*
For the full eight days, Scarpia was out in the streets with Letizia di Comastri and her small court of friends and admirers. Sometimes, with Letizia, he broke away from the group and they went alone into the side streets that led into the Corso, stopping to watch the impromptu dramas that were played out by mummers – a pregnant girl suddenly giving birth in the gutter, her baby a bundle of straw; a ferocious quarrel between five men that led to a fight with knives and the shedding of blood – the knives made of papier mâché, the blood, red paint. Then there were the battles that flared up when one group of revellers pelted another with sugared almonds, crystallised fruit or, more perniciously, puzzalona, pea-sized pieces of volcanic rock rolled in plaster and painted with whitewash.
The last great game of the carnival came on the eve of Ash Wednesday with the moccoli – small tapers lit after dark – when everyone’s aim was to extinguish the flames of those next to him and keep his own alight. That night the whole of the Corso became a masked ball with everyone determined to squeeze the last drop of fun from the carnival before the chimes of midnight ushered in Lent. To be without a taper was a capital crime. ‘Sia ammazzato chi no porta moccolo!’ Kill anyone without a candle! Paper lanterns hung from the balconies of the palazzi draped with sumptuous fabrics; lamps were placed on top of carriages to light up the street. To keep their tapers out of the reach of those who would stifle them, some tied them to poles, but others countered with wet sponges, also tied to reeds or sticks. The battle was frenzied but cheerful: the blood-curdling threats good-hearted. Sia ammazzata la bella signora, cried a masked young man shouting in the rough accent of the street as he pinched between his fingers the flame of Letizia’s candle. Sia ammazzato lei, countered the contessa as she in turn squashed the top of his taper with the top of her hand. Flints were struck; tapers relit; candlewax spilt over the finest dresses. The battle went on in the surging, jostling, dancing crowd.
Then, as they reached the Palazzo Colonna, there was a concerted assault on the candles and tapers of the Contessa di Comastri and her entourage, and suddenly the group was in darkness. Letizia was parted from her cicisbeo bello by a cross-current in the surging crowd – Scarpia was swept away and only saved from falling by a slim young man and a tall woman, both masked, the woman elegantly dressed as a Madame de Pompadour but with a flat chest and manly hands, the youth slim in a black-and-white Harlequin costume, but for all his virile manner unable to hide the swell of a bosom.
Their tapers, too, had been extinguished, and like Scarpia they were carried by the strong current of humanity into the eddy of the small Piazza di San Marcello. Like the survivors of a shipwreck, the three mounted the steps leading to the church – crowded, but above the throng. The door to the church was open; the woman led them in and, after a brief genuflection, went to relight her taper at the stand of votive candles in front of the statue of the Virgin. Scarpia and his young companion followed. They, also, lit their tapers. The masked woman turned to go back to the fray; the young man followed with Scarpia behind him, but, in the darkness between the inner and outer doors of the church, the Harlequin turned, snuffed out first Scarpia’s candle, then his own, and enfolded him in his arms. ‘Si ammazzato Scarpia,’ he whispered, pressing his soft bosom against Scarpia’s chest, and giving him a long but inexperienced kiss. Then he was gone, and when Scarpia came out onto the piazza, both the Harlequin and the Pompadour had disappeared into the crowd.
4
The young count Palmieri, who had somehow learned of Scarpia’s position in the Comastri household, warned Scarpia against Letizia di Comastri, whom he knew only by repute, and also against women in general. This came in one of his periodic rebukes of his gaoler for serving tyranny and injustice. ‘And all for what? A monthly salary of fifteen scudi? A papal bauble – the Order of the Gold Spur? And the favours of the Contessa di Comastri – a bored, fashionable woman with whom you think you are in love? Have you not read the Scripture? Does it not say in the Book of Proverbs Give not thy strength to women? And don’t think it is just your physical strength the prophet is talking about – those pleasant exertions – I know all about them – I know they have their charm; but they sap your spirit just as much as your body. They are blinkers to hide the suffering and injustice which surrounds you, a sedative for your conscience, a ruse of those with power to disarm a potential adversary, a man who, if he were not distracted by love, might see through the preposterous claims of divine right and the superstitious buttresses of exploitation and injustice.’
