The Judas Cloth Read online

  ‘There was no telegraph then,’ reminded Don Mauro, ‘and rumours ran riot.’ A cardinal was kidnapped. Legates fled. And in the diocese of Spoleto a motley lot of refugees converged on a Capuchin convent in the mountains. There were far too many for the convent to house, but the monks lent them their barns and outhouses and hayricks and they stayed there for some days to hide from the marauding troops. ‘Among them were some nuns and a girl who was put in their care. She was a cousin of your patron, Monsignor Amandi. In the confusion someone – nobody knows who or even how many people – forced her. Nine months later you were born.’

  ‘Didn’t she name anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was she a moron?’

  ‘No. Ashamed. Stunned? Hysterical perhaps? Anyway, she seemed to forget the experience later and the nuns let it drop. It was a mad time. You could say you were born of the revolution. Father Gavazzi, who travelled around preaching, did Monsignor Amandi a favour by bringing you to the capital. Your mother became a nun. She is not accessible.’ Don Mauro looked sad. ‘Especially not to you. Ill-disposed people could dig up old gossip. Father Gavazzi is in the public eye and so is Monsignor Amandi. It would discredit them if it were thought that either of them was …’

  ‘My father?’

  ‘There is nothing but malice behind such talk. But the abate did not want to be seen speaking to you at too much length.’

  ‘Is my mother sane?’ He had to know.

  ‘She is more than sane. She may be saintly. These things are – elusive.’ Ruddiness glowed patchily on Don Mauro’s face.

  ‘A saint?’

  ‘Some say so.’

  ‘How horrible!’ This too broke out despite himself.

  ‘Yes.’

  Nicola, who had expected to be contradicted, said primly, ‘I don’t think I meant that.’

  But Don Mauro had the bit between his teeth. His voice shook as he cried that the story conformed to a hateful pattern. First came the fall, the breaking of a spirit, then the forgiveness which ensured submission. Sanctity as abasement. The image of the Magdalene wiping Christ’s feet with her hair said it all. Woman’s glory, he ranted, became a foot-rag.

  Bubbles of saliva hung on his lip.

  Nicola asked whether Monsignor Amandi would approve of Don Mauro’s talking like this.

  ‘Why not? I can be disowned, you see. We are between orthodoxies and it is better I speak rather than someone who could embarrass others.’ A smile tripped on the assymetry of Don Mauro’s teeth. Nicola guessed his nervousness to be stoked with pride.

  ‘Was my mother some sort of … revolutionary?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you were?’

  ‘I was a priest trying to love my neighbour. Can one be responsible for a man’s soul and let his body be destroyed?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Bravo. We lived under an unjust papal government. If the salt lose its savour wherewith shall it be salted? God forgive me if I’m wrong. I hope this present pope will let me be reconciled. The last one wouldn’t and my bishop made an example of me.’

  This load of adult grief frightened Nicola. He looked at the priest’s pained mouth and felt ashamed to be young and intact.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a good lad, Nicola.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ Don Mauro laughed. ‘Ah, you’ve been thinking ill of me, is that it?’ Shrewd-eyed and at bay.

  Nicola must have blushed.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Don Mauro kissed and absolved him with a blast of appalling breath. ‘I had thought,’ his smile revived a lost, convivial, hard-riding, outdoor man, ‘of pretending I was your father. It would stop mouths and prevent trouble – but I couldn’t do it to you, lad. You’d have been too unhappy, eh?’

  Taking in Nicola’s discomfiture, he closed one piercing, bloodshot eye. ‘We have to have some thought for the individual, don’t you think? After all, the institution’s not a Moloch!’

  Gently, he squeezed his shoulder.

  *

  After Easter, which fell on 23rd April, Don Eugenio arranged for Nicola to travel north and meet Monsignor Amandi at his brother-in-law’s villa near Bologna, which turned out to be an old haunt of Don Mauro’s. The Villa Chiara? Home of the Conti Stanga? The old smuggler remembered it well.

  Nicola, coming to say goodbye, found him suffering from eczema and hope deferred. The tic in his cheek kept burrowing deeper.

  ‘You’ll be travelling some of the same route as the troops!’

  He spoke enviously. There was no question of his leaving Rome. The Pope had not agreed to see him and he must keep up the siege. He had been watching the political weather intently for, as he told Nicola, even fleas suffer in a conflagration and his hopes were tied to those of the Liberals.

