The Judas Cloth (27 page)

‘The police? You’re provoking the police?’

‘Not provoking. Reforming. People
want
reform. Everyone says so. They want industry, railways and telegraph lines and the advantages of modern living, but they still want tax exemptions. Well, they can’t have them.’

His eyes swivelled, reviewing projects in his mind. He was tired. Hadn’t been sleeping. Hadn’t made love to her in – how long?
Sixty-one
years old! Racing the clock.

‘What are they saying in the drawing rooms?’ he asked her.

‘It’s all stale. Most people are away.’ She no longer spoke to him of conspiracies.

‘Bologna,’ he said, ‘is in a frenzy. The “victory” went to people’s heads.’ His eye glittered with irony. He liked to deflate a myth. Myths did damage and he stepped on them, as he might on a puff-ball or a kelp-bladder. Pff! Out oozed the airy lies. ‘Intelligence sources show that Austrian orders were not to occupy the city lest the Anglo-French mediation over the armistice be affected. Even before the skirmish their troops had been told to retreat. Yet, now, a legend has been born. The brave populace wins through. David defeats Goliath. Republicans are puffing the people up and the idle poor are not only holding onto their guns but demanding payment for “keeping watch” over the city. How is your father?’ he asked Prospero. ‘Villas are being burgled and worse.’

Prospero thought his father could look out for himself.

The count said he had ordered the arrest of the demagogues, Garibaldi and Gavazzi, who were fomenting trouble up there.

Later, while driving on the Pincian Hill, Madame de Menou lamented to Prospero that the count, being the only man of calibre in the government, had to think of
everything.
‘If the conspiracies don’t kill him, over-work will. He’s sixty-one.’

That was ten years older than Prosperous own father. Until now he had not thought of his patrons as having ages at all. Astounded, he stole glances at her as she rustled from her carriage and again as she raised the parasol which threw scalloped shadows on her neck. Young enough to be Rossi’s daughter – or granddaughter!

‘In a way,’ she said, ‘he’s creating a constitution.’ She shook her head over the oddity. In a true parliamentary system no one man would have had such a burden. An absolute monarch perhaps – but
he
would be properly protected.

In mid-October a baker, who had somehow found himself in the confidence of desperate men, came to Rossi to reveal an antiquated sort of plot. Carabineers and dragoons were to march to the Quirinal and demand that the Pope renounce his temporal power. All cardinals and princes would be seized and a republic declared. The plan was demented. Perhaps it was a mere provocation?

Yet the baker gave details which inspired confidence and, though the designated date passed without trouble, Rossi, writing in the
Gazzetta
di
Roma,
menaced those who might be ‘tempted to carry out certain projects’. Was he foolish to dare them?

‘Let’s go to Frascati,’ proposed Madame de Menou. ‘We’ll drink that lovely wine. It doesn’t travel at all,’ she told Prospero. ‘If you drink it here it’s not the same.’

Could the baker have been settling a private score? Or was there a plot within the plot? Prospero knew from his father that in secret societies there was often an inner core whose plans differed from those discussed with the rank and file.

‘He’s had another anonymous letter,’ said Madame de Menou. ‘Something unpleasant. He won’t show it.’

Again they were in her carriage. The hood was down. They saw
veterans wearing a characteristic oilskin known as a
panuntella.
That meant ‘oiled bread’ and seemed to horrify her. It was as if they were sandwiches looking for meat. Some lacked shoes. By now those who really wanted to fight had re-enlisted and gone north.

Her sunshade would not stay open. Taking it from her, he tested the device on its shaft. Pink and silky, it expanded like a sea urchin, and light, falling through, coloured the cloth of his trousered thighs. She leaned a little way towards him so that the silk shaded them both. Then the toylike thing snapped shut. ‘I’m foolishly superstitious today. Is it broken?’ Her scent hypnotised him. The silk and the kid of her glove seemed as live as grass. The carriage was a moving boudoir and people in other ones stared. A lady raised her lorgnette. Shyly, he moved away from her; then, aware that this manoeuvre too would have been noted, pretended to be intent on the wayward movements of the parasol.

