The Judas Cloth Page 9

  ‘I brought these,’ he told Nicola, as they packed clothes and foodstuffs into bags. ‘Here.’ He slipped folded broadsheets into Nicola’s now empty basket. ‘Thought you’d be interested. Tell me, is it true the Jesuits brew up slow poisons which leave no trace?’

  ‘I don’t think you should take our charity and then spread idiotic tales like that.’

  ‘Who says they’re idiotic? Everyone believes them. I go out to work now and I hear a lot. I’ve been apprenticed to a bag-maker.’

  ‘What’s all this whispering?’ The doorkeeper, an ancient laybrother in a black bonnet, was standing over them. ‘Pishpishpish!’ he mimicked.

  This old man was the Collegio’s link with the outer world. His nickname – as key-keeper – was Brother Peter. ‘Well,’ he sucked in his draw-string mouth, ‘hearing each other’s confessions, are we? There are professionals for that.’

  ‘Brother, is it true that the Fathers might get sent away like they were before?’

  The doorkeeper, proud of being the last man alive to remember this event, was easily roused to reminisce. The Jesuits, he droned, were the Pope’s first line of defence and if there was, once again, a move to persuade the Holy Father to be rid of them, there was no need to ask who was behind it. Brother Peter’s finger was a divining rod blasted with old knowledge.

  ‘Satan!’ he quivered. He was as thin as sticks.

  Flavio nudged Nicola. ‘Satan?’ he encouraged.

  ‘Satanassa,’ confirmed the old man. The fiend had started wreaking havoc after Pope Ganganelli suppressed the Society in 1773. In no time they’d had a revolution in France. Then Napoleon Bonaparte had come here to take a pope prisoner. A pope! The old man’s speech was asthmatic with excitement. ‘Pius the S-s-sixth. He wasn’t a day under eighty and paralysed in both legs but off they trundled him regardless. In February. Over the Alps.’ Brother Peter’s tremulous hands scaled peaks.

  ‘You’re older than that yourself, Brother, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am. But I’m not being bumped over icy roads and hope not to be. Do you know who the Holy Father’s companion was on his Calvary? An ex-Jesuit. Father Marotti! His Maestro di Camera. Yes. “Faithful to the faithless” should be our motto. Have you packed your stuff? Well, off with you, then!’

  As Flavio was leaving, another old Jesuit appeared. A transparent man with white hair-tufts in his nose and ice-pale eyes, he was known as ‘the Russian’ because, having lived in Russia when the suppressed Society had found refuge there, he could sometimes be persuaded to tell stories full of frozen, snowy wastes.

  Flavio, who had been walking with his head turned to hear the doorkeeper’s last remarks, bumped into this frail man who might have fallen if Nicola had not steadied, then helped him to a chair.

  ‘Are you all right, Father? Well, we’ll be off then.’

  ‘Wait!’ The Russian stared at Flavio. ‘Who are you? he wanted to know. ‘What’s your family name?’

  ‘Rest yourself, Father!’ said the doorkeeper and whispered, ‘He’s nervous. A stone flew in his window last week. Stones they’re throwing now.’

  He was herding Flavio out the door when the Russian asked again: ‘What’s your name?’

  Flavio was clearly tempted to tell some magnificent lie. Instead, looking mortified, he admitted that his was a foundling’s name, Diodato, meaning God’s gift.

  Well, the Jesuit persisted, did he know who his father was? No? Nor even his mother? Flavio, sulkily, shook his head. And how old was he? Seventeen. The old Jesuit nodded. ‘I may know something about you,’ he said. ‘Don’t start hoping. It’s a long shot, but worth looking into. Come and see me tomorrow – no, the day after. What time do you stop work?’

  Flavio told him.

  ‘Good,’ said the old man. ‘Come and see me then.’

  *

  For some time after that, Nicola did not see Flavio, but the thought of what had happened kept running through his mind. He had dreamed of something like it happening to himself and felt Flavio had stolen his luck. Could this be a punishment for his initiative in the matter of the white stones? What had happened there was this. Nicola’s side had so fallen behind in the contest as to have no hope of winning by work or sport. It was also too late to catch up by spiritual acts but, since their currency was outside time, he decided that they could be counted in advance. There and then, he filled the jar with unearned stones and now, months later, was furtively and single-handedly paying off the debt. It was a sort of spiritual slavery.

