The Judas Cloth (59 page)

Prospero’s eyes began to close so that he could not tell whether he was reading or dreaming when he came on the venerable canard told about almost every pope, that he was a
papa
universalis
who fathered bastards in the flesh and humanity in the spirit. Forcing himself to wake up, he put the pamphlet back in its box and turned the three keys in their locks.

Next morning, he breakfasted in the unquiet company of Cesco who roved about, eating bread smeared with honey, from which now and again, always at the last possible moment, he caught an escaping dangle with a quick flick of his tongue.

‘That boy’s restless,’ Dottor Pasolini had said when Prospero paid a call on him the day before yesterday. ‘He’s seeing too much of agitators and Democrats.’

‘
You
say that!’

‘Oh, I’m a quiet man now,’ said the doctor. ‘The new authorities aren’t perfect. I should know. But they should be given a chance.’

He had fallen foul of them, but bore no rancour. It had been something, Prospero thought, to do with medical hygiene.

As they talked, Prospero inhaled the fustiness cocooning the old bachelor’s quarters. Dogs’ coats contributed to it and so did a tang of gunpowder and memories of fruit. It was a complex, masculine smell quite unlike the one in his own rooms in Rome. Pasolini offered brandy from a bottle frosted with lichen which, when scraped with a fingernail, released a chill, subaqueous gleam. Earlier in the day, he had ridden his horse across a stream, which was why his boots and britches were steaming by the fire and he himself in need of a restorative glass.

‘You’ll join me, Monsignore? I suppose I call you that now?’

Prospero, forestalling the old Mason’s irony, explained that his was a purely titular rank since his diocese – Philippi – fell outside the control of the Holy See. Like other Roman administrators, he had been awarded a bishopric
in
partibus
infidelium
–
though, indeed, distinctions between real and titular had faded since Italian bishops were so often prevented from taking up their duties.

‘Some would say, Doctor, that
this
is infidel country.’

The doctor mused. ‘Infidel? But to what can people be said to be unfaithful at a time of change? For you it’s simple, but I, you see, consider that we had a right to seek unity and that we now owe loyalty to the king who achieved it. Some, however, want further changes.

Prospero laughed. The doctor shook his head. ‘I know, I know! When we squabble, you feel triumphant. But that doesn’t prove you’re right.’ Pouring himself and Prospero a little more plum brandy – it was fiery stuff – he said, ‘Speaking in confidence, some are up to their old games. Not here. Close to Rome on our side of the border they’ve hidden guns. A certain prefect found out and telegraphed his superiors for orders, and do you know the answer he got?’ Like paper exposed to heat, the doctor’s face shrivelled darkly.

‘They told him to help the gun-runners!’

‘
Bravo
,
Monsignore! You understand the world!’ The doctor lowered his voice. ‘Turin is giving the Democrats rope. To crack down on them would divide our ranks. Besides, they can be used. Last spring, if the Pope had died and an uprising taken place in Rome, our troops would have gone in to put it down and, naturally, once in, they would have stayed.’

Prospero was not surprised. Conspirators, Mérode had told him, were spending a fortune trying to corrupt the Army. And certain cardinals were being vetted and courted. The Italians wanted to see the tiara pass into pliant hands.

It was then that Prospero had confronted Amandi with a straight question: was he intriguing? Amandi had furiously denied the charge and they had not spoken since.

‘Omens …’ Cesco was saying.

His brother didn’t listen. His mind was in the doctor’s brownish room where muzzles rested on padded paws and golden eyes flicked. He thought of the dogs as weaving the old man into the landscape from whose mesh they would retrieve any game he might shoot and to which they surely returned with each blink of those mild, vigilant eyes. Sometimes, a limb twitched or a canine groan seemed to sense and vent their master’s feelings – for the old conspirator was a prey to melancholy. Political triumph was as ashes in his mouth – and how could Prospero not rejoice? His joy, though, was tempered. He longed to taste those ashes himself!

As he and Cesco finished breakfast, they were joined by Nicola and talk about being thirteen at table was revived. Cesco was impatient for the
parocco
’s
answer, but Prospero refused to harry the priest. Instead, he shifted the topic to some silver which his brother had bought. It had belonged to Il Passatore, a brigand who had got his name from his secondary activity of smuggling – ‘passing’ – men across borders in the days before unity. When he was killed, the police sold off unclaimed objects from his ill-gotten haul. Cesco displayed tableware from which unknown monograms had been erased, then recalled legends about the outlaw whose defiance of papal troops had given him an ambiguous appeal. Withdrawing after each outrage to die reedy thickets in the marsh, he and his band were credited with acts whose immoderacy roused awe. They had enjoyed hospitality in safe houses all over the
province where, it was claimed, they had dined with their women on the finest fare brought by accomplices from who knew where? The kitchens of great palaces perhaps? Conceivably the Legate’s own? Menus of these banquets had been celebrated in broadsheets which were bought by the hungry and angry as finite substitutes for prayer. Food was what the popular imagination relished: cakes, roasts, jellies, sweetbreads and kidneys swimming in gravy. Dreams about these fed the fantasy better than any Eucharist. Spleen pâté flavoured with anchovies and capers, thrush pie, roasted eel and those fanciful roasts consisting, say, of larks inside pigeons inside guinea-hens inside geese: an ascending image of hierarchy whose ultimate human eater enjoys the supremacy of a lion. Sometimes, it was alleged, the bandits had distributed basketsfull to the needy, and the surplus from their banquets had fed a village. People hung chromolithographs of Il Passatore on their walls alongside those of Garibaldi and Bassi, ‘the honest priest’. Of the three, the bandit was the most congenial. A creature of the night, he focused old fancies about witchlike figures who defied the laws of probability and avenged the grim lives of the downtrodden. When your oppressor was a priest, you could, said Cesco, be driven to paganism, since religion ceased to console.