He thought: she doesn’t understand the small-mindedness of this city. There’s the Duchessa di Rignano observing us now. And Prince Volkonsky. Fumbling at the sunshade, he became aware that his embarrassment amused her.

The letter which Rossi had received ran as follows:

Rossi felt as though he had been dipped in a privy. To be sure,
vox
populi
was only mouthing the lines he had fed it, but its readiness to do so upset him. He did not show Dominique the jingle, for what pained him in it was a measure of pity. It could have been more abusive. Such things usually were. He found himself adding to it:

Truth wrote as woundingly as
vox
populi
– and indeed, maybe
vox
populi
was a friend.

He left for Frascati, refusing to let the other two come. He feared they too might have received jingles and be hiding them. Collusive pity could play Cupid, but he would not think about this. The Chamber was to reconvene on 15th November.

In Frascati, he drove about in a hired carriage, showing himself everywhere in the company of his wife, who had come from Switzerland to help him play the judicious and solid citizen – he had, to be sure, become one – of this theocratic state. In tall hat, frock coat, lawn shirt and discreet waistcoat, he manifested propriety. This was the State of the Church and he was its Minister. The visible manifested the invisible and he, who hoped to reconcile the Rights of Man – some of them, anyway – with the Commands of God, had better be winning in his ways.

Before leaving Rome he had gone to see the Pope and found him evasive. Possibly he was planning to replace him as minister. With whom? There was nobody even half as capable. But Mastai lacked realism. He had betrayed his last government, had betrayed his soldiers in mid-war, and might well betray Rossi.

Mastai’s lower lip had protruded damply and he had made puns. They were his passion and, thought the minister, suited the doubleness of the priestly ruler’s vision. Did he hope to turn this state back into the police state he had taken over two years ago? Interestingly, he was believed to have the evil eye. People, meeting him on his walks, sank on one knee, doffed their hats and, in the shelter of the hat’s crown, made the horned sign with index and little finger. If able to do so with discretion, men touched their privates and women their keys. There was, thought Rossi, a logic to God’s vicar having demonic properties. Christianity had, after all, inherited the city from paganism and small gods been subsumed. Why should not one be in attendance on Mastai?

Rossi spent his week in Frascati visiting acquaintances – all capable of writing anonymous jingles. Innumerable nephews were recommended to him for employment. On asking what the man had done so far, he was always told:

‘Nothing, but if he were less indolent, he could surely do anything at all.’

Often the man was thirty or thirty-five. ‘Ah‚’ quipped Rossi, ‘the state has a great reserve of indolent men!’

‘Well‚’ the supplicant’s friend would argue, ‘why not? The
prelates
who run it receive no practical training.’

‘But we all know,’ Rossi would reply, ‘that a prelate is good for anything. More is expected of a layman.’

His irony was too mild for them. Roman aristocrats – possibly the idlest in Europe – had not exerted their wits in a long time and were uncomfortable when a fellow wouldn’t come out with what he thought. Till now, they had had no role in government and their lands were farmed by agents who had begun to form the nucleus of a new class. Cardinal Antonelli, one of the cleverer prelates, had sprung from it and Pius who seemed to trust him might trust Rossi too if only he could believe him capable of holding the state together. Faith was what was needed. Confidence. To secure it, Rossi was pinning his hopes to the programme outlined in a speech he planned to deliver to the Chamber tomorrow and to the Pope this afternoon.

At the thought, he felt his hand make the horned sign.

After seeing Pius – he was thinking this on the drive back to Rome – he would make love to Dominique and exorcise the phantoms which had come between them. He was bringing her a basket of Muscat grapes not unlike the colour of her flesh.

Order in Bologna had broken down.

‘It’s not even political now,’ lamented the cardinal. The latest death was that of a night watchman in a sawmill. ‘They tell me he was a harmless poor fellow and the father of two. He was knocked on the head!’

