The Judas Cloth (52 page)

Unable to side wholeheartedly with either the Curia or the
nationalists
, Nicola envied those who could. Old clerical Rome now seemed the weaker party, so how betray it? He felt an anguished pity for his fellows, knowing that sooner or later, if there was no conciliation, there must be another siege. Walking in the city, he sometimes found himself touching the rough stone of an old palace and thinking how easily it could be reduced to rubble.

Truth
’
s
True
Friend,
a paper which advised Roman families of the better sort to take out three subscriptions – one each for drawing room, kitchen and stables – had begun challenging its readers to think for themselves: a novel notion but necessary, now that the tides of modern mendacity were upon us. It was their duty, said the paper, to learn to distinguish truth from sophisms. For example, Rome was the Capital of Christendom, a proud title. Did they want to trade it for that of a trumpery kingdom like Italy? They should also reflect on the fact that the Catholic world embraced 200 million souls who expected its head to be an independent sovereign.

‘So we’re to be sacrificed to the 200 million, is that it?’ asked a gentleman in the Caffè Nuovo, at a time when it was full of customers come in to escape the bone-chilling
tramontana
which had been raking the Corso all day. Consuming warm alcohol in the hope of thawing themselves out, they must have grown befuddled for, afterwards, none of them could recall who it was who said that the best use for the current copy of the
Friend,
the one containing the Pope’s latest speech, was to
use it to clean his bum. Perhaps more than one person said so? A police spy reported as much, but the men he named had witnesses to prove that they had been elsewhere that afternoon and the gentleman who lowered his trousers to suit his actions to his words was apparently a stranger and quite unknown.

Bystanders admitted that they had seen him bare his bum. Indeed, they told the police, they had been so mesmerised by the impropriety of it there in the middle of a decent café that they had failed to notice the face going with it. That would not have been visible at the crucial moment and, later, in the disturbance, both disappeared.

Anyway, a face,
Signor
Direttore
,
is a normal thing in a café. What struck us all was the bum. What was it like? Oh, no distinguishing marks! Quite ordinary. Neither fat nor thin. Speaking with respect, it was a bum like yours or mine.

The manager had not witnessed the incident and, though interrogated at length, was unable to shed light on the matter. He was fined and given a warning.

Nicola, who was shortly to be posted to the Treasury, listened, like everyone else, to the rumours which are the small change of history. The city, though livelier, had altered little since his boyhood. It was now gaslit and crowded, being filled with French officers with bright epaulets and spurs, befrogged Zouaves and Neapolitans from the exiled Bourbon court. In essence, though, it was as he had always known it: lazy, grimy and as vibrant with rumour as a great boarding-school. It was also riddled with spies. The French military police were watching the
pro-Austrian
faction, and the papal police the pro-Italian one – which had now split – and both, as happens with fishermen, found a lot of useless game in their nets.

‘You,’ Prospero warned Nicola when they met at a ceremony at the Minerva Church, ‘figure in one of the recent police bulletins about the day’s events. These are submitted to Cardinal Antonelli, but also to Monsignor de Mérode who has won the loyalty of the Director General of Police. I expect you to keep your own counsel about my mentioning this.’

‘Why do I figure there?’

‘Because of the duke.’

‘Flavio?’

‘Yes. They’re watching him.’

Prospero said no more. He was close to Mérode, with whom he had once nursed cholera victims during an epidemic, and was informed about a great range of matters including the burning topic of the day, which was Mérode’s rivalry with Antonelli, whose office the Arms Minister coveted with an openness which aroused – well, truthfully, what it aroused was hope. The Cardinal Secretary had been in power for a dozen years. Promotion at the bottom of a hierarchy can depend on shift at the top, so the prospect of a change heartened those whose careers might otherwise remain stuck.

For the moment, the Arms Minister’s men were few but, in his mind, theirs was a mystic mission and a challenge to God to help them help His cause. To keep their battle-will alive, Mérode wanted a larger share of the state’s military budget but, as most of this had been allocated to the garrison provided by the French Emperor, the hard-pressed, papal Finance Council refused to disburse.

Mérode’s response was to run up bills and by this means he had managed to build his men a barracks, a hospital and schools for their children. His colleagues fumed, but a man ready to bully God and Mammon – incarnate in the Finance Council – is hard to gainsay. As he saw it, a holy war was in progress so, like an officer in the field, he commandeered.

