The Judas Cloth
Page 4
He had come to the sacristy one Sunday. Would it be presuming, he wondered, if he were to invite his lordship to lunch at his humble home? There were devout members of his flock who had not had a chance to meet him. This sounded like a challenge, so the lunch became an armistice. The other guests made it clear that they, though less well-born than the Stangas, were loyal and that loyalty was insufficiently prized. The Centurioni, for example, were the true salt of the earth and were needed to defend property. Vagrants had been cutting down fruit trees and the roads were unsafe.
Mastai, lest his presence seem grudging, accepted second helpings of boiled beef and caper sauce.
‘It’s a local speciality,’ said his hostess.
A communion? Eyes winked in the grease.
‘Some,’ said the Signora, ‘think they’re above the law. It’s not the common folk who conspire.’
‘And some,’ said her husband, ‘get puffed up by reading the likes of Babeuf! Boeuf,’ he joked as the meat came round again. ‘Ba!’ An ex-customsman, who knew the names of forbidden authors, he was silly with pride at having a bishop at his board. ‘Sometimes,’ he reminisced, ‘we would find subversive papers like The Morning Chronicle wrapped around travellers’ shoes. You had to be alert for such tricks. Or they’d line suitcases with it. Gentlemen were the worst! Expecting to get away with it. Nobody is above suspicion.’
The bishop was reminded unpleasantly of the girl whose baby, it was now clear, could not have been sired by her uncle, although – he hoped cravenly – she might think so for she had called him by her uncle’s name.
‘Were you,’ his confessor had asked delicately, ‘quite yourself?’ Referring to the epileptic symptoms which could still cause mental confusion. Maybe he’d dreamed the episode?
‘Expecting to get away with it,’ repeated Nardoni. ‘But that didn’t work with me. I’m in-corr-up-tible, Monsignore!’
The bishop blushed.
‘No point dwelling on it,’ the confessor had decided. ‘The thing now is to deal with the consequences.’
The girl had been moved to a convent at Fognano in his new diocese. Best for her, the Reverend Mother had agreed, to be where nobody knew her story. The Abbess of Fognano must, of course, be told. But she, an old friend of Monsignore’s, would be discreet.
He had already visited to ask how things were. Had the girl mentioned the child at all? No. Or her past?
‘Not really. We gave out that the reason she left the other convent was because she’d been ill and the air here was healthier.’
‘You think she has managed to forget … everything?’
The abbess looked from under her coif at the bishop who had once held her longer than was strictly necessary, during a game of Blind Man’s Buff, when they were both fifteen and living in the town of Senigallia. ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘We all forget things.’
He saw that she had been hoping to reminisce with him about their youth. They had belonged to big, friendly families, and she loved recalling long-gone carriage drives and cheerful gatherings at New Year. Today, though, his mind was on the girl.
‘Oblivion,’ he told her, ‘is a grace. Better relinquish the past.’ He made a chopping gesture with his hand. Tac! Cut it off.
The abbess insisted that he honour the convent by taking a refreshment, though her mood had changed. They had been young together and now here she was, a woman of forty with nothing further to expect, whereas time moved differently for Monsignore. In the end, the same thought struck him and he became affable as people do when made aware of an inequality. He even listened to some of her gossip. Her girlhood friends were now grandmothers and she had crocheted caps for their children’s children. The thought returned them to the girl and her baby. Monsignor Amandi had sent for it. It had seemed wise to give it to a wet nurse straight away.
‘I know you’ll be kind to her,’ he said as he left.
He was right. The abbess had entered the convent to escape a tyrannical, bedridden father who was still tormenting two sisters left behind. In gratitude for her escape, she made the lot of other refugees who came here as happy as she could.
*
Monsignor Amandi wrote to Gambara that Monsignor Mastai had lunched with a spy who worked for the office of the Cardinal Secretary of State. ‘Be prudent‚’ he recommended. ‘Keep away and let his lordship get his fill of the Zelanti once and for all.’
Amandi, a man whose energies found insufficient outlet in the diplomatic missions at which he showed such tact, relished the sly exercise of influence over a man like Mastai who, being shrewd, pious, ailing and charming, was likely to rise higher than he would himself. People pitied Mastai – and how distrust a man you pity? Besides, he still had the support of Donna Clara.
