The Judas Cloth (43 page)

‘I’m like a squirrel,’ he told the parish priest, recalling his schoolboy nickname. ‘I gather my hoard in the fruitful season.’

The priest, a poor devil in a patched cassock and shoes so scuffed they seemed to have sprouted scales, was overjoyed to have a Roman priest stay in his comfortless presbytery whose mattresses were stuffed with corncobs. They went shooting together, warmed themselves with plum brandy and played passionate games of draughts. Slowly, from scraps and hints dropped over weeks, a picture took shape. Caterina, far from being simple and humble, had had some education. Her priestly bodyguard kept her isolated. No, the parish priest had not recently heard her confession. She had her retinue for that. Nor could he remember much about the innocent days before she saw the apparitions which had been so frequently described. It was only after the three priests took her in hand that she had developed her fluency at relaying what her voices said. How had the three priests first heard of her? They had come to preach a mission and it was during this that she had first seen the Virgin. Now you could only approach her through them.

The priest, being human, felt pique. There was talk, he let slip, about her domestic arrangements. Mind, he told Nicola, he had reproved the gossips. But it had stuck in his head. He shook this self-reprovingly. Then, surprisingly, for the hour was late for a man who had to save charcoal and count candles, asked Nicola to hear his confession. Yes, here and now. He needed to deliver himself of the buzz in his mind.

Plopping on his knees, he told under the seal of secrecy the story being whispered from village to village in that desolate, superstitious, brigand-ridden region. It was that the saint was no saint but the concubine of three cassocked devils who gave her powers to tell fortunes, predict the weather and perform small, surprising acts which gained her sway over people’s minds including, Lord save us, that of the Pope, to whom she gave bad advice so that he would end up losing the Gift of Constantine.

‘How,’ marvelled the priest, ‘did people in this village hear of that? I myself had forgotten what it was and had to look it up!’ Uneasiness widened his ingenuous eyes and his upper lip quivered. But his information was hard to dismiss. It came from the woman who laundered Caterina’s sheets. ‘She says Caterina has a lover!’

When Nicola left the village, the
parrocco
was like a man bereaved. He would miss their games of draughts and Nicola’s company on long hikes and lonely evenings. He had no hope of ever again finding so engaging a companion.

‘It’s a Godforsaken place,’ he joked bravely, as they embraced. ‘That’s one reason why I don’t believe in Caterina’s visions. Why would God cease to forsake us?’ Then he pressed a bottle of home-made brandy on his departing guest and, for dipping in it, some local biscuits hard enough to break a tooth.

Nicola who, for professional reasons, had set out to win the man’s heart, felt a mixture of elation and remorse.

In Rome, he told Amandi under the seal what he had learned under the seal and they agreed that they lacked evidence. Perhaps a reliable witness had better be slipped into the papal steward’s household. This move, though made with caution, must have come to the attention of Father Grassi, S.J., for he paid a call on Nicola and, coming quickly to the nub of his concern, asked why he had chosen to enter the Church.

Grassi’s face was purposeful. There was a jut to his jaw and his eyes were like gun bores. Did Nicola, he asked, want to destroy or to restore our power? This was the only question now. And closely connected to it was whether French Catholics could make their Emperor keep his troops here to protect us from Garibaldi. We must not make it hard for them. Miracles were salutary and necessary.

‘But not tricks?’

No, no, said the Jesuit irritably. Of course not! But to the eye of the
sceptic truths could
look
like tricks. Sceptics had a way of getting hold of the wrong end of things and taking the part for the whole. Remember the story of the three blind men and the elephant. Each thought he had the whole truth, but one felt only the trunk and another the tail. Anyway, there were myths on both sides. Take the rubbish being talked about the death of Father Bassi! Bassi died howling! Shaking like an aspen tree!

‘I spoke to Father Tasso at the time,’ said Nicola coldly, ‘and he said otherwise. He had spoken to the
confortatore
!’

‘Tasso was a mythomaniac. I,’ said Grassi, ‘spoke to Monsignor Bedini who talked to the Austrian firing squad.’

The two men were themselves shaking like aspens. Then Grassi changed tactics. He had not, he said, Nicola’s art of winning people. ‘I am not seductive,’ he said. ‘It’s a gift which carries responsibilities. You’d better be sure you’re right.’

Nicola was now sure that Grassi knew of his visit to Caterina’s village. The source must be her priestly acolytes – who else visited the place? – which in turn proved their connivance with the Society of Jesus.

