The Judas Cloth (15 page)

Nicola opened then closed his mouth and fumbled for reasons which had seemed cogent once. ‘We thought’ – how feeble it sounded – ‘that the guns had been planted here …’ But the words lay like stones in his mouth. For Father Curci there never had nor could have been guns. Erect and steadfast, he looked, in the rampart of his borrowed greatcoat, like some figure in feudal armour who could all too easily be felled by mean and mobile men. By me, thought Nicola, and saw that the things he wanted to say could not be said. He had lost another father.

Just minutes ago, on reading Curci’s note, he had felt a rush of affection for his teachers and, on learning that the worst had happened, intended offering to help in any way he could. Already others had rallied and the Father General been whisked away in an English gentleman’s carriage. He was wearing a wig.

‘Come quickly,’ the note begged. Clearly written before Curci spoke with his informant from the police headquarters, it must have been dispatched last night. ‘We leave tomorrow and must establish reliable contacts within the city. Dear son, I think of you as one of our most trustworthy. L.C. SJ.’

Greeting his confessor, Nicola started to commiserate. But the priest sprang from his embrace. ‘Why did you come?’ Father Curci’s eyes were
bloodshot. With bent head, he peered through thick brows like a beast gone to cover. Pointing at Brother Pietro’s lodge, ‘The corpse is in there,’ he said.

As if accepting his confessor’s last penance, Nicola went in and saw a body with a mashed head lying on Brother Pietro’s table. There was no sign of the porter himself. Two policemen sat in his place. Looking at the dead man, he recognised him as the one who had asked him to post a letter for him last June.

‘Who was he?’ he asked the policemen.

But they would say only that they were waiting for a police carriage.

Did Father Curci not wonder what the man had been doing in the Collegio? Or,
perinde
ac
cadaver,
did he ask no questions?

And now a carriage did come. Not the police carriage but one to take Curci and several other disguised Jesuits out of the state. In their borrowed greatcoats, it struck Nicola that they looked like orphans. They waved, but not to him.

Leaving the square, Nicola bumped into someone. It was Ciccio, looking more squint-eyed and broken than ever.

‘Did you tell the Jesuits? Was it you?’ Nicola, remembering that Ciccio had worked in a ministry, began to shake him. But the small man evaded his grip. He didn’t pretend to misunderstand.

Why would he tell them now? he asked reasonably. The Jesuits were finished. He was glad he hadn’t seen the Rector that time. And as for denouncing Martelli and Nicola, why would he? They were known, he said admiringly, to be in with the new powers. They’d played their cards well. He, alas, had not.

‘That’s why I came. I wonder,’ he asked hopefully, ‘could your friend, Martelli, put in a word for me? I have,’ he promised, ‘something to tell which will interest him.’

Since neither had money for a café, they walked about, heading first for the meat market where a dog gnawed at some fur and another lapped at a gutter. Further on was the marble torso of Pasquino. There were no papers stuck on it today, perhaps because censorship had been relaxed.

Ciccio’s tale centered on the guns which had been removed from the Collegio last June. They had reached the police during an interregnum when some old employees were still around and new ones already come, yet nobody wanted to take decisions until they saw how the political cat would jump. The upshot was that the guns had been hidden, then lost.

Ciccio, his face quivering as though it, like the carcasses in the San Eustachio market, had been flayed, explained that the ministry where he had still been employed had been in disarray. Papers were getting shuffled around and humble pen-pushers getting to know more than they should.

On they walked, winding like Ciccio’s narrative, and came to the piazza Montanara, a meeting place for country folk, where scribes rented their skills to the illiterate and there was a smell of donkey droppings. Red aprons. White head-dresses. Peasant girls and agricultural
implements
. A barber cut swathes of lather off a customer’s chin and Nicola realised that he was being offered the guns. What, he thought, could I do with guns?

‘I need help,’ explained Ciccio who was out of a job.

‘Maybe Don Eugenio could use you?’

