I ask when we open the door to a room with a bed that is completely untouched. By then, almost all the girls are blushing, but some are still spinning lies in their heads, hoping to cover up the priest’s shame.
‘Didn’t you say, girl, that the priest is asleep? So where is he sleeping?’ I give her a merciless stare.
Then the stories vary: there was such an infestation of fleas in his bed that she had to do a total disinfection, or the bed needed a
thorough cleaning after the cat crapped on it, or the priest’s willy got leaky from a bloating in his belly so, again, everything needed washing.
‘How’s that? A bloating in his belly? You foolish woman, are you sure the bloating wasn’t below his belly?’ I am unsparing with her. And all the while we’re tramping through the presbytery opening doors. But not to overplay it, I should say that, in fact, there are not very many doors to open and only two or three rooms, and in the smallest one, the attic, a modest, quite ordinary little room, we find a modest little bed and, in it, the parish priest, who is either snoring deeply in his drunkenness from the night before or our noise has wakened him enough for him to be wondering, underneath the goose feathers, how he can escape from this embarrassing position: whether he should slip out of the window (which is not a good idea, since our soldiers are waiting for him below) or hide in a chest (which in a room of this size is either non-existent or too small for his portly parochial body).
‘Whose room is this?’ I ask the girl.
‘The priest’s,’ she mumbles.
‘The priest’s? Does he have two bodies so he needs two beds?’
‘Well, everything here is the priest’s,’ many of them will say, now with an adorable sniffle. As the priest is pulling on his shirt and
trousers, you can see something bouncing beneath his big belly (nearly all the whorish priests are thickset, while the older, more senile ones are gaunt), the very thing that, according to the girl’s testimony, gets bloated at night.
‘This is a vile and wicked sin, priest, especially for one who is wed to Holy Church!’
And now the excuses start – ‘Really, you’ve got the wrong idea!’ – which are soon followed by begging for forgiveness. At my relentless gaze, every one of them is ready to confess and repent, after which come promises to be different from now on and explanations that he has nothing to do with the Lutherans, whom he truly despises, and if you don’t count this one sin, of which he is profoundly ashamed, he has no other blemishes on his conscience, and that he serves Mass regularly, on Sundays and feast days, and no longer preaches in Latin but, as is recommended, in the vernacular, that is, in Slovene, which everyone can understand. Finally, he ends by begging me to let him stay here, in this area, in this village, in this house, and not to send him away.
‘Fine,’ I tell him, ‘but under one condition: get rid of your maidservant and hire a new one, a woman at least twenty or thirty years older. So what do you say?’ I look him up and down, and he assures me, promises me, that he will, and then we say farewell and leave. It’s best not to look back. I know very well that as soon as our carriage and retinue and soldiers disappear on the horizon, the priest will wipe his sweaty brow, take a few deep breaths and then call for the maid and everything will be the same as before. Harder! We must be harder with the populace! And I do not mean just the peasants – they are the easiest; they have nothing to bargain with. No, the Provincial Estates are the problem. The towns, too, are a major problem, but the biggest obstacle is the nobility, who are blackmailing the prince with their Lutheranism and making the right to their religion a condition for collecting and transferring taxes and special tribute payments for the defence against the Turks. We must be harsh! Harsher measures are needed with them, otherwise the provinces of Inner Austria will splinter away from us and the Patriarchate of Aquileia will crumble before our eyes. Disunity brings neither order nor strong defence. And only order ensures prosperity and peace. So harder, harsher!
*
Georg Stobaeus von Palmburg, Counsellor and Bishop of Lavant, in a memorandum dated August 20 1598, to the Prince of the Provinces of Inner Austria, Archduke Ferdinand II:
Neither hard nor harsh – everything may be arranged without an inquisition. The war with the Turks means that Catholic reform must begin without delay. Among the many in Styria, Carinthia and Carniola who have publicly and freely declared themselves Lutherans are those who hold some of the most critical posts in the army and administration. When it comes to religion, nothing is more harmful than armed force. The archduke should decree that all his vassals must be Catholic. Whoever does not submit to this command must leave the provinces. To achieve this more easily, the archduke should, if necessary, win his subjects’ devotion and filial love with cheap food. Let the reform begin in the capital of the Inner Austrian provinces – in Graz. Protestant preachers should be forbidden to preach and banished from Graz under penalty of death, and the town should be guarded by Catholic soldiers.
Fears that the reform might trigger violent resistance are baseless. We must not forget that most of our Lutherans are real cowards. A sermon or two, threats of banishment and the forced sale of property at below cost, and they will soon admit the error of their ways. Let us proceed slowly and persistently, and the populace will gradually see the light. Not many will be willing to stake their lives on God and their world views and even fewer to renounce their comforts. This is where they live, this is their home; anywhere else they would be
foreigners. And being a foreigner takes courage – courage most of them do not have. So let us be neither hard nor harsh, but slow, persistent and gradual, and we will succeed.
The Miraculous Fount
For generations, the ice-cold water that welled up among the birch trees behind the church had been considered to have healing powers. In that very spot, Mary had supposedly appeared to a certain maidservant a few decades ago and told her that the liege lady, whose loins had remained inexplicably closed, would be swaddling a child the very next spring. Those were her exact words: next spring your mistress will be swaddling a child. As this seemed an even greater miracle than Mary’s appearance, the maids and servant girls who were more closely acquainted with the situation in the fiefdom quickly spread the news around. The more coarse-minded girls wondered if the lady of the castle might not miraculously see someone whose seed she would deem suitable, which would be worth carrying for nine months, along with the sufferings of pregnancy, an ordeal that, given her position, was unconditionally expected of her. Just as builders build, woodworkers work wood and lutenists lutenize, so castle ladies give birth to feudal heirs. What’s more, Mary was said to have pointed at the fount and told the maidservant that her lady should go there to bathe, as the water was healing and therefore holy as well.
‘Go there alone?’ the other maids asked the witness.
‘Alone. That’s what Mary said.’
‘So the count doesn’t need to go, too?’
‘Mary never mentioned him.’
If Mary mentioned only the lady and not the lord, it follows that the child would not necessarily be his, the other maids said, with meaningful smirks and lewd glances at the stable boys and young farmhands, two of whom turned red from embarrassment. Mary must know, they gossiped, since musicians were on the road again, and in these parts they always stopped at the castle. Whenever singers and instrumentalists stayed at the castle, many dames and damsels, and maids and servant girls, too, would start to glow and, regardless of station or age, even blossom, including the lady of the castle, who adored the lute, the queen of all entertainment. From late spring to early autumn lutenists and singers would gather at the castle. Some of them were quite awful, others superb. And the best of them, fully conscious of their talent, were able to create a certain magnetism around themselves, which was irresistible to the majority of people, who lacked such noble, elevated gifts. More than a few ladies, in a state of aural abandonment, were prepared, for a single ricercar, to throw away everything they valued as women, their dignity in particular, as well as other, similar attributes, whose worth, in extreme situations, could vanish in a flash.
As the lutenists plucked the strings