The Judas Cloth (29 page)

Talk like this was copiously reported to the Curia and worried the cardinal.

‘That wretched
Gazzetta
di
Bologna
has stirred everyone up. It printed the
Monitorio
which I certainly never gave out. I hid all my copies.’

‘They got it from the Tuscan papers,’ said Monsignor Giuseppe Passaponti, his Vicar General. ‘And now our parish priests are in need of Your Eminence’s paternal advice. They keep asking what to tell their flocks.’

‘Don’t answer.’

With respect, Eminence, the twenty thousand men in this diocese who cast their votes need to know whether or not they’re
excommunicated
. Many are priests. Some are parish priests.’

‘There’s worse!’ A frail old cleric rustled like parchment in a breeze. ‘News of Your Eminence’s failure to publish the
Monitorio
has appeared in a Roman handbill. I have it here. It prays that Your Eminence’s patriotism may enlighten the Pope.’

‘Let me see!’ The cardinal snatched the handbill. ‘Where are my glasses? Here,’ he told Nicola, ‘you read it! Oh God,’ he prayed or swore, ‘what did we ever do to You to be so afflicted?’

Nicola read that Oppizzoni had been advised by theologians not to publish the excommunication which would thus remain a dead letter. The cardinal cracked his knuckles. The Vicar General seemed to suffer a spasm. Imaginary theologians were giving their
nihil
obstat
to the revolution.

‘We must,’ said Passaponti, ‘issue a denial.’

The stricken cardinal waved a limp flipper-like hand. ‘Very well.’ Christ-the-fish! thought Nicola sympathetically, remembering the symbol in the Roman catacombs.

‘There’s more!’ The old curial priest probed with a scandalised finger. ‘Foreign newspapers are saying that Your Eminence and Your
Eminence’s
household voted for the Constitution.’

‘Deny it.’

‘And what about the twenty thousand penitents?’

The cardinal was exhausted. ‘What are other dioceses doing?’

‘Other dioceses have had smashed windows, arson, physical assaults and priests pelted with rotten vegetables.’

The cardinal’s eyelids descended. ‘Mmm!’ he murmured to his private darkness and was, apparently, vouchsafed enlightenment, for the lizardy skin flicked up. ‘I have it! We’ll do what the handbill says! We’ll solicit the advice of theologians. It will gain us time. Perhaps we might indicate that a merciful interpretation might be … No?’ A steely flicker from Monsignor Passaponti’s glasses reminded Oppizzoni that he stood convicted of laxity by Liberal handbills.

After that, news had come from Rome that a republic had been declared, the Pope dethroned and that the new government was to be a democracy.

‘Mad!’ was the opinion in all but the most advanced circles. Liberalism was the very most that could be hoped for. Democracy was a frill. It was a red rag to papal bulls and could only divide patriots. The hotheads
were weaving a noose for everybody’s neck. However, they had the troops so, for now, it was necessary to celebrate. Cannons sounded. Bells were rung, houses illuminated and a masked ball – tickets one scudo – held to raise money to help the Venetians who were still holding out against Austria.

Out in the square, papal coats of arms, torn from the fronts of public buildings, were being burned. Monsignor Passaponti, looking out of the window of Nicola’s office – he had come by with some papers – remarked that what we now had in the city’s heart were Satan’s own insignia. Flames! He sniffed fastidiously and flicked away some ash which had floated in.

Street lighting had been promised, the price of salt reduced and the milling tax abolished. On the other hand, the Catholic Powers were said to be making ready to come and restore the Pope.

One radiant Sunday, Rangone came to say goodbye and Nicola and he took a last walk in the hills. Below them, Bologna was as neat as a cake within its ruff of walls.

‘Have you been seeing Maria?’

No, said Rangone. Her brother had become awkward. ‘I did what you asked, though. I gave her money. She claimed to be pregnant, so I would have had to anyway. To avoid a scandal. But as sure as guns neither you nor I was the first. I swear that girl’s passage could accommodate my fist. She was probably corrupted by her brother or father. It’s quite common.’

Nicola started to rage at him, then apologised. He too, after all, had hoped to be rid of Maria and knew his anger for a disguised spurt of shame. What right had he to have idealised her, then been disappointed? Now, again, his mind was filling with her name. Maybe
that
was what had confused him from the start? Maria! Tower of Ivory! City of Gold! Help us! But it was she who needed help.

