The Judas Cloth Read online

  The margin-writer – Oppizzoni? – noted that the chaplains had presented no papers to the Curia, claimed to be answerable only to the Pope and were protected by the people: an alliance dangerous to challenge, as was clear from a list of clerical contributions made – before the Pope’s change of heart – to Gavazzi’s fund, which he was calling ‘the National Bank’. The following items figured on the list:

  Cardinal Archbishop Carlo Oppizzoni: two horses with their tackle and 200 scudi; Cardinal Amat (the Legate): 500 scudi; the Vicar General: 50 scudi; members of the Curia including bell-ringer, choir boys and sweeper: 85 scudi; etc.

  News of the Pope’s decision to back out of the war had led to such civil disorder and fear lest the city of Bologna secede from the state that the Legate had had to beg Father Bassi to speak to the people and calm their passions. He had done so but in such a way as to lay up trouble for the future, since his message was that the Pope must have fallen victim to Jesuit trickery.

  After that, he and Gavazzi left for the front.

  The cardinal’s troubles, however, did not end and, as Nicola read on, it became obvious that he been presented with a viperous tangle which could not be reduced to the balanced symmetry which Oppizzoni seemed to require.

  He took all his meals tête-à-tête with the old cardinal, who preferred not to be seen in public slopping food on himself or spilling wine on days when his palsy was bad.

  ‘Mens sana in corpore sana!’ Oppizzoni would groan in self-mockery as Nicola mopped peas or polenta from his napkinned chest. ‘Would I even know if I were losing my mind? Would they?’

  ‘They’, the scandalised Nicola came to see, was Rome.

  ‘Thank you, figliuolo. Pour yourself a glass of something. We need cheering, eh? You think Rome trusts me?’ And the old eagle’s eye gazed milkily yet sharply into Nicola’s. ‘They trust me to cover for them if there’s a débâcle! It’s an old trick. Blame it all on a sick old man. Sick here!’ Tapping his temple. ‘You’re cover too,’ he managed to say, while Nicola spooned semolina into his mouth.

  So was he a sly or a sacrificial lamb? Or both?

  ‘Keep that file up-to-date’, he mumbled between mouthfuls. ‘You’ve no idea how useful such things are when it comes to proving that inaction was the only possible policy.’

  The file did lend itself to such an argument, but indignation was mounting in the material arriving on Nicola’s desk. Recent complaints were mostly at Oppizzoni’s failure to defend his priests from the attacks made on their morals by the two Barnabites.

  ‘Your clergy,’ ran a typical one, ‘is ever more scandalised that Yr Eminence, as Shepherd of this Flock, has not driven off the wolves which have been devouring it. Has Yr Eminence become a silent watchdog in Israel? Alas, what damage is being wreaked while frenzied and rabid wolves, bears and hyenas in clerical garb are free to batten on the Ministers of the Sanctuary!’ There were several pages and the signature was ‘the clergy of Bologna’.

  An equally enraged protest signed by ‘the laity’ had been written in duplicate, one copy being sent to the Pope begging him to refute the pestiferous doctrines of the Masons, Bassi and Gavazzi.

  Hot on its heels came instructions from His Holiness to the cardinal to hold a three-day public ceremony of repentance for the scandals provoked by the chaplains who – leaflets, pamphlets, broadsheets and even magazines printed by them came daily from the front – were still claiming to be his spokesmen. So was Pius performing private acts of repentance? Decorum forbade the cardinal to ask. His answer was short and dry – ‘secco, secco’. Order, like spilled milk, could not always be restored and having expressed filial submission, he regretted that the prescribed ceremony, if held, must occasion even greater scandals, since the chaplains’ supporters were liable, if provoked, to do violence to the conservative clergy. Could Rome itself not recall the firebrands?

  This request elicited three letters, dated the same day, from, respectively, the offices of the Cardinal Secretary of State, the Congregation of Bishops and Regular Clergy, and the Ministry of Police, variously informing the cardinal that: (1) the Barnabites were being arrested; (2) he should arrest them himself; and (3) Gavazzi, being now in Austrian territory, could not be arrested. This last item was from the police who, surmised a bit of pencilled marginalia, had no doubt tipped Gavazzi off.