Nicola asked the name of the sawmill and, on hearing that it was the one he had mentioned to Captain Melzi and Count Stanga, went cold. Was he to blame for another death?

Garibaldi, complained Oppizzoni, was back in town. ‘Staying at the Pensione Svizzera. Rome wants him arrested. Him and Father Gavazzi!’ He groaned at the folly. ‘We’d have a revolution in the piazza. I’ve managed to persuade General Zucchi to take Gavazzi only.’ There was a pause. ‘I want you,’ he said quietly, ‘to warn him to slip away. He’s in the Barnabite convent. I’ll give you a letter for the Father Provincial to

get you in. Then you must alert the abate. They’ll aim to trick him, so he must trust nobody. On no account compromise me.’

Nicola hurried to the convent – only to find a police carriage already at the door. Two policemen and an official-looking gentleman were talking to the porter.

‘I need to see the Father Provincial.’ Nicola waved his letter.

‘It’s a bad moment.’ The porter slid his eyes from the gentleman to Nicola. ‘Nobody is to go in or out.’

‘I’m on the cardinal’s business. It’s urgent.’

The porter was in a quandary and Nicola about to resolve it for him by skipping past, when Father Gavazzi arrived in a state of high excitement.

‘You wanted to see me?’ he asked the important-looking gentleman.

‘We have a message from His Holiness. He wants to consult with you and we are to convey you to Rome. There is a letter at the government palace.’

Gavazzi looked at the police carriage.

‘For security,’ said the gentleman, ‘in these troubled times.’

Nicola now greeted Gavazzi. But the abate’s attention was all for the bearers of the papal message. One of the men turned to open the carriage door and Nicola, who had been making warning signs, was caught out and had to pretend to have been stung by a bee. Shyly, rubbing the fictitious sting, he hummed the
Dies
irae.
Gavazzi, however, wasn’t listening. Irritably, he waved away Nicola and his bee and begged the police to tell him more about the Holy Father’s summons. Did it mean that Pius had had a change of heart? Was he eager for a first-hand report on the fighting?

As a last resort, Nicola began to stroke the police horses and launched’ into a sort of clowning parody which had been popular at the Collegio: ‘Beware,’ he warned them. ‘Put not your trust in masters, for they are fickle and you, dearly beloved dobbins, could easily end in the knackers’ yard. Even the noblest humans lack your Hippie candour and if you could but see into their secret minds, you would make a run for it now!’ Here he had to stop for a policeman laid a hand on his arm, while Gavazzi raised his in a hushing gesture. Holding himself erect, the abate was marvelling, ‘So His Holiness wishes to see me?’

‘Yes,’ said the policemen.

‘Ah!’ breathed the abate. ‘I’ve prayed long and hard for a chance to speak to him face to face and God has answered my prayers. Thank
God! Thank God and may He bless the Angel Pope!’ His vindicated smile was painful to see.

Four days later the
Gazzetta
di
Bologna
carried the following item:

This morning Madame de Menou’s footman had found several slips of paper stuck in her front door. All said the same thing: the Civic Guard could not be trusted. Tomorrow, when the Chamber reconvened Count Rossi must surround himself with carabineers.

‘He won’t bring them inside‚’ she told Prospero. ‘It would offend the Democrats.’

All day, she had been receiving visits from politicians. ‘They can’t stop what they began!’ Twisting a wisp of handkerchief, she managed to smile and Prospero was reminded of the mother who had died at about her age. He recalled sitting somewhere, swinging short legs, while a maid unhooked her gown. A doomed sweetness from that time coloured this.

‘Read me the bits you’ve cut from the papers.’

‘They’re rubbish. Rhetoric!’

‘Read them.’

‘“Our minister”,’ he read, ‘“is employing tactics learned in France, but they will fail on the Tiber’s banks as surely as they did by the Seine.” That’s from
Epoca
.’

A
ponentino
with a sea-tang rose as the sun sank and rippled the cuttings.