‘But you are married,’ said Scarpia.
‘Yes, I have a wife,’ said Palmieri. ‘And I have a child. Both are a ball and chain. She visits me. You have seen her. She begs me to recant, to return home; to conform, to wear a powdered wig, like you; to live quietly and comfortably, to go to Mass, to pretend to believe. And it is a temptation, of course it is a temptation. To exchange this cold cell for the warmth of a woman, the embrace of my child. But it would be cowardice – as shameful as deserting one’s friends on the field of battle.’
The young Contessa Palmieri was permitted to visit her husband Vicenzo on Sundays and high feast days. They remained under guard. Sometimes she came with her two-year-old son, sometimes she came alone. Out of courtesy to his new friend, Scarpia would meet her at the entrance to the lower ramparts of the Castel Sant’Angelo, excuse her a search of her person, and escort her up the steep tunnel through the bowels of Hadrian’s Mausoleum to the fortifications perched on the top. To save his friend embarrassment, he would not himself be present at their encounters and would assign a Swiss guard or German mercenary who would understand little of what they said. Their reports suggested that in fact they were mostly silent: she wept while Palmieri spoke to her gently as a patient teacher might talk to a child.
Simona Palmieri was dark and thin, her face pretty but fixed in an expression of sadness. Following Vicenzo’s conviction she had returned to live with her parents and saw no one – disgraced as the wife of a man condemned by the Inquisition. Scarpia took pity on her and, then at the height of his conceit as a lover, imagined that it was a man’s embraces that she most missed. After a visit to her husband, Scarpia suggested that they meet to discuss what might be done to help him. She came at night to his lodgings. They talked and when Scarpia drew her towards him, she did not resist him. She succumbed like a corpse and responded to his embraces with reflex movements and joyless cries. She then lay beside him, inanimate, staring at the ceiling – no words, no smile, no expression of hatred or satisfaction or complicity or disgust – saying nothing even as she got off the bed and readjusted her clothes.
*
Now, for the second time in his life, Scarpia felt remorse. He had killed the Turk because he had taken Celestina, whom Scarpia had felt was his. Now he had taken Simona, who rightfully belonged to Count Palmieri. Post coitus, the reasoning that had preceded the act – the thought that he was somehow doing his imprisoned friend a good deed by caring for his wife, and that it was a kindness to fulfil her yearning for love – he realised had been the false promises of the Devil. When making love to Letizia a day or two later, he thought of Simona, then of Celestina, and felt a sudden anger against all women for drawing men into the abyss of brute passion and, as if to punish them, made love to Letizia with a brutality he had never shown before.
Letizia was delighted and, a week later, when they met again, she told Scarpia, bashfully, how during those seven days she had only thought of their last encounter, and how he was quite right to have been so brutal because she was shameless and should be punished; and that he must pre-empt her resistance and render her powerless by tying her hands to the bedposts with the cords that held back the curtains – she tripped across the room to unhook them from the wall – and she should lie on her stomach, splayed on the bed, because she did not deserve to look into his eyes.
Scarpia did as he was told, but felt humiliated making love to her in this contorted fashion. Again, he felt angry and tre
ated her with a roughness that only seemed to excite her more. Her cries of pleasure became intolerably irritating, but, because she was faced down into a pillow, they were muffled; and suddenly Scarpia heard other grunts chime in with his and hers – grunts that came from the painting of the Madonna on the wall.
Terrified that this was some terrible trick of the Devil, Scarpia leapt from the bed, and went over to the painting of the Madonna. It was silent, but from a hole in the wall the size of a pea, camouflaged by the bamboo pattern of the paper, came the sound of hoarse breathing. Scarpia seized his sword and thrust it through the hole. There was a cry, then scuffling sounds on the other side.
‘Oh no, Scarpia. Don’t kill him.’
He turned back to Letizia, still tied to the bedposts and twisting to face him. ‘Kill who? Has someone been watching us?’
‘Untie me, Scarpia. Let me explain.’
