The Judas Cloth (13 page)

His pupils were shocked. This, surely, was going too far?

Another time, he raised a face bleared with enthusiasm to share ‘a cheering thought’. It was this: ‘Joseph would never have had to flee with Mary into Egypt if Jesus had not been with them! Is it not the same with us now and an occasion of the most exalting joy?’

‘He’s soft in the head,’ said Martelli.

What had happened to the Church’s elite corps? Had it lost all backbone? Even rebellious pupils were disappointed. Their pride was invested in the legend of cunning, powerful Jesuits.

The hope was that the Society’s leaders were holding secret talks with the Pope. And when, in mid-March, a Te Deum was sung in the Collegio chapel, everyone guessed that he had promised them support. On the 19th, which was St Joseph’s Day, Nicola’s division was taken on an excursion outside the city walls. We could not, said the Prefect, stay cooped up forever.

The outing became a celebration. Sweet St Joseph’s fritters were selling at open-air booths and the Prefect bought some for everyone. Then the boys wore themselves out playing the strenuous games they had been missing. They were in high spirits, and even the walk back was a pleasure for the air was fizzing with smells from hidden gardens and from the hayricks which were still numerous in the city’s heart.

A crowd blocked their way through piazza Venezia, and word went down the line that they were, at all costs, to stay together.

A priest stood on a cart in front of the Austrian Embassy.

‘See there!’ A woman pointed at a pale patch on the wall behind his head. ‘That’s where the Austrian eagle used to be. It was torn down when news got here of the revolution in Vienna. The crowd dragged it the length of the Corso, beating it with sticks.’

A man laughed.

‘What’s there to laugh at?’ She was offended. The eagle had been burned in the piazza del Popolo. ‘From patriotism!’ she told the mocker.

‘Well, if that’s the extent of their patriotism‚’ said he, ‘the Austrians can sleep on both ears.’

‘Austro-Jesuit!’ The patriotic woman spat.

Nicola and his friends edged away from her, then found that they were no longer with the rest of their group.

‘Who’s the preacher?’ they asked and were told that he was the abate Gavazzi, a Liberal priest who had the ear of the Pope. But, a dispute arose about this. Some contended that the Pope had imprisoned the abate who had only just been released.

‘But if Gavazzi’s one of his advisers why would he lock him up?’

‘Because the Holy Father’s shillyshallying.’

‘And has advisers who think differently.’ A young man looked askance at the Collegio uniform.

Clutching Martelli’s coat, Nicola found his nose being rammed into breasts and backs. An elbow caught him in the ribs. His hat tilted over his eyes. No touching was countenanced in the Collegio and now here was this smothering flesh. At moments, he was pushed out like something newborn only to be reingulfed. This, he thought, is the secular world.

‘Stop shoving, you boys!’

But Martelli, propelled by the buttress of his friends, forged forward until, breaking through to open space, they fell to the ground. The crowd commented disparagingly. Hands yanked at their collars.
Members
of the Civic Guard were lined up around the speaker’s cart.

Aloft on it, the preacher loomed full-blooded and muscular, like a creature which could have stood between its shafts. His nostrils dilated. His role was to link God and man, and the movement here was clearly from below. He spoke soothingly. These, he said, of the Collegio boys, were only children. Let them listen now that they were here.

So, with the Guards’ grip on their necks, the six had to stay put while the abate used them to instruct his audience. Italian youth, he said, must be helped shake off a bad old heritage. ‘Young men,’ he exhorted, ‘free yourselves from dead ways of thinking lest you be like the corpses who walk our streets pretending to be alive. Try to live as God meant so that we may all be brothers instead of plotters and spies!’

Nicola felt queerly hollow as if what had been most secret inside himself had been pulled out for public display.

‘
Si
!’ yelled the
mobile
vulgus,
whose embrace was disconcertingly seductive.

So were the abate’s arguments as he challenged the Jesuits to stop plotting with Austria. ‘I challenge them!’ he cried and his eye roamed.
‘Let them not say that this would be to pander to the world, for the world is no longer the corrupt old world we have known. It has become new, young and hopeful. This, my friends, is truly a time of hope!’

