Q by Luther Blissett (poetry books to read txt) 📕

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.