The Judas Cloth (24 page)

So was she whose blush blazed angrily at him. ‘I don’t know.’

But she did and now so did he.

Cardinal Count Carlo Oppizzoni was eating his usual meal of plain boiled rice. He owed it to his flock to stay healthy, especially since his co-shepherd, Cardinal Amat, the Legate in charge of its temporal welfare, had not done so and was now recovering from unspecified ills at a spa. At Bagni di Lucca, was it? Or Porretto? Some spa. It was remarkable how often the health of senior prelates broke down at the selfsame moment as that of the body politic. That, said His Eminence, was now volatile, not to say feverish. Victory had gone to the heads of the people and, more dangerously, left weapons in their hands. ‘My own idea is that Father Gavazzi should be invited here to persuade them to turn them in. Don’t they call him “the people’s priest”? Well, let’s see the priestly side of him!’

‘Your Eminence is surely not expecting a revolution?’

‘No,’ said the cardinal. ‘Even Marshal Welden – we’ve heard from him – says the “mob” was stirred up by the Pope’s
Motu
Proprio.
He’s right. What fired them was nothing more newfangled than allegiance to their own ruler. Good old municipal pride. I feel it myself.’ Amazement thickened in the canny webs of his face. ‘Welden, in revenge, is letting us stew in our own juice. So, Gavazzi is our man.’

‘Was Your Eminence not meant to arrest him? There were letters from Rome …’

‘Contradictory,’ whispered the cardinal. ‘But you’d better let me have that dossier. Could be awkward if anyone got hold of it.’

Nicola did not expect to see Maria while the city was out of control and the streets in a fever. Passing Rangone’s door, however, he had an impulse to see the room which now felt more like home than any he’d
had. It was an hour when Rangone – who, unlike himself, kept regular hours – should be at work. So he used his key and walked in.

The vestibule was dark and, as he paused to adjust his eyes, he heard a band playing some streets away. Pleased, his blood leaped to the military flourish and to something closer which was keeping time to its tantara. This fusing music could be the city’s heartbeat.

Rangone’s voice was keeping tune too. Rangone was in step and always would be, thought Nicola, whose mind lagged behind what the rest of him already knew. Tum tarara! The brass underscored the repetitiveness of experience. These were the volunteers marching back. The cardinal had been worrying about them all week! He had been warned to expect as many as 4,000, all armed and unruly after their failures at the front. Turbulent.

‘… Nicola …’ That was Maria!

She was not calling but talking about him. The bed was moving in time to the band which was drawing close.

‘He … won’t … know!’ panted Rangone.

‘He’s a … nice boy!’

‘Of course he is! And what harm are we doing him? Eh? Tell me. Hmm?’

‘Don’t … Oh!’ Maria gave a little yelp.

‘No harm!’ The band had moved past and the words were now clearer. ‘I’m keeping you warm for him. I’m not one to keep things for myself. Warming you up. Teaching you … new tricks.’

‘What new tricks? Think I didn’t know that one?’

‘Think I don’t know any others?’

‘Let’s see then.’

Moving more quietly than when he came in, Nicola let himself out the door.

‘When we truly love,’ Nicola’s confessor told him, ‘we want to save the soul of the one we love. Not the earthly envelope.’

Why, he wondered, did confessors all talk to him of love? Was it because he revealed some excess of eagerness in their sly, tenebrous play-box where he lurked as tensely as he had sometimes done in cupboards and cubby-holes when playing hide and seek? A hope or need?

He visited the Villa Chiara which seemed to have shrunk. Count and captain looked wistful and smelled of dog. They had a new one now and were busy training it – perhaps from lack of anything else to be busy with? Their inaction, which he had not noticed before, was palpable and it was as if they could not quite find ways to fill their days. They were excited, though, by the news of Bologna and grateful for his visit. His status had changed. He could feel this as his story dilated in their minds. It blossomed there, its colours brightening as they exclaimed and slapped the table. He told them of the white-coats he had seen herded along and how wretched they had looked. He had heard later that seventy had been taken prisoner and had seen the ruins of a burned-out house where they had put their dead before turning it into a pyre.

‘People say there were one hundred and fifty corpses.’

They called the footman to fill his glass. This was a rite of passage.
He
was telling
them.

