Q, Luther Blissett [children's ebooks online .txt] 📗
- Author: Luther Blissett
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The dead man is now the titular owner of a luxury brothel in Venice.
The German I am looking for travelled through these parts during the years of the Anabaptist revolt.
Antwerp, 4th September 1550
Today Nicolas Buysscher is the right hand man of the Inquisitor of Antwerp.
Forty or so, tall, gaunt, the expression of someone who has held the fates of men in his hands.
He welcomed me very cordially. He remembered everything, holding nothing back. The details of an incredible experience.
The heresiarch of Antwerp was an astute and cultivated character, capable of weaving a complex web of connections both with the common people and with the important figures of the city. Even today, many people consider him a martyr and a hero. If you mention the name of Eloi down at the port, people still smile.
Eloi the roofer was a very special kind of heretic. He denied the notion of sin with a series of arguments that were difficult to refute. He seemed to want to build paradise on earth. He managed to persuade wealthy craftsmen and merchants to share their goods and property with the plebeians. A master in the art of trickery and persuasion. His followers in Antwerp lived together, in properties placed at their disposal by wealthier men. Over the course of the years dozens and dozens of men and women passed through the Loist community. Eloi welcomed them all, regardless of what misfortunes they might have fallen into. A very special kind of heretic, in contrast with the more extreme and bloody fringes of Anabaptism. Nonetheless, several of those survivors of M�nster or Batenburg’s gangs found refuge in his house. Expert dissembler as he was, he could have gone a lot further had he not trodden on the toes of the wrong people.
What the records had to keep silent. A complex fraud perpetrated upon the Fugger bankers, false letters of credit, hundreds of thousands of florins. An incredible thing: even the bankers had trouble explaining how it could have happened. And that isn’t clear even today.
The spoils have never been recovered.
Eloi had partners in this enterprise. One of them was a German merchant by the name of Hans Gr�eb, of whom there is no trace.
The Fuggers could not afford for this affair to become known, so they knocked on the door of the Inquisition. The order to take action against the Loists came directly from Rome.
They weren’t all arrested. It is believed that many of them fled to England.
As regards former M�nsterites, it is hard to say how many of them there were among the ranks of the Loists. One of them is known to have died some time ago, in prison. He was Balthasar Merck.
No other names are known. Not among those who were arrested.
The unknown German merchant who was Eloi’s partner
A colossal swindle of the Emperor’s bankers.
Money never recovered.
A luxury brothel in Venice.
Strategy of dissimulation.
Former M�nsterites.
The child and the statue.
Titian the Anabaptist.
Q’s diary
Antwerp, 7th September 1550
This mystery is taking me back in time. Outside the walls of M�nster.
Perhaps it’s a hallucination, information retrieved at random. In pursuit of a corpse.
Who? It could be myself. The final chase, to defer the coming end. What does a man do when he knows he’s dead? Old scores have to be settled. Starting with memories the mind had erased. Outside those walls.
In a muddy ditch, my whole life hanging on my filthy hands as they claw the earth. The arrogant whiskers of the mercenary holding his knife to my throat.
The smell of wet grass; lying like an insect in no-man’s-land, between the city and the rest of the world. No turning back. Ahead of me, the unknown: an army of paid soldiers ready to shoot anyone who crosses those walls.
Mud slipping through my fingers: the great towers, the easiest points to enter.
Your life isn’t worth shit, he tells me, just imagine you’re dead already.
I agitatedly describe every fortification, every passageway, the roster of the guards, how many sentries there are at each gate.
You can extend your life in the captain’s tent, he says, laughing. He thumps me and drags me away.
Captain von Dhaun saved my life and gave me a chance.
His exact words: if you manage to climb up on to the walls tonight, and come back without being killed, you’ll have shown that you merited my trust.
That was how the betrayal was accomplished, planned and jealously guarded since I reached the city of the mad, living side by side with them for over a year.
The last months of hunger and delirium are a black stain that the mind has erased. I never turned back throughout all that time. Fifteen years, to look for those people’s words and faces. Perhaps because I wanted to hide from myself the fact that I too had vacillated, for a moment, down in that ditch, as though I too had become infected with madness, my mind distracted from the task at hand. Perhaps because, that day, I risked failing miserably, risked being run through by the bishop’s mercenaries, who by some quirk of fate chose instead to bring me before their captain.
Over the days that followed, after the massacre, the bishop of Waldeck, who had returned as absolute lord of M�nster, his throne a pile of corpses, said that people such as myself, the heroic warriors of Christianity, would never be forgotten, commemorated in works and effigies.
He was a lying, the bastard. Every trace of people like myself has vanished. The people who carried out the project, who were ready to be consigned to the dustbin, from which they would be picked up by noble lords to do their dirty work for them.
Then I asked my lord, Christ’s black standard-bearer, to take me away from those lands, from the horror that had lacerated my flesh and crushed my faith.