  Rome, to judge by its communications with the cardinal, was in a state of paralysis and terror and, apparently being administered, said another marginal gloss, like a huckster’s booth. Nicola read these comments with interest, wondered if they were intended for his eyes, but did not mention them in his discussions with the cardinal, who had, perhaps, forgotten having made them, if indeed he had.

  The Curia of Bologna was not in a much better state, as was clear from several draught copies of a pastoral letter which the senior clergy desired to have addressed to them ‘to show that we ever are and will be at one with the adorable Prince Pius IX’.

  The draughts contradicted each other, for the priests were unable to reconcile faith and freedom. True freedom, they finally concluded, consisted in obedience to authority. Unfortunately, the position of the supreme authority – Pius – had grown hard to pin down.

  A last item: a confidential report to the cardinal stated that a memo had been secretly submitted by the General of the Barnabites, requesting the expulsion of Bassi and Gavazzi from that order. The cardinal’s informant believed that a rescript granting this request had been issued by the appropriate congregation but could not be acted on for fear of antagonising the populace. Once it was, the two would come under Oppizzoni’s jurisdiction as ordinary of their diocese of origin and, if he tried to discipline them, the people’s odium would all be for him. Letters from the cardinal requesting official information on the matter had received no reply.

  Ten

  Bologna, 1848

  The patriots’ war was going badly and the Pope held to blame. Priests drew black looks and Nicola fancied people stiffened at his approach. Did they think of him as the cardinal’s eyes and ears? It astonished him that a sinister colour could be put on his mild menial duties – unless, to be sure, His Eminence had intended that they should? Perhaps less innocent organs needed attention distracted from their activities?

  The notion mortified him and, once or twice, he stared down a starer, half ready to end with a duel on his hands. Duelling, though illegal, did occur. Nobody challenged him though – perhaps because he was protected by the cardinal’s cape? Piqued, he stared even more boldly at those he suspected of suspecting him. Some must be the ‘laiety of this diocese’ who had sent cowardly protests to Rome. Others had welcomed the troops with garlands. So why were they not at the front?

  His black suit embarrassed him. Shut up all day with His Eminence, he rarely met fellow employees and feared that, for them too, he was Oppizzoni’s tout.

  Seeking relief from solitude in the throng shuttling under the city’s flights of stone arcades, he breathed in convivial air. Open cafés exuded stews of smell and noise: frightening, yet exciting emanations of the citizenry whose plottings were known to him from Oppizzoni’s files. Here, as in an open menagerie, he could come cautiously close and even, as a visitor might riskily stroke a pretty feline, exchange pleasantries. Mostly, he was passive, letting secret susurrations blend with banter in his ear, and smells of vanilla, vinegar, chocolate, sweat, shit, musk, coffee and tobacco struggle in his nose. Scent-soaked handkerchiefs and whiffs of incense put up weak defences against fermentings of urine. Delicate diction was a protective filigree, like the iron window grids raised all along these charming streets, against irruptions of impatience, scepticism and despair.

  Once he thought he saw Maria, the girl from the gazebo, but lost her in the jostle. It was the afternoon promenade. Count Stanga, he knew, had sent her family somewhere to lie low – very likely here. If so, they would have trouble finding work. Talk in the curial offices was all about how the hemp trade was at a standstill, thousands living off ch
arity and the charity likely to be cut off.

  ‘Men have bodies as well as souls,’ was what the cardinal said when he needed help to adjust his cassock and climb onto his commode. ‘How,’ he asked on other occasions, ‘can we ask them to abide by the gospel if we don’t love and serve them as ourselves?’

  We did, he explained, try. Protestant England, for all her proud commerce, did not give her poor a fraction of the charity ours received. But our means were limited. Our weakness was that, for want of a thriving economy, we couldn’t afford a proper army, so had, when faced with civil disorder, to turn to the Catholic Powers whose cure was worse than the disease. When the French came, they ruined our aristocracy by abolishing entails while Austria rode roughshod over our people, then beggared us with bills. Gone were the days when Pope Julius II, entering this town in armour, had quelled rivalries and claimed it for God.

