The Judas Cloth (11 page)

Nicola, dismayed, again mumbled the word gratitude. But Father Curci, now feverish behind his grille, seemed to want more. He leaned so close that Nicola could feel the hot blast of his breath and asked if Nicola wanted to be loved for nature’s sake or for God’s? Nicola wanted to be loved for his own, but was afraid to say so lest he further upset Father Curci who had excitedly embarked on a discussion of love which managed to be, from Nicola’s viewpoint, depressingly arid. ‘After all‚’ said the priest, ‘it is the capacity for loving which matters rather than the lovableness of the object. God is the most deserving love-object, yet is often badly loved. Is this not so?’

The topic was hopelessly off course.

Nicola’s anxiety swung off at a tangent. ‘I’m not the son of the public
executioner or someone like that, am I?’ Anxiously, he began to recite prayers, bunging them, like stoppers, into a crack which was yawning in his head. Not the headsman, he prayed. Please!
Confiteor
– what sins? Treachery – no, better not mention that one. Intermittently, behind the porous screen of prayers too well known to block him off, he heard the confessor quote St Paul who had, it seemed, told the Galatians that spiritual fathers went into labour to give birth to Christ in their children.

The voice behind the screen rose zestfully and was undoubtedly audible to penitents awaiting their turn. ‘
Filioli
miei
‚’
it cried, ‘
quos
iterum
parturio
…’ Nicola hoped a destiny was not being thrust on him.

The Jesuits were girding themselves for persecution, one of their specialties. Accounts of their gruesome and gallant deaths in Tudor England and Japan had been dinned into him and, having eaten their bread for years, it would be shameful to admit that, now, when things were again getting hot, he’d like to leave. Especially if he was, as Father Curci claimed, peculiarly theirs. If only he had a family somewhere!

‘
F
ili
mi
…’

The confessor’s appeal was hard to deal with because he wasn’t acknowledging it as an appeal at all. He seemed to be offering some awful sort of love.

Amandi, clearly, was Nicola’s only hope. On his last visit, his lordship had actually suggested that Nicola should soon leave the Collegio and spend some time in the world. Later, if he did enter the Church, he would have help in making his way. He need not become a
priest
! Amandi’s smile had seemed to mock his own status, but you knew it was mock mockery, meant to make the prospect seem cosy, which it did. The prelacy, said Monsignore, was a true democracy since all a man of merit need do was to put on ecclesiastical dress. No need to take vows even. There were cardinals who had not.

Smiling, he blessed Nicola with two fingers, then turned away. The encounter had been festive but brief, being fitted into the gala occasion of the Pope’s June visit, when pope and Jesuits had seemed so pleased with each other – yet, even so, Monsignore had let slip the suggestion that Nicola leave. There had been no chance to ask him anything about this.

In the end the papal visit had gone off like clockwork with just one eruption of emotion when the
Schola
cantorum
sang
Tu
es
Petrus
and the old doorkeeper was heard to weep. Pius had duly distributed the communion wafer to chosen students and Nicola had his three-minute
meeting with Amandi. Now neither pope nor bishop looked likely to return.

Seen with hindsight, the display had been an appeal. ‘Stick by us‚’ was its gist. ‘You are Peter and we are your brothers in Christ. Don’t drop us on the say-so of your new friends.’ At several points during the proceedings, the papal guard – brought for security or show? – had sunk to their knees with a ring of metal and a leathery creak.

Nicola had been called to the parlour. It was now almost winter and the sun was low in the sky. His visitor was his milk-brother, Ciccio, on whom he had not set eyes in eleven years.

‘Nicola!’ Light smeared thick spectacles. The stranger was thin as string. ‘Remember me? You must have heard that our foster-mother died. Tata.’ Nicola was pinioned in a knobbly embrace. ‘I wouldn’t have known you. I suppose they’ll find you a gentleman’s job? I’ve been working since I was twelve. Pen-pushing. Now even that’s dried up.’

