The Council of Egypt Read online

  “Your Excellency believes that Gregorio’s suspicions are entirely unfounded?” Di Blasi asked.

  “Entirely, my dear boy, entirely. I leave it for you to judge: we have to do here with a man of no culture, utterly lacking in any culture.” He turned to Meli. “You know him well, so you can speak out. Do you believe that Giuseppe Vella has any knowledge of literature or history?”

  “An ignoramus.”

  “Well, then, how can such a man fabricate out of nothing a whole historical period that I am competent, in some measure, to verify? How can such a man concoct a fraud that even Gregorio would find very difficult?... Believe me. Vella knows Arabic. And I will tell you one more thing: he knows only Arabic; in our own language he cannot so much as compose a letter.”

  Chapter IV

  The house that Monsignor Airoldi had procured for him was spacious and full of light; one side faced toward the open countryside and another on a small walled garden where he could stroll for relaxation or take his siesta. One room in the house had become a veritable alchemist’s den. Here Giuseppe Vella kept an assortment of inks; a selection of glues graduated as to color, density, and strength; sheets of a transparently thin, greenish gold leaf; whole reams of heavy antique paper; various metals; cups, matrices, and crucibles – in a word, all the tools and materials of fraud.

  His first step had been to unbind the codex page by page. He had then carefully shuffled the bundle of loose leaves like a deck of playing cards. Indeed, his was a game of chance, calling for great ability and involving high stakes; accordingly, he had not neglected the final, propitiatory gesture – he had cut the pack into two neat piles. Then he had patiently, painstakingly replaced the leaves in the binding. This done, the life story of Mohammed was adequately embroiled; his connection with events like the war of Dû ’Amarra and the Battle of Ohod had been severed; the revelations of the Koran, on the day of the Battle of Ohod, had been interspersed among a listing of converts; and so forth. But this was not enough. Now came the most delicate part of the task – the total corruption of the text, the transformation of the Arabic characters into characters that he had decided to call “Siculi-Arabic,” and that was nothing more than Maltese, the dialect of Malta, transcribed into the Arabic alphabet. That is, he was transforming an Arabic text into a Maltese text, but using Arabic rather than Latin characters; and at the same time he was converting a life of Mohammed in Arabic into a history of Sicily in Maltese. He did not waste much effort on the transformation phase, with the result that later Don Giuseppe Calleja, a Maltese who knew Arabic well, found himself unable to understand much of the text, and said that to him it appeared – only appeared – to be a Maltese document in Arabic characters.

  Don Giuseppe then embellished the codex with light, wriggling lines like the legs of a fly, and with dots and hooks and loops, which he distributed over each page with a sure and careful hand. He then covered each page with a colorless glue and, with a dexterous spatula, he spread gold leaf over it to provide a uniform patina and thereby make the new ink indistinguishable from the old. After these linguistic and highly delicate manual labors, he plunged into the other task, which would engage his knowledge and imagination to their fullest – to create out of nothing, or almost nothing, the entire history of the Moslems in Sicily.

  He would have dispensed gladly with what little of this history others had recorded or invented – very likely invented, he thought; he would have worked with more enthusiasm could he have abandoned himself freely to his imagination, to a frenzy of inventiveness. But Monsignor Airoldi was a meticulous student of everything ever written about Sicily up until his own day in Greek, Latin, and the languages of Europe. Also, there was that Rosario Gregorio, poised like a watchdog to seize and rend him to pieces. He must study, then, to equate imagination to whatever information was generally accepted; he must avoid what had befallen him in the early days of his adventure when, unfortunately, he had attributed the deeds of one personage to another – for example, assigning to Ibrahim ben-Aalbi the order to invade Sicily when it had been given instead by Ziadattallah. This particular equivocation had deeply perplexed Monsignor Airoldi, but his doubts had been soon dissipated by the prompt arrival of a medal especially struck off to endorse the reliability of the codex and the competence of its translator. This medal reached Monsignor Airoldi in the form of a gift from the grateful Moroccan Ambassador, but it had cost Don Giuseppe, this being his first such effort, an immense labor to make it at home.