  The Pope too was said to be in great agony of mind. A manifesto, issued by one of his generals, containing the words ‘God wills it!’, had turned the deployment of Roman troops along the Austrian border into a crusade and committed God and His Vicar to making war on Catholic Austria. An unheard-of thing! To send in the troops could provoke a schism and to disown the general a mutiny. Yet how keep our men idle while fellow Italians fought? What could Pius do now? Don Mauro hung around tobacco shops and clubs, picking up rumours then brought them home to Miss Foljambe, who took a sporting interest in all this.

  The English were cheering for the Liberals and Miss F hoped the dear pope would grasp the nettle and send in the troops. However, the signs pointed the other way. Mastai was thought to be suffering from a paralysis of the will due to Austrian protests.

  Don Mauro’s bad luck dazed him.

  ‘I was advised,’ he confided, ‘yesterday to take a rest cure at a spa.’ He hissed the word: an insult which could – Nicola saw – have been kindly meant.

  Don Mauro’s eyes called out for cover: bandages or eye patches. They had the inturned burn of a man whom life has over-tested. He said he must pen a note to Father Gavazzi which Nicola should deliver. ‘He’ll make Bologna his headquarters for a while. It’s a good place to raise funds for the troops, so you’ll find him there.’ He withdrew to write his letter.

  Later, he walked half way down the Corso with Nicola whose last glimpse of him was outside Merle’s bookshop where he would spend the next few hours sifting rumours and peering between the uncut pages of books. He was wearing his round layman’s hat.

  *

  Nicola left the city in a roomy posting coach which swayed nautically through damp streets. A watery sun emerged, and housefronts in yellows, cinnamons and maroon steamed like cooked crabs and gave off a reek of brine. An unstable image of St Peter’s swung in, then out of, view, as they crossed the Ponte Molle, the bridge beyond which, it is said, the world stops for true Romans. Passengers loosened their coats and belts.

  A lawyer took charge of the conversation. The Campagna, in his opinion, should be ploughed. Dug. That would release the poisonous vapours which caused malaria and agriculture could become intensive and profitable. ‘Open it up!’ he cried of the lands which stretched on two sides of the coach like a monotonous, russet sea. Local labour, he noted, was unobtainable and only desperate migrants from the Abruzzi were prepared to work this pestilential earth. Nicola was reminded that his wet nurse’s husband had done so and died.

  Looking out he saw nothing but goats, grey oxen and a crumbling aqueduct. He fell asleep, rocked by the motion of the coach, and when he awoke the distant mountains had turned blue. Men in long cloaks passed in the distance. Shepherds? Some time later he saw a line of mules tied together by their tails.

  ‘We’re a country of carnivals and footmen,’ spat the lawyer, furious because someone had used the word ‘picturesque’. Why, he raged, were only the ruined and rotten worthy of being put in a picture? Industry was what we needed. Factories.

  When the coach pulled in at Civita Castellana, Nicola whose rump felt as if he had been sitting on walnuts was glad to stretch his legs.
He found hospitality that night in a convent, and next day had the excitement of seeing the troops from the Kingdom of Naples trudge north. There had been no rain here and their boots raised white dust so that they looked like an army of pizza-makers. The coach passengers dined at Terni and spent the night at Spoleto, where Nicola again stayed in a convent but could not sleep for thinking of the refugees who had fled from here in 1831.

  Waking, he tried to remember Monsignor Amandi’s face and whether it was like his own. Absorbed by this, he did not become drawn into the wave of patriotism which gripped everyone else.

  Next evening there was no convent to lodge him. The troops had slowed progress on the roads and the only inn was crowded. A party of foreigners – ‘English milords’ said the innkeeper – had taken the best rooms and the coach passengers had to do with what was left. Nicola’s was hardly more than a cupboard with walls so thin that the foreigners’ conversations seemed as close as his ear.

  At first they were incomprehensible, then broke into meaning. A man’s voice said, ‘I don’t want the others to understand! Tell me in Italian. Who is he?’

  ‘Just a boy I used to know.’

  The second speaker sounded familiar.

  ‘Before you rose in the world?’

  ‘It’s still before. I intend to rise higher than your employ, Milord.’