Grassi said sadly, ‘I have succeeded only in making you suspect me. Yet, as priests, our aims must be the same: to preserve the faith. Just remember that the cult of “truth” can be a fetish! One may be holding the elephant’s tail!’

Nicola was troubled, and might have been influenced by the Jesuit’s appeal, if Amandi’s spy had not discovered that Caterina was pregnant, which put an end to his role in the affair. Events took their course and in February 1857 the Holy office condemned her to prison ‘for deliberately inventing apparitions of the Most Blessed Virgin and Jesus Christ, for laying fraudulent claims to prophetic gifts and for immorality’. Her friar and priests got three years’ penal servitude apiece, but the Jesuits got off scot-free, although they had probably engineered the whole thing.

Donna Geltrude, a faded beauty, was bloomless but elegant, with eyes like cobwebbed pansies.

Nicola was grateful for the ritual of tea which allowed him to get his bearings while sampling thin sandwiches and remembering Flavio’s account of his single meeting with his mother. He imagined her, who was still fine in a sketchy way, proffering the tips of her fingers for a kiss, then simply walking away. She had an insubstantial look, as though
ready at any moment to do just such a disappearing act – and must have become skilled at performing it. She had been living in retirement, she told him, in her villa near Imola and also in Paris. It was there that she had heard that Flavio was planning to marry a circus performer.

‘Miss Ella? I suspect,’ Nicola told her, ‘you have been misinformed.’

‘Ah?’ Her teacup rose, then paused. ‘You have heard of her?’

‘Flavio and I are old friends.’

‘I suppose your own mother was so close that you cannot conceive of a mother like me?’

Nicola explained that, on the contrary, he, like Flavio, had been brought up in institutions.

Air evaded Donna Geltrude who began to cough. Getting it back with difficulty, she managed to say, ‘I have no feelings now. Only maladies. Tell me, Father Santi, have you any idea what Flavio feels about me? Please be candid.’

‘If he feels anything,’ said Nicola, ‘it is anger.’

‘I see!’ More catching for air. ‘Is that what may make him marry a circus rider? Revenge? A shaming of our name which I tried to deny him? I have been wondering whether if he knew why – there is a why – he would feel less bitter?’

Miss Foljambe now offered to withdraw but her friend said she was welcome to hear what she had to say. People, Donna Geltrude knew, thought her a monster, but their imaginings were more monstrous than the truth which, for good or ill, she wanted to tell to Father Santi, who could decide whether to pass it on to Flavio.

Her story started in the century’s second decade when she, as a child, was spending much of her time mooning in her parents’ garden in Rome, which was so overgrown that the air looked like pond water and the mossed statues were as plump as kitchen maids. Her family belonged to that Roman aristocracy which someone had compared to lizards living in the dried-out carapace of an ancestral crocodile. And indeed her earliest memories were of complaint. Times had, it appeared, been palmier once, and the brocade draperies in a better state. Now her relatives lived by improvisation and spent their best energies addressing formal supplications to each other for such favours as tax-exemptions, state pensions and ceremonial sinecures. Recurringly, they marvelled at the good fortune of their only resourceful acquaintance, the Marchese de’ Lepri who, being unable to pay his cook, had granted him permission
to open a restaurant in his palace courtyard, which was now the most profitable eating place in Rome. The unpredictability of that delighted them. It was like winning at the lottery and spurred them to ponder lucky combinations of numbers in the hope of a like windfall coming to themselves.

Such hopes had nothing to do with greed. Cutting a fine figure was a duty imposed by their caste and by the papal court which required that outward signs of divine favour be kept up. Ceremonies were lessons for the illiterate and playing one’s inherited role in the pedagogic pageant was a defence against social upheaval.

Requirements were a matter of custom, not choice. Prelates of a given rank must, for instance, have three footmen when they drove out on certain feast days, so the less affluent would hire some loiterer to squeeze into their livery and make up the number. This, observed Donna Geltrude, was of course still true of cardinals. Then, it had also affected the lay aristocracy. She remembered only too well the cost of such masquerades and the skimping which went on in secret. The French occupation had imposed taxes and abolished entails, thereby reducing some of the greatest families to penury; and when Pius VII returned from exile to an empty treasury, it was again the aristocracy who paid the price. He simply refused to honour the banknotes issued years earlier to depositors of gold and silver specie, thus pauperising many more families and dissipating enthusiasm for his restoration.