Next day he went to the cathedral and spoke to the assistant sweeper of his job, his rheumatism and the price of tobacco, before slipping in a casual query: how was his daughter these days? The one who used to work for Donna Anna? Married perhaps? He spoke lightly, but the sweeper’s face became as red as steak. Knots tightened in his neck and his body was suddenly clumsy with pain. It was kind of the
signore
to ask, he managed to mutter. Then he burst out: daughters! Blood ties! What
were they but millstones to drown a man! The noises wheezing up his throat were perhaps attempts to deal with some natural obstruction.

Maria’s friend, Gianna, was no longer at the tobacco shop. She had married a greengrocer and Nicola found her selling lettuces and looking swollen and pink. She greeted him with good humour. Yes, she was expecting a child and, to be sure, happy. Her husband was good to her. Here he was, tying up bundles of pot herbs. She described Nicola as a customer from her days at the tobacconist’s. There were congratulations and the husband said nobody could say he was slow at the job! Then, after some whispering, she asked Nicola into the back room and gave him a glass of barley-water.

Maria, she said, had had to leave. She’d gone to Rome. To San Rocco. ‘It’s where women go, you know, in her condition.’

He knew. All Rome did. San Rocco was the lying-in hospital for secret pregnancies. Women there were allowed to keep their faces veiled, and it was said that to no one, not even to a husband or father, would the authorities divulge their names.

The babies were usually put on the revolving wheel at the door of the Santo Spirito Hospital. Tata, his wet-nurse, had sometimes taken babies from there, though she preferred not to as the money was bad and sometimes not paid at all.

‘When was she due?’ he asked.

Gianna thought May.

Nicola’s confessor, having voted in the elections, was being sent to do penance in a monastery.

‘I’m not complaining,’ he said. ‘Just letting you know why you won’t see me for a while. Do you want to step out of this box and have a coffee with me? Let’s talk for once like normal men.’

Nicola wanted to talk about Maria, but the confessor said they could do that in a café if they kept their voices down. On the way, he remarked that a number of priests, aghast at events in Rome and Gaeta, were thinking of leaving the Church. His name was Father Tasso and, seen in the open, he was in his early thirties. All bone. Intent and intense with a high forehead and receding hair.

‘I won’t do that,’ he said as he sat down. ‘I’ll stay inside and make it uncomfortable for the authorities.’

Nicola told him that the authorities were uncomfortable already. He ordered a milk with honey and talked about Maria. Father Tasso
admitted that she could have been corrupted by her own relatives, even if it was self-serving of Rangone to say so. Surprising numbers of children in this parish were the offspring of their official sisters. Mothers registered the births as their own to avoid scandal. Midwives connived. The family was the single most efficient unit in this state. ‘Efficient at keeping up appearances, and thus an image of the state itself – which is driven to Holy Hypocrisy because it represents heaven! Bear with me,’ said the priest; ‘sometimes I fear I’m losing my reason!’

Nicola thought this possible. There was a tremor in Tasso’s voice as he talked of sin and how we were all responsible for it. Not just the sinner. Perhaps the sinner least of all?

Nicola asked if he meant we should have more charitable institutions. Like San Rocco? But Tasso said, no, what we needed was employment. Industry. ‘That,’ he confided, ‘is why I voted for the constitution. Mazzini can’t do worse than we did.’

‘What should
I
do about Maria?’

‘What are you prepared to do?’

Nicola wasn’t sure. Better do nothing then, said the priest. ‘If you took her out of San Rocco and made her your mistress, then got tired of her, you know what would happen.’

Nicola said he might help the child. Stop it being put on the wheel. The priest looked doubtful.

‘It might have been me.’

‘Or Christ.’

Nicola said he would go to Rome. His confessor disadvised this. However, the idea of Rome enthralled him and he remarked that if Nicola did go – against his advice – he might see historic changes. Besides, he wasn’t Nicola’s spiritual adviser any more or anyone’s. ‘Pius IX delivered a forked message and I’m at a loss.’

‘What about obedience?’

‘To whom? Pius the Liberal or Pius the Conservative?’

Piedmont now denounced the armistice with Austria and was defeated by her at Novara. This alarmed the French.