*
Summer. Imola dozed among its brick arcades. Pigeon’s-foot pink, amber, plum and tawny were blanched to a sparkling pallor – pigeon-droppings – until sundown when a cardinal tint blazed then dissolved in a dusk sweet with eddies of tobacco smoke, as old men hauled straw-bottomed chairs into the streets and began to gossip.
The rumour was that Monsignor Mastai-Ferretti … Shush! Sounds carry! What about Monsignore? … a row with Monsignor Folicardi of Faenza. Really? Why? He wants the Abbey of Fognano to be under himself and Folicardi says it’s always been in his diocese which is true. Maybe Monsignore wants the abbess under himself! Shush! They say that she … What’s all this whispering? What? How old is she? No! Well, have it your way. Anyway what’s sure and certain is that Monsignor Folicardi sent a protest to Rome but Monsignore has friends there and the convent has changed dioceses. Yes. Oh, he’s a powerful bishop and will soon have a red hat. An attractive man too. No smoke without fire.
*
The lieutenant crossed the cathedral square with the bandy gait of a horseman. Guessing that secret gawkers had him in their sights, he squared his shoulders. Authority needed to impose itself. Every so often, as he’d told His Lordship, you had to fire off your gun. Jacobins were getting too confident. ‘With respect, they’ve been raising their heads since Your Lordship’s kindness to them. They think now they have licence to meet openly. Oh, nothing to put your finger on, but we can smell their mood. Around here you get a feel for that. Bologna law school is close and turns out pettifoggers who would argue the leg off an iron pot. That young fellow, Gambara, thinks he has Your Lordship’s protection.’
The bishop had given him a look of lordly detachment. ‘Oh?’
Feeling squat – he wore boots with heels – the lieutenant recognised the lordliness as secular and resented it. The Mastai-Ferretti were small nobility and as pugnacious as bantams. Men like that – the lieutenant knew – expected men like us to fret our guts for them and, if it came to it, fight. Nardoni had a wound near his groin – a bit closer and buona notte, he’d be a eunuch! The thought haunted him. He dreamed frequently that he was being gelded and woke sweating – or, worse, only thought he’d woken up, so that when he touched himself to make sure, he found nothing there and heard his voice whimper in a falsetto. Wrenching himself from sleep’s sharp practices, he would bite himself, touch his balls and waken his wife. ‘Open your legs. Yes. Now! I don’t care if you do get pregnant again! Move, can’t you! Oh Jesus! oh God, God, GOD!’ Well, at least he had proven his manhood – if he was awake! Was he? He never enjoyed it now. Not any more and all because of a skirmish on the Tuscan border! All to keep fat prelates safe – men who themselves had no use for balls and used their safety to encourage agitators who might one day … The lieutenant’s hand crept unstoppably to his groin and he saw the bishop look fastidiously away.
‘He’s a tout, Monsignore. A spy.’
‘Who?’
‘Gambara, Gianmarco.’ Despite himself, it came out like a police report.
‘For whom?’
The lieutenant planned to find out. For now, all he could say was: ‘He gets letters by private courier. And his talk in cafés is too free.’
‘Too free for a spy?’
That, Nardoni saw with satisfaction, upset the bishop. Somehow he’d hit home.
‘He,’ said Mastai surprisingly, ‘says you’re one.’
‘Me? A spy?’
‘Or decoy.’ His lordship laughed as though this were a joke. In the lieutenant’s experience, jokes were rarely just jokes. ‘The talkative,’ said Mastai, ‘in your book are all decoys and the rest are spies. So you too must be one or the other. Provoke what, anyway? Talk of what?’
‘In the café yesterday,’ said Nardoni, ‘the topic was Your Lordship’s tiff with Monsignor Folicardi.’
Mastai’s ringed hand flashed a benediction and he leaned towards the door. A flunkey opened it and Nardoni found himself outside.
Since then he had been reviewing the conversation. ‘He says you’re one,’ could have been a chance bull’s-eye. Had he flinched? The crux of the matter was that Nardoni was on the payroll of Vienna as well as Rome and Rome mustn’t know it. If Gambara too was working for Austria …
Now, standing outside the bishop’s palace he pulled the bell-pull and realised too late that he had prepared nothing to say. Never mind. He’d feel his way. Discover just what Gambara had said about him – if he’d said anything. The bishop might have been chancing his arm.