‘How could we feel loyalty to the papacy after that?’ demanded Donna Geltrude, who had, Nicola remembered, Republican leanings.

Cynicism had been the order of the day and she and her brothers grew used to thinking that they had been born into a ruined world. She had three brothers. The eldest was to become the Father Prefect whom Father Santi knew from the Collegio Romano, and the next and nearest to her age was her brother Cesare, with whom she enjoyed an intimacy so close that there was no need for speech between them. The eldest brother was too pious to play with them and the youngest too young. So, they were thrown together.

‘He had asthma!’ Donna Geltrude laughed, choked a bit, then laughed again. ‘As I do now!’

When she was fourteen, Pope Leo XII was raised to the tiara and set about moralising the city. No need to remind her listeners of what was notorious. Sunday card-playing could get a peasant ten strokes of the whip and, as there were myriads of such laws which nobody observed, nobody had any morality at all. The law was an ass and everyone knew
it. If a peasant could get ten lashes for playing cards during mass, what punishment was left for a real crime? This, anyway, was what Cesare said and Geltrude believed him, for he was three years older than she and took the lead in all their games. The one he proposed shortly after Pope Leo’s accession did not surprise her at all. At first it seemed childish – a relapse into nursery play – and by the time she saw that there was more to it, they were lovers.

The word, said she, might seem shocking, but the reality brought no more guilt than going for a ride on their ponies. Public impropriety was what the pontifical police were after and Cesare and she were privacy itself. They were always either in their parents’
palazzo
in Rome or in the country on their own land. They had governesses and a chaplain to chaperone them, but these were lazy and when the children ran away from them, held their tongues so as not to be blamed. The chaplain was their confessor too and naturally Cesare and she did not embarrass him by confessing their sin of the flesh. Besides, repeated Donna Geltrude, she had never thought of what they did in those terms. After all, so much of life was private – wasn’t it? – out of consideration for other people. One did not parade one’s intimate functions. One kept up a front.

‘Am I taking too long?’ Donna Geltrude sighed and speeded up. She had finally confessed all, she said, when she was pregnant with Flavio, and been advised to repudiate the fruit of her sin. This was much later though and, by then, her luck had long run out.

What happened was that one hot September morning, when Cesare and she were supposed to be studying with the chaplain, they persuaded him to let them go cool their feet in a stream which ran about a hundred yards from the villa garden. It was no distance to let them stray and he, favouring his arthritic legs, sat on a bench to wait and fell asleep. Meanwhile, their father and his steward came by with guns in search of the wild fowl which they liked to eat, after these had been spit-roasted between sage leaves, bacon and oiled bread. The foliage by the stream was so dense that they might have shot the lovers had they not been alerted by the vigorous rippling of a clump of reeds. Suspecting a poacher, their father crept forward stealthily and pounced.

‘He was,’ said Donna Geltrude, ‘a man of iron restraint. He said nothing, gave nothing away. He simply prodded Cesare’s naked backside with his boot, waited to catch his eye, then withdrew silently and led the steward off in another direction. He even said something to the chaplain, as he passed him, about the dangers of sitting in the sun. Next morning
he left the villa without saying a word and, returning ten days later, announced to Cesare that, asthma or no asthma, he was to join the Austrian Army as a private and serve under an officer who would ensure that his spell in the regiment either killed him or turned him into a man.’ The officer was a notorious martinet and Cesare could look forward to getting the sort of discipline which he, his father, had culpably failed to provide.

‘To me,’ said Donna Geltrude, ‘all he said was that I was to be locked up until he could find me a husband, which he did within a month. The duke was thirty years older than I, and knew at once that I was no virgin. He had, he told me, deflowered so many that I could not have hoped to deceive him, but in deference to their memory he would not complain. He had, however, married so as to have children and wanted these to be his own, so he was taking his sister out of her convent to keep an eye on me day and night. This horrified me. I had met the sister at our wedding and she was a spiteful poor creature with a squint who could not forgive the world for its prejudice against the squint-eyed. I told him that if he would leave her in her convent, I would undertake neither to foist a bastard on him nor to take a lover without letting him know. I think he was amused. In the light of all the married and unmarried women he had slept with, he could not hope to find more virtue than the sort I was promising. After all, a city without brothels and full of celibate prelates can be forced by popes like Leo XII to keep up appearances but never to change its ways. “Very well,” he said, “if you give me your word of honour.” So I gave it to him and did my best to keep it.’