The Judas Cloth (75 page)

‘You,’ said he, ‘are suffering from a maggot of the mind! A megrim. It’s understandable that while possessed by it, you resist believing this – but one has to tell you the truth and that, Monsignore, is that Cardinal Amandi died at home of a heart attack. Our last conversation in this office was held because his death was sudden and I wanted you to know that the doctor had established its cause. You are free to see the medical report and the minutes of our conversation. Your other memories are false. You must try to understand this and I pray that you will, since there is no other hope of your recovering your serenity. I have seen men in your state of shock before in this very office. I urge you to pray for resignation to God’s will. Your fantasies, forgive my saying this, are a form of rebellion against it.’

Some time later, Nicola found himself in a small square, close to Montecitorio, seated on the rim of a well. He tried to recall how he had got here, but his vision was a cloud and his moiling mind only now recovering its ability to think. As it did, he marvelled at his restraint for he had not, it came back to him, raged at nor tried to throttle Randi. Instead, he had turned, walked silently from the Governor’s office and, somehow, finding his way down dark stairs and corridors, reached the sunlight. This feat of self-control had left him numb. Yet where would have been the point in throttling the lickspittle, since the spittle licked must be Mastai’s? Randi’s impudence was inconceivable otherwise.

What had helped Nicola subdue his feelings was the memory of his conversation with Darboy. The Frenchman had stressed the need for prudence if they were to hope for an eventual triumph of the dead cardinal’s policies. Darboy, bravest of the anti-Infallibilists, warned that precipitous action would play into Mastai’s hands. Time and patience were our best assets. ‘Later, much can be undone which is now being done, but only if we avoid exacerbating our differences with the Majority.’ Then he asked Nicola to think of him as taking the dead man’s place as a friend and adviser. The two could feel each other’s emotion as they embraced. ‘
Du
calme
!’ murmured Darboy as they said goodbye.

Mindful of this, Nicola forbade himself to rile the unspeakable Randi who might yet – it consoled him to think – have to suffer his own share of humiliations, since the Italians, if they took Rome, would not be tender with men like him.

Gianni begged Nicola to forgive him if he didn’t serve out his notice. He would forgo pay, but must leave now. He was a small man and had a family to look out for. ‘Please believe me, Monsignore, if anything I said could help His Eminence, I’d say it. As God is my witness, I would! But it wouldn’t, would it? Justice, Monsignore, is something we’ll all see in heaven, please God!’ Then Gianni began kissing the bishop’s hand and weeping all over it. ‘I’ll pray for His Eminence,’ he promised. ‘I’ll have masses said for his soul.’

Two footmen were leaving too. Having, like most of their kind, worked for tips only, they had no pay to forgo. Questions threw them into a mute terror. A third man who had been present when the cardinal was brought back denied having seen any sign of blood or foul play. None, Monsignore! Staring Nicola in the eye. Their departure was like a last funeral rite for, without the livery they had worn in Amandi’s service, they dwindled to near-invisibility.

That same evening the news was that six more bishops had left Rome. All were members of the Opposition.

Darboy had gone to the Vatican with like-minded bishops – Mainz, Dijon, Lyons and the Primate of Hungary – to plead for changes to the form of the definition which would make it acceptable to the consciences of the Minority and secure a unanimous
placet
on the 18th.

‘It’s an olive branch,’ his secretary told all who came for news. ‘We must pray that His Holiness will not refuse it.’ The Church was infallible. All agreed about that. But were there two infallibilities? Papal and ecclesiastical? Or, more reasonably, was the Pope infallible only when he had consulted his bishops and spoke as the voice of tradition?

The sun blazed.
Piazze
were griddles and jokes about the fires in which Pius was roasting bishops no longer amused anyone. There was a scum of sweat on the horses which drove Nicola to the Council, and when he pointed this out, the coachman was so surly that he feared he too might
be about to give notice. He put off thinking about this, though, for the public crisis was peaking and by the session’s end, when Prospero fell into step beside him, the two felt a precarious bond. Both were sick of strife.

