The Judas Cloth Page 14

  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 finanzie
ri. 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.

  Patiently, she went on with her gros point, knotting threads and waiting for light to break. He spoke of the discredit which could be brought on the cause if its supporters were not seen to be above reproach. Liberal priests must not give scandal … Did he, she asked timidly, mean himself. No? Ah!

  ‘Yet in a way I do. You see I could prevent a scandal – take it, that is, upon myself. The institution must be protected, even if it becomes a Moloch.’

  ‘Moloch? You mean the idol to which children were sacrificed?’

  That startled him. ‘Children?’ He looked flustered and was perhaps going to pieces – as happened with Papa who, after years of tyranny, ended up shamelessly dependent. He whined. Whined! Yet when Mama, as a young bride, had run home to her family, he hauled her back and locked her up. A court case taken by her father failed on the grounds, said the judge, that hard cases made poor laws and he would not condone the flouting of a husband’s authority. After that, Miss Foljambe was born and trapped Mama for good.

  ‘If you mean the institution of the family,’ said she, ‘I would sacrifice nothing to it. Not a thing.’

  At the end, her delightful riding companion became a dribbling wreck whose disease, said the doctor, was best not named. Once, unmistakably, he attempted to get his hand under her skirt.

  Her lodger, she surmised, had a mistress. Possibly bastards whom, of course, he must give up. Archdeacon Manning, who had been subjecting the Romish Church to scrutiny, believed that the present pope was strongly opposed to laxity. Don Mauro’s cause would founder if he had such complications. Perhaps, as he had been living in exile, the complications were conveniently abroad?

  *

  Don Mauro welcomed Nicola and introduced him to a lady whose name appeared to have no vowels: Flljmb. She stared at him in a way which set his mind whirring, then gave him a glass of port. Could she be his mother – no, she was supposed to be a nun.

  He hoped Don Mauro recalled that he was to discuss her.

  ‘1831 …’ Don Mauro spiralled away from the topic – though maybe not? It was the year of Nicola’s conception. ‘France …’

  Tremulously, Nicola emptied his glass and wondered if his mother could be French. His throat was painfully dry.

  ‘General Lafayette …’

  Nicola asked nervously if he might pour himself more port. Ms Flljmb had left the room. Don Mauro shuffled foxed papers. A cat lay nose to tail on an overstuffed chair. Its stomach throbbed and it
struck Nicola that the apartment was made in its image: furry with pink ruchings and padded curves.

  For something to do, he picked up the beast which leaped away with plump agility then began to play with a bell connected with a bell-pull several floors below. Someone was clearly pulling it, for the bell, though stuffed with tow, began to vibrate and, as the cat extracted the stuffing, to ring. The sound seemed to Nicola to be coming from his own head.

  Don Mauro, ignoring it, continued to reminisce. History poured from his mouth which sported a black tooth among yellow ones, like a paternoster among aves. Because of this, his mouth seemed to wink, but his eyes were sad.

  ‘Hope,’ he said, ‘is the climate of our story. You must try and imagine it. Hope and panic. Listen to the oath taken by the Grand Elect of the Carbonari Sect. Mmmm,’ he mumbled, ‘“… and if I should have the misfortune to break this oath I consent to be crucified in a cave … stripped and crowned with thorns as was done to Christ our model and redeemer. I agree too that while I am still alive my belly shall be ripped open and my guts and heart torn out …” Do you think this was playacting, young man? It was terror. People were trying to ensure that their friends would stick by them in spite of their fear of the regime …’

  ‘And my mother …?’

  ‘Wait.’

  Outside the window were roofs. Terracotta tiles overlapped like the scales of a fish. A pigeon preened. Don Mauro talked of villas where gentlemen conspired. He had travelled from one to another, carrying correspondence or guiding refugees.

  ‘People despise such activities now. They say we achieved nothing. I say we were preparing what’s happened since. If you want the butterfly you must first have the worm.’

  Even the Duke of Modena had conspired. A world of stealth, nocturnal sessions, rumour and disguise was described by Don Mauro and half imagined by Nicola, whose head was affected by the port. Somewhere along this narrative, revolution broke out. The Duke panicked, denounced his confederates and sent for the hangman.