  Oppizzoni grew glum. In his fifty years as archbishop, papal claims had become a ramshackle ritual which must, though, be kept up. We had to do this, he told Nicola, for the sake of the Faith and the millions who believed in it – few of whom lived here. We here were in a trap, for this state, like the Christmas crib, must continue to convey its message even if, groaned Oppizzoni, in moments of choler or despair, ‘I sometimes think my role in the crib is that of the ass!’

  *

  Again he thought he saw her, but wasn’t sure. Her sort of prettiness was common in these northern Legations. It was that pale, chicken-bone beauty so delicately painted by Duccio and Fra Filippo Lippi which, when less than perfect, lets veins show through and reddens round the eyes. Sorting her out from poor copies, he saw that her ivory smoothness was rare.

  This time she was with another girl who must have said something knowing, for the gazebo girl blushed and he saw that he was not to reveal that they had met. Later, though, the friend proved a help for he ran into her alone – she turned out to work at a tobacconist’s – and, striking up an acquaintance, was able when next he met the two, to offer them a refreshment. He learned that Maria – the friend was Gianna – was now a seamstress.

  *

  ‘I see you frequent the daughters of the people,’ said a young man called Rangone who worked at the archiepiscopal palace. ‘Ancillary loves! Is that it?’

  Rangone was the son of a marchese from Imola. ‘You should know,’ he teased, ‘that girls like that have brothers and the brothers have daggers which they would have no qualms about sticking into our intemperate flesh. A neat return for what we hope to do to their sisters.’

  Nicola said he didn’t hope to do anything. Rangone said, ‘I have my own lodgings with my own key. I could lend it to you for a few hours. No obligation. You’d be safer there.’

  ‘But I’m not thinking of making love to her.’

  ‘Well, stuprum is what our employers’ minds will turn to if you’re seen offering girls ices. Not to mention brothers!’

  Sure enough, when Nicola found Maria in the cigar shop and spoke to her, a glowering young man pulled her into the street.

  Gianna looked out to where this protector was pinching Maria’s arm. That, she said, was her brother. ‘You innocent boys are the worst. You’ll do her no good and get her into trouble too!’

  What did that mean? He asked Rangone, who said, ‘You’re ruining her market value.’ Rangone spoke bitterly, having, he claimed, suffered over a woman in Imola. He was convinced that elsewhere – in Milan for instance – there was less hypocrisy. ‘We are the most materialistic people in Europe. Honour here is what shows: a tangible thing. And you avenge it tangibly by sticking a knife in someone’s stomach. Pff! French bravos wield their knife differently. They go for the heart, which is stylish – and easier to miss. Here men skewer the belly because it’s where they suffer and the reason they sell their sisters. If your friend’s brother could set her up with a fat prelate, don’t think he wouldn’t!’ Rangone spoke from experience. In Imola he had fallen foul of a Monsignore who had an arrangement with the wife of a clerk. ‘Very convenient. The husband was at work all day, so the Monsignore – no need to draw you a picture. Then she fell in love with me – and guess who was jealous? Not the husband. So the Monsignore went to see my father, complained of my immorality and issued threats – and here I am, exiled.’

  ‘Are you in love with her?’

  Rangone wasn’t sure. She was corrupt – but he couldn’t forget her. On reaching the lodgings which he had offered to lend, he paused in front of a pier glass. ‘Do I look weak?’ He jutted his chin. Who had been unworthy of a great love? Himself? The woman?

  ‘If she was corrupt …’ Nicola consoled.

  ‘Oh, but so was Manon. Do you know the story? She was rotten, yet her lover followed her when she was deported. That’s love,’ said Rangone eagerly. ‘Besides, there’s something moving about female corruption. Because of what she couldn’t give me, she gave me … other things. She was totally – can you imagine that? – compliant. She told me I owned her soul and that she would accept any brutalities. In the end ours became a spiritual sort of love.’ Rangone turned away shyly. ‘I think she would have killed herself if I’d asked.’

  ‘Weren’t you play-acting a bit?’