A thought stirred in Nicola’s mind. Gavazzi needed guns. As army chaplain, he was already fund-raising to try and buy some.

Martelli, on hearing of Ciccio’s offer, rushed Nicola to the Barnabite convent of San Carlo a Cattinari, where the abate was saying his last goodbyes before setting off with the troops.

‘What have you to lose?’ he asked, when Nicola hung back.

The abate, euphoric, with a tricolour crucifix on his chest, was packing and trying to rid himself of a hanger-on.

‘Try Padre Ventura,’ he was saying. ‘He has His Holiness’s ear. I’m leaving. I respect you, Don Mauro, which is why I won’t give you false hopes.’

Martelli whispered something to him and the abate looked interested. Beckoning the man he had addressed as Don Mauro, he murmured in his ear, then turned to Nicola.

‘Don Mauro,’ he told him, ‘is from the same part of the country as Monsignor Amandi. He will tell you, at leisure, more than I could last night. You were conceived in turbulent times and now the turbulence is back. Perhaps God has marked you out to take part in it? Your friend tells me that you have assistance for us. Good. Christ is suffering in the persons of our beleaguered brothers who are struggling against tyranny. It is our duty to come to their aid. After all, His Vicar is with us, so how can we have doubts? Don Mauro too needs help. You might recommend him to your patron. God bless you both.’ The abate took both their
hands in his, then turned briskly away. He had many calls on his attention.

Don Mauro, a small, vaguely clerical-looking man, smiled at Nicola. We have been given short shrift. I lodge at the Palazzo Spada in the apartment of an English lady called Miss Foljambe. My days are utterly idle. Come tomorrow if you like.’

As Martelli and Nicola walked through the Barnabite convent, priests gathered to stare at them. Clearly the abate’s visitors were a source of scandal.

‘Who is Don Mauro?’

‘A defrocked priest.’

‘What did you tell the abate?’

‘What Ciccio told you. How to get the guns.’

Nardoni’s smashed face came back to Nicola. But it was too late to worry about him. Since infancy, he had been praying at the end of every mass that God should thrust Satan back down to hell. Now the Austrians were to be thrust back to Austria. Guns would be needed.

‘Shall we watch the troops leave?’

‘All right.’

Martelli warned that they were a bit of a ragtag. ‘But the useless ones will drop off as they march north. And they’ll be getting some training.’

And they’ll get our guns.

‘Yes.’

After the troops had left, they stared at some gentlemen who, in honour of the martial occasion, had pinned decorations on their frock coats. Martelli,
sotto
voce
,
quoted the lines:

They were still loose in the city when the Ave Maria bells rang and windows began glistening like mica in the darkening air. Martelli, drunk with such unwonted freedom, confided that he planned to fake his age and join the troops up north.

Old grime filtered the light and the air was the conniving colour of weak tea. Count Pellegrino Rossi sat in a spice shop patronised by returned emigrés. Earlier, finding himself heading for the Quirinal Palace, he had done an about-face and, returning to the Corso, avoided the places which ministers were likely to frequent. A man without a position could start living by proxy.

The spice shop was austere. Blue and white jars lined the walls. There were benches, three tables and a newspaper on a stick. Sunlight, like other frivolities, stayed outside. Some faces looked familiar. All looked purposeful. Like himself, these men hid their idleness. They also looked damaged and he felt ashamed of his distaste.

An ex-priest moved from group to group with a diffidence, and perhaps a hidden arrogance, learned in the seminary.

‘Monsieur l
’
Ambassadeur?
’

‘Sit down, Father.’

‘Not “Father”, Excellency. I was defrocked.’

‘So was I, Don Mauro. I am only an honorary Excellency now.’