  *

  His patron’s feast day was coming up and Nicola had been encouraged to prepare an address in Latin verse. Will he be coming to hear it? he wondered.

  But it seemed unlikely that Monsignor Amandi would come. There was a curl to the Father Prefect’s lip. Fair-weather friends were keeping their distance, for the Pope, whose policies had led to an impasse, seemed likely to sacrifice the Society. Last Sunday our preacher at the Gesù had thundered, ‘One cannot make a pact with the devil!’ He meant the Constitutional Liberals with whom Mastai was on dangerously good terms. There was a pent silence while the preacher’s eloquent eyebrows rose, then descended. ‘Even,’ he whispered piercingly, ‘to defeat a greater devil!’ The hush was now breathless. The Party of Revolution was the greater devil.

  The church had been crowded and several great families had turned out to show their support for the Jesuits. Silken bonnets and jet-bordered mantillas caught the gleam of votive candles, but the Civic Guard, which was on duty, had to restrain students from the Sapienza University from assaulting the preacher. Another time – this was on everyone’s mind – the guards might fraternise. They had been freshly recruited from among the citizens and were dangerously forbearing with the blackguards who continued to disturb the peace outside the Collegio windows.

  Sometimes the boys caught glimpses of these. Dark mouths nuzzled the air and the mob’s faces seemed stunned by a conundrum. On his election, eighteen months ago, the Pope had promised to improve their lot and now it was worse.

  With diminishing optimism, they varied their cry: Long live Pius the Ninth only! Down with bad advisers!

  So now the advisers were looking for scapegoats.

  This was no sillier than their other notions. Take ‘progress’: a sad trick, said the Prefect of Studies, whereby unbelievers consoled themselves for their loss of faith. It related, he said, to the presumptuous anarchy of Protestantism and other -isms which meant as little to his pupils as the contagions afflicting sheep: Indifferentism, Pantheism, malignant pustules, Febronianism, carbuncular fever … ‘Ism, -ism,’ he lisped and his mouth puckered. Eczema, rabies, mange … The Prefect’s face was the colour of bone. His hands hung like damp napkins. Was it not clear, he asked, that as mankind had fallen from grace and Rome from greatness, decline, not progress, must be nature’s law? How, in this metropolis, which had shrivelled and shrunk within its walls, could that be put in doubt? Did the walls’ marooned circumference speak of improvement? Did the fact that ancient Rome had covered three times the present city’s site? Cows now grazed in the Forum. Vineyards smothered the approaches to the Colosseum, navel of the ancient city.

  ‘Alas, my sons,’ and his damp-damask hands dangled with limp grace, ‘we come too late to plot the way our enemies suppose.’

  His martyred melancholy caught at their hearts, and they longed to rush out and thrash these enemies – but the essence of martyrdom was not fighting; so dreams of giving back as good as you got had to be quashed.

  There is comfort in passivity too, and Nicola sometimes surrendered to it during services in Saint Ignatius’ Church, where perspectives drew the eye towards the brown vortex of its cupola. The cupola was false. The Jesuits had never got around to building a real one, so torpid reveries were apt to liven into speculation about the technicalities of trompe l’oeil. Most of the Prefect’s colleagues would have thought this a good thing. Boys’ minds should be kept busy and the school day was a system of vents and checks designed to prevent
any overheating of their inner life.

  Unmixed feelings were dangerous – even family affections. Indeed, to the priests’ minds, families, though a necessary source of supply, were propagators of moral contagion for youths who had been insufficiently hardened. Like seedlings, it was a risk to remove them from shelter, and visits home were discouraged. Only during the annual vacation, starting in mid-September, were pupils supposed to go home and, even then, many were persuaded to go instead to the Society’s villa where sporting events, picnics and other wholesome activities were on offer. Thus Nicola had not suffered much through being an orphan. That is, he had not until now. And now there was talk of pupils being sent home. Home? To him it was unknown territory. Friends, when questioned about it, mentioned getting up late and eating pancakes. Indolence and gluttony seemed to sum up their nostalgia, as though they too were apprentice travellers in that foreign sphere.

