The Shadow Of The Bell Tower. Stefano Vignaroli
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Mary with the baby Jesus in her arms was already present in a niche between the windows on the top floor, while there was no trace of the four “telamons” supporting the balcony on the first floor. On the contrary, the balcony, although not completely absent, was very small compared to what it was used to seeing. The entire right side of the square was occupied, in place of the Bishop’s Palace and Palazzo Ripanti, by an enormous fortress, a sort of castle, decorated with typical arches and swallow-tailed Ghibelline merlons. On the left side there were the Church of St. Florian, with its dome and bell tower, and the Ghislieri Palace, not yet finished, surrounded by the bricklayers’ scaffoldings. Lucia looked towards the beginning of Via del Fortino, where there was a dyer’s shop, in front of which the craftsman had lit a fire to boil water in a pot encrusted with carbon black. A little girl had approached the fire dangerously and a strip of her dress had caught fire. In short, the girl found herself wrapped in flames. Lucia wanted to run towards to help her, but she couldn’t take a step. She was horrified, hearing the girl’s desperate cries ringing in her ears. Then one, two raindrops, one roar, the flames were extinguished. The feeling of no longer touching his feet on the ground. Lucia was lying on the pavement. When she opened her eyes again she saw the blue sky, a sky from which not a single drop of rain could have fallen. A distinguished man, elegantly dressed, with a briefcase in his hand, tried to help her get up.
«Are you all right?»
«Yes, yes», and refusing any help, Lucia stood up. «It was just a failure, a pressure surge. Everything’s all right now, thank you!»
She crossed the square, which now had the usual appearance, at a good pace, to try to get to her place of work as soon as possible, before the dean could notice her delay, but with the images she had experienced for a few moments well printed in her mind.
Suggestion, only suggestion, nothing but suggestion. There is no other logical explanation for dreams and now for visions!
Yet, a voice from her subconscious seemed to want to tell her that they were memories, that they were episodes she had lived in another life, in a remote past, as a different person, but always bearing the same name: Lucia.
She entered the building, climbed the staircase leading to the first floor and started the computer at her workstation. The temptation to take a peek at her profiles in the various social networks was made vain by the knowledge that the bastard of the dean was punctually checking, through the server, the log file of her computer and reproached her if she allowed herself to surf the Internet for reasons not strictly related to work. So she opened the Excel worksheet where she went to classify the texts and the Access file where she recorded the data in order to have a complete database of the library. Each text was then scanned and stored in a PDF file, to be uploaded to the foundation’s website for later consultation. The texts she was working on in those days, and which had perhaps been the trigger for her dreams and recent visions, were a “History of Jesi” published by Manuzi, the very Bernardino Manuzi who in the sixteenth century had the printing house in the palace where she had taken up residence, and a booklet, whose author was Lucia Baldeschi, entitled “Principles of natural medicine and healing with herbs”.
Then she had on her table a manuscript of a few pages, according to her, also attributable to Lucia Baldeschi, who was trying to describe the meaning and symbolism of a particular seven-pointed pentacle. All three of them were real puzzles, and Lucia would not give up until she had unravelled the arcana that hid behind each of those texts. “The History of Jesi” was really interesting, a work started by Bernardino Manuzi, printer in Jesi, based on ancient documents and oral traditions, and completed thanks to the contribution of other authors. On his table he had an original copy of the book, printed by Manuzi himself, from which several pages had been torn out, who knows in what remote period, who knows by whom, who knows for what reason. Precisely the pages that referred to a painful period in the history of Jesi, from 1517 to 1521, a period marked by the “sack of Jesi” and the government of Cardinal Baldeschi who, thanks to the fact of being head of the Inquisition Tribunal, had persecuted and had executed many people just because they hindered his power. And Lucia Baldeschi was his niece. An inquisitor uncle and a niece who devoted herself to natural medicine and herbal medicine, considered at that time witchcraft practices. How could they live together and perhaps live in the same palace? The fact that Lucia Baldeschi’s writings were there made one lean towards the theory that she had lived there, and certainly that was also the Cardinal’s home. The Court of the Inquisition had its seat right next door. At the beginning of the 16th century, at the Cardinal’s request, it had been transferred from the convent of San Domenico to the more comfortable complex of St. Florian, while the Torrione di Mezzogiorno had remained the seat of the prisons where the condemned were held and tortured. Who knows what those removed pages of the book were about; perhaps there was a scabrous story in which the uncle accused his niece of witchcraft, had locked up her in the dungeons of the Torrione di Mezzogiorno, or in the more comfortable ones of the St. Florian complex, had tortured her and finally had burned her at the stake in the public square. Of course, this story would have tarnished the memory of Cardinal Baldeschi, and so someone in the family would tear out those pages to make them lose track.
It was starting to get hot, and Lucia opened the large window of the room, just the one giving on the balcony supported by the four strange statues, taking care to close the large mosquito net, so that air could enter, but not annoying insects. While the dean appeared, he reproached Lucia with his gaze, an inquisitive gaze, who seemed to want to interpret in the gesture of opening the window the young woman’s contemporary desire to light a cigarette.
I will certainly not give you satisfaction, old caryatid! I certainly don’t smoke here, if only because I can’t stand your mischief, but also out of respect for the precious objects, books, stuccoes, paintings, which are kept in here, Lucia brooded to herself, while she noticed the similarity between the dean, the almost seventy-year-old Guglielmo Tramonti, and Cardinal Artemio Baldeschi, as she saw him every day in a portrait hanging on the walls of the room and as he appeared to her in her recent dreams.
«Even though we don’t have air conditioning here, it’s best to keep the windows closed. Sweating has never hurt anyone, and the air could be harmful to the works we have in custody!» Lucia saw the dean heading towards the window, but instead of closing it as she intended, he opened the mosquito net and looked out through the metal railing on the balcony. In a moment, the dean disappeared. Lucia rushed to the balcony and looked down. Guglielmo Tramonti’s body laid lifeless on the pavement of the square, face down on the ground, dressed as a Cardinal and surrounded by a reddish patch of his own blood. How did it could happen? Where did all that blood come from? The height was not too high! Had he smashed his skull and his vital fluid was leaving him from an open wound on his forehead? And the clothes? Why was he wearing the purple suit? He wasn’t wearing it a few moments before! She looked up looking for the details of the Square and saw it again as it was in the vision she had had just before, when she had left the bar: the Square of a Renaissance city. The voice of the Dean, coming from behind, brought her back to reality. She found herself focusing with his eyes on the tombstone which, on the facade of the Church of St. Florian, remembered Giordano Bruno as a victim of priestly tyranny. Everything was again in its place, the fountain with the obelisk, the Complex of St. Florian, the Cathedral, the Bishop’s Palaces, Palazzo Ghislieri. A little further on, on the bell tower of the Government Palace waved normally the tricolour flag.
«Well? I asked you to close the window and what do you do, you go out on the balcony? But... are you sure you’re okay, girl? You look very pale. Do you want to go home for the day?»
«No, no, thanks, I’m fine. It’s all gone, just a dizzy spell. I instinctively needed to go out for some oxygen, to get some fresh air. But it’s all right now, I can get back to work.»
«Fine, but I’d be glad to know you’re getting a medical check-up. You’re not pregnant, are you?»
«The Holy Spirit hasn’t come to visit me yet», Lucia concluded ironically, accompanying these last words with an evasive gesture of her hand. She took the book on the History of Jesi and began to scan the first pages. On the tenth page, she opened the OCR program on the computer and started to manually correct errors, which allowed her to read some new parts, unknown to her.
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