Ciccio’s coat, pinned at the throat, could be holding in untidy bones. One shoulder rode high and he looked like a damaged specimen from one of those books of fables which show insects dressed as men: the grasshopper perhaps or the ant? Timidly, he paused, as if pondering an oblique approach, then asked if he could see the Rector. Nicola told him that
he
could not arrange this. Disappointed, Ciccio talked again of their foster-mother, as though hoping to tighten their bond. She had died three years ago and, no, he hadn’t attended the funeral.

‘She used to say that you’d come back one day in a fine carriage and take her for a ride. With emblazoned door panels! You came in one, you see. She was proud of that.’

Nicola could hardly remember the milky woman. She was a blur: warm and slightly sour like an ooze of old cushions. After leaving her, he had spent some years with nuns.

‘She said you had a good heart.’

This shamed him. ‘How could she know?’

‘She put a lot of children through her hands.’ Ciccio lowered his voice. ‘They didn’t pull it off, did they?’

‘What?’

‘You can trust me, Nico! I had a position of trust. In a ministry. Now newcomers are as thick as fleas, so I left before I was pushed. We took boxes of stuff with us. It’s why I wanted to see the Rector. We thought
the section would be reformed and we’d be in work again. There were bigwigs interested. Your Rector would know – but it looks as if it’s come to nothing, eh?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ciccio.’

Ciccio looked downcast. ‘Ah well, it was good to see you, Nico.’ No longer hoping for help, he had lost his nervousness. Yet his forehead was damp with sweat and he refused to open his coat. Perhaps he had pawned his linen? Nicola had an impulse to detain him. He wanted to ask ‘What else did Tata say about me?’ Instead, he asked: ‘About those rumours …’

Ciccio stood up. ‘It’s not my place to tell. Tata used to say “Ciccio’s limited but reliable”.’ Sadly, his smile accepted this.

‘I’m sorry I can’t help.’

‘I understand. The fathers are preparing you for big things.’

‘You’re making fun of me.’

‘No. Why? I thought you’d be a man now. But
they’
re
holding you back. Reserving you. You’ll be the better for it.’

Nicola was piqued. He felt that the innocent one here was Ciccio. How
could
he have expected to walk in and get a meeting with the Rector? Why not with the General himself?

‘Maybe I’ll come again when you’re a bishop!’

‘That might be a long time!’

‘Oh, I’ve copied letters about babies getting appointments before they’re out of swaddling clothes. Drawing salaries!’

Nicola, who saw him to the front door, was ashamed when Martelli stepped from a carriage and stared. He had been home for the autumn vacation and was no doubt making worldly comparisons. As Ciccio crossed the square, he looked more than ever like an insect which had been crushed by a careless foot.

Martelli was full of news of the arguments going on in clubs and cafés. Their topic was whether the Pope, whose most recent concession was to set up an Advisory Council composed of laymen, could truly be weaned away from the zealots. Ciccio’s hints interested him. ‘It
proves
they’re plotting,’ he cried and Nicola was sorry he’d passed the chatter on. Martelli, at the time of the ‘tapestry’ – their code word – had claimed to be thinking of the Jesuits’ own interests. Now he seemed to have forgotten them.

He denied this. ‘Don’t you see that to prevent the really wild men
from taking over, we must anticipate them. Bring in reforms, take the wind out of their sails!’

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘Santi, we’re nearly sixteen! If it wasn’t for my shitpot of a father, I’d be active already!’

Nicola was shocked.

‘He doesn’t want me to see my cousin because he was in gaol. In Bologna, anyone who’s been in gaol is a hero. Don’t look like that, Nicola. Are you going to be a Jesuit? Even if you are, you’ll have to pick sides.’

Would he? The Jesuits themselves denied this. It consoled them to know that, even now, aloft in their Observatory, Father Vico, famous for having tracked Halley’s comet, was oblivious of things terrestrial, as he got on with describing the entire visible sky. The Father Prefect had made much of this in his last talk.

The Prefect, said Martelli, had his head in a bag.

The text at dinner was by a man who had opposed the Jesuits until he saw how the Church’s enemies united against them. Then: ‘A conviction took root in me that there must be some mysterious explanation for the amazing unity among those odd bedfellows, their enemies. Hidden in that intuitive hatred is a conviction that by striking at
them
one strikes the Church at its heart.’