  ‘Invite him in for a glass of something. No? Supposing I do?’

  Invite whom in? What boy? Could they mean Nicola?

  ‘If you do, you won’t see me again.’

  The listener put his ear to the partition. It was the orphan! Flavio! Nicola hadn’t seen him since the day the Russian Jesuit said he might know his family. After that, he had heard some talk of a fortune which the orphan might be able to claim. It hadn’t sounded credible – yet here he was with rich foreigners! Could he – Nicola was envious – have found his father? The other voice did not sound fatherly. But then, Nicola was no judge.

  ‘Don’t you like me at all?’ asked the possible father.

  ‘Not enough to show you off.’

  ‘You’re quite horrid. Go and sleep somewhere else.’

  ‘Where? With Milady?’

  ‘I doubt if she’d welcome you. But please don’t feel challenged.’

  ‘So I shall go next door.’

  Overwhelmed by shyness, Nicola wished there were somewhere to hide. But already the door of his cupboard was rattling. ‘It’s Flavio,’ said Flavio’s voice.

  ‘It doesn’t lock.’ Nicola decided to be impassive. Flavio had a knack of making him uneasy.

  Flavio stood in the crack of the door with a lighted candle. ‘Hullo, Nicola.’

  Nicola moved over. Flavio sat down beside him. ‘You heard all that, I suppose?’

  ‘I didn’t understand much.’

  ‘It’s simple really. He who plays the piper likes me to dance to his tune. But I’ll only do it for so long.’

  ‘Do you work for him then?’

  ‘Yes.’ Flavio explained that he was like a sweet-seller at the Carnival, one of the ‘ambulant’ ones whose licence required them to keep on the move. ‘I have to be spry.’

  ‘I heard you’d come into a fortune?’

  No, said Flavio. There would have to be a court case and this was no time for it since his backers, the Jesuits, were in exile. His mother had been found but refused to acknowledge him.

  ‘She says I’m a bastard and have no claims. She says she’ll say so in court.’

  Nicola was so stunned by this story that when Flavio’s fingers ran up his spine, he didn’t try to remove them. Then he began to enjoy the sensation, as Flavio whispered that he had learned the art of massage from one of His Lordship’s Turkish grooms. He pressed his knuckles into Nicola’s neck muscles which, after several days on the road, were knotted and sore. ‘It’s a good feeling, isn’t it? Mmm? Isn’t it? Ah you’re so hard here!’ He had raised his voice as though talking for the benefit of the man next door. ‘Jesuit boy!’ Flavio pinched Nicola’s neck muscles so that he groaned despite himself. Was Flavio a friend? Nicola, who had been feeling lonely, was comforted at being with someone he knew and whose fate was parallel to his own. Both had unnatural mothers. Flavio was straddling him now and saying things which did not quite make sense. ‘You’ve never done this to yourself, have you,’ he said in that voice which was undoubtedly addressed to the foreign listener.

  ‘Don’t ask why I didn’t want you to meet him. He’s dry-hearted!’ His knuckles kept time to the words.

  Abruptly, the door opened and a censorious whisper hissed: ‘Vos excammunico‚ turpes!’ A light swung, and a hand made a thumbs-down sign. ‘Into the pit of hell!’ went the theatrical hiss. ‘Into the third mouth of triple-jawed Satan.’ As the light rose, the hiss was revealed to be coming from one of the slit-eyed, mitre-shaped hoods commonly worn by fraternities for the dead. To Nicola, the word ‘turpes’, though issued in mockery, carried a real charge. He was attempting to wriggle free of Flavio’s weight when the hooded figure leaped on top of them both.

  Quick as a fish, Flavio slid away and pulled Nicola after him.

  ‘Sorry, Milord, working hours are over.’

  ‘I thought you’d be amused!’

  Hood and cloak were now off and the man sitting in the midst of their shed billows was laughing. He looked not much older than they were.

  ‘You think only you have rights to privacy.’

  ‘My dear Flavio, half the inn must have heard your charade. Introduce me.’ The Englishman extended a hand to Nicola.