In turn they spoke of how Prospero’s prospective employer, Count Rossi, had been offered the highest position open to a layman in this realm. One created by the new reforms.

‘He’s a moderate,’ said Stanga. ‘Prospero would never work for what he’d call an
esaltato,
meaning a man like me!’ His chin bobbed in amused resignation. ‘Well. He’s seeing life. Visiting drawing rooms. Maybe he’ll fall in love?’ This was the count’s hope, just as his fear was Prospero’s becoming a priest.

‘We think there may be something in the air,’ said Melzi.

Nicola smiled to think of them scanning Prospero’s letters for reticences. But the word ‘love’ felt like heat on a nerve.

When the count took his new dog for a run, Melzi confided, ‘He’s stopped seeing his cousin. That’s for Prospero’s sake. She wants him to marry her, but he’s reluctant to bring in another heir. Meanwhile, he’s lonely. Prospero,’ the captain murmured, ‘should be more attentive. Write. Visit. You should let him know.’

Later, it was the count’s turn to confide. Poor Melzi had been devastated by the news of Guidotti’s death. A bad business. And he reproached himself even now for having envied his old friend’s
promotion
. What had happened was that the general, though devoted to the idea of Italy, failed to hold the line at Piave and was blamed by his superiors. Crazed by the disgrace, he brooded for some days then, putting on his dress uniform and medals, made a mad sally out under enemy fire. Pride? Suicide?

Whatever it was, out he went and Bassi, the chaplain, had to coax him
to take shelter by insisting that, if he would not, Bassi would stay with him, at the risk of his own life. To be rid of him, Guidotti returned to safety, then rushed back towards the bullets. Back after him went Bassi and so on, back and forth, ridiculously, until the general was dead and the chaplain had three wounds.

‘The worst of it is,’ said the count, ‘that Melzi has a visceral hatred for priests. And now here is our old hero making a bollocks of things and the priest a hero. Prospero would laugh.’

Nicola turned to the matter which had brought him here: the guns. Glibly, he told how the name of the old
Centurione
, which he
remembered
from here, had turned up on one of the lists at the Curia. ‘I guessed this must be his son. He was employed by one of the charities we’ve set up. Digging …’ The pay was poor, twenty
baiocchi
a day, so Nicola had gone to see the family, knowing they must be in want. He had discovered that the guns were hidden at a saw-mill and, in the present climate, dangerous.

‘I didn’t tell the cardinal because it would be difficult for him. Compromising …’

‘How,’ asked Stanga, now restored and businesslike, ‘did the man come to tell you about this?’

‘Fright,’ said Nicola. ‘The Austrians, you see, threaten to shoot people who hide arms, so when I mentioned your name, he told me …’

‘We’ll have them moved and rehidden,’ decided the count, ‘where neither side can get them. Luckily, I still have connections. Peace is what this pope needs. We’ll take them into protective custody.’ He was rapturous at having something significant to do.

Nicola saw Maria at the Montagnola, which had become a place of pilgrimage. Idlers re-enacted the battle, reliving the highlights of 8th August. She was listening to one of these myth-makers and he, remembering how she and he had spent that afternoon, grew absorbed in a myth of his own. Yearning back to before their Fall, he began dreaming of an Eden – then remembered that even that day the Fall had begun, perhaps more through his fault than hers. He had felt – what? Undated. Depressed. Had she guessed?

There she was. He could have touched her. She hadn’t seen him. Light, falling through the weave of her hat, threw golden flakes on her skin, and her tongue, edging forward, lolled on her lower lip. A strand of hair fell across her eyes and, taking off her hat, she tossed it back
with a movement which brought her body so cosily into play that he again felt the fever which she could rouse but not satisfy, and turned, unhappily, away.

The city was divided between warring factions and so was some elusive part of himself over which he lacked control.

God was at His game of suspending help so that men might help themselves and the diocese, though perhaps not in the forefront of the divine mind, was being tried. In the end, the cardinal had left the Gavazzi–Bassi dossier with Nicola, for it had to be kept up and His Eminence’s eyesight prevented his doing this himself.

