The Judas Cloth Page 17

  A wheel spattered dung. That, in popular superstition, meant gold: perhaps the salary he would receive from his soon-to-be-made appointment? Pensively, he scraped it off his boot. Livery-braid, brass harness-fittings and crested door panels swayed past at the pace of a river whose surface movement belies an underlying torpor.

  ‘Buon giorno‚ Eccellenza.’

  Androgynous gentlemen dressed in the bright silks peculiar to the papal household were succeeded by ladies, one of whom was reputed to have the Pope’s ear. Contacts here were everything, for this was the ark: last gaudy remnant of a world swept away elsewhere in 1789.

  ‘Come and see me, Conte!’

  ‘With delight, Contessa.’

  That was the Contessa Spaur whose upholstered carriage gave off a scent of the boudoir. The Corso, for the duration of the promenade, was one enormous salon with the advantage that those not on visiting terms could still scrutinise each other. Up and down went the two rows of carriages between the piazza Venezia and the piazza del Popolo, round and round like a carousel. After a few tours, they might enlarge their orbit to take in the Pincio gardens, where another ring of victorias, berlins, calashes and phaetons mimed an image of life as cyclic, circumscribed and fairly easily controlled. The names of passengers echoed those of nearby palaces: Bonaparte, Salviati, Torlonia, Lante, Doria, Chigi, Odescalchi, Ruspoli and Niccolini. Here in one hour the whole of good society could roll by on its afternoon airing. Here skill and merit had never been valued, which was why these affable people had nobody to defend them against the results of their improvidence.

  Earlier, Rossi had sat in an apothecary’s shop among men whose frock coats had stains so ramifying as to resemble the design in watered silk: meandering logs and maps of their owners’ vicissitudes. They were discussing the latest revolution in Paris which looked like toppling the government which had toppled his. The topic didn’t hold them though, and soon a young man was complaining about his mother-in-law’s having tied a bag of badger hairs around his son’s neck to scare off witches. A black-eyed youth with a three-day stubble, he kept clenching angry fists.

  ‘While I was away she got the upper hand. I left my wife under her roof, so now, according to her, I haven’t a word to say!’

  ‘Leave it,’ he was advised. ‘Your own mother probably hung the same gear on you and you’re none the worse for it.’

  ‘Superstition,’ shouted the father.

  ‘Some of these old women know a thing or two.’

  ‘Balls!’

  ‘You don’t need balls for everything!’

  Laughter. The talk wrangled on, then turned to the war which could be a shambles. Father Gavazzi’s sermons were lovely to listen to, but why were we fighting? For the Milanese? What did they ever do for us? They were half Austrian anyway.

  ‘They want to get rid of the Austrians,’ instructed the young man who had complained about his mother-in-law. ‘The Piedmontese are helping them and the Neapolitans! And so must we.’ He mentioned ‘Italy’ and was shouted down. What was ‘Italy’ anyway? And who believed the Neapolitans would ever truly fight? They’d turn tail before reaching the field of battle.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘There’s no maybe to it. Did you see them go by? Crawling up the peninsula as if they were on crutches! Their king,’ said a cynic, ‘only sent them because he had a revolution on his hands. But revolutionaries go home. They leave the piazza and what they won gets taken back. You’ll see.’

  Rossi watched the apothecary weigh out a measure of powder, wrap it in a twist of paper and sell it to a small boy who had come in with a note. Then, slowly, he withdrew a barley-sugar stick from a jar. The boy’s eyes were like those of a stalking cat.

  Behind him came a burst of laughter: that sour, puncturing laugh of men who expect to be deceived and put their pride in knowing it. The small boy grasped the barley sugar and raced off like a marauding animal. The talkers were discussing treachery.

  If Rossi went to power – the idea had become real to him and so more daunting – he would have to deal with men like these who had learned to distrust all leaders. Even the best, they claimed, were out for themselves. Ferdinand of Naples was a two-faced tyrant. Carlo Alberto of Piedmont was fighting the Austrians – but on whose behalf?

  ‘He’s trying to unify the peninsula.’

