After Hannibal (26 page)

The true likeness he had seen in the Farnese Collection in Naples, the Pope’s true face, in all its lineaments of cruelty and greed, rendered with the force of genius in Titian’s 1543 portrait of him. Five years after the destruction of the Baglioni and the demolition of their houses, he sits hunched forward in his scarlet cap and
mantle, looking sidelong at the spectator, thin-jawed and evil-eyed, like an old ferret.

Plotter or opportunist? Two main types of humanity. Sometimes, of course, there was an intimate mingling. He thought suddenly of the letter in his pocket, requiring from him too the forming of a plan or the seizing of an opportunity. He distrusted himself as a man of action, knew he was not resolute, distrusted even his impulses. Perhaps this Pope had distrusted his. In the welter of blood and treachery that was the history of Perugia and the history of the world, the successful ones, those who came out on top, were always people with a consistent policy …

This one too, he thought, looking at the frozen nobility of the face in its medallion of stone. There seemed to him now some faint suggestion of sardonic humor about the lips. Nothing if not politic, this son of the Church. Once again he ran through the events. In September of 1534 Pope Clement VII dies. Within a week of this the teenage Ridolfo Baglioni, with some choice associates, murders the Papal Vice-Legate, Cinzio Filonardi, and some other members of the papal party, by the usual method of multiple stabbings. The bodies, still warm and bleeding, are thrown by the gang into the
carnaio
, the common pit where the corpses of the destitute from the hospitals are thrown.

An affront not to be overlooked. Filonardi represented the Pope’s authority in Perugia; effectively he was the governor of the city. But the new Pope, elected to the throne of St. Peter in the name of Paul III, shows no immediate reaction. He waits a year, then comes on a visit to Perugia accompanied by a thousand troops and fourteen cardinals. A show of power and pomp then, but the apparent
purpose is to forgive the city this murder of his legate. True, the delinquent Ridolfo is sent away; but Paul makes the municipality a gift in perpetuity of one thousand five hundred packloads of wheat a year, thus leading the people of Perugia to believe that in spite of everything they are his favored sons.

After this he bides his time. He sounds out opinion, takes the measure of things. Then in 1540, when the city has suffered a series of bad harvests and poverty is widespread and acute, he publishes a bull increasing the price of salt. Since the purchase of a certain amount of salt was compulsory, this amounted to a tax.

Did he do it by express design, to bring the city to revolt and give him a pretext for full-scale invasion? Was it true, as he said, that he needed the money to combat the Lutheran heresy and provide for the defense of Christendom against the Turks? Or was it, as the Perugians believed and later chronicles hinted, that it was for the upkeep of his court and the advancement of his bastards? These were questions to which history afforded no complete answer and even less the face before him, which he scanned again now with a sort of obstinate attentiveness, as if the stone might soften into meaning if stared at long enough.

But there was nothing much to be learned from faces, even living ones. He thought again of the faces that had passed by him on the escalator. Laura’s face would be unreadable when they met again, it would not be possible to know whether her leaving had been the maturing of a plan or the seizing of an opportunity. Which would I rather it was? he wondered, with a faint feeling of sickness. A plan was less impulsive, made the need for the lover seem somehow less urgent.

Paul’s scheme, if that was what it was, had worked well. The people of Perugia rose in desperate revolt, the papal troops advanced on the town. Ridolfo, returned from exile, made a brief resistance with what force he could muster but he was easily defeated. In a matter of days it was all over, the city was in the hands of the Pope. He sent his relative, the Duke of Castro, to choose a site for the fortress and the work of demolition began at once. The pleasure palaces, the scented gardens, the costly furnishings of damask and cloth-of-gold …

Not that it had been only the Baglioni mansions. The whole of the Borgo San Giuliano had been swept away. Church after church fell beneath the assault of crowbar and pickax, the tombs were violated and the remains of the dead flung out and scattered. As the years passed and the Pope’s paranoia kept pace with the number of his enemies, more and more buildings were destroyed. In 1543 Santa Maria dei Servi was pulled down because it was too near. Two years later the tower of San Domenico suffered the same fate because it overlooked the papal fortress.

Monti felt again the impact of fatality in this chain of events. Buildings demolished, new ones built. Human relations not much different, structures of affections. In the foundations there were always flaws, seeds of subsidence and decay, faults that needed attention if the house was to stand.

Sometimes, of course, collapse was preferable to repair; but this was something not easy to decide. The destruction of the Baglioni houses had signaled the end of the oppressive rule of that lawless and arrogant brood; but the government of priests that followed had been a tyranny crueler, more systematic, far worse. Forced labor,
crippling taxes, torture as a customary practice, people shut away for the slightest offense, for no more than a wrong word, in the horrific cells below him, fashioned within the thickness of the massive walls, cavities hardly big enough to admit a crawling figure. The iron railings surrounding the Great Fountain in the Cathedral Square had been garnished continuously with decomposing heads.

For three centuries the Vicars of Christ in due succession ruled this once proud city-state; and the symbol of this rule had been the colossal building in whose entrails he was standing. Symbols again, he thought—without proper attention to symbol there is no true history. No wonder the final demolition of the place had been greeted with such jubilation by the watching crowd. They had to wait for two years even after the city was taken by the troops of Victor Emmanuel and became part of United Italy. It was not until 1862 that the last of the walls were brought down and the great slabs of stone broken up to be transported. And so the rule of the popes came to its symbolic end. Who lives by the bulldozer dies by the bulldozer, Monti thought—he would offer this for the consideration of his students when next they met.