Scarpia threw down his sword on the bed, its blade marked with plaster and a trace of blood. He unknotted the cords, and roughly pulled Letizia by her arms to face him. ‘Who was there? What has been going on?’
Letizia raised the sheet to cover her breasts: her eyes, avoiding his, looked with alarm at his sword. ‘Have you killed him? Oh, Santa Maria. Please God, you have not killed him.’
‘Killed who?’
‘He is a silly old man. He has few pleasures. What harm did it do to us?’
‘He? Who? Prince Paducci?’
‘Of course, of course. Who else? And you have killed him!’
‘I hope my sword went straight into his eye.’
‘Oh no. It is too terrible. Why are you so cruel? He liked to watch, that is all.’
‘And you knew this? You let him?’
‘Of course – why not? He is so good to me. It cost us nothing, after all. And why, when there is so much pleasure . . .’ – now she gave a timid smile through her tears – ‘why not share it? And how much better that a rich old fool should give me his money rather than some whore?’
‘Some whore?’ cried Scarpia. ‘You have played the whore and dragged me down into Hell.’
A new rush of tears. ‘How can you say that, Vitellio? He has never touched me. If I am a whore, then I am your whore. And you know that the count, my husband, gives me very little money and so all the things we enjoy are thanks to Paducci – our stakes at faro, the carriages, our little dinners together, these rooms, this bed? Could you have paid for these things out of your pay as a soldier? Didn’t you realise that our happiness came at a price?’
‘You have humiliated me,’ said Scarpia. ‘I am dishonoured. Undone.’
‘Oh, come here, you poor provincial,’ said Letizia, opening her arms and letting the sheet fall from her breasts. And, filled with self-loathing, Scarpia went to her and, as her limbs closed around him in a now conventional fashion, he resumed what he had begun – his mind working at variance to his body, but taking an oath that he was making love to the Contessa di Comastri for the very last time.
5
The papal treasurer, Fabrizio Ruffo, missed nothing, and, when Scarpia asked to be transferred to some garrison outside Rome, he knew why. At a number of conversazioni Ruffo had noticed the mixed looks the contessa had directed at her cicisbeo bello – one moment pleading, the next affronted; and, in Scarpia, a disinclination to meet her eyes, a look of gloomy disdain. He had noticed, too, that Prince Paducci did not appear at the Palazzo Comastri: it was said that he had been sick, but when he did return the only symptom of an illness was a livid scar down the side of his cheek, poorly hidden by paste and powder. Scarpia was now rarely to be seen at the Palazzo Comastri: Ruffo had heard the rumours that his protégé had been dismissed from his post as il bello in the contessa’s triumvirate of cicisbei, rumours apparently confirmed when Letizia was seen in her carriage on the Corso with the young Chevalier Malaspina.
The Treasurer Ruffo also knew of the long periods of time that Scarpia spent in the company of Count Palmieri, and he had become anxious that the gaoler was becoming infected by his prisoner’s ideas. Ruffo judged Scarpia to be solid in his faith, sound in his instincts and intelligent enough to parry an atheist’s argument; but he also knew that Scarpia preferred to act rather than to think; that he was happier on horseback in the open air than in a library reading a book; and that for all his success as a soldier, and the tender rewards he had enjoyed for his courage and good looks, he remained socially ill at ease. Satan might not be able to capture his soul with intellectual arguments, but he might be vulnerable to the force of fashion, which can be as powerful in the realm of ideas as it is in the choice of women’s clothes. How many young men, Ruffo asked himself, had become Freemasons not because they accepted the brotherhood’s absurd claims of descent from the builders of the Temple of Solomon and the Knights Templar, or the incoherent mumbo-jumbo about the Supreme Being, but because it was fashionable in Paris and Vienna?
Scarpia’s request suited Ruffo, who, on taking office and command of the pontifical army, had seen the vulnerability of the Papal States. He had ordered the construction of new coastal fortifications, and though Scarpia might have liked to have been sent further away – to Ancona, perhaps, or to Bologna – Ruffo persuaded him to go to Civitavecchia, where he needed a man he could trust.