In the process, illustrious feathers were ruffled and the murmur grew that his hostility towards the French garrison, which was defending this state, disqualified him from ever governing it. He failed to sense this and soon observers were relishing the spectacle of a man frantically scaling the heights of an ambition from whence he must, at any moment, fall. His ladder was not grounded in firm reality. He was reaching madly for the moon and became widely known as ‘the lunatic’.

Opinion, however, was not steadfast. Waverers were heard to say that one man’s lunatic was another’s saint. Moreover, Mérode was congenial to the Pope, so in the end a party of key prelates, including Monsignor Matteucci, the Director General of the Police, threw in their lot with him.

This fresh factionalism was soon spreading an unease which was compounded by the roughness of Mérode’s manners. He had learned them as a captain in the French campaign in North Africa – where he should perhaps have stayed. If he had, his prowess among the
untrammelled
adventurings of a colonial war might have led to a crop of statues of le Colonel or even – why not? – le Général Mérode gracing French municipal parks.

Instead, he had come here to engage in what he conceived of as a nobler struggle and had enticed his old commanding officer to follow him. General de la Moricière, the hero and ‘captor of Abd el-Kader’, was now training Zouaves and struggling with skinflint papal
bureaucrats
. If only for
his
sake, Mérode felt it incumbent on him to do as Romans did, namely intrigue.

That anyway was the gossip which reached Nicola while he awaited his posting to the Treasury – a ministry directly under the control of Mérode’s rival, Cardinal Antonelli.

The gossip was fuelled by reports of the practical jokes, some tasteless and one featuring rats, which the Minister had played on officers of the Imperial garrison. Such pranks were not peculiar to him. Others, it transpired, could put them to more sinister use.

In February 1862, several European monarchs and other prominent persons received through the post packets of lewd photographs of the ex-Queen of Naples who was living with her deposed husband in Rome. Since the papal police knew the ex-king to be trying to destabilise the regime which had ousted him, their suspicions fell on men who supported it and on whom they already had an eye. Sure enough, it soon came out that the so-called Action Committe had commissioned a certain Signor Diotallevi to fabricate the images by attaching a likeness of the queen’s head to that of a nude body belonging, they guessed, either to a woman of ill fame or to the photographer’s own wife.

The incident caught the imagination of the city’s preachers. Father Grassi was particularly struck by the role played by science, which rationalists often aimed to substitute for faith as a path to truth. Science, they claimed, could not lie! And yet – Grassi’s eyebrows knitted passionately as he leaned from his pulpit – without Monsieur Daguerre’s photographic process, could this slanderous chimera have had the impact that it had?

‘Who have we here?’ he demanded. ‘
Chi
?
Chi
? And his voice shrilled like an owl’s. ‘We have a Chimera!’ Modern thought was just such a fire-breathing monster as the Chimera with her lion’s head, goatish body and serpent’s tail! ‘Alas, dearly beloved!’ he mourned, ‘for what have we exchanged our precious birthright of faith?’ Over and over, during a series of Lenten sermons, he brought his congregation to tears by describing how the young queen’s beauty and innocence had been demeaned by the instruments of modernity. The camera was Lucifer’s gift.

Cardinal Amandi too had been sent the photographs, and Nicola
came on them while sorting a bundle of his post. The lard-pale body disturbed him. Its lewd poses were ridiculous and compared, say, with Miss Ella’s, upsettingly clumsy. Its nakedness – he had so rarely seen nakedness – seemed unnatural, a violation and, like the flayed carcasses at San Eustachio, evoked butchery. The navel was like the gouged eye of a peeled potato. What was shown here was a misused lump of matter which haunted his mind. There was a familiarity to it too and though, at first, he thought this traceable to some painting of a martyrdom, discomfort led in the end to a personal memory, Maria.

Did this body resemble hers? He could not have said. It was older – but then so would hers be now. He burned the photographs, but a memory of them oozed back and stole the substance of everything white, so that milk, mashed parsnips, paper, pasta, clouds and linen altar-cloths took on a protean tendency to form themselves into contorted hunks of thigh or buttock. Anxiously, he consulted his confessor, who asked if he was relishing this and, when told that, on the contrary, it was a torment, said that there was no sin here. Maybe not, said Nicola, but there was anguish.