  ‘Ever hear of the stork who united frogs in his belly?’

  It struck Rossi that Pius was very like these men. He had the occasional impulse towards reform but no sustained faith in things secular. Here belief in the deep flaw of nature was bred in the bone. Voices had sunk.

  ‘How,’ whispered one, ‘do Republican frogs get out of the royal belly? Through the anus. They fall into royal shit!’

  More fatalistic laughter. It set Rossi’s teeth on edge. Fatalism fed fanaticism and extremism excused inactivity.

  ‘A republic,’ he was surprised to hear his own voice, ‘is not possible here. France, which has one on her own soil, would not tolerate one on ours. She wants stability on her southern border.’

  He had not meant to speak, but now it struck him that the company had been waiting if not laying bait for such a remark.

  ‘Excellency,’ the apothecary was sycophantic, ‘you mustn’t take our joking seriously. We’re all loyal subjects of His Holiness.’

  ‘So you know me?’

  ‘Your Excellency is a well-known patriot.’

  ‘Might His Excellency‚’ said a bearded man, ‘be attributing notions of his own to today’s France?’ The man had a squint which made it hard to look him in the eye. ‘God speaks through the people,’ he said sternly. ‘Its will is sacred.’

  Hot breath blew on Rossi’s ear. ‘Excellency,’ begged the young father who had objected to badger hairs, ‘I have a wife and child and depend on my mother-in-law who …’

  ‘The point of change,’ Rossi murmured quietly so as not to shame the man, ‘is to do away with personal recommendations.’

  ‘I write a good hand. They’re taking on new men in the civil service …’ The whining voice pleaded doggedly, as if Rossi had not spoken. ‘I could keep Your Excellency informed. I’d be devoted …’

  ‘Why aren’t you with the Army?’ Rossi asked aloud.

  The young man looked at him with hatred.

  ‘Why aren’t all of you?’ He threw the question wide.

  ‘It’s no time to join up, Excellency. We’re not mad.’ The squint-eyed man’s face was at odds with itself.

  Rossi drew on his gloves. ‘You’re not mad enough!’

  The contempt in his voice surprised him. It was an axiom that a politician must make himself liked but here, in his own country, he was like a seducer who, on finding his feelings engaged, loses technique. Yet irritation was giving way to a fizz of hope. After all, he was getting a second chance at the poetry of politics.

  From Prospero’s diary:

  Yesterday I spoke with my father about going to Rome to work for Count Rossi. He wept, felt old and was gloomy all day. Nonetheless, I think my going might be a relief.

  This morning, early, I went for a ride alone in the mist. The sun was a smear of bruise-colours and Moro’s hooves left tracks in the frost. Keeping my cheek on his neck, I let him hurtle through whippy undergrowth so as to rake my mind clear of thoughts about my mother. I have been afflicted by these and blame Nicola. He asks more questions than a confessor.

  When she was alive, we used to celebrate our birthdays with fireworks, and I remember her singing songs for my father about dead, beautiful women. They were mostly French, and I have sometimes felt that they – he and she – poisoned themselves with French ideas. My father airs them still and young Nicola asks questions. Encouraging him.

  Moro’s coat foamed. His smells were an antidote to French poisons. Then I saw the man with the musket.

  ‘Alt!’ he shouted.

  It was what the Centurioni had yelled before they shot her. I was remembering this as I calmed Moro who was ready to bolt. ‘Calma!�
� I kept saying: ‘Easy!’ I was partly saying it to myself.

  Then I saw the second man and, through the trees, a shooting blind. He too had a musket.

  ‘Signor Prospero!’

  I knew him. He’s called Storto and used to work for my father as an odd-job man. The other one was a customs guard.

  ‘That was stupid!’ I said. ‘You frightened the horse.’

  ‘Signor Prospero, come and see what we have here.’ He pointed at the blind. I followed him in, while the other one tied up Moro. It was dark, but after a moment I made out two men lying on sacks.

  ‘They’re the ones who killed your mother,’ said Storto. ‘Centurioni! Sons of whores! Their day has come.’

