8 Winderby's Last Case - Duncan McGibbon (read book txt) 📗

amok
with stylistic license when they heard the old
man did not intend staying.
The statuary, despite rumours
to the contrary, was the work of tedious hands...

PS It is time the quidtuncs stopped
and you set sail for Cythera?

I am your obedient servant,
Frederick Attwater, Keeper of Enigmas.


30,.The Further Wanderings of Winderby 1

So you can go on with your tale:
“Rome in winter, Venus and Mars in quartile,
and Mars exhalting in its house,
the scorpion was in the ascendant.
The Lord, Sun had hidden his face
The configurations were influential,
but Silentio had tired of Ptolomy,
only the fixed stars of active intellect
and the god, whose chariot of crippled limbs,
His Circassian servant was pushing him
over the bridge, and would determine
the imperative will
and clothe again his passive bones
in the mysteries of pure nature
as Adam to Christ,
so Orpheus would be
a body, to suit a future God.

His circle feasted under the pruned vines
The sirocco was dying down,
leaving a still, dry cold in the gardens
as nightfall exposed Gaffurius’ heavens.
in sounds of polyphonic moisture.
Cold dew fell and
a coal fire was burned
in the Athanor, around
which the guests gathered round and rubbed
hands. They ate from
long tables set out in the cortile .
The quail, pigeon and lamb
being particularly praised.
Afterwards there were confetti
a group of the graces and muses
in the summerhouse, formed
exquisitely in a strange dance.

A peal of trumpets, announced
the beginning of the history of Orfeo
Politian’s words had carefully
revised by Giovanni
to allow for eutrapelia
Ludicrous oratory
and pleasure -making applauded
Silentio's entry.

The first acts were listened to
with amused silence,
but an interval was called
after Orpheus' descent to Hades.
Proserpina was feeling a little faint
and the Maenad graces, whose garments
did not suit October were still
warming themselves by the brasier.
The red light ruddied
their exposed thighs, calves
and shoulders.
Orpheus-Silentio had ceased to be convivial,
despite the encouragement
of Sir William Thorndyke,
his closest adept.
Silentio's massive head was draped
in laurels and his tunic was pinioned
by his arms to his side. Gauffurius, the
composer had offered to play for him.
He had been roughly pushed off.
Silentio stared at the skies.

Unnerved, the Maenads made a start,
the cold motivated a certain masterful
gymnastic style of acting.
Gathered at the Northern end
of the colonnades, which
formed the stage, they limbered up for
the chorus.

Giovanni looked at Eurydice, played by
his friend, the Marchionese
Giulia di Pompazzi
she returned it apprehensively.
(His real presence did not descend with her to Hades)
Non totum descendi anima quem descendit.
Then Orpheo began laughingly to speak the
words, and ended;
“hence forth I shall gather fresh flowers”
and held out his stubby arms
as the audience threw six wild roses at him.

The maenads, impatient at the waiting,
echoed, evoe, evoe...
“There is he who scorns our love”
the larger limbed leader took over the chorus
evoé let us give him death
and all three rushed from the collonades
towards the figure of Silentio strapped in his
moving fame,
“Seize the thyrsus”, cried the smallest,
her voice unsure,“break down that branch,”
came in the first a red-haired
daughter of a local trader,
threw down the faun and the skin.
In a frenzy all three began to strike
at Silentio who kept his hideous face
turned to the stars.
They thrust him to the ground
and Silentio roared to the thrill
of the spectators, servants included
Everything in soaked in his blood,
“Go now and scorn the wedding torch,”
they intoned together
Then all three interlocked arms
two bent outwards and one inwards.

'Ognun segua, Bacco, te'
Bacco Bacco eù, oè

The whole audience began to join in,
following the breathless maenads
in a frenzied procession
across the garden, over the bridge
through the loggia and into the
cortile popolaresco

All of us, all of us after Baccus!
Hurray, hurray, come after us.
I’m dead sleepy, almost dished.
Am I? Aren’t I? Am I pissed?
I can’t stand up. You’re just as a drunk.
Come on. Come on. Don’t play the monk.
Get sloshed with me, with me I say!
The voices died away into the house

All of us, all of us, go his way!

Orpheus lay supine
on the grainy amphitheatre.
his servant hesitating until
they disappeared. Then at a
sign from the withered heap,
the servant stepped forward
and righted the frame.
Silentio, mobile rushed to the brazier
burning in the ludus globi
balanced with a beryl on scales
and threw in the beryl,
and a scorpion then,
returned to his first position.
Concurrently screams
of terror could be heard in the Cortile.
éu, oé, eroe, oé. Where the feminine
voices were thick with terror
they faded slowly to silence
only to be responded
to by a whispering and the sound of
aristocrats ordering their coaches
and the clop of hooves stepping
and then galloping out of the countryside
into the Roman night.

In the Cortile the three Maenads
crouched in paralysis, still intertwined,
The skittish one facing the other two,
her arms upturned while the two pairs
of hands of her companions
held hers and each others.
They were processing, Charis emanating
by a surprised serious expression the message
to Euphrosyne, who rapt in an
expression of awesome beauty re emanated
as if turning back from the legend to look
to Thalia. It was one of haughty voluptuousness

Yet the space at which Charis was looking
was empty, above the square mounting-block
he had surrounded.