*
Ruffo did not know of the shame now felt by Scarpia when he entered the cell of Count Palmieri; that his protégé dared not look his prisoner in the eye, and lived in daily terror that he would be told by his wife that she had been seduced. Worse, the crime he had committed he repeated; he summoned Simona Palmieri to his lodgings and, mutely, she came. Why? Did she hope to buy with her body some advantage for her husband? Scarpia had told her he had done all he could to ameliorate her husband’s condition, and had no power to hasten his release. She seemed to accept this, but came all the same. He got little joy from their encounters; the words of St Paul kept ringing through his head: I find myself doing the very things I hate. And she seemed to court degradation. Was it to confirm her sense of worthlessness as a wife abandoned in favour of mankind? This was conjecture. They rarely spoke. She came and went like a ghost. It was to escape from Simona as much as from Letizia that Scarpia left Rome.
Looking down over the tiled roofs of Civitavecchia from the Michelangelo Fortress, Scarpia remembered the night he had spent at an inn after landing from Spain. Then he had been disgraced over a woman; now, too, he was disgraced in his own eyes over two others. Here he would lead a chaste and spartan life, devoted to his duties – a military monk, like a Knight of Malta. He confessed his sins to a priest in a small parish church in Civitavecchia who gave Scarpia a harsh penance – daily Mass for a month. ‘The wages of sin are death,’ he said in a thin but vehement voice. ‘Adultery! With two women – one depraved and corrupt, the other helpless and at your mercy. You feel shame? Good. But don’t deceive yourself that these are peccadillos. Unrepented, they would send you to Hell. If you cannot contain yourself, you must find a wife, because, as the Apostle Paul teaches, it is better to marry than to burn. Find a wife, young man, and sin no more.’
Scarpia suspected that the priest was a Jansenist, banished to this poor parish by the Vicar General; but he was glad all the same, since the priest’s severity matched his remorse. As to his advice to find a wife, Scarpia decided it would be no sin to ignore it. Palmieri was right. Give not thy strength to women. And what kind of wife could he marry now that he had fallen from favour at the Palazzo Comastri? And at the Palazzo Marcisano, too, he had sensed a new froideur. The princess seemed uncomfortable in his presence, and the prince, who had once been so welcoming, looked annoyed whenever he saw Scarpia coming through his door. Only Ludovico welcomed him, but now with a shade of embarrassment in his smile.
Why had he lost favour with the Marcisanos? Was it because of his liaison with the Contessa di Comastri? Had the Chevalier Spinelli let it be known how Prince Paducci had gained the scar on his left cheek? Was Letizia disparaging him now that he was no longer her lover? Easily ima
gining himself the object of tittering ridicule, Scarpia decided to absent himself from the Roman palazzi altogether and hope for a war in which he could win glory or, if there was no war, demonstrate his abilities as an officer. He might then be asked by a king to reorganise his armed forces like the Englishman, John Acton, in Naples. Gaining a reputation for efficiency was all he could expect from his service in the pontifical army because, for all Ruffo’s reforms and extravagant expenditure, there was little chance that the Papal States could confront an invading army or repel the fleet of a major power like Britain or France.
*
Then, at ten one morning, Scarpia was called from the guardroom of the Michelangelo Fortress by Spoletta to say that he had a visitor from Rome, Prince Ludovico di Marcisano. Scarpia was confused. He wanted at first to say that he was too busy to receive him, but the colonel who was in command, hearing that a carriage had drawn up at the gates of the fortress with the coat of arms of the Marcisanos on its door, at once sent an adjutant to tell Scarpia that, should the prince be so inclined, he should invite his illustrious guest to lunch. Scarpia therefore went down to the courtyard, through the gates and over the drawbridge to the coach where he was told by the liveried coachman that his master was stretching his legs. Scarpia turned towards the port, saw Ludovico, and went to join him.
‘Ah, Vitellio.’ Ludovico turned away from the ships he had been studying and laid his hand on Scarpia’s shoulder – a half-embrace. ‘Is it inconvenient, this visit? It was such a lovely day and I love the smell of the sea.’
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