  Sometimes, at the end of a vacation, he had glimpsed one of their mothers through a carriage window, crushing her bonnet as she hugged her son goodbye. Then, off she would be driven and, for months, be as remote as the Virgin Mary. ‘Queen of Heaven, Lily of the Valley … pray for us!’ Women were mediators and ambiguous. Real lilies of the valley were modest blooms sold by ragged vendors in the spring: girls from the Agro Romano who wore long gold pins in their hair with which, if you trifled with them, they would, it was said, unhesitatingly stab you through the heart.

  Where, if the Jesuits were exiled, would Nicola go? Monsignor Amandi was his only connection outside the Collegio, so Nicola planned to use his Latin address to remind him of himself and, citing the old anagram for Collegium Romanum – angelo mirum locum, a place wondrous to an angel – invite him to visit.

  It was, surely, time that Amandi told Nicola who his parents were.

  The reasons for his lordship’s reticence might be painful. Nicola was braced, especially as everyone else was reticent too, including his confessor, Father Curci.

  ‘My son,’ he had answered when Nicola brought the matter up. ‘You have a family right here.’

  ‘I know, Father, and I’m grateful. But I must have had a real one too.’

  ‘What do you mean by “real”?’

  ‘Blood …’

  Blood, said the confessor, was a mere animal link. ‘If your natural father turns out to be a Turk, will you become a Muhammadan? No? Well then …’

  Cornered, Nicola admitted that he hoped to be – the word was hard to bring out – loved. This upset the confessor, who asked whether Nicola believed that a man who unthinkingly scattered his seed loved the fruit of it better than the one who chose to devote his life to the care of the young. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘do you think we are called “fathers”?’

  Nicola, dismayed, again mumbled the word gratitude. But Father Curci, now feverish behind his grille, seemed to want more. He leaned so close that Nicola could feel the hot blast of his breath and asked if Nicola wanted to be loved for nature’s sake or for God’s? Nicola wanted to be loved for his own, but was afraid to say so lest he further upset Father Curci who had excitedly embarked on a discussion of love which managed to be, from Nicola’s viewpoint, depressingly arid. ‘After all‚’ said the priest, ‘it is the capacity for loving which matters rather than the lovableness of the object. God is the most deserving love-object, yet is often badly loved. Is this not so?’

  The topic was hopelessly off course.

  Nicola’s anxiety swung off at a tangent. ‘I’m not the son of the public executioner or someone like that, am I?’ Anxiously, he began to recite prayers, bunging them, like stoppers, into a crack which was yawning in his head. Not the headsman, he prayed. Please! Confiteor – what sins? Treachery – no, better not mention that one. Intermittently, behind the porous screen of prayers too well known to block him off, he heard the confessor quote St Paul who had, it seemed, told the Galatians that spiritual fathers went into labour to give birth to Christ in their children.

  The voice behind the screen rose zestfully and was undoubtedly audible to penitents awaiting their turn. ‘Filioli miei‚’ it cried, ‘quos iterum parturio …’ Nicola hoped a destiny was not being thrust on him.

  The Jesuits were girding themselves for persecution, one of their specialties. Accounts of their gruesome and gallant deaths in Tudor England and Japan had been dinned into him and, having eaten their bread for years, it would be shameful to admit that, now, when things were again getting hot, he’d like to leave. Especially if he was, as Father Curci claimed, peculiarly theirs. If only he had a family somewhere!

  ‘Fili mi …’

  The confessor’s appeal was hard to deal with because he wasn’t acknowledging it as an appeal at all. He seemed to be offering some awful sort of love.

  Amandi, clearly, was Nicola’s only hope. On his last visit, his lordship had actually suggested that Nicola should soon leave the Collegio and spend some time in the world. Later, if he did enter the Church, he would have help in making his way. He need not become a priest! Amandi’s smile had seemed to mock his own status, but you knew it was mock mockery, meant to make the prospect seem cosy, which it did. The prelacy, said Monsignore, was a true democracy since all a man of merit need do was to put on ecclesiastical dress. No need to take vows even. There were cardinals who had not.

  Smiling, he blessed Nicola with two fingers, then turned away. The encounter had been festive but brief, being fitted into the gala occasion of the Pope’s June visit, when pope and Jesuits had seemed so pleased with each other – yet, even so, Monsignore had let slip the suggestion that Nicola leave. There had been no chance to ask him anything about this.