He was looking at Paul’s face still, though no longer in hope of finding clues in it. In the light of day above his head, where once had stood the towers of the Baglioni and then the ramparts of the fortress, civil servants parked their cars outside the offices of the provincial municipality in Piazza Italia. There was the little square with its palm trees and fountain and bus stops around the perimeter and across from this the imposing fronts of the Bank of Italy, the Palazzo Calderini, the Hotel Brufani. Someday all this too would be leveled to the ground. That was perhaps the condition we are all
ultimately destined to, razed, blank, at peace—the peace of demolition with no walls left standing to shelter our illusions. Through the cloth of his shirt Monti touched the letter folded in the breast pocket. He was not ready for that state yet, though knowing that someday he might be.

This recognition of abiding need seemed like a sort of decision. He was in the act of turning away when he felt a sort of shuddering or wincing of things, so brief that he could not tell whether the tremor was within him or above or below but lasting long enough for him to sketch a gesture toward the wall for support. The floor had seemed to shift under his feet but it was from above that the evidence came: a fall of white dust, mixed with some larger flakes, floating down from a corner of the ceiling and making a brief mist in the room.

As the morning wore on without incident, Cecilia began to think that the Checchetti might after all have summoned pride to their aid. She found herself quite fervently hoping that this was so, that in spite of the difficult and disadvantageous position they had got themselves into, in the teeth of threats of legal action and loss of cash, they would find within themselves the stern nobility to resist Mancini’s ultimatum. Backs to the wall, fighting against the odds their folly had accumulated against them, the Checchetti might thus be redeemed, might rise above their own ugliness and meanness and petty malignancy.

It was not, she admitted to herself, on the face of things a very
likely scenario. Nevertheless, as time passed and nothing happened, the hope grew. But it was not until she was making the mid-morning cup of tea for Harold and herself that she realized the true nature of this hope. She was standing at the rather primitive gas stove, which they were intending to change for something more up-to-date. It was fed by a cylinder below and Cecilia kept this closed when not in use, fearing an escape of gas. Sunlight was streaming through the kitchen window and when Cecilia bent to loosen the cap at the head of the cylinder she moved into this shaft of sunlight.

She remained where she was for some time, leaning down into this sun-filled space, her hand resting on the neck of the cylinder. As she slowly straightened up again she was visited by one of those rare moments of pure knowledge, undiluted, untrammeled, a shaft of insight straight and unfaltering. And in this moment she knew that it was not for the Checchetti that she cared so much, nor even for the symbolical redeeming, through them, of all those who toil and whose lives are of narrow scope but noble in simplicity. This was what she wanted to feel, what she liked to think she felt; but it was not the truth. She did not want Harold to win, that was the truth. Filling the kettle with water, setting it on the gas, she acknowledged it to herself: she wanted Harold to be thwarted in his expectations.

She was at first, and typically, possessed by guilt at this visitation of knowledge. She was accustomed to think of herself as a guide to Harold, a kind of arbiter of the refinements of life. There were gaps in his education through no fault of his own—he had been obliged to leave school early and make his own way in life, unlike herself, who had had every privilege, whose parents had paid for
private schools and extra lessons in music and art, and sent her to Italy to study.

Harold had been rescued from a toilsome life by discovering in himself a talent for buying things and selling them at a profit. He had started in a small way as a dealer in secondhand furniture and the scourings of obscure auction sales, then gone into property speculation in the eighties, when the going was good. They were fairly prosperous now but she had always thought of her husband as somehow underprivileged—like the Checchetti, in a way. His dogged resolve to better himself, to acquire more knowledge and culture, had touched her from the beginning and appealed to the spirit of philanthropy, which was strong in her and which she tended to confuse with love.

A good deal of this feeling still remained as a habitual response but the heart had gone out of it over the years as she realized that Harold was not really seeking her help to unlock the door to finer perceptions and more elevated thoughts but was looking for enhanced status among the people he did business with. More credibility, as he would probably have put it.

She had known all this for quite a long time now. But somehow, since this business of the wall and the entry of Mancini into their lives, it had come home to her with starker clarity. Lately she had not felt able to talk much to Harold about feelings or impressions. She had even given up correcting his misquotations, a congenital tendency, she had always thought, like a form of dyslexia. It had aroused her sympathy once …

It was true, she thought, as she poured hot water into the teapot, Mancini had inaugurated a new phase, he had brought something
out in both of them. She thought of the lawyer again now. The gestures of his hands, his manner at once pontifical and humorous, her strange difficulty in imagining any time of life for him previous to this, any childhood or youth. It was as if he had, since time began, been seated behind that vast and shiny desk of his. Harold had become a disciple, there was no other way of putting it: hardly an hour went by without his uttering some words of praise, some reference to the lawyer’s phenomenal powers. Perhaps he addressed Mancini in his prayers … This was a sour thought, of a kind unusual with her, and she felt at once ashamed of it. All the same, it was as if Harold had been looking for a master and now had found one.

The tea made, she went outside, to the area behind the house, and called up to Harold. He came down from the hillside, his binoculars slung round his neck. “No sign of activity yet and it’s not far from eleven.” He looked downcast.

Cecilia handed him his tea. “Does it matter, Harold?” she said. “Does it really matter? If they don’t come they won’t be able to claim the money and we can use some of it to have the wood brought down and stacked by someone else.”

“Someone else?” Chapman set his cup down very carefully, always a sign of strong feeling with him. “
Someone else?
You don’t understand anything, Cecilia. This whole thing has been worked out by Mancini, it has a dynamic shape. It is not a question of money, it is a question of justice. If I had to pay someone else, it would mean I had come off worse.” A sort of baffled rage began to rise in him at this further evidence of his wife’s lack of understanding. He looked with hostility at her sun-freckled face—she was too fair-skinned to
tan deeply—and her unbecoming summer dress with its overall pattern of strawberries or raspberries. “They tried to blackmail us,” he said. “You who are so high-minded, don’t you see there is a moral principle involved here?”