There were cheers. Martelli joined in and Nicola too, though reproaching him with a dutiful nudge, felt exhilarated by the prospect of a young, hopeful world waiting for them both. It was sad, of course, to think of the Father Prefect and Father Curci as corpses and corrupt – meaning, surely, no more than soft like decaying fruit – but how deny that an aura of doom clung to these good, unmanly men?

Meanwhile the preacher was promising an end to poverty. Cheers. More promises. Then shouts so deafening that he had to use the full resources of his lungs and it was as if he were inhaling his listeners’ energy with his black, pumping nostrils. Nicola lost track of the sermon which mentioned war and tariffs. The preacher, glowing with sweat, managed to look both bull-like and heroic, which might well have been how Zeus had looked when he took the shape of a bull to woo Pasiphae and beget the Minotaur.

‘As God created light by naming it,’ cried Gavazzi, ‘so shall the cry of this generation restore life to a nation which was once the light of Europe and the world!’

This, though obscure, glowed in the imagination like old coal. Nicola was stirred and so was the piazza which went silent for a pent moment. Then someone called ‘
Bravo
!’‚
someone else cried ‘Now!’ and from all sides the word ‘
Italia
!’
began to explode. Mouths jutted. Lips trumpeted and, like birds volleying from cover, the syllables whirred. It was impossible not to join in. Nicola, caught off guard, was like someone whose foot taps to an enemy tune.

‘By God, young man!’ A floppy old face leaned into his. ‘I’ve prayed for the day I’d hear a Roman crowd shout that! Ten years the Austrians kept me in gaol.’ The old man’s eyes watered and his jaw shook. ‘Ten years of eating soup with cooked worms floating in it! But today,’ he touched Nicola’s shoulder, ‘I feel as young as you. God bless your youth, boy.’ The gummy smile was impossible to snub.

‘God bless you too,’ Nicola answered and wondered whether God or he had turned coat.

‘
Viva
l’Italia
e Pio
Nono
!’

Drunk on this man’s vision, the random collection of gawkers, agitators and – possibly? – paid demonstrators felt the touch of history.
They
were the Roman people.

Then, disappointingly, it was over. The speaker was whisked off and
his admirers faced an empty afternoon. ‘Can
we
go too?’ Perversely, Martelli defied the exultant mood which the crowd was still savouring.

‘It’s over, isn’t it?’ he insisted.

A guard – still dazed – continued to hold him and several people gave him black looks.

Abruptly, Martelli wrenched free. The guard reached for and hit him, possibly by mistake. There was a hubbub.

‘It’s the Jesuit boys. They’ve attacked the Civic Guard.’

‘To think that at this moment in Milan young fellows are fighting Austrians while these …’

Someone hit Nicola on the nose and blood began to flow.

‘You,’ Martelli harangued the guards, ‘are meant to keep the peace …’

Nicola wished he would pipe down. A squad of fellows, older than they, hemmed them in between the cart and the wall of the Austrian Embassy. With faltering authority, the guards cautioned everyone and the newcomers began amusing themselves. Slow banter was tossed about like a knife in the hand.

‘But I agree with you!’ was Martelli’s response to a comment about Jesuits. He did too. He was the least ‘Jesuited’ of their pupils.

But agreement was not wanted. ‘Sneaky, eh?’ said one of his tormentors. ‘Trying to pass for one of us. That’s what the Jays teach them,’ he told his friends in mock surprise. ‘That,’ addressing Martelli, ‘is how we
know
you’re spies.’

Suddenly, the boy next to Nicola was knocked down. There was a lull. Any move now could trigger a free-for-all and the Civic guards were refraining from making one.

The man who did came from nowhere, and, before anyone knew it, had an arm around the throat of the chief lout. His other hand grabbed and held the lout’s knife. Astonishingly, he wore a cassock.