Orpheus appeared by the great doorway
and faced at them. His expression was
one of dissatisfaction, for the other
doorway, a maidservant appeared
with Guila, covered in a cloak.
she moved ,with her eyes on Giovanni.

In a dream, though she resisted a little
when the maid servant removed her
cloak which left her naked,
yet she looked on compliantly into
Orpheus' eyes. Both creatures danced
a swirl of fabric, violence and style.
An express calm came over them
again, she slipped in between
the paralysed arms, which
had a patina of sweat
and were turning blue and purple
with the frozen grip.
She stood on the mounting block
and turned towards the others.
Charis's stare was now on her.
She was the intermediary between
the region above the stars
and absolute movement.

Giovanni strained at his frame
then began to slip forward,
stronger and stronger his steps became
until his the flesh rose on the bone
and the muscles filled out,
a god, he stood there.
There was a clap of thunder,
and the figures turned to bronze
except Orpheus who vanished
as the rain begun to fall
drenching his four figures.

According to the Cronaca,
he disappeared. What now?

Or is that really the end?
You should know, Mr Winderby!”


31. On the Design of the Adversary

My dear Winderby,
From the Cronaca:
The Pope (In Rome, Il Papa) was, on orders of his own,
to be found dead, or, at least, in ecstasy, when it arrived.
Silentio, Giovanni, nato in Roma da e illustre
Pierfrancesco Card. Silentini
di antichissima famiglia nipote del Pont
Papa (et plusquam Papa)had never seen a day like it.
'No nephew of mine would be born a freak,'
or a daughter,” thus his Bullae, one affirming,
the other denying progeny.
The creature’s arrival would have been
viewed as providential
both to the narrative
(which got a quite a start)
and to his parents who could take
to the vaults now in abandon,
to gaze in effigy at opposite beatified ancestors.
To the Pope, too, whose Bull
had confiscated
the yet to be indexed
natal bed,
it must have been a relief,
needing no dogmatic utterance.
His priestly and episcopal formation
caused less anxiety than the evidence
of his birth to those who could not
quantify future conditionals.
The Social Services being
in Coelare Coelum
over his condition of health
and could only issue a library card,
rather than question the Bullae’s
consistency at the level of propositions.
Thus on November the 2nd,
they settled on a boy,
Silentio di Pierfrancesco
and argued the case for a truth function
that cohered with emotion in excess of sense.
Raised to the Cardinalate in only his third month
of conception, the chair of St Peter's
gran’ impulsivo was plauded by pundits,
‘creato Chierico di Camera,
Prefidenza delle Strade,
e poi Prete Cardinale de Arcadie.’
The Bulls were
both unclear on the questions of sex,
and sanity yet ratified his raising.
Thus the actus elicitus was enough
as whatever was imperative
would come to pass
as was the habit in the Papal States;
(Post natal care I was of a high quality
that year and the convent floor was scrubbed,
at least once that decade)
He grew, a member of a common blood-gossip,
but un-communicating, save in script
Hence, a boy, that will do, Silentio di Pierfrancesco.
That the proportions of his skull
where much in excess of custom
and that his lifeless legs wasted
their flesh in a month, might have been
seen by the family as a stumbling block
to his career, but they need not be
considered part of the public narrative,
for whatever history wants will come to pass
in the Papal States and in Europe.
regardless of monstrous, private life

A gross, protruding forehead,
which splays his eyes,
allowing the patrician nose a slow incline,
or too much space to rise.
His cylindrical breast which heaved
at each effortful wheeze,
the irrelevant legs
were upstaged
by the incredible power of his shoulders
despite his inability to speak.

His clothing compensated
in sumptuous Renaissance silk;
it hangs on his shape
an oversized Christening gown,
his cassock, cloak and pallium
covered five speeded up
layers of sacramental privilege
(the earlier
hysterical hatred of music concealed
in silence)
He would have sharpened his heavy skull
to a deadly poignard, his teeth to needles
and have had hooks made, to Vitruvian design,
for his stubby hands,
but it was not deemed fitting
until after the official portrait
was painted by Costa.
Amassed in Baroque acrobatics
he towered on empty clouds.
He slept only two hours a night
rose, said Mass, privately,
or with his Humanist circle,
followed by his breviary.
Then took to his study to scribble
at his defence of Cajetan,
at his compilation of how Suarez
fell short of the Blessed Cajetan,
whose commentries had inspired him,
at Padua,and The Sapientia.
He had connexions with the Roman circle
of inflammatory vision with whom he shared
a vow of silence and an obscure
belief in metempsychosis.
His thesis defended the
inability of natural reason
to prove the immortality of the soul
and held that Cajetan’s
commentary on
ln Primam questione
duo, articulum duum
‘I do not see that natural created truth
desires to see God.
did not clash with the
Angelic Doctor's Summa
Contra Gentiles at three fifty seven p.m.
His own beliefs added the view that
Christ took Adam's body after He rose.
and was hidden in it
as Pan to Proteus and Zeus to Eloi
And accordingly was