The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico Read Online Free PDF Page A

old and retired, were living quiet lives away from the public eye; others were difficult to find: plausiblefears had prompted them to leave Portugal and offer their services to other monarchs. Dom Pedro waited for them one by one in the courtyard of his palace. He was haunted by insomnia. Some nights he would get up and break the unbearable silence of his rooms by having the servants light all the torches and by calling the trumpeters and ordering them to play. The chronicler of the period who recorded these events is prodigal with his details: he describes the bare, austere courtyard, the echoing of horses’ hooves on stone, the rattle of chains, the shouts of the guards announcing the capture of another wanted man. He describes too how Dom Pedro waited patiently, standing motionless at a window from which he could look down on the courtyard and the road whence his victims must come. He was a tall man, very thin, with an ascetic face and long pointed beard, like a physician or a priest, and he always wore the same cloak over the same jerkin. Our meticulous chronicler even gives us the words, or rather supplications, the prisoners addressed to their torturer, and to which he never replied: for the king would do nothing more than supply details of a technicalnature indicating what he felt would be the most fitting way to put an end to a victim’s life. Dom Pedro was not without reserves of irony: for a prisoner called Coelho, which in Portuguese means ‘rabbit,’ he chose death over a gridiron. But in every case, and sometimes while they were still alive, he would have the victim’s chest ripped open and the heart removed and brought to him on a copper tray. He would take the still warm organ in his hands and toss it to a pack of greedy dogs waiting below on the terrace.
    But his bloody vendetta, which horrified our good chronicler, did not prove an effective placebo for Dom Pedro. His resentment at having been crushed by events now irremediable was not to be satisfied by the cardiac muscle of a few courtiers: in the stony loneliness of his palace he meditated a more subtle revenge which concerned not the pragmatic or human planes, but that of time itself and of the concatenation of events which make up our lives – events which in this case were already past. He decided to retrieve the irretrievable.
    It was a hot Coimbra summer, and lavender and broomwere flourishing along the pebbly banks of the river. The washerwomen beat their laundry in the lazy trickle that snaked between the stones; and they sang. Dom Pedro realised that everything – his subjects, that river, the flowers, the songs, his very being there as a king – would have been the same even if everything had been different and nothing had happened; and that the tremendous plausibility of existence, inexorable as reality always is, was more solid than his ferocity, could not be wiped out by any vendetta of his. What exactly did the king think as he looked out of his window across the white plains of Portugal? What kind of sorrow was it that haunted him? The nostalgia for what has been may be heart-rending; but nostalgia for what we would have liked to happen, for what might have been and never was, must be intolerable. Probably it was this nostalgia that was crushing Dom Pedro. Every night, in his incurable insomnia, he would look up at the stars: and perhaps it was the interstellar distances, those spaces immeasurable in terms of human time which gave him the idea. Perhaps that subtle irony which he nursed in his heart along with the nostalgiafor what hadn’t been also played its part. In any event he thought up a brilliant plan.
    As we have seen, Dom Pedro was a man of few words and strong character: the following morning a terse notice announced a great feast for the people throughout the kingdom, the coronation of a queen and a solemn nuptial procession in the midst of an exultant crowd all the way from Coimbra to