  Another man would not have borne all this; his nerves would have been undone by the continual anxiety, the strained concentration on material that was both elusive and treacherous, not to speak of the mechanical labor as an engraver, a founder, and, in his own peculiar way, a restorer. Don Giuseppe, however, went about his work as happy as a lark. He was even getting plump; unfriendly tongues said that his skin glistened like the hide of a well-fed horse in the care of a good master. His sense of risk put him in his element, as did good food, money in his pocket, and the discreet portion of pleasure that he had finally attained as a possibility if not a fact of life.

  He arose with the dawn’s first light, after five or, at the most, six hours of sleep. His mind refreshed, he wrote down ten or so lines of what in the eyes of the world would be the translation of the Codex of San Martino, that is, the Council of Sicily; he checked them against chronological and genealogical charts that he had drawn up to prevent his lapsing into discrepancies or errors; if he still had doubts, he consulted the available texts; if even the texts could not dispel his uncertainty, he left a small blank space and with an asterisk flagged a few vague annotations at the bottom of the page so that Monsignor Airoldi could, according to his own best judgment, suggest an interpretation. Then he recopied it, garbling the passage with Oriental ambiguities and Italian ungrammaticisms. As an aid in devising the most colorful syntactical errors, he kept at his side the Rudiments of the Italian Language, by Abbot Pierdomenico Soresi.

  Then a pause to refresh himself: hot chocolate; a slice of the soft sponge cake that the nuns of the Pietà faithfully supplied; a satisfying smoke; and a walk in the garden which, still glittering with frost, breathed a grateful freshness. At such moments, Don Giuseppe’s senses, quickened by the Sisters’ sponge cake – by its color and consistency rather than by its flavor – were intoxicated: the fraudulent world he was delineating surged up like a wave of light to invade, penetrate, and transform reality. Out of the elements of water and woman and fruit flowed the sweetness of being alive, and Don Giuseppe surrendered to it like any governor or emir whose existence he daily invented.

  His labors allowed for no prolonged self-indulgence, however, and he returned indoors to his difficult task, his progress determining whether or not he would tranquilly enjoy the lunch that, killing two birds with one stone, he prepared over the fire in which he tempered his alloys. Then a brief respite in the garden, under the pergola, where he would drift into a light sleep. Finally, perhaps an hour dedicated, as he put it, to embellishing the codex or, now and again, to designing medals and coins.

  Thus the hour of the Ave Maria arrived; the stroke of the bell almost always found him on the street, on his way to Monsignor Airoldi’s palace or another rendezvous or to some evening gala.

  As for the Mass that he was in duty bound to recite every morning, thanks to the onerous work he was engaged in, he had secured permission to say it before the little altar he had had set up in his house. But often it quite slipped his mind.

  Chapter V

  The days rolled by and sank, one after another, into that shadowy chaos from which, with patient study and sturdy fantasy, Giuseppe Vella was evoking caliphs, imams, and emirs. In the other world that Don Giuseppe now assiduously frequented, however, time was punctuated by the incursions of Caracciolo, and these “Caracciolisms,” as they were termed, provoked a frenzy of scorn and anger.

  The Prince di Trabia had already taken pen in hand, in the name of the entire nobility: “Each day our fervid p
rayers ascend to Heaven that the Hearts of Our Sovereigns may be moved to release us from an enslavement more cruel than that suffered by the Children of Israel in Babylon. The laws and decrees of the King are held in utter disrespect here! Fiat upon fiat flows from an administration more harsh than was ever that of the Divan. Who among us does not long to abandon all public responsibility and withdraw into a welcome retirement but certain mutual interests must be protected and oblige us to remain in a country that has been transformed into a maze of the direst dangers and disasters.” The letter was addressed to the Marquis della Sambuca, Minister at the Court in Naples. The reference to the Divan had blossomed spontaneously from the Prince’s pen because there was so much talk about the Council of Sicily that Vella was translating and that Monsignor Airoldi regularly reported on in the drawing rooms of Palermo. Flotsam out of The Arabian Nights now speckled the mirror of fashion; Vella, seemingly so closed and morose, gave the ladies the impression that he bore within him the secret, the mysterious, erotic dimension of those nights; a sweep of their own fans unfurled scenes of extraordinary couplings and strenuous pleasures inspired by those same fabulous nights, but because the fans were imported from France and judged to be contraband, they were often sequestered and publicly burned by the executioner before the Palazzo Steri.