‘He gave them something solid to dream about.’

Prospero let this pass. He held his peace until Cesco said, ‘They say he was the Pope’s bastard.’

‘Who?’

‘Il Passatore. He looked a bit like Papa Mastai and …’

Prospero was outraged. ‘The
Italians
,’
he hissed, for his voice was failing him, ‘are brigands and their defence is to call their victim the father of a brigand! Venal hacks lie and idiots listen!’ The other two looked shocked. ‘It could,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘be lethal!’

‘Lethal?’ Nicola, cutting himself a slice of bread, was taken aback.

‘Just think about it!’ ordered Prospero. ‘We know the plans of the Pope’s enemies! They were in the
Opinione
of last April for all to see. Counting on his death, they kill his reputation as a prelude perhaps to worse! Like it or not, though, his health has recovered.’

Nicola, his knife poised in wonder, asked, ‘Why wouldn’t I like it?’

Prospero left the room. He might have left the villa if this had not meant leaving the
parocco
to dine alone with Cesco and his priest-baiting friends. Nicola too needed protection, though for the opposite reason: he could fall under their influence, being in some ways a nincompoop!
His orphan-state had, in Prospero’s opinion, left him without instinct. A fallen nestling, reared by hand, cannot be safely returned to the wild.

Back in his room, he confronted his locked box. It was, he thought, like Pandora’s, then caught himself. No. Things were not
like
any more. Things
were.
This was infidel country! The metaphors had grown real. Words poisoned. Words killed. And nobody had the right to be innocent.

Rearranging his pamphlets, he fancied that his fingers tingled at the contact. The French ones were the most dangerous, since they misled the Emperor’s electorate in the hope that it would oblige him to cease protecting the Pope.

Outside the window, a horseman in dusty black was jogging up the drive. The
parocco
!
Eager to reach him before Cesco did, Prospero locked his box and ran down. His father, however, had got there first. The count, whose days were spent vaguely pottering, welcomed any diversion.

‘I’ll call Daniele,’ he was telling the visitor. ‘He’ll take your horse. Brisk day isn’t it? Who did you say you were?’

The parish priest said he was the parish priest.

‘No,’ said the count. ‘He doesn’t come here. He’s a bigot and I’m told a bit of a rustic who’s not really up to a parish like this. We used to have the Pope here once. He was our bishop. This is my son, Monsignor Stanga. Prospero, this gentleman is looking for the parish priest. I’ve been telling him that he won’t find him here, but it’s come back to me that there was talk of inviting him so we wouldn’t be thirteen at table. Do you know about that?

Prospero managed to get rid of his father and tried to apologise for him, but the priest was not in the mood for soothing.

‘I have been thinking,’ said the priest, ‘of Christ’s command to pray for those who persecute and calumniate us. A man can become obsessed by petty things. What, after all, is a dead dog stinking up one’s well when compared with His Passion? Or petty insults? I will dine with you.’

Clearly, he was indifferent to the whys and wherefores of the invitation he was accepting in such a sacrificial spirit. Its Prime Mover did not, he had decided, dwell in the villa.

When he left, Prospero returned to his room, where he spent the next hour reading a summary of an English pamphlet printed on cheap paper which blurred the ink. It had been published in Holborn, London, and was entitled:
Revelations
by
Alessandro
Gavazzi,
ex-Friar
of
the
Barnabite
Order
concerning
the
True
and
Veritable
Origins,
Life
and
Deeds
of
Pope
Pius
IX,
based
on
the
Author’s
own
Privileged
Knowledge,
together
with
Documents
obtained
during
the
Roman
Republic
from
the
Archives
of
the
Apostolic
Chancery
and
Other
Sources:

Prospero pushed the thing away, drew it back and sighed. Gavazzi had made a name for himself in England and America, where his preacher’s talents gave force to his renegade’s rage. The story – Prospero ran a practised eye down the pages – combined stock elements with some odd enough to suggest that this episode had not been invented from whole cloth. Gavazzi described a group of women who had found
accommodation
in a wash-house, their efforts to make themselves comfortable, his own good offices, and the indiscretions of a young nun who had befriended a girl with whom, alleged the ex-
abate,
Mastai now made love in a shooting blind. She told him the girl’s story: a sad one of incest or near-incest with a clerical uncle living in the mountains some way from here. The nun was from these mountains herself, which was why the girl had confided in her. She understood the shifts to which people could be driven by isolation. Now, the girl had wandered off and Gavazzi helped look for her. However, it was a bright night. People had lit bonfires and it seemed unlikely that she could fail to find her way back.
A more pressing danger was that rebels might come here in search of food. Accordingly, he and one or two others resolved to keep watch. They posted themselves some way from the convent and it was during this vigil that he portrayed himself as indulging in musings which prepared his later apostasy. A crisis of conscience. A description of a faith’s first, premonitory stagger. He was a young man then and affected, as much as anyone, by the uncertainty of the moment – as much, he implied, as Mastai himself.