The Council of Egypt Read online

  He listened to the courier’s message, and it struck him as a good omen that the Viceroy’s summons should reach him as he was about to assign a number to the viceroy the butcher had dreamed about.

  To the courier he said, “I am coming at once,” and he asked the butcher, “In your dream, did the Viceroy appear in a public or private aspect?”

  “What?” said the butcher.

  “I said, was he with company, in a procession, or alone?”

  “The way I dreamed him, it was face to face, just the two of us.”

  “Viceroy eleven... couscous thirty-one... four for the pig...”

  “But the pig was laughing,” the butcher pointed out.

  “He was laughing hard.”

  “Did you see him laugh, or did you only hear him?”

  “Now that I come to think of it, it seems to me that when he began to laugh I stopped seeing him.”

  “Then add seventy-seven... and forty-five for the neighbor woman.”

  He signaled to the courier and moved toward the door.

  “Father!” the butcher shouted. “You’ve forgotten about – the rest of that last part!”

  “If you really want to include that,” the Chaplain said, and he flushed, “then make it eighty. But there can be only five numbers. Drop either the eighty or the seventy-seven.”

  “Not the eighty, for sure,” the butcher said.

  The Chaplain went out, silently consigning the fellow to the Devil.

  He found the Viceroy in a state of agitation. He had no time even to bow before Caracciolo propelled the Moroccan Ambassador virtually into his arms.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know Arabic” – the Viceroy’s pleasantry was edged – “or I’ll pack you off to the Vicaría.”

  “A little, yes, I know a little Arabic,” Don Giuseppe said.

  “Good. Then show this fellow around, give him anything he asks for, satisfy every wish, every whim – prostitutes, princesses, whatever he wants.”

  “Excellency!” Don Giuseppe protested, pointing to the Jerusalem cross on his chest.

  “Take it off, go to the stews yourself. It would be no novelty, I warrant,” the Viceroy answered, with a malicious smile.

  The Ambassador, henceforth chained to Vella like a blind man to his guide, had not asked to go to bordellos, luckily, for all that he did allow his slow, rheumy glance to slip like flowing honey down the ladies’ low décolletages. Instead, he had asked to see everything Arabic that was to be found in Palermo. This being the stipulation, the mood of each day depended on the extent to which Don Giuseppe could satisfy it; some days he scored well and some days he missed. Fortunately, Monsignor Airoldi had intervened and, with his passion for Sicilian history and all things Arabic, had become the Ambassador’s self-appointed guide while Don Giuseppe continued to act as interpreter. In this way, Monsignor had made a duty that was already lucrative for Don Giuseppe agreeable as well; he spent delightful evenings in the company of beautiful women, enchanted evenings of warm lights, silks, mirrors, beguiling music, delicate foods and wines, and illustrious company.

  The realization that all this could not last beyond the departure of Abdallah Mohammed ben-Olman began to gnaw at the heart of Don Giuseppe Vella. The prospect of going back to the struggle to make ends meet on a miserly benefice and the uncertain proceeds from doling out numbers seemed to him a bitter and despairful fate.

  And so, from fear of losing pleasures he had scarcely yet savored, from innate avarice, and from an obscure scorn for his fellow creatures, Giuseppe Vella seized the opportunity that fate offered him, and with sober, lucid daring became the protagonist of a vast fraud.

  Chapter II

  On the 12th of January, 1783, Abdallah Mohammed ben-Olman departed. As the felucca set sail, his frame of mind was very like that of his erstwhile companion and interpreter – one of liberation and joy. It is true that the Ambassador had been a virtual deaf-mute, but Don Giuseppe had passed some uneasy moments. His heart, as the saying goes, had been in his mouth for fear that a gesture of impatience, an eloquent shrug of disappointment, might betray to Monsignor Airoldi and the others the fact that the interpreter was by no means so sure of his Arabic.

  “Good riddance to you and to your Devil,” Don Giuseppe murmured, as the felucca melted into the coppery hot horizon. And suddenly he discovered that he had forgotten, or had never known, the name of the Ambassador. For the purposes of his proposed fraud, he rebaptized him Mohammed ben-Osman Mahgia, and forthwith tested Monsignor’s reaction: “Our dear Mohammed ben-Osman Mahgia,” he said.