‘You,’ he told the guards, ‘look sharp about doing your duty or I’ll report you for fraternising with troublemakers. Escort these gentlemen to their school party which is by the Corso. These buffoons,’ he tightened his arm around his prisoner’s throat, ‘aren’t worth locking up.’ Releasing his victim, he prodded a knee into his spine. ‘Disperse. Now. Fast, before I change my mind. And that,’ he told the bystanders, ‘goes for you all.’ Still holding the confiscated knife, he climbed onto the cart to supervise their retreat.

He was a lean man, a bit ungainly with a crooked eye, a long nose and the face of a stone crusader. ‘Quick!’ he chivvied. Jumping down, he
caught up with the six boys as they reached the Prefect of Studies and introduced himself. He was Xavier de Mérode, a novice who until three years ago had been a serving officer with the French in the Sahara. He smiled and the Father Prefect did too, pleased to recognise a man of his own sort in this champion. Mérode? Surely, he must be related … And indeed it was soon discovered that they had a distant but definite connection.

Rain, rattling down like staves, now drove everyone into a covered courtyard where the conversation quickened. Nicola, brimming with the stimulus of the day, felt his imagination enticed in a new direction: the Sahara!

The Prefect too had been ignited. Cousinship drew him back to the world: an odd region of it scattered through France where grandmothers tended the flame of memory, prayed for relatives guillotined sixty years ago and turned their châteaux into shrines. ‘They mourn their dead saints‚’ sighed the Jesuit. A class had been consecrated by blood. ‘Your maternal grandmother – a Grammont, was she not?’

‘Yes.’

Rain lashed the ground outside, and golden horse droppings frothed and leaped. If you squinted they could have been flames.

The Prefect began a game of naming families, matching them like cards in a suit. Had Mérode an ancestor who had died at the siege of Maestricht? Or was it that of Landres?’

‘Both! Both!’ The novice’s ancestors’ deaths had conferred panache on half the battlefields of Europe.

The guards stared morosely at this heraldic creature in the crumpled cassock who, it emerged, was also descended from the royal saint Elizabeth of Hungary. One thought of all the church statues which, during this Lenten season, were hidden under lumpy purple cloth. Mérode too could have descended from some niche. He had, he said, attended today’s sermon, for a purpose.

‘If we,’ said the ex-officer, ‘do not listen and report what we hear, how will princes keep informed?’

The Prefect looked nervously at the guards and Mérode told them curtly that they could leave.

‘Gavazzi,’ he said then, ‘is dangerous. Last month, as you know, the Holy Father used the words “God bless Italy” in a public speech. Harmless words, one might think. But Gavazzi has been twisting them to mean that to bless Italy is to curse Austria whose presence in this peninsula makes a free Italy impossible. Arguing that the Pope has
thereby launched a crusade, he recruits young men to fight in it and then tells the Pope that it would be dangerous to check the tide of patriotism which he himself has unleashed. He’s viperous! A snake!’

‘I heard‚’ said the Prefect, ‘that they’re calling him Peter the Hermit.’

‘It’s only half a joke. People are enrolling to fight and giving money for his “crusade”. A crusade against a Catholic country! Launched by the Pope! It’s demented,’ said the novice, ‘or deeply cunning. Because, such a ragtag army could only fail – and out of failure comes revolution. We in France have seen what the Gavazzis do. They pit the Son against the Father and the Sermon on the Mount against the Ten
Commandments
. They smuggle revolution inside the Church.’

A breeze blended street smells into something as poignant as a
potpourri
while the ex-ambassador paused to eat cheese-stuffed rice-fritters with his fingers. This gave him intense pleasure. Just now, on the Gianiculum, he had seen a cardinal descend from his crested carriage, refuse the services of three footmen and do the same. Roman
nonchalance
! The ex-ambassador had never been able to indulge it until now.

An exile watches his step and His Excellency Count Pellegrino Rossi had been moving around Europe like a journeyman for thirty-four years! Minding your step lest the ground shift was sound strategy, but now it was too late. The shift had taken place and his replacement had been installed in the Palazzo Colonna with a tricolour over the door.

