Don Giovanni Bassi, by Linda Colman
Red, red is the sun,
Heartlessly indifferent to time.
The wind knows though
The promise of early chill.
BashÅ
Don Giovanni, Lately of Rome
Once, long ago, in medieval Rome, there lived a nobleman named Don Giovanni Bassi. Don Giovanni was a wealthy man and a great sinner, known throughout the city for debauching children and defrauding widows. He was also a man of significant influence. The Law was never able to touch him, and Don Giovanni lived in comfort until the day when he woke up, looked in the mirror, and found himself an old man. Now nearing the end of his life, Don Giovanni, a man of faith, began to worry about the punishment that awaited him in the afterworld.
Don Giovanni had surrounded himself with a coterie of learned men, counselors versed in the ways of church and state. Now he called upon his counselors to purchase for him an indulgence for his sins, a document for which he was willing to pay any price. But when his counselors approached intermediaries of the Holy See, they were told that Don Giovanni was too great a sinner to be granted a remission, even under the circumstances of a generous offer.
In despair, Don Giovanni consulted his oldest and dearest friend, the Bishop of Ferrara. Was there any way Don Giovanni could obtain forgiveness on Earth, preferably in the form of a binding document? But the Bishop only sighed and shook his head, counseling penance, fasting, and prayer. Don Giovanni, though he believed in the power of God, was a man who never prayed, for he feared any type of conversation that would lead him to the truth. Moreover, he was a sybarite of longstanding, and penance and fasting were out of the question.
Concluding that he would never be pardoned on Earth or in Heaven, Don Giovanni threw himself into one last desperate flurry of debauchery and sin, protected as he was from the consequences of his acts by his loyal coterie. One morning though, as he was recovering from a particularly wicked round of sinning, Don Giovanni received a visitor from the country.
The visitor, a priest from a small hamlet near Ostia, told him of a merchant who lived in this hamlet: a sinner, and no nobleman, but one who called himself Don Giovanni Bassi. And this merchant Don Giovanni, born in a country parish to an obscure branch of the Bassi clan, had recently purchased an indulgence for his sins. For a small recompense, the priest would disclose to our Don Giovanni the whereabouts of the merchant’s holy document.
The wheels in the mind of our Don Giovanni began to whirl rapidly round and round. Could God Himself be defrauded? This happenstance of the other Don Giovanni might provide the ultimate test of the old sinner’s skill at deception. If only our Don Giovanni could obtain the indulgence granted to this so-called Don, this Giovanni Bassi of Ostia.
Soon the old sinner, disguised as a peasant, was on the road to Ostia. Against the advice of his counselors, he had decided to carry out this important mission on his own. When he reached the hamlet that had been described by the priest, he asked directions to the home of Caterina Bassi, a poor widow and the mother of the merchant Giovanni Bassi. Old and handsome as he was, and looking rather pathetic in his rustic peasant’s costume, our Don Giovanni easily gained admission to Caterina’s home, where he was offered a warm meal and a bed for the night.
The country priest had whispered to Don Giovanni that the indulgence was kept hidden in a bucket at the bottom of Caterina’s well, gone dry these many years. For Caterina’s son was a superstitious man who believed that the indulgence, like some stolen treasure, ought to be concealed from prying eyes. Now, at midnight, Don Giovanni slipped from his bed in the widow’s house and crept out to the well. It was a moonless night, but the old man succeeded in groping his way to the well, and was quietly hauling up the bucket when he heard a rustling sound. Perhaps a creature in the dry brush? ...
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