This morning, each bishop had been handed the text of a protest, signed by the five Council Presidents, against pamphlets which impugned the Council’s freedom. Cardinal d’Angelis then read it aloud with indignant relish. ‘Calumnious’, ‘disgraceful’, ‘falsehoods’ and ‘
filthiest
lies’ were the only official responses to the Minority’s anguish. The bishops were then asked to stand up in token of approval and to sign and hand in their copies for the Vatican archives
ad
perpetuam
rei
memoriam.

Nicola, caught unawares, was already on his feet when he heard Majority members yell ‘Anathema!’ at those who had failed to rise. Only then did he see that the Council was being tricked into attesting to its own moral unanimity and that this was Mastai’s answer to yesterday’s delegation. Promptly, he sat back down and held hard to his seat when men next to him tried to wrestle him up.

‘Don’t be foolish!’ called Prospero. ‘It’s too late!’

‘All have stood up!’ shouted a bishop.

‘Not all!’ protested several voices.

‘All!’ bayed the Majority, maddened by victory. And indeed the seated men were concealed by those who stood and their voices smothered by the roar.

When members streamed out, the younger men who sat on the lower benches were ahead. Prospero told Nicola, ‘I said mass this morning for Amandi.’

‘Do you believe he died of a heart attack?’

Prospero’s eyes flinched. ‘I won’t pretend not to understand. I felt as you do when Count Rossi died. But, later, I saw that I had gone a little mad. Won’t you come and talk about it? This evening?’

Nicola agreed gratefully, for he did feel a little mad. Also unshelled and lonely, so that the prospect of an evening alone was almost as bad as joining the Minority in their ingenuous huddles, where they would shame him by their surprise at the Curia’s new manoeuvre, and by the pity or contempt or whatever it was that foreign bishops felt for men who lived here. Probably contempt. For why think their equation of
doctor
Romanus
with
asinus
Germanus
did not apply to him? Amandi, who had known the courts of Europe, had been one of themselves. What,
without his patronage, could Nicola seem but a providentially strayed
asinus
?

So he looked forward almost with tenderness to the evening with Prospero and arrived full of expectancy of small, consoling intimacies and silences and ease: things for which he only now knew he had been aching. Even talking nonsense together would be cheering! Even being sad! But, almost at once, he sensed that Prospero was on, rather than off, duty and found himself wondering whether he had been invited from friendship or policy and whether he and Prospero were still friends. It would be hard if new associates thought him an
asinus
and old ones a renegade!

Cheated then of inconsequentiality and closeness, he had to listen to a defence of the
Sodalitium
Pianum,
an experiment which, said Prospero, though shelved pro tern, must one day be revived. How else keep a check on the hordes of foreigners who now came here to vote? There was already talk of de-Italianising the Church! And in the name of what? As he spoke, Prospero kept looking expectantly at Nicola who only half listened and would not reply.

‘Do you think men who disagree as much as we do,’ he asked instead, ‘can be friends? Or is friendship another “Liberal fallacy”?’ Laughing, he held up his glass as though hoping for Prospero’s body and blood or at least a toast to old cordiality. But all he got was Marsala which he drank too fast while his friend said something dampening about charity and how attachments could offend against it. Nicola, said Prospero, let his heart rule his head. Witness his mad suspicions over poor Amandi’s death. ‘You thought of him as a father, didn’t you?’

We had too many fathers, groaned the needy and now slightly inebriated Nicola. And brothers in Christ. ‘It’s a stolen vocabulary,’ he complained. ‘Stolen! Even Grassi calls me
dilecte
fili
!
In his mouth it sounds like a lie. Everything does.’

‘That’s because Jesuit militancy envisaged persecutions of a simpler sort than those we see today. Grassi would make a splendid martyr but won’t get the chance.’

‘So instead he sacrifices others.’

‘You are sour! Is it because you think Amandi was your father? He wasn’t, you know. He wasn’t your blood father.’

‘I never – how do you know? What …? You were cousins.
Do
you know something?’ Nicola felt strangely out of control. His body seemed to have got news which hadn’t reached his mind. ‘Blood father,’ he repeated, and his blood effervesced while his mind viewed this
phenom
enon
with surprise. At the same time, he felt annoyed that, having come to find a friend, he should instead be deprived of a father. Not that he had thought of Amandi as literally that. Especially not since learning about poor Sister Paola. That conjunction was not likely. But he had loved him like one and no mere begetter was going to displace the dead man in his loyalties – which must be Prospero’s aim!
He
was on duty all right!