Someone had sent a copy of a cartoon which was to appear in tomorrow’s edition
of
Don
Pirlone.
It portrayed a quixotic Rossi leaning on a pike. A chit detailed his salary. His neck was bare, but the rest of him was ironclad and surrounded by poppies. Prospero held it up. ‘What do poppies mean?’

‘Sleep?’ She rose. ‘Dream? He’s late.’ She moved to the window. ‘Or that reformers are dreamers? I suppose some are. In real life things age and rot. Reforms try to turn that around. Naturally, they would …’

‘… appeal to a man of sixty-one?’ The count had possibly been in the doorway for some time. ‘Sorry, children, I told Pietro not to announce me. He’s bringing up some grapes. I brought these myself‚’ They were roses. ‘A pastoral impulse.’ He kissed Madame de Menou. ‘I can see you’re worrying. Everyone is. Even the Pope whom I’ve just seen. Just remember I’m the cat with nine lives and so have an unwieldy past. Think of the obligations! They kept me late. Ah, you have the papers. May I?’ He began to scan them.

Madame de Menou – Prospero saw – could see no way to make good her gaffe. The count talked of security arrangements. Five hundred carabineers were to come into the city and he had to see Colonel Calderari again … Then he must polish his speech. ‘His Holiness, whimsically, complained only of its style! Too many biblical quotations. Does he feel I’m the devil citing scripture?’

Again he kissed her, begged Prospero to look after her – and left. They would not meet again until after tomorrow’s ceremony.

Madame de Menou put her face in her hands. ‘He’s hurt! That cartoon is right to dress him in iron. He’s hard and sensitive! An impossible mixture.’ She would not, she decided, go anywhere this evening. Prospero, though,
must
go into the city and see what echoes he might pick up. ‘Look after him, Prospero.’

‘He told me to look after you.’

‘Please.’

So he left, at first walking at random, then pausing in a café where, on taking off his coat, he found Rossi’s speech in a pocket. He must have picked it up with the newspaper cuttings. Sitting down, he skimmed the headings: confidence … hope … deficit of one million to be anticipated … trade, the sea … Romans were paid an average of three scudi per head, the French nine, the English ten. If production could be increased, then … Meanwhile the clergy’s gift must tide us over … For moments, the optimism astonished him. Then he felt its contagion.

As he was leaving, Don Vigilio – he had met him with Rossi – waylaid him. The agent’s wrinkles had a prestidigitator’s deftness. Up they went, then down. It was as though he had switched masks. Ordering the arrest of popular men like Gavazzi was, he murmured, rash. His Excellency should …

Outside again, Prospero made for Rossi’s
palazzo
and delivered the copy of the speech. Then he looked into a wine shop where legionaries in
panuntelle
shouted and sang. His mind snatched at meanings. The pressure of Madame de Menou’s handclasp lingered on his skin.

Elsewhere there was talk of a doctor whose demonstrations in the Teatro Capranica showed – what? ‘Get it in the neck …’ he heard. His mind was aswim. Might the mummery turn real?

A man offered him a woman. Safe. Clean. The fellow had a revolutionary’s beard and long hair. No, said Prospero.

‘The carotid artery …’ These must be medical students.

‘She only does it sometimes‚’ argued the pimp. ‘She’s my sister.’ He told of exile and ill use. Prospero bought him a
foglietta
of wine and heard an apologia for pimping delivered in a preacher’s vocabulary. ‘Your health, sir.’ The pimp smoked and his words scurried between rapid puffs.

Prospero bought another
foglietta.

Pimping was a social service, said the returned exile. Had the gentleman ever asked himself what men did who couldn’t find solace for their needs? Had he wondered to what they might be driven? On what weak flesh they wreaked their brutality?

The medical students were discussing knives.

‘I wouldn’t sully my lips telling you,’ said the pimp and spat for emphasis. ‘Nature foiled turns savage.’

Parish priests, he claimed, trained people to denounce their
neighbours
. If a man was seen going to a woman’s house, the PP had the police around to arrest her for
stuprum
before he could lace up his shoes. She’d as like as not get a whipping or a five-year sentence and even the man could be locked up.