Frighten him, he thought. ‘We’re worried, Monsignore,’ he might warn. ‘Conspirators are in touch with Vienna. There’s a move to detach this part of the state from the Holy Father’s dominions and attach it to the Empire. Has nobody mentioned Austria lately in your lordship’s hearing? Her enlightened policies? How much better off her subjects are? No? Not even Signor Gambara? I ask because we have reason to believe …’ That would do. Again and with greater assurance the lieutenant pulled the bell.
The footman who finally came to the door said that Monsignore was in Fognano conducting a retreat for the nuns. He wouldn’t be back for three days.
Three days! The lieutenant walked back across the square. Three nights! Pausing at the apothecary’s shop, he decided to buy a bottle of laudanum.
*
They were hot days and the bishop returned from his journey in a paste of dust and sweat. His clothes clung to him and his mind was dizzy with the scruples of women. Yet he was good with nuns, being much in demand as a confessor, and had improved the health in the convents of his old diocese by insisting on better food and hygiene. Medical certificates must, he had ruled, be supplied by all new novices. Too many families used the religious orders to rid themselves of sickly daughters. Consumption was rife. Deaths upset survivors and in the midst of all this, the foolish quarrel over jurisdiction with Monsignor Folicardi was the last straw.
On reaching his palace, he told his vicar-general who had come to meet him to go back in and wait. ‘I want to say a prayer in the cathedral,’ he said. ‘I won’t be long.’
It was cool by the main altar and he was enjoying the shade and occasionally shaking the neck of his cassock to get air on his skin, when a man sprinted up the nave followed by two others. The first one vaulted over the altar-rails and shouted ‘sanctuary!’ Then he turned and shouted it again. There was a panicked tremor in his voice until, seeing the bishop, fear visibly fell from him. ‘Ah, Monsignore!’ he cried. ‘Thank God!’ It was Gambara.
His pursuers were now on him but he didn’t try to resist. ‘Sanctuary,’ he reminded them more steadily and, as they started to pinion his arms, his protest had an almost pedantic assurance. ‘This is the high altar …’ he was arguing when his voice expired in a strangulated gulp. The man holding his arms had jerked his head upwards while the other one slit his throat.
Mastai felt these images explode into flying shards and for seconds could not put them together: blood, Gambara, violated sanctuary … They wouldn’t coalesce. And then he thought: murder, while something prickled on his skin and his vision blurred as though gnats had got in his eye.
He started to scream but couldn’t, and when he took his hand from his locked throat it came away bloody. Then he was breathing again and lurched beseechingly towards the altar, howling ‘Oh God, my God!’ It was at once prayer, query and reproach.
The men were now gone and Gambara’s body had slithered down the steps. Clutching his own chest, the bishop found it soggy with the dead man’s blood. No question but that Gambara was dead. Blood was spreading from the crooked heap which lay before the altar like some savage offering.
A few old women and a priest who had been hearing confessions in a side chapel gathered round. A boy was sent for the police. The priest whispered in Mastai’s ear. ‘Come, Monsignore.’
‘No, no. I knew the victim. I must testify.’
The old women buzzed and whispered and the priest – a small man in a stained cassock – hovered a while longer then plucked at his superior’s sleeve.
‘Monsignore, with respect, it would be better if Your Lordship weren’t here. The killers were Centurioni, you see, and the police can’t arrest them. Well, strictly speaking, they can, but it could cause trouble and if your lordship denounces them, the police won’t know what to do.’
Mastai turned on him. ‘What do you mean? What do you know about this?’
‘Nothing, Monsignore.’ The small priest backed fearfully away.
Later, people would agree that the priest had given wise advice, for the two Centurioni disappeared, spirited off, no doubt, to a part of the state where the corps was clandestine, whereas here it was expected to take responsibility for its acts. A representative of the Commissario Straordinario – a State of Emergency was still in force – told His Lordship that, regrettably, nothing could be done. Better not give scandal. The Commissario, you see … The dead man was thought to have been a – well, there had been denunciations. The Cardinal Secretary of State himself … But this was guesswork, for the gossips relied on footmen for their information and the crucial conversation took place out of doors, where there was nowhere for a footman to hide, and only gestures could be vouched for: evasive on the part of the Commis sario’s envoy, incredulous on that of Monsignor Mastai. Lip-readers – at a distance – recognised a recurring word which might be ‘Rome’ or ‘no’ or ‘morte’. The bishop looked stunned. As for Padre Cassio – the wise little priest – nobody thought he had played much of a role, although it was of interest that he was the confessor of Lieutenant Nardoni’s wife who had recently grown thin and agitated and was going to confession as often as others to the café.