‘Even if you do know something,’ Nicola warned, ‘it won’t change my sense that Mastai and the climate he created were to blame for Amandi’s death. And don’t ask if I’ve lost my faith, because the faith we have now isn’t in Christ. He was meek, but Mastai wants to win! Remember his foot on the Melkite patriarch’s neck, and how the Armenian bishops had to flee from his police!’

Prospero came and held Nicola’s shoulders. ‘You’re talking away faith,’ he warned. ‘You’re like a man who needs cold water thrown on him. So I’m going to tell you something to give you pause. Mastai is your father, your spiritual father, but also your father of the loins. I wouldn’t lie about this.’

Nicola made him repeat what he had said and felt the words tear at his flesh. He also felt something harden in his throat, then nausea. ‘Wouldn’t you lie about it?’ he wondered slow-wittedly. ‘I suppose not. Unless it’s a parable? Is it? No?’ There was a long moment of silence, during which the nausea got worse and he had trouble breathing. Then he asked, ‘Have you proof?’

He didn’t want it, felt befouled and humiliated – yet saw a symmetry here. It was as though the divisions and turmoil which had for years been moving closer to the city had now reached inside his own head. His skull thrummed. It was an assaulted belfry, a sickened aviary, and through its din he could just hear Prospero tell about ‘pamphlets which …’ Distaste kept cutting off that voice. Then words slid through. He heard ‘most were patent bosh’, then the word ‘censorship’ pulled him up, for was he not engaging in it himself? He, like the sick body politic, was baffling off the inevitable. He started to listen then and learned, without surprise, that the Abate Gavazzi was Prospero’s source and that, though he had not named Nicola in his pamphlet, Prospero’s inquiries among his own aunts and cousins had supplied and confirmed the identification. ‘After all, your mother was a connection of ours.’
Prospero
, though loath to root in the midden of scurrility, had had to take the Gavazzi pamphlet seriously, for professional …

‘Can I see it?’

‘I destroyed it.’

‘You can’t have! You were reading for the
Congregatio
Indicis
! Surely you’re not allowed to do that!’

‘What kind of a waxwork dummy do you think I am, Nicola? I destroyed it because of you! Putting books on the Index draws attention to them and I didn’t want you ever to see this one. I couldn’t foresee this conversation, could I?’

‘There must be other copies?’

‘In England? Maybe. Though the thing was ephemeral. Printed on paper destined to end up wiping bums. You
could
track Gavazzi down. But take my word for it, the story fits. As for your mother …’

‘I know about her. Don’t say anything!’ Nicola was offended that Prospero thought of the secret as ‘a midden of scurrility’. At the same time he felt something like this himself – but
not
because of poor Sister Paola.

‘You know who she was?’ Prospero clearly doubted this. He thinks, guessed Nicola, that I fancy it’s some lady who does me credit: Donna Clara Colonna or the Countess Spaur.

‘I know it was the nun.’ This, he saw, had taken some wind out of Prospero’s sails.

She, said Prospero, as though pedantically eager to establish that they meant the same nun, was in the news again. ‘She is the object of a local cult and people are calling her a saint.’

Nicola closed his eyes and saw her palimpsest of a face. Greyed and roughened like salt cod, it used to glow as she reminisced. Sister Paola! Her he had accepted without difficulty, for an affinity had been growing between them even as he was reading his story into the tapestry of hers. He had not, it seemed, read it aright and her ramblings would have to be wrenched into a new pattern. Unless Prospero was wrong? Nicola prayed for this. Better the boy Bonaparte or even the incestuous uncle, both of whom were safely dead! She too, poor gallant creature, must have had felt this and confused the trail. She had brought him a new dimension of himself, a new Santi – though, to be sure, that name was false. Should it be Mastai? The mockery scorched him. The Pope’s bastard! It was like the name of some obscene sweetmeat such as those cakes called Nun’s farts or – stop, Nicola! Yes, he must stop – yet was intensely curious about his story and would later, he promised himself, put together the scraps he had in his head and find
his
truth. She – almost as if she’d known! – had given him the clues.