That, said the reader, was from a speech made in the French Upper House three years ago, when our schools in France were being forced to close. The reader then sat down to his cooled meal.

Martelli at once began a voluble conversation and Nicola, who was too far away to hear, was exhilarated by the flash of his eye. Yet the reading too had appealed. Like moths to light, their teachers seemed drawn to fatality. It was an abyss into which they felt enticed to plunge. Sometimes, just before falling asleep, Nicola imagined sliding into it with them and the thrill of surrender crossed over into his dreams.

In more energetic moments, these fancies gave way to ones in which he rushed out into the mob and laid about him with a stick.

Martelli was idly rearranging meat-scraps on his plate. He’s reading the entrails, thought Nicola, and felt relieved to find his friend’s challenge reducible to a joke.

‘Souls for God …’

‘Holiness, you win them!’ Amandi meant this. ‘Something
extraordinary
happens between your flock and you.’

Mastai sighed. ‘They ask for material things. I fear they’ll soon start to see me as the representative for Railways and Lower Customs Tariffs!’ His smile was cheerless. ‘You and I were accustomed to follow orders.’

‘Now you give them.’

‘And the advice I get is contradictory. Grassi’s, Gizzi’s …’

Cardinal Gizzi, the Cardinal Secretary, had resigned on the grounds that Mastai lacked fixity of purpose and was impossible to work with. The gossip was that Chancellor Metternich had used Austria’s secret veto to stop Gizzi himself becoming pope and was now sorry. Warnings about the Chancellor’s state of mind came thick and fast from the nuncio in Vienna, but Mastai disregarded them.

‘Why,’ he had greeted Amandi today, ‘has the Austrian eagle two heads? To gobble its prey faster.’ Jokes restored him. ‘The dove,’ he quipped, ‘won’t speak through eagles’ beaks.’ But did the dove speak at all? Advice blasted Mastai’s ears. He needed a new St Joan. ‘Maybe we should pray for one?’

This was seriously meant. Like a fairytale king, he had asked for news of the visionaries of his realm and was now hoping to learn what was on God’s mind – which mattered more than Chancellor Metternich’s – from the testimony of two children to whom the Virgin was said to have appeared shortly after his own election.

It seemed that God, like the Chancellor, was angry. Recent
crop-failures
were a warning and worse would follow unless people renounced blasphemy. ‘She said,’ Mastai told Amandi, ‘that her Son’s hand is raised to smite the world and she has been holding it back, but her arm is tired.’ The vision had occurred near a small Alpine village and this in itself was a message. God had chosen to speak to the simple. A rebuff for our intellectualists. Mastai relished it. ‘We must believe,’ he said, ‘as little children do.’ ‘Blasphemy’ meant the whole baggage of modern presumption. He agreed with this. His Liberal mentors were insatiable and he would have liked nothing better than to turn his back on them and drive to where the Madonna had appeared to two French cowherds aged eleven and fourteen. She had been floating over a ravine, by a stream whose waters were now healing the sick.

‘I said we needed a St Joan. Well …’ Mastai smiled. What a trial, thought Amandi, if he turned out to be a saint. The thought shocked
him. I’m forgetting his shrewdness, he decided. This is a way of extricating himself from the Liberal grip. For a moment, he closed his eyes. Opening them, he found Pius watching him.

‘I know what’s on your mind. Politics. But I won’t use you there.’ Mastai’s grin split his aimiable currant-bun face. ‘I have enough men of reason there. I want you to go to France.’

Two weeks later, having journeyed up the leg of Italy and over the Alps, Amandi reached the parish of La Salette in the diocese of Grenoble. He was dazed by a repetitious effulgence of pale precipices and cataracts as white as horses’ tails. Snow, crisp as salt, stung the air, and at one point the travellers had had to leave their carriage, as its horses were harnessed to a sled.