  Not only fans, but every fashion came from France and flourished lushly in a society that was a labyrinth, if labyrinth at all, of voluptuousness and indolence, titillated only by the hazards of biribissi and adultery. True, Caracciolo made himself something of a nuisance. The ladies were now restrained from wearing the liliform cross, green on a field of peacock blue, that identified families of the Inquisition and, by extension, conferred civil immunity upon the wearer; thus it might befall a highborn lady who had permitted herself some caprice, some indiscretion, to be arrested like any streetwalker – as had, indeed, happened to the Princess di Serradifalco. Then there was the tax on carriages, together with the sequestration of those whose owners refused to pay – the Marchioness di Geraci, the Duke di Cesarò, to name two. And the arrest of the Duke di Sperlinga, the pretext being a murder he had committed in only heaven knows what fit of nerves. Not to mention the nine government posts, all generously remunerated, that henceforth would be filled not by noblemen but by ordinary state employees. Or the five prelatures, with their truly notable stipends, of which the Church had been relieved. Caracciolisms followed one upon the heels of another, to the detriment of the Church and her unfortunate priests: a prohibition against accepting the traditional obol for funeral services; a prohibition against begging for Masses and works of charity; prohibition of this, of that, with not a day passing that did not bring its fresh vexation and disclose the Viceroy poking his Voltairean nose into the business of religion.

  On a late June afternoon, a storm of compassion for this condemned religion shook the nobles as they chatted at their club on the Piazza Marina, fanned by a cooling breeze that swept in from the sea. The Feast of Santa Rosalia was approaching, and Caracciolo had decided to economize; that is, to reduce from five to three the clays of public illumination and fireworks offered as tribute to the Saint. A decision so grave, this, that not even the few, the very few, nobles who were somehow devoted to the Viceroy, had the courage to defend him. They – Regalmici, Sorrentino, Prades, Castelnuovo – stood silent while the tempest beat about them. Only the lawyer Francesco Paolo Di Blasi held his ground, despite his being a pettifogger himself and, as he lived on an income of only a thousand onzas more or less, not entirely at home in aristocratic circles.

  Baron Mortillaro, acting in the name of the Palermitan Senate, had already forwarded a petition to the King protesting the Viceroy’s blasphemous decision. At Court, the petition would be supported by a sister of the Baron, who was married to a Spanish diplomat. The outcome – His Majesty’s displeasure and disgrace for the Viceroy – was expected by return post.

  “What’s more, he supports the Jansenists!” The Prince di Pietraperzia’s voice rose to a thundering finale.

  “The Jansenists?” The young Duke della Verdura was appalled, although he was not sure precisely who the Jansenists were.

  “Exactly, the Jansenists,” the Prince confirmed.

  “I believe that the Duke would like to know who the Jansenists are,” Di Blasi suggested.

  “Yes,” the young Duke said.

  “Well, the Jansenists are people who are mucking up the business of grace and so on to suit themselves... St. Augustine... In other words, a... a kind of heresy... But you,” he turned, purpling, on Di Blasi, “why are you meddling in this? If the Duke wants to know who the Jansenists are, let him ask his confessor. When it comes to matters of faith, too many cooks spoil the broth, I say.”

  “But you sounded so horrified when you said the Viceroy protects Jansenists—”

  “Yes, my dear sir, he does protect them. Any and everything that can tear religion down and destroy it, that he protects.”

  “You know for a certainty, do you, that the Jansenists can tear religion down and destroy it?”

  “That’s what I’ve been told. And if you want to know, the person who told me was—”

  “Was your confessor, naturally.”

  “My confessor. And what he knows about doctrine would do for an army.”

  “Would an army know what to do with his doctrine, do you think?”