How then, asked Prospero, did the pimp practise his trade?

‘We have our ways!’ Encouraged, he gave his name. Renzo. ‘She’s only twenty-three.’ He stood up and Prospero was aware of opportunity fizzing like a chemical held to the nose.

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘You’ll like her,’ said Renzo. ‘Bring wine. Not for yourself! Wine’s no help for a man going to a woman, but it softens her. Hard for soft is the bargain, eh?’

As they went out, someone said, ‘Tomorrow!’

Prospero had caught the city’s fever. A greed for freedom stung the air. Down the via Ripetta they walked, and over Ponte Sisto, into lanes where darkness was as thick as fur.

‘Better spring a leak.’ Renzo unbuttoned. ‘We drank a lot.’

‘How about your neighbours and the police?’ It was occurring to Prospero that he could be robbed. The optimism of drink began to wane.

‘They rarely bother gentlemen,’ said Renzo. ‘Besides, if anyone spots you, they’ll think you’re me. I’ll wait for you to come back out. They mustn’t see two of us at once.’

So up a reeking, pitch-black stairway Prospero groped, key in hand, and, only as he fumbled for a door, did he remember that Renzo hadn’t told him the girl’s name. Was this the door? Somewhere a dog yapped. What if …

It opened. A woman said, ‘Renzo!’ She held a lamp. ‘Is he in trouble?’

‘No.’

She let him in. She did not look like anyone’s idea of a whore. A picture of St Catherine and some dried olive twigs hung on a wall. Ridiculously, he said, ‘I’ll go and send Renzo up.’ She had a gold chain around her neck, and somewhere under her thick cotton nightdress would be a holy medal. She saw the wine.

‘Ah!’ She sharpened with understanding. ‘So he’s below?’

‘St Catherine,’ prayed Prospero, ‘make it as if I never came!’

‘I’ll get glasses.’

She was back before he could bolt, having loosened her hair. It was probably her best feature: electric, frothy and thick as a bush. She poured wine and he thought of her in gaol in fear of a whipping, a Magdalen. She drew him to her and he felt softness through the shawl. Her breasts slid, reminding him of those games where you grope for prizes in a barrel of bran.

‘Come.’

In her bedroom was yet another holy picture: a polychrome Christ whose hand fondled a bleeding heart and whose lips smiled rosily. Prospero, too befuddled to manage buttons, was stripped of his frock coat and learned that his companion’s name was Cesca. She murmured invigorating praise, assuring him that Renzo never brought her anything but the best. This reversed things, turning them about as if she were Messaline, the lubricious Empress, and he a man procured for her night’s pleasure. Weren’t Messaline’s lovers drowned at dawn? In the Tiber? Disregarding omens, he remembered that he was to give hard for soft and found himself doing so, as she groped for her own bran-tub prize, then fell asleep and dreamed that Count Rossi was looking sadly at him from the bleeding, gilt-framed image of the Sacred Heart.

He was awoken by a row.

‘I froze stiff in that doorway.’ That was Renzo. ‘You should have sent him down long ago.’

His sister said the customer had been half cut and to send him out in that state would have been asking for trouble.

Well, we had trouble now, said Renzo. There he was slug-naked and the city full of police. How get him out? What if he was seen?

‘Say he was taken ill and you brought him home from charity.’

‘Ach!’ was Renzo’s response, followed by the sound of a spit.

The two withdrew and Prospero made a move to get up, but was overcome by dizziness and fell back into his stupor which felt like the bottom of a deep, shuddering well. Could Renzo, he wondered half lucidly, have put something in his wine?

When next he awoke, light was cutting his eyeballs and a policeman saying he’d have to take him to the Vicariato, which was the court where morals charges were heard. The pimp and whore were there already. Prospero tried out the story about being taken ill but was advised to save his breath. Renzo had a record as long as your arm and the girl had been in and out of stir. However, said the policeman, we were never keen to embarrass the sons of good families. Prospero, his wits returning, said his papers were at his lodgings and thumbed an empty wallet. The policeman had a twitchy, insinuating moustache. What time was it? Prospero, who should by now have been at the Cancelleria, began to tread a tremulous line between using and protecting Rossi’s name. In the end, he went home in a police carriage then, having bribed the policeman to release him, bribed him again to drive him to the Palazzo della Cancelleria. The streets around it, however, were so crowded that it proved quicker to get out and make his way on foot.