His Excellency whisked crumbs from his waistcoat and tried to remember whether in childhood he had ever eaten fritters in the street. Probably not. Prodigies do not have true childhoods and he, though in his sixties, was aware of a fund of boyishness still rash and urgent in an untapped part of his soul.

The word drew him up. It was much in use these days. So were ‘free’ and ‘fight’: buoyant words which revived memories of three and a half decades ago when the prodigy kicked over the traces and bolted. He soon learned to keep his soul well in hand.

The fritter crumpled. Its batter was bubbly like condensing air. He had got his teeth into the radiant Roman day.

Weeds coloured the crannies of monuments and a foreign woman, having set up her easel, was dabbing in watery approximations of this anarchic brilliance.

He moved along. Idleness was alien to him and he had already killed time at Merle’s bookshop. It was a meeting place for the lettered whom he had no longer any reason to avoid.

Vacating the ambassadorial appartments had cost him few regrets. His wife, a Geneva Protestant, was not
persona
grata
to the papal government, so his three-year residency had been something of a bivouac. Charlotte, obliged to keep out of the way, had claimed not to mind and probably hadn’t. Being French ambassadress to the Holy See would not have suited her. Few could be less fit for the role. Watching her, you saw how the Reformation had come about. Not only did she get things wrong, she saw wrong everywhere – even in a cardinal’s companionably accepting snuff from his footman’s snuffbox.

‘It’s not what you think,’ Rossi reassured. But her mind was no more negotiable than a ledger. ‘The cardinal,’ he explained, ‘does not need to insist on status as a
bourgeois
might.’

‘What’s wrong with being
bourgeois
?’
asked his
bourgeoise
on whom their recently acquired title sat oddly.

‘Only that people here are more intimate with their servants.’

To Charlotte ‘intimate’ meant lewd. She got homesick and, despite remissions – springtime, carnival – only recovered when back in her wholesome Geneva. Rossi understood. One became a hybrid, missing Swiss cleanliness in the scrolled and golden Roman cafés, yet – in his case – yearning, when in Geneva, for Roman ease. Charlotte did not. She complained querulously when here and had not acquired the nous of Roman ladies who knew how to feign abstraction when a gentleman was emptying his bladder into a potted shrub. Her delicacy was as vulnerable to a urine splash as demons to holy water. Thank God she was now enjoying Northern hygiene in the company of their second son. There had been one appalling occasion when some drops bounced onto her dress. At the Princess Colonna’s. Memory quailed. He shook his head.

Theirs had not been a love match, so he had no reproaches to make. She had been the companion of his cautious years.

He reached the Caffè Nuovo. Marco Minghetti, one of the new lay ministers, invited him to his table and Rossi sighed at the smeared marble. ‘Would you think I was being Swiss if we asked one of these fellows to clean it?’

They took up their usual debate, pausing only when the still smeary table – the waiter’s flourish had merely rearranged the dirt – was approached by a cleric whose stoop sagged into a bow. Dottor Vigilio was off his beat in this Liberals’ café.

‘Bad news, Minister,’ he greeted Minghetti. ‘A man has been
murdered in Ancona under the windows of the British consul whose daughters witnessed the knifing. It seems he hoped for sanctuary.’

Minghetti looked put out.

‘The victim was the unfortunate Lucarelli whom I had the honour to recommend to both Your Excellencies some time back.’

‘Lucarelli the spy?’ asked Rossi.

‘A sincere man who craved the consolation of kissing both your Excellencies’ hands.’ The cleric granted him ten seconds’ silence. Then: ‘There are others for whom something may yet be done. Archives have been opened stripping away the mystery which should protect such men. If we use them, can we then deny them?’

‘I,’ said the minister, ‘used nobody.’

‘Not you personally, Minister.’ Dottor Vigilio smiled mossily.