  The men stared at us the way animals do, without really focusing. They must have been there some time because there was a smell of shit. I suppose one or both had lost control.

  I said, ‘Nobody knows who did that.’

  ‘With respect, Signor Prospero, people do know. Don’t you trust us?’

  I didn’t of course. What I was thinking was that these fellows might lynch their prisoners and implicate me and my father. They could say I had ordered them to do it.

  ‘This has nothing …’ My voice stuck and I couldn’t go on. I didn’t believe the men were Centurioni. Most of them fled months ago and since then a lot of private vendettas have been pursued under the cloak of politics. ‘If you believe what you say,’ I managed at last, ‘you should take them to the police.’

  Storto leered ‘You know better than that, Signor Prospero. They never had truck with the law. They were the law. Was anyone charged with the death of your mother?’

  My teeth were chattering.

  ‘You don’t want to think they did it,’ he marvelled. ‘That these lumps of running shit could have done it.’ He kept studying me, then nodded as though he had reached a decision.

  So had I. It was true: I was offended on my mother’s account. I did not want her memory touched by what was going on.

  My tutor, Don Pietro, used to talk to me of carnal impurity and as I turned fourteen his questions grew insistent. He thought me hypocritical but avoided quite saying so. Perhaps some confessor less crude than himself had warned him against planting sin where it had not taken root. Now, for the first time, I felt the self-distaste on which he used to harp. Storto kept nagging. ‘To get justice, Signor Prospero, a man still has to take things into his own hands. Only now our lot has a chance.’

  He gave me his slow grin and I guessed we were thinking the same thing: my father is known to have been a conspirator. The police no doubt still have him on their lists. I wondered how long Storto and his friend had waited for me to happen by. But, to be sure, they’d know that I ride this way often.

  ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘Signor Prospero, you offend us. All we want is justice.’ The other man was untying the prisoners. I realised suddenly that Storto had not been an odd-job man at all but one of my father’s less reputable confederates in the conspiracies which criss-crossed the country for so many years. He holds power over him now that my father supports the new regime and that the bid is for peaceful reform which extremists, naturally, do not want.

  ‘They are Centurioni,’ he told me. ‘Murderers. You think we don’t know? When they were riding high they didn’t conceal themselves.’

  ‘You’re not going to butcher them?’

  I think the word worked on him. He must, after all, hope to tell about this exploit one day.

  ‘Not butcher, Signor Prospero.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘The cavaletto.’

  It seemed mild after my fears: the wooden horse. You put a man arse-up on a flogging-stool and let him have it. The Centurioni used it a lot. So did the papal authorities. In Hungary the Austrians stripped a noblewoman naked and ‘horsed’ her in front of her husband who had conspired against them. She went mad and he killed himself. But that was because they were gentlefolk and because of their ruined honour. To do it to thugs could be an insurance against worse. I decided to stay. If I left, who knew what might happen?

  I am not sure I was right.

  I suppose I had better record the rest. The men were stripped, tied down and beaten with a stick which left weals the colour of raw meat. They screamed. The thing went on until there was blood and I kept thinking that the shouts were a queer form of triumph, as though they were proclaiming their own liveness. This was an eccentric idea. My mind was chasing whims so as to absent itself from what was going on. It couldn’t though. There was no purging: just shame which touched us all. I think the kidnappers felt it too, because there was a dullness in the customsman’s voice when he said, as the victims were fumbling for their britches: ‘A taste of their own medicine. They gave it out often enough.’

  Storto mumbled. The let-down had reached him too. I watched as the beaten men hobbled out the door, paused and then, as nobody stopped them, stumbled off at a crooked and, no doubt, painful, lurch.

  I am worried, which is why I have noted this down as faithfully as I have felt able to do.

  *

  Nicola asked: ‘Is your father unhappy?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Prospero. ‘He can’t catch the moon in his teeth.’

  They had walked to the nearest village and were resting in its osteria. It was a small village whose lanes were dark. Through open doors Nicola had glimpsed caverns of poverty, from which children tumbled, looking like boar cubs striped with sun and dirt.