  “A dear friend, indeed,” Monsignor Airoldi said, “and what a pity that he wished to leave us so soon. His counsel would have been precious to you in the work you will be undertaking.”

  “We will remain in touch by letter.”

  “But you know how it is – to have the eye of such a man present, available... You would have brought the work forward together with more speed, with greater assurance... If Sicily were a kingdom in fact as it is in name, we could have had the ambassadorship to Palermo offered to – what is his name?”

  “Mohammed ben-Osman Mahgia.”

  “Ah, yes... But you will do very well without him, I am sure... Remember how eager, how warm my own concern in this is. Centuries of history and of civilization exhumed from the shadows and brought forth into the light of knowledge... Oh, it is a great work, my friend, a peerless work, to which your name will be forever bound, and even my own most modest one—”

  “Oh, Excellency,” Don Giuseppe demurred.

  “Yes, yes, the merit will be principally yours. I am – what shall I say – I am only your impresario... And, by the way, I am aware of your circumstances – your niece’s house, the noisy section of town, the uncomfortable quarters. My secretary is busy looking for a house suitable for you and your work, something decent, quiet...”

  “I am deeply grateful to Your Excellency.”

  “And I will see to it that you do not lack other signs of my benevolence – my interested benevolence, mind you, my interested benevolence,” he emphasized, smiling, and extended his hand for the Chaplain to kiss. Puffing and groaning slightly from the effort, he stepped up into his gilded sedan chair. The footman closed the door; from behind the glass, Monsignor gestured his farewell and blessing. Don Giuseppe, his hand on the Jerusalem cross on his chest, stood frozen in a deep bow that enabled him to restrain a rush of turbulent joy over a gamble risked and won.

  Sunk in his own thoughts, he walked home through the crowded Kalsa quarter; women pointed to him, children ran shouting behind him – “That’s the priest who was with the Turk” – “The Turk’s priest” – for as the Moroccan’s companion, he had become a well-known figure. Don Giuseppe did not even hear them. Tall and vigorous of frame, slow and solemn in carriage, the great cross of Jerusalem lying on his chest, he strode through that human dust, his olive-complexioned face grave and his eyes abstracted. His mind was busy juggling dates and names: like dice, they rolled in the Hegira, down the corridors of the Christian Era, and through the obscure, immutable centuries of the human dust of Kalsa; now they rolled together to form a figure or a human destiny, now they bounced noisily along blind passages of the past. The historians Fazello, Inveges, Caruso, the Cambridge Chronicle – all elements of his gamble, the dice of his game. “All I need is a method,” he told himself, “and attention, close attention.” And yet he could not fend off a feeling that the mysterious wing of piety would brush against his calculated fraud, and that human pain would be born from the dust of Kalsa.

  Chapter III

  “You, Excellency,” the Marquis di Geraci said, “have had the good fortune to find the Arabic codices. But I ask myself this: Where will scholars be able to turn when the day comes for them to write the history of the Holy Inquisition in Sicily?”

  “They will surely find documents that have been preserved in other offices, in other archives,” Monsignor Airoldi said in slight embarrassment. “And then there are c
hronicles and diaries.”

  “Excellency, you yourself have shown me that these are not the same. To have put the official records of the Holy Office in Sicily to the torch means an enormous, an irreparable loss! And the time – think of the time it will take to trace other documents that have been scattered here and there and everywhere, and to reassemble and collate them...As for diaries! A man hears some nonsense or other that is making the rounds and sets it down in his diary. Like the Marquis di Villabianca – he collects gossip! His diary will be a laughingstock a hundred years from now.”

  “But my dear Marquis, what can you do about it? The matter is finished and done with now. Our Viceroy saw fit to indulge in this caprice.”

  “If Your Excellency chooses to consider it a caprice, then it is the caprice of a pettifogger!”

  “Sh-h-h,” Monsignor put his finger to his lips and crossed himself.