‘It’s a cross, then,’ said the confessor comfortably. ‘Bear it.’

Bearing it, Nicola walked through churches, looking at marble and canvas flesh, in the hope of matching up the limbs which had begun to haunt him, and so leaving them behind with those which grateful supplicants donated in the form of silver simulacra of hearts, livers, lungs, legs and other parts which specialised saints had cured of their disorders.

Could Maria be the photographer’s wife? Signora Diotallevi? Or the loose woman whom the Diotallevi couple swore had come for one sitting and then disappeared into the city’s underworld? Nicola decided against trying to find out.

Once he had so decided, the pale image ceased pursuing him, or did so only intermittently, as it must be doing with half the men in Rome while the judicial inquiry continued to dig up facts. Costanza Diotallevi had a past. As the mistress of an aide-de-camp to General Goyon, Commander of the French garrison, she had spied both for the French and for the Action Committee and now, to obtain a pardon, was ready to reveal what she knew about both.

When it became known that a deal had been struck and that she was working for Monsignor de Mérode, a shudder of anxiety rippled through the town.
He
was thought to be short on scruple and
she
was unlikely to stick to the truth.

Meanwhile, at the Secretariat of State, Cardinal Antonelli plodded manfully on with his labours, ignoring his rival’s manoeuvres and, presumably, biding his time. Security, diplomacy, finance and foreign affairs engaged his energies. Son and grandson of men who had amassed a fortune through their own industry, the cardinal had an impressive appetite for work and figures. Eschewing balls and
conversazioni,
he rarely took a holiday but, unlike the slovenly Mérode, was known for the elegance of his dress and carriages. He had alluring dark eyes and, in the privacy of his own palace, permitted himself to soothe and refresh them by revelling in choice collections of antiques, flowers and precious stones. Here too he received visits from great ladies who were enthralled by the ambiguity of his status – the cardinal was a layman – and whose appeal for him was, assured his friends, of the same chaste, aesthetic order as that of his hot-house flowers. Perhaps. Perhaps not. The Italian press laid bastards at his door, but Romans found as much piquancy in the perception that his role in his twelve-year association with Mastai was that of a woman. Pius, who was wilful, took decisions and Antonelli, who was ingenious, had often to repair the damage incurred. Like the good wife in old manuals of husbandry, he managed the economy as well as could be done without reforming it, which meant that the cleverer of the two men was condemned to continual improvisation.

Nicola’s appointment had come through and he was now at the Treasury, where he spent his first weeks learning the ropes under the benevolent direction of a hierarchy at whose apex was Monsignor Ferrari, the Finance Minister, with whom he had few dealings at first. Then, one morning, he was told to go to Ferrari’s office.

When he came in, the Treasurer rose, walked around his desk, removed his spectacles and stared at him. Monsignor Ferrari had a reputation for caution. When he put back the spectacles, his eyes seemed to press against the glass like blunt-nosed fish.

‘His Eminence wants to see you?’

‘Cardinal Antonelli?’

Ferrari’s chin sank so that Nicola could see nothing of him but an entanglement of eyebrows. ‘I must warn you that you have been named in the Democratic press.’ The Treasurer’s mouth shot forward, then closed like that of a draw-string purse. Centripetal wrinkles met in a knot. He handed Nicola a copy of a paper called
Roma
O Morte,
in which
a letter to the editor had been circled in ink. It was, said Ferrari, a clandestine publication.

Nicola took it and the word ‘clandestine’ triggered a fear that his more tormenting fancies had somehow oozed from his head. He almost expected to see the name ‘Maria’ in the swimming print.

‘Read it.’

He made an effort and the print steadied. Signed ‘Indignant patriot from Subiaco’, the letter informed the editor that Marco Minghetti, a minister in the Turin Cabinet, was secretly corresponding with priests in Rome. ‘Indignant patriot’ warned the minister that he would no more be a match now for priestly perfidy than he had been in 1848, when, as one of the first lay politicians to try working with Pio Nono, he had been bamboozled, double-crossed and led by the nose. The letter named Monsignor Nicola Santi as one of the priests. Ah, thought Nicola, and his heart lurched a second time. Politics! He longed to be clear of them.