‘So the days of diplomacy are over?’ Sliding onto a bench, the
ex-priest
fixed Rossi with needling eyes. ‘Did you see Ferrari’s piece in
La
Revue
Indépendante
?
Someone smuggled me a copy. “Diplomacy,” it says, “that empty science of interests, has been abolished. The question of liberty must now be put first.”’ Don Mauro’s face was pale with concentrations of pink. Ill, thought Rossi, feverish. His coat covered him like an unfriendly shell. It was gaudy with bold tartan checks.

‘A glass of wine?’

‘No, no!’ The priestly hands might have been turning it to blood. The man leaned forward. ‘We’re one revolution behind France. Since February. Ferrari says, “Italian reformists are merely shoring up
enlightened
despotism.” It’s too late for that. Do you agree?’

‘Here in this spice shop, it sounds well enough, but a revolution would meet obstacles. Austrian bayonets perhaps.’

‘Oh, indeed, the national question comes first. Mazzini says so.’ The ex-priest cited his authorities as he must once have cited scripture. Rossi thought: how dare I despise him? It was the words’ source he disliked. He had met Mazzini once in an exiles’
trattoria
in Ostender Street, London, and thought him woolly-minded.

Don Mauro leaned close. ‘Surely France will help? Now that it’s a republic?’ Pleading, as though with Rossi with whose services the new republic had dispensed.

‘What if the worst happens? Do you,’ Rossi could not forbear mockery, ‘expect Resurrection to follow the Crucifixion?’

The ex-priest flinched. ‘My new faith is weaker than the old.’ Exile had tuned him too finely. The count sensed a tormented effort to reach – what? Perhaps he was merely watching a dim mind struggle with its limits? ‘Count,’ came the appeal, ‘if you saw hell all around you, would you not think
any
move to save those in it better than none?’

‘Hell?’ Rossi edged away from this raging nucleus. The hurts he had had the luck to escape in exile were incarnate here.

‘I believe you know Monsieur Lammenais?’ Don Mauro’s breath was sour. ‘It was he who gave me the courage to think this.’

‘Monsieur Lammenais is changeable. What is he saying now?’

‘That universal reason, that common to all men, cannot err. Well, I think he says that. I myself am a doer, not a thinker.’

‘Can one divide the two?’

‘Oh yes. The man who acts stops hesitating. Thought is hesitation.’

Rossi was struck by this. Don Mauro’s story came back to him. He was one of those men who pass their ordinands’ exam by learning Togni’s manual off by heart, then spend their lives in rural parishes, hunting a little, growing tomatoes and playing cards … What went wrong?

‘Monsieur Lammenais …’

Another unfrocked priest! Rossi had met him in Paris in General Pepe’s house. Amused, he relished the memory. The General was a card. Comical. Affable. Forever quoting memoirs in which he referred to himself as a hero. Turgenev used to visit too, and Madame Sand, the novelist, and Lammenais whose ideas had the distinction of having been condemned in two encyclicals. Don Mauro would not want to know that, after perorating brilliantly on various topics, his mentor told Rossi, ‘I mean what I say, but sometimes it strikes me that I may be insane.’ No
wonder, thought Rossi, he sought an infallible guide! First it was the Pope. Now it’s universal reason.

‘Why were you exiled?’ The count wondered if he was breaking some rule of refugee etiquette. ‘I,’ he offered, ‘was unwise enough to sign proclamations. Ink, as they say, can convict you.’

‘Oh, Signor Conte, your story is well known.’

My story, thought Rossi, is that I wrote rhetoric for Murat, that bogus Italian who, like his master, Bonaparte, wooed and raped our peninsula, then left his rapist’s seed to burgeon: the idea of nationality. I helped scatter it.