  ‘Maybe. She went on her knees to me once.’ He spoke with a mixture of embarrassment and pride.

  Rangone’s talk struck Nicola as extravagant – but others might think the same of his desire to have a harmless friendship with Maria.

  ‘Will you really lend me your key?’

  Rangone smiled.

  Nicola bristled. ‘I only want to talk!’ he insisted. ‘If you don’t believe me I won’t trouble you.’

  ‘I do. I do. I’ll have a copy made. But don’t let the neighbours guess. I might be charged with pimping!’

  *

  Arranging to meet Maria at Rangone’s was easy. Nicola was at last doing the expected thing. He had cakes delivered and watched with pleasure as she ate them. He avoided touching her but felt infinitely elated and playful. She could neither stay long nor come every day. But he liked the challenge of smuggling ice-cream up the stairs, slyly, so as not to alert watching neighbours, and fast, so that the treat should not melt.

  In the hot summer, every window was a watching post. Women sat there and sewed. Men sat there and smoked. Conversations wove back and forth and who went in what door and for what purpose was of acknowledged interest. Maria pretended to be going to a haberdasher who had a shop at the back of the courtyard for thread and other sundries. She came and went by herself and he waited a good half-hour after she had left before venturing out.

  ‘What can you find to talk to her about?’ marvelled Rangone. ‘Girls like that aren’t for talking to. Besides, talk’s dangerous. A coachman who works for an uncle of mine was gaoled in Rome for talking to a girl. He had to marry her before they’d let him out and the ceremony took place with him on one side of the bars and her on another. Admittedly, that was under Pope Leo XII who was a mad martinet. The coachman now says he was let out of one gaol and put into a worse one: matrimony. But to go back to talking, I can’t imagine it. What do you talk about?’

  Nicola couldn’t say. All he remembered was how she once got pistachio ice-cream on her nose or her fright when she thought she might be seen by a friend of her brother’s. He was tempted to tease her but didn’t. Remembering Rangone’s account of his poor tormented mistress, he restrained himself.

  She, however, teased him and even adopted a habitual little smile as though she was finding him comical. He wondered if she discussed him with Gianna? Or her sisters? She was one of seven. Her mother was a laundress and her brother was employed on one of the public works which had been invented to keep the idle from starving, building a road around the city. In the room, alone with her, he enjoyed a domestic privacy which he had never known.

  From delicacy, he did not offer her money. She, however, brought the matter up. She had had, she said, to ask Gianna to deliver her sewing each time she came here. ‘We should give her a present.’
What sort of present? Oh, she’d find something if Nicola gave her the money. Mortified, he gave her what he had on him which must, he guessed, be more than she earned herself in a month. Even he was not so simple as to think it was for Gianna.

  He had not kissed her and, now that money had passed between them, felt unable to try. He might seem to be calling in a debt.

  Then, one day when there was a last spoonful of ice-cream on his plate she scooped it into her mouth, clapped wet lips to his, trickled the melting stuff onto his tongue then, drawing it back, sucked at the tongue so fiercely that he thought she would pull it out by the root.

  Laughing, she took off out the door and down the stairs and when he went, incautiously, to the window, did not look up but skipped down the street, twirling and flouncing her skirts with what he recognised as erotic mockery. His tongue hurt.

  It was now August.

  Walking back to work, he hugged the shade, grateful for the stone canopy of the portici. Suddenly hot with lust, he blazed, as a fire banked overnight will do when its crust is broken in the morning by the chambermaid’s poker. Rangone was right. Talk with a girl like that was only a kindling, to linger over it unmanly! His aching tongue licked vestiges of ice-cream from his lips.

  He quickened his step and wondered why he had been so slow to see what was clear to Maria and Rangone and even to Pope Leo XII. In his mind’s eye, he saw the shine on her inner lip. He was practically at the archbishop’s palace when he noticed knots of people urgently talking. What was happening? The Austrians, he was told, had crossed the Po and were marching through the Pope’s lands, mopping up remnants of our defeated army. They were already in Ferrara and looked like coming here. Atrocities had been committed and they had burned a village to the ground.