The square seethed. There must be 3,000 people here. Prospero craned his neck and contemplated anarchy. Damaged faces stared and gummy mouths revealed dark twists of gullet. These were the plebs! They had no mind of their own. Like the riderless horses which were raced down the Corso in carnival time, they took off when released, pooled panicked energy, then must somehow be halted and brought under control. The horses were stopped by a great curtain stretched for that purpose across the Corso. Was there a way of halting these?

He couldn’t advance. Bodies were packed so tight that if anyone were to faint – as some surely must – they would be trampled. Closer to the palazzo steps, the crowd looked different. It seemed to consist of legionaries, men back from the front with cold, savage eyes. Oddly, there were no regular troops in sight. No police either and not many Civic Guards.

An elbow caught him in the chest A youth in an oilskin was skewering his way through. ‘Here’s Beppino!’ he shouted. His face blazed.

The boy was dizzy with joy at seeing so many men from the legion which he had thought disbanded for good. Eagerly, he was shouting greetings even before he was able to get within earshot: celebratory yells and battle cries and his own name or, anyway, the one some might know him by. He felt drunk from relief at finding them all together again.

‘Beppino’s coming,’ he began announcing himself, when he was not half way across the square, for though he couldn’t see their faces, the sight of those massed
panuntelle
warmed his heart ‘Wait for Beppino, fellows! Don’t start without me!’

Beppino was how the military authority knew him, but he had been christened Mario because of having been born on one of the Virgin’s feast days and, perhaps for the same reason, was apprenticed to a legless cripple who made a living carving crucifixes. The man had taught him to paint the blood on the five wounds of Jesus, but, more importantly, Beppino had had to pull him around on a tray with wheels and perform a number of intimate services which turned his stomach. He had been thinking for a long time of running away, so when Father Gavazzi came to his town to recruit volunteers, he lied about his age and joined up. He was fourteen but said he was older and that his name was Beppino, short for Giuseppe, like General Garibaldi. He loved the Army. He had loved the war. Even retreats and bad food were a lark when you were with friends and could moan about it together. What shocked him was being disbanded. Told it was over. Where could he go now? Not back to the cripple – and his parents wouldn’t want him. They’d had six more kids after him.

He’d been begging. That was what he’d been reduced to. Then he’d run into a fellow who said things might be starting again and there was some action planned for today. What sort of action?

‘Just you be there,’ said his mate. ‘All our lot will be.’

He couldn’t see anyone he knew though. Not a soul though he was close enough to see faces. Never mind. They were legionaries and so was he.

‘We’ve been betrayed,’ his mate had said. ‘And we’re not going to let the traitors get away with it!’

That was the stuff. We were still we! That was what Beppino liked to hear. And of course we’d been betrayed. Right from the start, men had said it, when the ammunition didn’t come or there was nothing to eat.
Well, it stood to reason, didn’t it? That was why we’d been defeated and why we must stick together. Maybe, here in Rome, we would have a chance to pay out some of the bigwigs who’d been behind it all. The deputies. The politicians. There had been talk about doing that around many a camp fire and on many a sodden march. You talked, but never thought it would happen. Yet here Beppino was, in the heart of Rome, squirming his way up the Chancellery steps. Panting, he turned to look down on the square which was jam-packed with people who must have come to petition the deputies for something or other. Climbing higher, he kept hoping to recognise companions from his too short war. A shambles was what the end of it had been. Girls jeered at our ‘oily bread’ oilskins and the Pope had found nothing better to say than that, though he’d never meant us to cross the Po, we should, once we did, have fought better. Well, whose fault was it if we hadn’t? Who’d mucked us?