Don Mauro admitted to a crime of action. ‘How could I desert my parishioners when they were preyed upon? I was their shepherd and the others were –
Centurioni.
I had, it seemed to me, no choice. My bishop saw it otherwise.’ Don Mauro’s smile was a wound. He had been condemned to death and ceremonially defrocked. He described the ritual: an ordination in reverse which had, he claimed, left him, even now, less than alive. ‘I couldn’t, you see, be executed as a priest. The bishop had to snatch the chalice from me. With the host. Then I was stripped of my vestments and given a blow on each cheek with the stole as a sign that I had betrayed the gospel. They scraped my thumbs and tonsure to remove the holy oils. Two days later, the prison was seized by rebels. I was in a numb trance, and when I came to my senses, was in Marseilles where they had fled, taking me with them. I hadn’t a word of French. Signor Conte, men like me look to men like you. Hope is abroad again. The Pope’s subjects are free the way deer are free in a park. Do you see how intolerable that is? A facsimile of freedom.’

‘I’m not in power, Don Mauro. I’m not even a citizen.’

‘You will be.’

For a moment the little man had communicated his anguished state – or a mimetic moment of it. Then Rossi recovered his sang-froid. A bit mad, he thought. No wonder. That appalling ceremony. What a loathsome regime the Church had run here. He looked sadly at the wrecked creature in the tartan shell. Don Mauro kept rubbing his hands. Like Pilate or Lady Macbeth. But he had picked up the wrong gesture.
His
hands had been scraped clean.

‘Do you need money?’

Don Mauro refused. ‘This city,’ he said, ‘extends more charity than any other. Fair is fair, the deer in the park have to be fed.’ Laughing for the first time, he rose.

Don Eugenio took Martelli and Nicola to a puppet show to see a play about a priest from the border with the Duchy of Tuscany. ‘Great smuggling country,’ he told them, adding that the priest had smuggled wanted men and saved many before being caught and forced into exile. ‘He’s a new sort of hero. It seems that we need priestly heroes now to show that the Church has always been on the side of the downtrodden.’ Don Eugenio’s voice was impassive.

Jumping shadows from oil lamps and the musty warmth of the little theatre roused their spirits. Walking in, they passed a man snoring in a corner.

‘That’s the censor.’ Don Eugenio explained that the theatre
management
always got him drunk.

The air was muggy and the floor crackled with the spat-out shells of sunflower seeds. All this, however, was forgotten when the performance began with a story about Charlemagne’s knights. The puppets, cunningly manipulated by strings, wore perfectly articulated suits of armour. They even rode horses and wielded swords with which they triumphantly skewered infidels.

Then the new play was announced:
The
True
and
Veritable
History
of
Don
X,
the
Smuggling
Priest.
A puppet in clerical black bounced his horse over the ‘salt road’ which was the name of the tracks along which goods were carried to avoid customs duties. Others burdened by bags sneaked a zigzag course across the small stage: smugglers. People cheered them for breaking a bad law. ‘We shouldn’t have internal borders,’ yelled a man sitting close to Nicola. ‘Look at the shape of the peninsula!’ He drew a boot in the air. Chop it up and how could it advance? Everyone laughed.

Meanwhile Don X’s horse looked alarmed. His ears twitched and, turning his head comically, he showed the whites of his eyes.

‘Look out!’ warned the crowd. The customsmen were coming.
I
finanzieri.
A chase. Shouts. Shots. But the puppet priest outwitted them and, in a humorous interlude, baffled the gendarmes who came to his presbytery to interrogate him. Later, he was denounced by a spy and a cage closed over him: prison. His horse wept. Then came a new, liberal pope and proclaimed an amnesty. The cage was whisked off and there was the gallant little puppet reunited with his horse. Bowing to the audience, they cried
‘Viva
Pio
Nono’.

‘That could not have been put on last year.’ Don Eugenio applauded with the tips of his fingers. ‘Rightly perhaps? People take advantage of the Holy Father’s good heart. I brought you here,’ he told Nicola, ‘because Don X is Don Mauro whom I know you are planning to see.
Everything is known in this city. Bear that in mind. He lodges with an English lady who is said to be a spy.’

Miss Foljambe tried to keep her lodger cheered up.

His blunt fingers inexpertly stroked her cat. They were black-ribbed and reminded her of freshly pulled carrots. ‘I have no conversation,’ he apologised.