  “To the Devil – forgive me, Excellency – I say to the Devil with him and his friends and his henchmen. I call bread bread and wine wine, and what Your Excellency calls caprice I call crime. To burn the archives of the Holy Inquisition! That is burning three centuries as if they were nothing! But it takes more than fire to burn three hundred years. A patrimony, a treasure that belongs to all men, and to us, most particularly to us of the nobility!”

  “Deus, judica causam tuam,” the lawyer Di Blasi said ironically. “The motto of the Inquisition, sir.” As everyone knew, the Viceroy had ordered it chiseled off the façade of the Palazzo Steri.

  The Marquis scowled at the young man. “Furthermore,” he continued, with greater heat, “I ask myself how the Archbishop could have let himself be dragged into actually witnessing such a sacrilege.”

  “It was no sacrilege. The Marquis Caracciolo wanted to give everyone an unmistakable message, a clear warning that times are about to change. That one must deal with a certain phase of the past as one deals with plague-infected clothing – burn it,” Di Blasi said.

  “About the participation of His Eminence, what do you want me to say? As our young lawyer friend so rightly points out, the times are changing,” Monsignor Airoldi said.

  “Some fellow by the name of D’Alembert,” the Prince di Cattolica interrupted, “has had a letter that our pettifogger wrote him about all this published in the Mercure de France. You would die laughing to read it, that’s how ridiculous it is. He says, can you imagine, that he wept when the Administrative Secretary publicly read out the decree ordering the archives to be destroyed... Did any of you see him weep?”

  “I was not present,” the Marquis said disdainfully.

  “I was there,” Di Blasi said, “and I assure you that the Viceroy was really moved. As was I.”

  “I’ll arrange to borrow the Mercure de France,” the Prince di Cattolica said, glancing scornfully at Di Blasi and turning to the Marquis di Geraci, “and I’ll have you read it. It’s laughable, I tell you, laughable.” He walked off laughing, but abruptly turned back and grasped the Marquis by the arm. “May I have a word with you?”

  The Marquis glanced around as if seeking help, and his cheeks puffed in impatience, but he followed.

  “The Marquis is viperous on the subject of the Viceroy,” Monsignor Airoldi explained to Don Giuseppe Vella, who was standing at his side. “Just imagine, it’s been hinted to him that he should no longer use certain titles – First Count of Italy, First Gentleman of the Two Sicilies, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. How can a man possibly go on living without those titles?”

  This flash of malice roused Giovanni Meli, who had appeared to be half asleep in an armchair. “And what about the Prince, too, poor fellow!” His face drooped compassionately, as if he truly shared in the Prince di Cattolica’s dilemma. “He wangles Naples into granting him an extension of six months to settle with his creditors, but no such thing, gentlemen. The Viceroy wishes him to pay them off at once. Ah, what times we live in!” He glanced down to shield the ironic sparkle in his eyes, and then looked up with a most candid and innocent air. “Not to mention the wretched Prince di Pietraperzia locked up in Castellammare for a mere nothing, for less than nothing, really. He simply gave hospitality and protection to a pair of assassins. Now I ask you, whenever in this world has a nobleman ended up in jail for such a thing?”

  “Unheard of! Unspeakable!” said Don Vincenzo di Pietro, who in passing had overheard the last words; he frowned with indignation.

  “The nobility, the salt of the earth of Sicily,” Giovanni Meli said.

  Don Gaspare Palermo concurred : “Well said, well said!”

  “And our privileges, hand in hand with the freedom of Sicily,” Don Vincenzo went on.

  “What freedom?” Di Blasi asked.

  “Not the freedom you mean, most certainly not,” Don Gaspare replied drily.

  “Equality!” Don Vincenzo cried banteringly, and then, changing his voice, he mimicked: “‘Inequality among men is repugnant to the sufficient mind.’ Sufficient mind, indeed! Fool’s talk.”

  Di Blasi appeared unperturbed, but the reference to an article of his published five years earlier wounded him, partly because the speaker’s manner and tone had been so uncivilly scornful and also because he himself no longer held a very high opinion of the essay; he felt now that he had made a mistake to publish it; it was approximate, inadequate – childish, in a word.