  “You have a knack for getting me off the subject. What has an army to do with it? We were talking about the Feast of Santa Rosalia, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “So... The Feast should last five days, and if someone wants to economize, let him economize in his own house. And if someone wants to repair the damage done by the Messina earthquake with the money of the people of Palermo – to divert funds from the Feast for such a thing – then I say this: let every man mind his own troubles, and if Messina has had a disaster, let Messina take care of it herself... Those messinesi! They’re forever trying to fleece Palermo.”

  “I know for a fact that our pettifogger has taken steps to transfer the capital from Palermo to Messina,” the Duke di Cesarò said.

  “You hear that?” the Prince di Pietraperzia shouted at Di Blasi and Regalmici and Caracciolo’s other friends. “Men of Palermo, are your bowels not stirred within you to hear such a thing?”

  “The Viceroy has nothing against the city of Palermo,” Regalmici said. “He simply believes that the concentration of nobility in Palermo makes for obstacles and delays in the work of the government.”

  “Which is another way of saying that he’s got it in for us,” said the Marquis di Villabianca.

  “This is something you have just discovered?” Monsignor Airoldi smiled.

  He was sitting a little apart from the group, with Vella, as usual, by his side. They had reviewed the day’s work on the Council of Sicily; now, in silence, they were eating a delicious lemon ice, and Don Giuseppe, letting the sherbet slip down his throat in large spoonfuls, was visibly refreshed.

  The Marquis di Villabianca drew his chair close to the pair and confided in a whisper to Monsignor, “Do you know what the Viceroy found on the desk in his study this morning? A message in big black letters that said ‘Either five days or death!’”

  “Not really!” the Bishop exclaimed delightedly.

  “I had it in confidence from the Marquis Caldarera, who is a member of the official household. The Viceroy was furious, he says, like a maddened bull.”

  “The fact of the matter is simple: he wants to hurt us wherever and however he can,” the Prince di Trabia said.

  “But at last he’s bitten off more than he can chew,” Baron Mortillaro said fawningly; he was alluding to Trabia’s letter to the Minister in Naples.

  “Ah, this I don’t know, my dear fellow, this I am not so sure of,” di Trabia parried, and then, with deep feeling, even grief, “I fear they’ve lost their heads in Naples, too. The King most certainly cannot count on advisers of understanding and wisdom, of t
ested loyalty. If the new census and the new cadastre that the Marquis Caracciolo has proposed are actually approved, we will see some very odd things. We will be paying taxes on our estates in the very selfsame way that any bourgeois pays on a field that yields him a half salma of grain.” The Prince held it to be a point of style, a proof of his own unshaken serenity, to refer to the Viceroy by title and name rather than to say pettifogger.

  “Does it not seem logical to you,” Di Blasi said, “and, more than logical, just, that the man who owns a half salma should pay taxes on his half salma and that the man who owns a thousand salmas should pay on a thousand?”

  “Logical? Just? I call it monstrous! Our rights are sacrosanct! Sacrosanct because every king, every viceroy, has sworn on his oath that we should have them... You are always busy looking into old customs; you ought to know as much... The freedom of Sicily, holy God!” He raised clasped hands to consecrate that freedom once again.

  “I know all this, yes, and I also know about all the usurpations of property and other abuses. But aside from whatever there may be to say pro or con privilege – about the substance, so to speak, of privilege as such – we must still recognize the fact that privilege, or what you call the freedom of Sicily, can no longer be maintained. It is one vast usurpation that encompasses others, endless other—”

  The discussion would have ended who knows how if the Countess di Regalpetra, a splendid vision in her gown of light taffeta with white and cherry-red stripes, and with her point d’Angleterre lace fan opened over a nearly bare bosom, had not moved away from the group of her friends and called Di Blasi to her.

  “Were you talking of very weighty matters? Forgive me. I called you because I wanted to tell you instantly instantly instantly that I have read that delicious little book you so kindly lent me... Delicious, oh yes, delicious... Of course, rather too, how shall I say, too daring...” A coquettish flick of the fan hid the bright malice of her smile and eyes. “But how do you manage to have all these delicious books? These utterly delicious little books?”