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  Anyone who left or who so much as attempted to flee would receive forty lashes with the knotted cord and be delivered to the Magistrate for punishment. At the entrance, they nailed the infamous placard with the inscription sanita — Health. We were then admonished to comply with whatever instructions might be given us thereafter, including the provisions adopted in times of infection, or plague; and whoever did not obey would be severely punished. From inside the hostelry, we heard dumbstruck that we were condemned to sequestration.

  "We are dead, all dead," quoth one of the guests in colourless tones.

  We were gathered in the long, narrow hallway of the hostelry, which had become dismal and dark since the barring of the door. We looked about ourselves, bewildered. None could make the decision to move to the adjoining rooms, where supper lay, already cold. My master, slumped on the great bench in the entrance, inveighed, holding his head in his hands. He uttered abuse and curses unfit to be repeated and threatened harm to anyone so bold as to venture near him. Suddenly, he began to rain down tremendous blows against the poor bench with his bare hands, causing the register of guests to jump up into the air. After that, he lifted the table and hurled it against the wall. We had to intervene and hold him back, clutching his arms and chest. Pellegrino tried to break free but lost his balance, dragging a pair of the guests to the ground with him, and dashing them one against the other with a great din. I myself managed to dodge out of the way a moment before the human heap threatened to bury me. My master was nimbler than his would-be controllers and almost at once was back on his feet, shouting and again unleashing his wrath on the bench with his fists.

  I decided to abandon that narrow and now dangerous space and slipped away up the stairs. Here, however, after rushing up the first steps, I found myself face to face with Abbot Melani. He was coming down unhurriedly, stepping prudently.

  "So they have really locked us up, my boy," said he, with that strange French roiling of his V.

  "What are we to do now?" I asked.

  "Nothing."

  "But we shall die of the pestilence."

  "We shall see," he said with an indefinable nuance in his tone that I had already come to recognise.

  Then he changed direction and led me up to the first floor. We went right to the end of the corridor and entered the large chamber which the old man who had just died shared with his companion Pompeo Dulcibeni from the Marches. A curtain divided the room in two. We drew it aside and there, crouching on the floor and fumbling in his little bag, we found the chirurgeon Cristofano.

  In front of him, sprawled across the armchair, was Signor di Mourai, still half-dressed as Cristofano and the medical examiner had left him that morning. The dead man was somewhat malodorous because of the September heat and the foot bath in which his flesh was already beginning to rot, the Bargello having ordered that nothing was to be moved until the end of the roll-call.

  "Boy, I asked you this morning kindly to clean up that noisome water on the floor," ordered Cristofano, with a note of impatience in his voice.

  I was about to reply that I had done so immediately after he had ordered me to; but glancing down, I saw that around the basin there were indeed still several small puddles. I did as I had been commanded without protesting, using cloth and mop and cursing myself for not having been more careful that morning. In fact, I had until then never seen a corpse in all my life and I must have been confused by the emotion.

  Mourai seemed even more meagre and bloodless than when he had arrived at the Locanda del Donzello. His lips were slightly parted and from them still dripped a little of that greenish froth which Cristofano, wishing to open his mouth a little more, began to remove with a cloth. The chirurgeon took pains, however, to touch this only after wrapping his own hand in another piece of cloth. As he had already done that morning, he scrutinised the dead man's throat carefully and sniffed at the froth. Then he got Abbot Melani to help him arrange the body on the bed. Once removed from the basin, the feet were greyish and from them emanated a dreadful odour of death which took our breath away.

  Cristofano donned a pair of gloves in brown material which he took from the little bag. He returned to his inspection of the oral cavity, then observed the thorax and the groin. First, however, he prodded delicately behind the ears; then turned his attention to the armpits, removing the clothing so as to be able to observe the soft flesh with its covering of sparse hairs. Lastly, he pressed repeatedly with his fingertips the soft skin halfway between the organs of generation and the beginning of the thighs. He removed his gloves carefully and placed them in a sort of little cage divided into two compartments by a horizontal grate. In the lower half, there was a small basin into which he poured a brownish liquid, then closed the door of the compartment in which he had placed the gloves.

  "It is vinegar," he explained. "It purges the pestiferous humours. One never knows. That being said, I stand by my idea: this really does not seem to me to be the infection. For the time being, we may rest our minds."

  "You told the Bargello's men that it might be a congestion," I reminded him.

  "That was only an example, given to gain time. I already knew from Pellegrino that Mourai ate only broths and clear soups."

  "That is true," I confirmed. "Even this morning at dawn, he asked for one."

  "Ah yes? Tell us more," asked the physician, showing interest.

  "There is not much to be said: he asked my master for a clear soup with milk when, as every morning, he went to wake up Signor di Mourai and the gentleman from the Marches with whom he shared his room. But Signor Pellegrino was busy and so he asked me to prepare it. I went down to the kitchen, made it and brought it to him."

  "Were you alone?"

  "Yes."

  "Did anyone come into the kitchen?"

  "No."

  "Did you ever leave the milk unattended?"

  "Not even one moment."