One of its thornier items was a run of letters from Venice, where the volunteers were fighting the Austrians and their chaplain, Bassi, had, with unpriestly verve, referred to the city’s pro-Austrian patriarch as a lickspittle. Since Bassi enjoyed his commanding officer’s protection, the patriarch had applied for help to Oppizzoni.

Meanwhile, letters from Rome announced that, since the chaplains had been expelled from their order, they were now under His
Eminence’s
jurisdiction.

‘Oh, no they’re not!’ cried Oppizzoni. ‘Until they’re informed of it, the expulsion has no legal effect, and
I
shall not inform them. For now, we must stay on the good side of Father Gavazzi who has agreed to persuade the populace to give up their arms. Write,’ he instructed, ‘copies of letters telling the Venetian Patriarch and the Roman
Congregation
what they want to hear. Then file them. We shall claim the originals were duly sent and lost. Everyone knows the post is disrupted.’

Nicola went to hear Gavazzi urge the Bolognese to give up their arms and noted that the better class of citizen seemed greatly soothed by this appeal.

‘They’re clutching at straws,’ said Rangone who was there too. ‘Can anyone
believe
that those who have arms will give them up?’

‘I’m not imaginative,’ said Nicola. ‘What people do often surprises me.’

Rangone gave him a look. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘You can surely guess.’

‘No. I’m not imaginative either. Tell me.’

The scene was tedious. Nicola walked back to his office. Lies, he
thought furiously, prevailed everywhere. Even in his own head. Even in his passion for Maria. From the beginning, she had been frank enough. It was he who had chosen to deceive himself. It was not concern for her soul which kept him awake at night and made him gnaw his knuckles and see her name in the syllables his pen was tracing on curial stationery. Maybe the notion of soul was simply a word for emotional intensity: something like the steam which rises from an over-heated body then condenses in clammy drops? He could well believe that, swinging from a fierce idealism to distrust of the spirit.

Trying to stun himself with work, he spent the afternoon roughing out replies to the letters in the file. The one from the Barnabite General was sour. Why, it permitted itself to wonder, had His Eminence not acknowledged earlier ones? Might the General humbly beg His
Eminence
to do him the favour now of letting him know through one of his secretaries that he had received the present communication? Maria, thought Nicola angrily, Maria! Wishing to express his deepest sentiments of veneration, the Barnabite General kissed the cardinal’s sacred purple. Ridiculous monkey! Nicola, hearing himself exclaim aloud, was unsure to whom his annoyance was addressed.

The chaplains impressed him. They risked their flesh for disincarnate passions, whereas he was even more shamefully carnal than Rangone, who seemed able to nibble at pleasure then move lightly on. Nicola, a would-be cannibal, wanted to devour and annihilate Maria.

The thick, creamy paper was her skin. He wrote on it: ‘I acknowledge receipt of two rescripts from the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars concerning the Secularisation of the two religious, Fathers Gavazzi and Bassi.’

A letter from Bassi to his Barnabite superiors had been forwarded as no longer concerning them. ‘By God’s grace,’ claimed the chaplain, ‘I have till now lived a blameless life here in Venice. Neither taverns nor cafés have had a glimpse of me …’

Nicola filed this with the chaplain’s attack on the Venetian patriarch, who had claimed that all established authority, including Austria’s, must be taken to represent God. Such a doctrine, argued the priest, gave credence to Montesquieu’s claim that Catholicism suited tyrants and Protestantism suited republics. This could lose us the allegiance of all high-hearted and generous young men. But … Nicola was pondering the word high-hearted and whether it applied to himself, when there was a knock.

‘Wait.’ He locked up his file then opened his door to find Rangone outside it.

‘I realise you must have guessed.’

‘I didn’t. I heard. I came to your rooms when you and she were there.’

Rangone turned away. ‘Hell!’

‘It has been, rather.’

‘Is it any good my apologising?’ Rangone looked him fitfully in the eye. ‘I’d offer to keep away from her, but I imagine you think her tarnished or something. Different? I could, if you didn’t think this
wormbase
of me, prove to you that it’s not so.’

Nicola felt tired.

‘Sit down,’ he invited and slumped morosely in a wooden chair.

‘I wish I could undo it. It was self-indulgent and not really much fun.’

‘It sounded like fun.’

‘Shit!’