The Prosecutor by Augusto Roa Bastos

Author:Augusto Roa Bastos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
ISBN: 9781683930341
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2018-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

--Gossip mill of Madrid:

Tell us: Who killed the Count?

--They say that The Cid killed him

Because the Count was healthy.

Tasteless crazy idea

The truth of the case has been

That the killer was Bellido

And the instigator, sovereign.[137]

The mystery of the ring remains. It could not be the Queen’s ring. The great silver ring was worthy of a corpulent chamberlain of the court, but not of her Serene Highness. It also could not be hers because of its nature as a secret weapon. In his collection of jewels, Don Juan de Tassis had various pieces with similar characteristics, some of them, like the ring in question, resulting from the sacking of Rome. Throughout four centuries, the count’s ring slid through branches of the lush genealogical tree of the Tassis y Peralta, until by the law of chance, which also dominates in dynastic glades, it fell into the oak jewelry box of Clara Tarsis, Jimena’s mother.

This trajectory of wandering objects is sometimes more mysterious than the itineraries of human beings. It suggests small imbalances in the cosmos. Orbits that bite their own tail. The Count of Villamediana’s ring precisely assumes the shape of a serpent whose tail enters in the mouth of the silver ophidian under the opal mount that crowns it.

There is also an inexplicable connection in the last names of those that compose the extensive conglomerate of postmasters. Thus, the Tassis of Castile are tied to the Tasso of Bergamo. The latter, in turn, become the branch of the Thurn und Thaxis, in which Alessandrina de Rye stands out, one of the greatest figures of the postal couriers. The postal centers were in Frankfort, Cologne, Hamburg, Rheinhausen, and Venice, without excluding the pontifical seat. In the postal empire of the Tasso family, the right of succession extended to the feminine branch. Later this right was adopted by all the Postmasters’ businesses. “If the empire had survived,” I once said to Jimena, regarding that, “the right to be empress of the postmasters would have fallen to you.” She didn’t find these genealogical blunders very amusing.

The Tasso family did not turn their nose up at modifying their last name according to the demands of the different languages and of the countries to which their postal empire was extending itself. One can observe the principal etymological and phonetic roots. Thus, the Tassos became Daxen, Taxis, Thaxis, Thassis, Thassus, and hence, the Tassis of the first count of Villamediana. The famous poet Torcuato Tasso did not belong to the noble sect of the General Postmasters. He limited himself to writing Jerusalem Delivered in which he celebrates the crusade of the magnificent Godfrey of Bouillon.[138] If you believe the family chronicles, it seems that Don Torcuato was fascinated by traveling for the great mail transactions (“ships on dry land,” he called them in his poems), whose rocking put him in a state of trance. Some of his biographers assure—all of us tend to discover the unpublished angle of reality—that the poet wrote some of the cantos of Jerusalem during the postal transactions on the frequent trips from Sorrento to Rome.

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