Don Vigilio brought Cardinal Amandi copies of secret dispatches sent by their ambassador to his superiors in Paris. The originals had been in cypher, but here they were
en
clair.

‘We have copies of their seals too.’ He spoke with professional pride. ‘So we can reseal the letters.’

‘Regretfully,’ wrote the ambassador, ‘hopes of effecting a
reconciliation
between the Pope and his people are quite illusory. They do not want the priests’ government back and he will hold out no hope of introducing liberal institutions. The clique around him is Austrian to the core!’

‘I am not Cardinal Secretary of State. Have you shown these to Antonelli?’

The agent winked. ‘The wind is on the turn. France may end up by siding with the men now in charge in Rome.’

Amandi read his mind: if that happened, men like himself and Rosmini would be in the saddle and Antonelli – who was compromising himself with Austria – out.

‘I told the Pope,’ wrote the ambassador, ‘that our Republic would come up against grave difficulties if asked to go to Rome to destroy a sister-republic.’

There was also a copy of a note sent by the French Embassy in Gaeta to the one in Rome:

‘Speaking in strict confidence, our mission is to convince the Roman Republic that we, as Republicans, are on their side, while letting the papal court in Gaeta suppose that, as Catholics, we are on theirs. We may thus hope to prevent Austria from taking Rome before we do.’

‘In which case,’ said Don Vigilio, ‘conciliatory policies would be imposed!’ Turning up his hands to show acceptance of the divine will, he bowed and withdrew.

Nicola’s new confessor disagreed with the old one. Of course Nicola must go and save that innocent girl! Did he realise how dangerously he had been living? He lectured him at length. ‘Go to Republican Rome?’

‘And would you leave the girl alone in that rabid forest?’ Don Carlo was a frowning inquisitor of a man with a head like the eagle on the Austrian bearings which managed to look two ways at once. Lean in his cassock as a charred string bean, he had a blaze of white, wispy hair which flared in a halo from his shrivelled skull. He had imposed himself on Nicola, saying he was taking over Father Tasso’s
penitents and implying that they must be tainted and in need of being spiritually gingered up.

Cardinal Oppizzoni, who seemed in need of this himself, said Nicola might go to Rome. ‘Was your conscience so very troubled?’ he asked, and Nicola guessed that he should not have spoken frankly to the new confessor. Oppizzoni did not say so, but neither did he say – as he had of Tasso – that Don Carlo could be trusted not to abuse the confessional.

Amandi, who was being sent to yet another mountain village to see yet another female visionary, guessed that he was being got off the scene.

‘God’s voice,’ hoped Pius, ‘may be speaking through her.’

But with the chorus of reaction now baying with full throat, it seemed unlikely that any messages, divine or otherwise, would get through. Conservatives were zestfully hunting down proponents of the tolerance which had led to Rome’s falling into radical hands and Rosmini was their prime quarry. His books were being combed for heresy and this would almost certainly be found, perhaps after he too was off the scene.

Mastai was being pressed to make a decision but could not, his friend knew, bring himself to make one while Rosmini and Amandi himself were nearby. He liked them better than Antonelli, who was not his kind of man – yet, for him, this discredited them because it was by yielding to human preferences that he had brought things to their present pass. He knew himself to be too easily moved.

He was shrewd too though and, if the sceptical Amandi was again being plunged like a demon in the holy water font, might not the papal aim be two-fold? Might he be counting on Amandi to ensure that the new visionary was not a tool forged by the forces of reaction – Antonelli and the Jesuits – to manipulate Pius himself?

We are being played off against each other, Amandi decided, and left Gaeta just as the Catholic Powers – animated by equally divergent aims – prepared to send in their troops.

Monsignor Bedini was to be the new Legate to the northern Legations just as soon as the Austrians recaptured them for the Pope. This was a reward from Cardinal Antonelli, on whose behalf Bedini had secretly gone to France to stir up Catholic opinion in favour of His Eminence’s policies.

Cardinal Amandi’s behaviour gave Bedini pause. Was he playing a deep game? Why was he haring off after demented shepherdesses? Was his disinterest in politics a screen – and if so for what? Gossip – Gaeta was a gossip-shop – had it that he had some unassessable hold on the Pope. Might he, Bedini, be backing the wrong horse?