to the present, that Ciacconio, after bumping into our thief, had found this page from the Bible stained with what showed every appearance of being blood.

"And finding, or better, selling the beginning of a chapter from the Bible stained with the blood of Saint Calixtus, to name but a name, can bring in plenty of money. That is why his friend is gently reproving him for having revealed to us the existence of the sheet of paper."

"But how is it possible," I protested, "that the thousand-year-old blood of a martyr could be found on a modern printed book?"

"I shall answer you with a story, which I heard last year in Ver­sailles. A fellow in the market was trying to sell a skull which was, he guaranteed, that of the famous Cromwell. One of the would-be buyers pointed out to him that the skull was too small to be that of the great leader, who notoriously had a rather large head."

"And what did the vendor reply?"

"He replied: 'Of course, this was the skull of Cromwell as a child!' That skull, I am assured, was sold—and at a price. Think of it, Ugo­nio and Ciacconio should have no trouble selling their scrap of Bible stained with the blood of Saint Calixtus."

"Shall we return the page to them, Signor Atto?"

"Not for the time being," said he, raising his voice and turning to the
corpisantari.
"We shall hold onto it and we shall return it to them only when they have done us a couple of favours."

And he explained what we needed.

"Gfrrrlubh," assented Ciacconio, in the end.

Once he had imparted their instructions to the
corpisantari
, who van­ished into the darkness, Atto Melani decided that it was time to re­turn to the Donzello.

At that juncture, I asked him whether he did not find it some­what strange to discover in these galleries a bloodstained page of the Bible.

"That page, in my view, was lost by the thief of your little pearls," was his only reply.

"And how can you be so sure of that?"

"I did not say that I was sure. But think for one moment: the paper seems to be new. The bloodstain (if it is blood, and I think so) does not seem old. It is too vivid. Ciacconio found it, if he was telling—sorry, if he was gurgling—the truth, immediately after his meeting with a stranger in the gallery into which the thief disap­peared. Does that not suffice for you? And if we speak of the Bible, who does that bring to mind for you?"

"Padre Robleda."

"Precisely: a Bible smacks of priests."

"Still, the meaning of some details escapes me," I objected.

"What are you getting at?"

"'-primum
' is all that remains of
'Caput primum\
while '
Malach?
is clearly what remains of
'Malachiae’.
This made me think that under the bloodstain there must have been the word
'profetia'. So
here we have the chapter of the Bible concerning the prophet Malachi," I observed, remembering the lessons received during my almost monastic child­hood. "However, I cannot understand the 'nda' in the first line at the top. Have you any idea, Signor Atto? I have none whatever."

Abbot Melani shrugged his shoulders: "I certainly cannot claim to be an expert on the matter."

I found such a profession of ignorance concerning the Bible sin­gular, coming from an abbot. And, when I came to think of it, his affirmation that "a Bible smacks of priests" sounded strangely crude. What kind of an abbot was he?

Meanwhile, we were returning into the conduit, and Melani had resumed his considerations. "Anyone can possess a Bible, indeed the inn has at least one, is that not so?"

"Certainly, two, to be precise; but I know both of them well and the page which you are holding could not have come from either."

"Of course. But you will agree with me that the page could have come from the Bible of any one of the guests at the Donzello, who might easily have brought a copy of the Scriptures with him on his travels. It is a pity that the tear has removed the ornate initial capital that opens the chapter, which surely comes from the beginning of a chapter in the Book of Malachi, and which would have helped us to trace the origin of our find."

I did not agree with him: there were other strange things about that paper, and I pointed them out to him: "Have you ever seen a page from the Bible printed on one side only, like this one?"

"It must be the end of a chapter."

"But the chapter has hardly begun!"

"Perhaps the prophecy of Malachi is unusually brief. We cannot know, the last lines have been torn off, too. Or perhaps it is common printing practice, or an error, who knows? Be that as it may, Ugonio and Ciacconio, too, will give us a hand: they are too afraid that they will never see their filthy scrap of paper again."

"Speaking of fear, I did not know that you had a pistol," said I, remembering the firearm with which he had threatened the two

corpisantari.

"Nor did I know that I had one," he replied, looking at me obliquely with a wry grin, and he drew from his pocket the shining wooden metal-tipped barrel, of which the stock seemed to have disappeared inexplicably in Melani's hand when he brandished the instrument.

"A pipe!" I exclaimed. But how is it possible that Ugonio and Ciacconio did not see that?"

"The light was poor, and my face was threatening enough. And perhaps the two
corpisantari
did not wish to find out how much harm I could do them."

I was stupefied by the simplicity of the stratagem, by the noncha­lance with which the abbot had carried it off and by its unexpected success.