Veritas (Atto Melani) Read Online Free PDF Page A

responded with hostile silence.
    She was truly amiable, Camilla de’ Rossi, I thought, despite my wife’s diffidence. She was dressed in a white habit, its sleeves lined with fine, pure Indian linen, and a hood in the
same linen with a black crépon veil hanging down behind.
    The face that the hood and veil left uncovered belonged to neither of the two physiognomies peculiar to young nuns (or secular sisters, it made little difference): she had neither the watery,
dull eyes surrounded by pudgy pink and white cheeks like ham lard, nor the hard little tetchy eyes set in a sallow, scraggy complexion. Camilla de’ Rossi was an attractive, blooming girl,
whose dark, proud eyes and lively mouth reminded me of my wife’s features just a few years earlier.
    There was another knock.
    “Your lunch has arrived,” announced the Chormaisterin, as she opened the door to two scullery maids carrying trays.
    The meal, curiously, was all based on spelt: flat loaves of spelt and chestnuts, cream of apples and spelt, a pie of spelt grains and fennel.
    “Now hurry up,” urged Camilla after we had refreshed ourselves, “you’re expected in half an hour’s time at the notary.”
    “So you know . . .” I said, astonished.
    “I know everything,” she cut me short. “I’ve already sent word to the notary that you’ve arrived. So come along; I’ll look after your boy.”
    “You don’t really expect me to leave my son in your hands?” protested Cloridia.
    “We are all in the hands of Our Lord, my daughter,” answered the Chormaisterin maternally, though as to age she could have been
our
daughter.
    Having said this, she ushered us with gentle firmness towards the door.
    I pleaded to Cloridia with my eyes not to offer any resistance nor to make any of her less gracious remarks about the tribe of the brides of Christ.
    “Anything, if it means I don’t see soot again,” she merely said.
    I thanked God that my consort, thanks to her hatred of the chimney-sweeping trade, had finally given in. And perhaps the young nun, who seemed to have genuinely taken our little boy’s
health to heart, was beginning to break down Cloridia’s wall of diffidence.
    When we stepped outside we found the convent’s idiot leaning against the wall and waiting for us; the Chormaisterin gave him a quick confirmatory glance.
    “This is Simonis. He’ll take you to the notary.”
    “But Mother,” I tried to object, “I don’t know German very well, and I don’t understand when he speaks to me. When we got here . . .”
    “What you heard wasn’t German: Simonis is Greek. And when he wants he can make himself understood, trust me,” she said with a smile, and without another word she closed the
door behind us.

    “Very generous this donation of Abbot Milani, yes, yes?”
    It was with these words, spoken in diligent Italian with only Melani’s name pronounced incorrectly, that the notary welcomed us into his office, gazing at us from behind his little
spectacles; unfortunately it was not clear whether the words constituted an affirmation or a question.
    We had arrived at the office after a short walk through the snow, during which our limbs had nonetheless grown exceedingly numb. The terrible winter of 1709, which had brought our family and the
whole of Rome to its knees, had been nothing in comparison with this, and I realised that the heavy overcoats we had bought before our departure were as much protection as an onion skin. Cloridia
was tormented by her fluxion of the chest.
    “Yes, yes,” the notary repeated several times, after bidding us remove our coats and shoes and inviting us to sit down opposite him. Simonis had remained in the anteroom.
    While we enjoyed the warmth of an enormous and rich cast-iron stove coated with majolica, such as I had never seen before, he began to leaf through a file, whose cover bore words in gothic
characters.
    Cloridia and I, our chests bursting with silent tension, looked on as his hands riffled