‘I find,’ said Minghetti, who had not asked the cleric to sit, ‘that half the Treasury’s revenues go to parasites who disgorge its vital substance to lesser creatures of their own. Your clients, Dottor Vigilio, probably belonged to the best-paid category we have. We now need money for arms and are at a loss where to look. Will they pay the state back what they milked from it?’

‘Count,’ the agent turned to Rossi, ‘I appeal to you …’

‘I am a private citizen, Dottor Vigilio.’

‘Oh Excellency, that is unlikely to last.’

The young minister was impatient but Rossi relished the agent’s perceptible undermining of his own overt discourse. Something as elusive as a tonal shift solicited connivance. You and I, implied this secondary language, are birds of a feather; we live on several planes.

To Rossi, lifelong exile and funambulist, the invitation to volatility was irresistible. Since the Paris revolution brought down the regime he represented, he had been drawing closer to the Roman one. Both Minghetti and His Holiness unofficially turned to him for advice. Weeks ago he, and he alone, had been granted an advance look at the new and grudging constitution – the first ever granted here – while it was still a draft.

‘Your Holiness,’ he had exclaimed, ‘it is not a constitution. It is a declaration of war on Your Holiness’s subjects.’

Nothing mealy-mouthed about that! But the Pope published the thing anyway. A neophyte ruler – especially if more bishop than king – needed delicate handling. Had Rossi lost his touch?

As a young refugee his misfortune had had the glamour of a war wound. But wounds, over time, become disabilities, so he learned to
hide his and three times made his mark in new territory. After being exiled from Bologna, where he had been one of the law school’s shining lights, he had glowed a while in the firmament of the Swiss Diet, then moved to Paris where he could have had a cabinet post if he had not preferred the ambassadorship.
That
had been a coup. Alone among political exiles, he had returned on his own terms! All his roads led here – though in the end it was a near thing. Guizot, his master at the French Foreign Ministry, was now an exile himself, yet here was Rossi, home and dry, with more political nous than any man in the peninsula!

Impetuosity tempted him as it hadn’t done since he risked his Chair of Jurisprudence to join Joachim Murat’s daredevil bid to unite the peninsula. Thirty-four years ago. Be prudent, Rossi.

He always had been. After that one wild act he became a byword for it. His work on a constitution for the Swiss and in Guizot’s government in Paris were – he now hoped – an apprenticeship for his real task: to help glue together the jigsaw parts of his own country: Italy. It would be his youthful dream realised! A prickle of anticipation played along his skin.

He must have smiled, for Dottor Vigilio took this as a cue.

‘Gentlemen, I have a new supplicant …’

Will Minghetti think ill of me, wondered Rossi, if I encourage the agent?

But now the minister, a man unable to spend his day in cafés, took his leave.

The other two, like a couple left unchaperoned, lowered their voices. The agent’s new supplicant was called Nardoni and, like all old spies, he had a file of papers to barter for protection. The agent, moving at a tangent, asked Rossi’s opinion on a case in the file. ‘It concerns a lady who, while married to one nobleman – let us call him Don X – had a son by Don Z. Certain parties wish to know whether the child has any standing in law.’

‘Normally such offspring is assumed to be the husband’s.’

‘Ah, but in this case the mother chose not to foist spurious issue on him. The child was delivered in secrecy while her lover stood outside her door with a cocked pistol. This lover was a foreign gentleman who returned in time to his own country. The child was bundled out to a foundling hospital and brought up by strangers. Now, however, the legitimate male line is extinct, following the deaths of Don X and his son.’

‘And to whom will the family fortune go? I presume this to be the pivotal interest here,’ said Rossi.

‘There is a daughter who married into a Republican family.’

‘So the bastard’s sponsors must be – don’t tell me – the Gregorians? Well, my answer is the same: a child born in wedlock is the husband’s.
Pater
est
quem
jus
tae
nuptiae
demonstrant.’

‘Indeed. But the mother has scruples. Her former confessor told her that the real sin was in importing alien blood into the family and adulterating the stock. Women who sin can be seized with an aversion for the sin’s fruit. The lady’s present confessor, a more humane man, hopes to persuade her that her attitude lacks charity.
She
wants to apprise the Pope of her dilemma.’