  "Are you sure?"

  "If you are thinking that something in the broth might have harmed Signor di Mourai, know that I administered it to him personally, for Signor Dulcibeni had already gone out; and I myself drank a beaker of it."

  The chirurgeon asked no more questions. He looked at the corpse and added: "I cannot perform an autopsy here and now, nor do I believe that anyone will do so, given the suspicion of plague. However, I repeat, this does not look to me like the infection."

  "But then," I asked, "why have we been placed in quarantine?"

  "Through excess of zeal. You are still young, but I believe that in these parts they remember the last visitation all too well. If nothing new occurs, they will soon realise that there is no danger. This old gentleman who, in any case, already seems not to have been enjoying good health, was not infected. And what is more, I would say that neither you nor I are. However, we have no choice: we shall have to pass poor Signor di Mourai's body and clothing out through the window, as the Bargello ordered. Each one of us will, moreover, have to sleep in a separate chamber. There are enough apartments in this inn, if I am not mistaken," said he, questioning me with his eyes.

  I nodded in agreement. On each floor, four chambers opened onto the two branches of the corridor: one rather spacious apartment just next to the stairs, followed by a very small one and then an L-shaped one, while at the end of the corridor was the largest room, the only one to give not only onto the alleyway but onto the Via dell'Orso. This would mean occupying all the apartments on the first and second floors, but I knew that my master would not complain too much about that, since no other guests could join us for the time being.

  "Dulcibeni will sleep in my chamber," added Cristofano. "He certainly cannot remain here with the corpse. However," he concluded, "if there are no other cases, true or false, in the next few days, they will release us."

  "In how much time exactly?" asked Atto Melani.

  "Who can tell? If anyone in the neighbourhood should feel unwell, perhaps only because he has drunk bad wine or eaten fish that has gone off, they will at once think o
f us."

  "Then we risk remaining here forever," said I, already feeling suffocated by the thick walls of the inn.

  "Forever, no. But calm down now: have you not been here, night and day, for the past few weeks? I have rarely seen you leave the house; you are already used to being shut in."

  That was true. My master had taken me into service out of pity, knowing that I was alone in the world. And I worked from morning till night.

  It happened early last spring, when Pellegrino had come to Rome from Bologna, where he worked as a cook, to take over the activity of the Donzello after the misfortune which had befallen his cousin, the late innkeeper, Signora Luigia de Grandis Bonetti. She, poor woman, had given up the ghost following the physical consequences of an attack suffered in the street at the hands of two gypsy scoundrels, who were trying to rob her of her purse. The hostelry had for thirty years been run by Luigia, together with her husband Lorenzo and their son Francesco, and subsequently by Luigia alone, when she had been widowed and bereaved of her son. For a time, it was quite well known and received guests from all over the world. Such was Luigia's veneration for Duke Orsini, the owner of the little building in which the inn was situated, that she bequeathed to him all that she possessed. The Duke, however, made no objection when Pellegrino (who had to feed his wife, an unmarried daughter and a little girl) arrived from Bologna and begged His Grace to allow him to continue his cousin Luigia's flourishing activity.

  This was a golden opportunity for my master, who had already squandered another such: after a difficult career in the kitchens of a wealthy cardinal, in which he had reached the enviable rank of deputy carver, he was dismissed because of his choleric character and his all- too-frequent intemperance.

  Hardly had Pellegrino settled near the Donzello, waiting for the few passing guests to free the premises, than I was recommended to him by the parish priest of the nearby church of Santa Maria in Posterula. With the coming of the torrid Roman summer, his consort, who was indeed full of enthusiasm for the idea of becoming an innkeeper's wife, left for the Apennine mountains, where her parents still lived. They were due to return at the end of the month, and, in the meantime, I was the only remaining helper.

  Of course, I could not be expected to be the best of apprentices: but I put my all into pleasing my master. Once I had finished the day's work, I willingly sought every opportunity to make myself useful. And since I did not care to venture out alone and face the dangers of the streets (above all the cruel jokes of those of my own age) I was, as the chirurgeon Cristofano had observed, almost always at work in the Inn of the Donzello. Nevertheless, the thought of being sequestered for a whole quarantine in those chambers, however familiar and welcoming, suddenly seemed to me an unbearable sacrifice.

  In the meanwhile, the hubbub in the entrance had died down and we were soon rejoined by my master and all those who had engaged in that lengthy and useless waste of their strength. Cristofano's recent pronouncement was explained to them, which raised everyone's spirits, except my master's.

  "I'll kill them, I'll kill them all," said he, again losing his temper.

  He added that this misfortune had ruined him, for no one would ever again come to the Donzello, nor of course would it be possible to sell the hostelry's business, which had already been devalued by that accursed crack in the wall, and he would have to use up all his credit to obtain another such; in short, he would soon be poor and ruined, ruined forever, but first he would tell all to the College of Innkeepers, ah yes, even if they all knew that it was quite useless, quoth he, contradicting himself over and over, and I understood that he had unfortunately been at the Greco wine again.