  The proprietor asked about the count. ‘A pity he’s not going to Rome. Someone,’ he lowered his voice, ‘should see to law and order round here. There are murders all the time now and with the war it’ll be worse. Soldiers on the rampage.’

  ‘The war’s north of the Po.’

  ‘The Po’s easily crossed.’ The man touched his genitals. ‘Someone should warn His Holiness about what’s happening. Hope is a dangerous thing. Those priests who came through with the troops said things that may be all right in the city. Country folk don’t understand. They gave away what they can’t afford and are expecting to get it back a hundredfold.’

  Later he said, ‘My sons have gone north to fight. No fool like a young fool.’

  ‘That’s a reproach,’ muttered Prospero. ‘Why haven’t I joined up?’ But the host’s mind was on public matters. Drawing Prospero aside, he made recommendations so urgent that Nicola thought it best to step outside.

  As he did, a carriage drove up and splashed him with water from a deep puddle in the road.

  He swore, then blushed, and a lady who had been preparing to step from the carriage blushed too and broke into apologies and reproaches to her coachman. What a way to drive! ‘Here.’ She took a scarf from her neck and handed it to Nicola. He must dry himself, she insisted. ‘Please‚’ she begged, ‘you must.’

  She was rosy and ringleted and very determined. The coachman must dry the young gentleman, she insisted. Yes. With her scarf.

  Nicola protested; she insisted; the coachman was at a loss and the three voices were mingling and responding like parts in an opera when the landlord and Prospero stepped out the door.

  ‘… if His Holiness won’t listen to your father,’ the landlord was saying, ‘if he won’t listen to Count Stanga … Ah,’ he broke off, ‘you here … Donna Anna! Can I do anything for you?’ He seemed flustered and so did the rosy lady who had lost her colour.

  ‘No,’ she said faintly. ‘I was just leaving.’ Turning to Nicola she snatched the scarf which he had been trying to hand her back. ‘Well, if you won’t …’ she mumbled and got back into her carriage, whereupon it started up and was gone before it occurred to him to marvel at the speed with which the coachman, regaining his box, had anticipated his mistress’s change of mind and mood.

  *

  Count Stanga was a delicate, fine-featured man whose fingers made a papery sound when clasped. He was excitable and in his presence Prospero was often silent, as though hoping to calm him by contagion. The count, however,
was not calmed, but rattled like dry corn and had kept up a barrage of chat since Nicola’s first evening, when he had been full of news about the troops. Two nephews of the Pope’s had joined up, he reported, and the Archbishop of Milan was encouraging seminarians to fight.

  ‘Seminarians!’ He stared at his son. The cassock, said the stare, was no longer an excuse.

  This evening, again, they met at dinner. A single candelabrum cast a focused radiance outside which the room seemed to have no walls. Back and back stretched the depths of blackness, plumbed here and there by glints of metal or glass.

  The count raked a hand through hair which must once have been the same golden colour as Prospero’s. It was a small hand, neat as a comb. He was depressed by Prospero’s account of the osteria owner’s worries.

  ‘Be careful what you say in places like that,’ he warned.

  ‘I saw Storto not long ago,’ said his son. ‘He had a musket.’

  ‘That’s the sort of thing I’m worried about.’

  ‘I believe smuggling is going on as much as ever.’

  ‘Oh it’s inevitable! There’s talk of a league which will rid the peninsula of tariff barriers, but His Holiness gets no co-operation. Foreign governments won’t give up what they have without a fight – which is why anyone with nerve should enlist.’

  ‘I have nerve,’ said Prospero. ‘It takes nerve to resist you. Don’t you suppose I’d like to please you?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Why don’t you then?’

  ‘I saw someone shot once. You ought to understand.’

  This time the pause was longer. Prospero’s face recoiled into a clench.

  ‘Yes.’ His father sighed.

  A large hound lying under the table – Nicola had got a shock when his foot landed on it – was now fed a tidbit and caressed. The count, Nicola saw, needed to cuddle something. Father and son had the same wide, even, alabaster smile, but in the older man’s face it had an avid brilliance.