And now that is the place to which I must return, faithless now, to open up my scars again.
Ravenna, 10th September 1550
Scenes of poverty are always the same. Thin, ragged children. Bellies swollen with nothing, bare feet. Filthy little hands begging for alms. Women filling sacks of grain, up to their knees in the great vat that holds a season’s harvest, babies tied behind their backs with scarves so as not to interrupt the work.
A few old people, bony, crippled, sightless eyes.�
The road of dry mud outside the southern gate. The shacks leaning against the walls like a shapeless excrescence of the city, spreading slowly into the countryside.
Not a man in sight. They’re probably all in the fields, bundling the straw for beds for the coming winter, and hay for their lordships’ animals.
Only three men loading sacks on to a cart, bent-backed and sweating.
The district of shacks. Wood and stinking rushes, along with the mud and the mosquitoes.
I break up the bread and cheese that I have in my bag and distribute it among the children swarming around me. There are tiny ones that can barely walk, and bigger ones, busy firing their catapults at the sparrows raiding the grain. One of the quicker ones gives me his weapon.
I greet them all with a smile and a blessing. Slight nods of the head in reply.
The three men glance at me uncertainly. Massive great men, big heads.
Poverty is misshapen.
A whistle echoes from the walls.
All eyes on the gate. The three men hurry to cover the cart with a big piece of sack-cloth.
Their agitation suddenly erupts, the men curse furiously.
Something’s about to happen.
A troop of knights passes through the archway. I count about a dozen of them. Armour and lances at the ready. A standard with the bishop’s ensigns.
They ride in amidst the protests of the women, they stop, they can’t go any further, excited shouts.
One of the women who were filling the sacks, the most furious of the lot, stands up to the head of the troop.
They scream at each other in ungrammatical Latin mixed with the almost incomprehensible local dialect.
‘… to receive a tenth of the grain…’
‘…in the middle of the month…’
‘…getting earlier and earlier…’
‘…we’re not going to do it any more…’
‘…non-negotiable…’
‘…His Lordship has decreed…’
The three men have stayed by the cart. Furtive looks. One of them climbs on board, the other two secure the canopy very tightly with ropes.
The tax collector notices them.
He points in their direction, muttering something.
The woman grips the horse’s reins and tugs on them.
The bastard strikes her in the face with a riding crop.
I leap to my feet on a rickety bench: ‘You son of a pox-ridden whore!’
The bastard turns around, I’ve already taken aim.
The stone gets him right in the face.
He collapses on his horse with his hands over his face while everyone around unleashes an infernal hubbub. The boys throw rocks in unison like a line of archers. The women creep under the horses, severing their hamstrings with little knives. The cart sets off at breakneck speed. The blood-covered fucker shouts: ‘After it! After it!’
The horses rear up, fall to the ground, a hail of stones rains down on the cops. Sticks and work-tools are raised in the air. Alerted by the shouting, the men run in from the fields.
The two men who were loading the cart gesture to me to follow them. They slip into a gap in the middle of the shacks. We make our way down ever narrower alleyways, with me bringing up the rear, hurl ourselves into a hut built of worm-eaten boards, come out the other side, on the banks of a stream, little more than a ditch.
A flat, narrow little boat, in we go, pushing like crazy, among curses that I can’t understand.
Ahead of us waits the dense pine forest.
Q’s diary
M�nster, 15th September 1550
The J�defeldertor is the gate through which goods go in and out. The peasants go in with their harvest, the merchants go out with their manufactured goods. Carts loaded with fabrics announce that M�nster’s most lucrative activity has been revived with fresh vigour. There is no memory of Knipperdolling, the former head of the weavers’ guild.
The streets are filled with men and women, playing out their daily life.
The convent of �berwasser is now a hospital. Perhaps some nuns are still here. There’s certainly no sign of Tillbeck and J�defeldt, the two Lutheran burgomasters who barricaded themselves in there during the days of the Anabaptist revolt.
In the main square in the centre of the city, the Cathedral and the Rathaus still stand facing one another. The Cathedral has been completely restored, adorned with statues and spires that exalt the Roman Church. Outside the council building there are troops of guards, whose presence is apparent everywhere.
Then there’s the Market Square. The stalls are arranged in a line along its edge, displaying their products. Voices are shouting prices, striking deals.
St Lamberti.
Three cages hang from the bell-tower. Empty.
No one looks at them.
Bockelson, Knipperdolling, Krechting.
I alone stood there with my nose in the air for I don’t know how long, while everyone walked past me: some on their way to the market-stalls, some going into the church.
No one looks at them.
The past hangs right over their heads. And if they try to lift their heads too far, the cages are there as a reminder.
M�nster is a warning to the whole of Chistendom: everything returns to the way it was, nothing remains of evil but the eternal symbol of the most terrible punishment.
Before they
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