  In the end the papal visit had gone off like clockwork with just one eruption of emotion when the Schola cantorum sang Tu es Petrus and the old doorkeeper was heard to weep. Pius had duly distributed the communion wafer to chosen students and Nicola had his three-minute meeting with Amandi. Now neither pope nor bishop looked likely to return.

  Seen with hindsight, the display had been an appeal. ‘Stick by us‚’ was its gist. ‘You are Peter and we are your brothers in Christ. Don’t drop us on the say-so of your new friends.’ At several points during the proceedings, the papal guard – brought for security or show? – had sunk to their knees with a ring of metal and a leathery creak.

  Five

  Nicola had been called to the parlour. It was now almost winter and the sun was low in the sky. His visitor was his milk-brother, Ciccio, on whom he had not set eyes in eleven years.

  ‘Nicola!’ Light smeared thick spectacles. The stranger was thin as string. ‘Remember me? You must have heard that our foster-mother died. Tata.’ Nicola was pinioned in a knobbly embrace. ‘I wouldn’t have known you. I suppose they’ll find you a gentleman’s job? I’ve been working since I was twelve. Pen-pushing. Now even that’s dried up.’

  Ciccio’s coat, pinned at the throat, could be holding in untidy bones. One shoulder rode high and he looked like a damaged specimen from one of those books of fables which show insects dressed as men: the grasshopper perhaps or the ant? Timidly, he paused, as if pondering an oblique approach, then asked if he could see the Rector. Nicola told him that he could not arrange this. Disappointed, Ciccio talked again of their foster-mother, as though hoping to tighten their bond. She had died three years ago and, no, he hadn’t attended the funeral.

  ‘She used to say that you’d come back one day in a fine carriage and take her for a ride. With emblazoned door panels! You came in one, you see. She was proud of that.’

  Nicola could hardly remember the milky woman. She was a blur: warm and slightly sour like an ooze of old cushions. After leaving her, he had spent some years with nuns.

  ‘She said you had a good heart.’

  This shamed him. ‘How could she know?’

  ‘She put a lot of children through her hands.’ Ciccio lowered his voice. ‘They didn’t pull it off, did they?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You can trust me, Nico! I had a position of trust. In a minis
try. Now newcomers are as thick as fleas, so I left before I was pushed. We took boxes of stuff with us. It’s why I wanted to see the Rector. We thought the section would be reformed and we’d be in work again. There were bigwigs interested. Your Rector would know – but it looks as if it’s come to nothing, eh?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ciccio.’

  Ciccio looked downcast. ‘Ah well, it was good to see you, Nico.’ No longer hoping for help, he had lost his nervousness. Yet his forehead was damp with sweat and he refused to open his coat. Perhaps he had pawned his linen? Nicola had an impulse to detain him. He wanted to ask ‘What else did Tata say about me?’ Instead, he asked: ‘About those rumours …’

  Ciccio stood up. ‘It’s not my place to tell. Tata used to say “Ciccio’s limited but reliable”.’ Sadly, his smile accepted this.

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t help.’

  ‘I understand. The fathers are preparing you for big things.’

  ‘You’re making fun of me.’

  ‘No. Why? I thought you’d be a man now. But they’re holding you back. Reserving you. You’ll be the better for it.’

  Nicola was piqued. He felt that the innocent one here was Ciccio. How could he have expected to walk in and get a meeting with the Rector? Why not with the General himself?

  ‘Maybe I’ll come again when you’re a bishop!’

  ‘That might be a long time!’

  ‘Oh, I’ve copied letters about babies getting appointments before they’re out of swaddling clothes. Drawing salaries!’

  Nicola, who saw him to the front door, was ashamed when Martelli stepped from a carriage and stared. He had been home for the autumn vacation and was no doubt making worldly comparisons. As Ciccio crossed the square, he looked more than ever like an insect which had been crushed by a careless foot.

  *

  Martelli was full of news of the arguments going on in clubs and cafés. Their topic was whether the Pope, whose most recent concession was to set up an Advisory Council composed of laymen, could truly be weaned away from the zealots. Ciccio’s hints interested him. ‘It proves they’re plotting,’ he cried and Nicola was sorry he’d passed the chatter on. Martelli, at the time of the ‘tapestry’ – their code word – had claimed to be thinking of the Jesuits’ own interests. Now he seemed to have forgotten them.