  “Very likely you find Don Antonino Pepi’s essay on the natural inequality of man more convincing,” he said, with light irony.

  “If Don Antonino Pepi has written that men are not equal, then I agree with him... But, just among ourselves, all these essays and articles, why, I would not wipe my behind with them.”

  “And you are right, sir!” Meli shouted. His fervor left Don Vincenzo perplexed and uncertain. But no, he told himself, somewhere in that enthusiasm lay a hidden sting, a poisoned thorn, for scribblers were all of a kind.

  Fortunately, it was time to sit down – to cards, that is – and everyone swarmed toward the game rooms, where the servants had already set up the tables. Don Gaspare and Don Vincenzo went off together.

  Meli, who had a taste for goading a companion into revealing his inner feelings, changed the subject. “Don Rosario Gregorio,” he said, addressing Vella, “is going around saying the most outlandish things. That you don’t know a word of Arabic, for example, and that you are inventing the contents of the codex of San Martino from scratch...”

  Vella started, but then said coldly, “Why does he not come and say these things to me? I would persuade him how mistaken he is... And then, too, I could benefit from his help, his learning. Instead of indulging in such slander, we could work together, we could collaborate on a task that is costing me only God knows what effort, what anxiety.” These last pitiable words were wrenched from him almost tearfully.

  “You see how meek he is, this chaplain of ours?” Monsignor Airoldi said to Meli. “A man of gold, patient, humble...”

  Vella arose. He had contrived to give his anger the semblance of offended virtue or resigned martyrdom.

  “If Your Excellency permits, I would like a moment to refresh my mind.”

  “By all means, by all means,” Monsignor urged him kindly.

  Don Giuseppe moved toward the rooms where the others were at cards. He took pleasure in watching money flow through the game, in seeing destiny leap from a card or a number, in observing the reactions of these ladies and gentlemen. It was considered ill-mannered, actually, to observe a game without taking part in it, but for a priest, who was forbidden by his means and by propriety to play games of chance, an exception to the rule was made. Don Giuseppe passed from one table to another, pausing where the play was fiercest. One game stirred him particularly; it was called biribissi, and it paid off at sixty-four to one; it was quite illegal, of course, thereby giving the players the added pleasure of flouting the intrusive, the ever-intrusive authorities. Sometimes with the playing of a single card, a single number, an entire estate crumbled: Don Giuseppe, who did not lack imagination, saw
the figures or numbers on the card dissolve and re-form as a tiny map of that estate – not idyllic, Arcadian fields, but real fields solidly bespeaking their rentals and revenues. And sometimes a gentleman-player did not have an estate left to wager; then he would stake the carriage that awaited him in the courtyard below, or a valet who was known to be particularly deft at dressing hair. There were such marked men, men fated to lose; at first, bad luck would glide like a serpent from one player to another, but then would come to coil about these men and throughout an evening nevermore abandon them.

  The women played absently, without passion, hardly ever for more than ready cash – silver scudi, silver onzas, silver ducats. In Don Giuseppe’s apprehension of that feminine world, silver was its quality or essence; the voices, laughter, music created an essence at once corporeal and illusory, reflected both in mirror and in echo; he responded confusedly to its fascination, stirred by desire and respect, prurience and chastity. This aroused no inner turmoil, however; his gratification came from allowing his eye to feast quietly on the scene before him.

  While the eye of Don Giuseppe took its pleasure, his anger now appeased and all God’s grace scattered before him in silver onzas and graceful bosoms, Monsignor Airoldi was saying to Meli and Di Blasi, “You see what he is like? Easily moved, impressionable, apprehensive... and particularly sensitive to the opinion of Gregorio, because he immensely admires Gregorio’s intelligence and learning. So he is quite unable to understand such an attitude – nor, in all truth, can I – such a mean, spiteful attitude. I am disturbed by it myself, I do admit. Out of respect for me he should be, if not silent, then at least circumspect.”