To fill silences, she found herself saying more than she had intended, mentioning her limp and explaining – why on earth? – that she had never desired marriage.

He looked attentively at her, seeing, she supposed, a pleasing young woman with a copper-coloured plait wound around her head, a neat waist and a sensibly discreet, grey crinoline.

‘Surely you could marry if you chose?’

‘Because of my money?’ Her harshness was for foolish ghosts. ‘I do not choose. Private life can be a prison.’ She did not wish to shock, but what was the point in opening your house to a man beyond the pale if you could not yourself overstep? He had heard confessions. He must surely understand more than her Roman friends who were baffled by her failure to buy herself a man. One or two had advanced the suit of a biddable nephew or cousin: good-natured youths who would cherish a wife richer than themselves without wanting to even the score. She was, she told him, clear-eyed.

‘Ah,’ said he, surprising her, ‘that could be a mistake. People’s prejudices bind them together. If you strip them away, they’re confused and unhappy.’

He was teasing her. Or else lacked independence of mind, as Roman Catholics often did. She worked a half inch of her
gros
point
before recollecting that he had suffered for his.

Did she not, he asked, miss having a family?

She, who had come here with her mother precisely to escape the tyranny of family, was vexed. Did bullying penitents in the confessional – an institution which it gave her goose flesh to think of – produce such indiscretion?

‘I am alone,’ he said, so candidly that she warmed to him again. ‘The Church was my family. But I was put out of it.’

‘So now you could have an ordinary one.’

‘No. The family would know they were second best: worse, an impediment.’

His dilemma interested her.

‘If I am reinstated,’ he mused, ‘my voice will have some power. This is a time when we can hope, at last, to act.’

‘Against your Church?

‘I don’t see it as against.’ He had begun to glow. She knew he was a Liberal and had an inkling that this, here in Rome, might be thought heretical. Her own church, being so regarded, was situated pointedly outside the city gates. The glow stimulated her. It was the connection she sought with men: fiery and disembodied. Adam’s fingers in the Sistine Chapel were picking up just such a charge.

However, it flickered out and the cat must have felt this too, for it slid off the lodger’s lap.

It had struck her that a priest might incur blame for lodging with her, and she had raised the matter with the consul before agreeing to let Don Mauro use the upstairs flat. The answer was not to worry. Trivial rules were not to the point. Radical priests would soon either triumph or lose definitively. Her own government, she had been allowed to guess, was playing these men like cards.

Politics had tantalised her ever since her tomboy phase when Papa used to praise her pluck and fascinate her with speeches pitched above her head. It had been years before she knew that he could as happily have tried out his oratory on his gun dog.

God or the Pope must have let her lodger down in some similar way. He was said to have been a man of action, though he had a tic in his chin like a bubble in gruel and didn’t look you in the eye.

Disappointment – never explained – had caught up with Papa too and led to his retiring to the country, where, for a while, he amused himself by teaching her to jump perilously high fences and protecting her from Mama’s remonstrances. Then, quite suddenly, he handed her over to their adversary and seemed to think of her as one too. No longer a surrogate boy, she was no good as a girl and her limp – from a fall at one of the fences – exasperated him. He kept away while she fumbled through the hoops which Mama was obliged to raise for her. A dancing mistress was heard to say that her name was apt – ‘Madleg Foljambe!’ the woman had quipped cruelly – and although Miss Foljambe was hurt, she did learn to dance, more or less, and also to laugh at herself.

‘If you become a great man, Don Mauro,’ she said, ‘I may figure as a footnote to your biography. Foljambe of the footnotes: a syllable from scandal. Footnotes instead of footlights,’ she annotated. But he didn’t smile. Despite exile in Manchester, his English was poor.

And he was preoccupied. ‘If a man had a public mission …’

Confessor to a confessor, she danced in her head. This was sheer stimulus – or would be if Don Mauro could bring himself to talk without mincing matters. It seemed he could not.