  The doctor continued: "We shall have to gather all the old man's blankets and clothing and tip them into the street when the dead- cart comes to collect the corpse."

  He then turned to Pompeo Dulcibeni: "Did you meet or hear of infected persons coming from Naples?"

  "Absolutely not."

  The gentleman from the Marches seemed to be experiencing difficulty in hiding how deeply perturbed he was by his friend's death, which had, moreover, occurred in his absence. A veil of perspiration covered his forehead and his cheeks. The physician questioned him concerning a number of details: whether the old man had eaten regularly, whether his bodily functions were regular, whether he had been of melancholy humour; all in all, whether he had shown any signs of suffering other than those normally present in one of advanced age. But Dulcibeni was aware of no such thing. The man was rather massive, always wearing a black great-coat; but above all made to look awkward and cumbersome by a very old gorget of Flemish lace (as I believe must have been the fashion many, many years ago) and by his bulging paunch. This, together with his florid complexion, made one suspect a propensity for food not inferior to my master's for the Greco wine. Thick hair, now almost all white, a tendency to take umbrage, a slightly fatigued tone of voice and a grave and pensive expression conferred on him the semblance of an honest and temperate man. Only with the passing of time and closer observation was I to see in his severe blue-green eyes and ever-frowning eyebrows the reflection of a concealed and ineradicable bitterness.

  Dulcibeni said that he had met the late Signor di Mourai quite by chance, in the course of a voyage, and he did not know much about him. Together with Signor Devize, he had accompanied him from Naples; for the old man, being almost completely blind, was in need of assistance. Signor Devize, the musician and guitar player, had, affirmed Dulcibeni (with Devize nodding agreement), come to Italy to acquire a new instrument from a Neapolitan lute-maker. Later, he had expressed the desire to stay in Rome in order to learn the most recent musical styles, before returning to Paris.

  "What will happen if we go out before the end of the quarantine?" I asked.

  "Attempting to flee is the least advisable solution," replied Cristofano, "since all the ways out are sealed, including the passage that leads from the tower where Monna Cloridia lives on to the roof. The windows are too high or have been covered with grating, and the watch is patrolling below. What is more, attempting to escape from quarantine incurs an exceedingly severe punishment, and one would be imprisoned under far worse conditions for years and years. The people of the quarter would help recapture any fugitive."

  Evening shadows were falling, and I distributed lamps and oil.

  "Let us endeavour to keep up our spirits," added the Tuscan chirurgeon, looking meaningfully at my master. "We must give the impression that all goes perfectly with us. If nothing changes, I shall not examine you-not unless you so request. Should there be other cases of ill health, I shall have to do so for the sake of us all. Warn me if ever you feel unwell, even if it seems to be a mere trifle. For the time being, however, it will do no good to worry, for this man," said he, pointing at the inert body of Signor di Mourai, "did not die of the plague."

  "What, then, did he die of?" asked Abbot Melani.

  "Not of plague, I repeat."

  'And how do you know, Doctor?" responded the abbot, distrustfully.

  "We are still in summer and it is quite hot. If this were plague, it would be of the summer variety, which is caused by the corruption of natural heat and provokes fevers and headaches. In such cases, the cadavers at once become black and hot, and present tokens that are also black and putrescent. But this man has not the shadow of a token, or an abscess, a botch, a swelling or whatever you might wish to call it; neither under the armpits, nor behind the ears, nor in the groin. There was no rise in temperature, nor burning. And, from what his companions have told me, he seemed quite well until within hours of his death. That, as far as I am concerned, is sufficient to rule out contagion with the plague."

  "Then it is another illness," replied Melani.

  "I repeat: in order to understand that, it would be necessary to have recourse to anatomy: to open up the body and examine it from the inside; in other words, as the chirurgeons do in Holland. On the face of it, I could diagnose an acute attack of putrid fevers, which shows no signs until it
is too late for any remedy. Yet I can find no sign of putrefaction on the body or bad odours other than those of death or old age. I might perhaps suppose it to be the malady of mazzuco, or modoro, as the Spaniards call it: that causes an aposteme, which is to say, an abscess within the brain, and is thus invisible. And once that is present, death must ensue. If, on the other hand, the illness is at the stage of its initial symptoms, it can be easily remedied. Had I been informed of it even a few days ago, I might perhaps have been able to save him. It would have sufficed to bleed one of the two veins under the tongue, to administer in his beverage an infinitesimal quantity of oil of vitriol, and to anoint stomach and head with holy oil. But, as far as we can see, old Mourai showed no signs of being unwell. Besides…"

  "Besides?" urged Melani.

  "Mazzuco certainly does not cause a swelling of the tongue," concluded the chirurgeon with a telling grimace. Perhaps it is… something very like poison."

  Poison. While the physician returned to his chamber, each of us contemplated the corpse in silence. For the first time, the Jesuit made the sign of the cross. Master Pellegrino renewed his imprecations, cursing the misfortune of having a dead man in his hostelry and, what is more, one who had perhaps been poisoned. And who would have the courage to hear what his wife would have to say, on her return?