‘And your friends distrust His Holiness?’

The agent turned up his hands.

‘You think he is surrounded by bad advisers? Perhaps,’ it struck Rossi, ‘you wonder about me?’

‘Excellency, you are a known moderate.’

‘So you are testing me?’ The case, Rossi guessed, was no doubt a fiction and so perhaps were Nardoni and his file. In seminaries such cases of conscience were regularly invented to try the resourcefulness of aspiring priests.

‘If the case were to come to trial would you think the present climate favourable?’

‘To Liberals or Republicans?’

The agent nodded.

‘No.’ Rossi rose.

‘I’ll walk out with you.’

Outside, the agent murmured. ‘It
is
a real case. I know Your Excellency is discretion itself. It would be hard to win, would it not, if the mother were to declare the boy a bastard?’

‘Would she?’

‘Who knows? These are strange times. It is probably your duty, Excellency, to save us from the extremes which threaten us.’

‘If I did, would they threaten
me
?’

The agent’s hands sketched the gestures of a priest offering up the sacrifice of the mass. Perhaps he was offering up Rossi? Returning to the Nardoni file, he whispered: ‘Any man who takes power will need information he can use for his own protection …’

Rossi interrupted him: ‘No,’ he said. ‘Blackmail is what you’re
proposing, isn’t it? So: no.’ He felt elated. Challenge was like wine to him.

A letter had come from Monsignor Amandi. It was addressed to the Rector. Pale fingers folded it into a trumpet, turning the writing from Nicola who would not be shown the contents.

‘You’re to leave us.’

The Rector looked harassed. He lowered the paper trumpet and began to mumble. A pity to interrupt one’s studies. Normally – but where now was normality? The school itself might shortly be closing down. ‘Don’t forget the principles we have endeavoured …’

It was a demobilising speech. Man and boy looked at each other with tired sympathy.

‘Pray for us,’ said the Rector. The light was silver on the surface of his soutane. The Jesuits wore their clothes until they were too threadbare to be given to beggars.

Tears filled Nicola’s eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Father …’ It was the washing out of something he had not had time to quite feel: the quick quitting of a debt. Oh God, he thought – and the tears sprayed. God would be staying here in this target for threats and missiles. It was shameful to be so glad to go.

Before leaving, he divided his few possessions and gave away one or two of the things he liked best: a magic, propitiatory move.

His confessor embraced him. ‘I have information for you.’ Father Curci drew him into an empty classroom. ‘I have discovered who first delivered you to your wet nurse.’

‘The bishop …’

‘It wasn’t he.’ The confessor’s eyes were bright. ‘I’m not happy about telling you. At another time I’d wait but we’ll soon be packing our bags. Hotheads are pushing the Holy Father into this war with Austria and we’re seen, God knows unjustly, as Austrophiles …’

Nicola waited.

‘Before I tell you,’ Father Curci looked severe, ‘I want you to remember that anyone living under obedience should let himself be directed under divine providence as though he were a corpse –
perinde
ac
cadaver.
A corpse or a staff in an old man’s hand. Remember that when you see us kicked out. You won’t hear a murmur from us. Just
remember why when we’re maligned by men like Gavazzi. It was he,’ Curci paused, ‘who brought you to your wet nurse.’

‘The preacher? Father Gavazzi?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he a bad priest?’

‘Who can look into his conscience? He was a prison chaplain in Parma and seems to have been unbalanced by what he saw. Now he’ll unbalance others. Letting him loose among the common people is like throwing a live brand into hay.’ The confessor squeezed Nicola’s hands in his own and kissed him on both cheeks.

Nicola went to take his leave of the Prefect of Studies and found his cell door open and Father Grassi standing at it. He was in
mid-harangue
. ‘Sixty!’ cried Grassi. ‘Sixty bishops have declared their support fur us, yet the Holy Father will not let their letters be published!’