He had removed his violet insignia and dressed like an ordinary priest, even adding the neck bands peculiar to French ones. The local bishop favoured the local miracle and Amandi did not want reports reaching him that Rome had sent an observer. Bishop Philibert de Bruillard, ordained in 1789 – a year to mark a man – had gone into hiding during the Terror, then been spiritual director to Madeleine Sophie Barat, foundress of the Sacred Heart nuns who were widely known as ‘
Jesuitesses
’.
Their
proclaimed aim was to teach the future mothers of well-to-do France how to keep revolutionary notions from entering their sons’ heads, and it looked as though the new miracle’s aim was to prevent them burgeoning in those of the starving.

There were plenty of these. The potato crop had failed again and so had cereals. All along the way, Amandi saw fields of rotting stalks and, when his carriage sank in mud and broke its rear axle, he was himself mistaken for a victim of the times.

He had managed to hire a cart to convey his baggage to the nearest inn and, as he walked ahead of it, was surprised by the approach of what looked like a mirror-image of himself. Another priest, wearing a tattered soutane, walked beside a cart piled high with furniture. The winter sun dazzled, and for moments Amandi wondered whether he, like the cowherds, was seeing a mirage.

The other priest raised a hand in salutation. ‘Are you another of us, Father?’

The man’s face looked tear-stained and now, as though triggered by the thought, wails burst from behind his cart where a woman was
hobbling along. She had furrowed skin and darned clothes: a priest’s housekeeper or mother? He was young enough for that.

Amandi, sensing a misunderstanding, said he’d had an accident.

He wasn’t the only one, said the Frenchman. Thirty-five accidents had happened today. Thirty-five letters had been sent from the episcopal palace, throwing priests from their parishes with scarcely more ceremony than if they’d been thieving footmen. ‘We’re lucky to be spared the kick in the bum! We’ll end sweeping the streets. In the old days we’d have had redress. But since the church courts are gone, bishops are
all-powerful
. Oh, mother,
stop
!
You’ll have me crying too.’

The young man’s voice had an edge of hysteria. While he tried to comfort the old woman, Amandi observed their possessions. A bucket hung from the cart’s tail. There were bedding rolls, pots and a painting of St Aloysius Liquori. All had the humiliated look of objects which need to be arranged just so to hide their blemishes. There was one padded chair. Who got that? The mother? Yes, for her son was fond of her. He was rubbing her hands now and gently shaking her as though in the despairing hope of infusing a little spirit into her.

‘I’m making a list.’ He turned back to Amandi. ‘Will you let me put your name on it, Father? Since the Church denies us recourse, we can try the state. Go to law. After all, we’re on its payroll. This is no time for turning the other cheek. The poor depend on us. You
are
one of us?’ The youth was seized by doubt.

His mother knew better. Alert as a dog, she had been plucking at his arm to warn that there was something not right about Amandi.

The young man’s muscles froze. Then the blood rose in his face. ‘I’m a fool,’ he acknowledged as he took in the good cloth and cut of Amandi’s dusty clothes. ‘You,’ he supposed dully, ‘must be an observer for Monseigneur de Bruillard? His …’ the word slipped out, ‘spy?’

‘No.’ Amandi felt awkward. He
was,
after all, a sort of spy.

Suddenly, the young priest began banging his forehead with his fist, to the scandal of the two carters who stared reprovingly at this unpriestly behaviour. ‘Fool!’ The boy banged his forehead.

‘Stop!’ Amandi caught his arm. ‘It’s not what you think. On the contrary, we may be able to help each other.’

Later, in a private room in the nearest inn, he and le Père Dubus – the young priest’s name – became allies. Dubus had to be wooed from his suspicions; but Amandi, after all, was a diplomat, knew France, knew
men, and disposed of the excellent argument that the other had nothing to lose. Neither had the French Church which, for reasons to do with chance and history, needed outside help.

‘Outside?’ Dubus’ mind was slow. He had been up early, packing his depressing possessions, and had just put his mother to bed after feeding her bread soaked in broth.

Now he and Amandi, alias le Père Roux, which was the name on his papers, sat burning their shins at a fire whose heat was mostly escaping up the chimney – like the Church’s energies, said Dubus, who believed in applying these to the needs of this world and had on this account fallen foul of his bishop.