  Flavio, half sulkily, said that Nicola was Nicola and this was Lord Blessington. The Milord had small clever eyes, a horse-shaped head and a cloud of beery hair. A closer look showed that what Nicola had taken for youth was a replica of it. The Englishman’s skin was pomaded. ‘You’re angry with me,’ he said, smiling and clasping his hands. ‘It’s a bad beginning. But it was a joke. Do you know about jokes?’ he asked Nicola. ‘They’re more necessary as one grows older. How can I make amends? Come and have a glass of cognac with me and we’ll drown our differences.’

  *

  ‘He spies a bit,’ said Flavio later. ‘The English worry about France interfering on the side of the Piedmontese.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I spy too. I spy with my little eye, which is how I know that you have a letter for Father Gavazzi. Do you know what’s in it? No? Shall we have a look?’

  ‘Did you go through my things while I was at dinner?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I should hit you,’ said Nicola. ‘I don’t know why I don’t. That was a despicable thing to do.’

  Flavio took Nicola’s hands in his. ‘You don’t because you fear we may be alike. Or else opposites? A couple, of sorts! And because you’ve left your tidy Collegio and don’t know the wild world outside and I do. I can guide you a bit, Nicola, but not much, because we’re not really alike.’ He kissed Nicola on the cheek. ‘I like you, but I’m not like you. And, anyway, I may be coming into your world where you can guide me. Friends?’

  For a shy, half-angry moment, Nicola turned his back. Then he swung round and said, ‘Oh, there’s no point fighting with you, Flavio, so: all right. Friends.’

  It was now 4 a.m. and Flavio’s Milord had fallen asleep. He had a wife, Nicola gathered, a Milady, now asleep too out in the yard in her double-springed barouche, which was more comfortable than anything the inn could provide. Their arrangements seemed odd but Nicola was more interested in hearing Flavio’s story and in how the Father Prefect had taken him to see the priest’s own sister who, it now appeared, was Flavio’s mother. The Jesuit, who had been deeply agitated, had warned Flavio that the meeting might not go off smoothly. He had then taken him to various outfitters and had him dressed like a gentleman, lest he disgust her on sight. The naive man had imagined that, given help, a maternal instinct would suddenly assert itself, and Flavio too seemed to have entertained some hope. But no such thing had happened.

  ‘Her le
gitimate son is dead and she must be enraged to see that I, the unwanted one, survived him. Anyway she was as cold as stone. The Father Prefect was dumbfounded. No wonder he “left the world”, as he calls it. He’s not fit to cope with it.’

  Flavio laughed. His small teeth were like a cat’s. His lips were charmingly modelled, his nose straight, his hair feathery. He had a quick, cool eye and Nicola imagined the reluctant mother being frightened by its intelligence. She would surely have hoped to be confronted by someone less likely to judge her.

  ‘The Father Prefect is soft and the shameful thing is that so was I. He made me pray. I’m sure God thinks the less of me!’ He had been introduced to the duchess – yes, she was a duchess – by her own name which must, her brother had decided, now be his.

  ‘Oh,’ she’d said, ‘so you’ve got the same name as we have? I believe there is a family somewhere in the south which has it too. No relation of course. Perhaps you’re one of them.’

  ‘I stood gaping,’ said Flavio. ‘She’s a plump little woman with a mouth like mine. My mouth on a bad day! And it was closed against me. Tight and rancorous while mine was catching flies!’

  Her brother had tried to talk, but she interrupted him. ‘I’m sorry, Bandino,’ she said, ‘but you’ll have to excuse me.’ Then off she went and didn’t come back. Later she told her brother that she would not let her husband’s inheritance go to a bastard. She owed it to the dead man not to. And to his live daughter.

  ‘Yes,’ said Flavio, ‘of course I want it. Can you imagine being denied by your mother? To your face? I even look like her, for God’s sake. Yes, I want the inheritance because it means acknowledgment. That’s not the Father Prefect’s reason. He wants to keep it from her daughter, who has married a Liberal. Money is something the Jays pretend to despise. But don’t be deceived. The parade of poverty, mended cassocks, etcetera, means something else. They give it up because they prize it. And remember that though the individual gives it up the Society keeps it. It’s a small shift really to change from “me” and “mine” to “us” and “our”.’ He nodded at the sleeping Englishman. ‘He’s amiable because he’s rich. If I get this money I’ll be amiable myself. Just think, Nicola, you can’t even take vows of poverty unless you have money to give up! It buys fine feelings. Oh yes. I want it.’