From the notebooks of the noble abbot
Raffaello Lambruschini:
Monsignor – later Cardinal – Amandi is my source for the story of Gambara’s murder by Centurioni and, while I do not doubt his veracity, I note that he was abroad at the time and that an equally good source has it that it was Gambara who killed a Centurione, then fled the country and ended up in California where he grew rich in the Gold Rush. According to this version, Monsignor Mastai-Ferretti helped him escape and, decades later, when the Church was in dire need, a providentially large and anonymous donation arrived from Sacramento. A parable? Perhaps. Pious parables are much alike and it is worth noting that Mastai’s having helped Louis Napoleon escape the Austrians in 1831 is sometimes linked to the help the future emperor was to give the future pope. Men who inspire gratitude do better in life than those who don’t.
Common to both versions of the murder-story is the account of the bishop being splashed with a dying man’s blood: a baptism which leads to his looking differently thereafter on the world around him. What is unquestioned is that for years after this he shunned politics and that, although, in 1840, he duly received a cardinal’s hat, he continued to live as quietly as a porporato could.
Naturally, he continued to receive news from the capital where, apart from spies and manufacturers of lace-trimmings, the most active citizens were those who hoped to topple the regime and men like my uncle who were labouring to prop it up. The latter were regularly lampooned in squibs stuck on the broken marbl
e torso known as ‘Pasquino’, the ‘protester’s patron’, which stood outside Palazzo Braschi.
Black beetle, black beetle,
You live off the people!
The pasquinade, never a subtle genre, grew crude towards the end and I am bound to say that the fault lay with the regime which by now suffered from a touch of rigor mortis. Panic stiffened it. Respect was on the ebb and on the via Pia, at the hour of the promenade, irreverence could be detected in many of the looks cast at the eminent porporati who descended from gilt-trimmed carriages to read their breviaries and stretch their red-stockinged legs.
‘What’s needed,’ murmured the disaffected, ‘is a dose of a different sort of red.’
Outside ecclesiastical hatters, swinging replicas of behatted heads, stirred bloody associations and so did the trunkless wooden forms inside the shops on which red skull caps were displayed.
Few, to be sure, gave thought to such signals, and hatters went on doing a thriving trade with men whose enthusiasm for violet and red zucchetti, birettas, damask mitres and hats trimmed with cords appropriate to rank was as lively as any lady’s in the latest plates from Paris.
The loftiest headgear was naturally that of the popes whose triple-tiered tiaras manifested claims over heaven, hell and here, realms which some of them seemed unable to distinguish, such as Pope Leo XII, who, hoping to force his subjects to live like angels, closed the Roman wine shops. Naturally, when he died, they danced like demons and drank his successor’s health so copiously that the Almighty must have been displeased for He took him to Himself the following year. The next pope was Gregory who, being elected during the disturbances of 1831, ruled harshly and fearfully – or so everyone said, including the poet Belli, who later worked as a censor preventing others doing the same. Oh, life fizzed with irony in those years! Citizens joked and preachers preached and when agents began coming from the north to stir up rebellion, the jokes worried them more than the sermons, for they saw them as proof of a Roman incapacity for belief. ‘Cynical,’ they called our citizens. ‘Servile!’ And it was true that most of the lay population were servants and maybe they were cynical. ‘See Rome and lose your faith!’ The old tag worried the Jacobins for a new faith can founder as fast as an old one. Roma veduta, fede perduta! It worried them. At least, they thought, the priests believed in something and for a while they tried working with priests against priests and tried to enlist me. But I said that I would not work against the Church but only, if it could be done, help reform it from within. So off they went, leaving me to wonder if posterity would ever be able to imagine how la Dominante was in those years. Rome. The caput mundi. It was strangling in bureaucracy and privilege. Impoverished. Undeveloped. Idle. Its aristocracy had been ruined when the French forced them to divide their fortunes by abolishing entails. Nobody knew what to do and under my uncle’s rule it was difficult to find out since it was illegal to travel abroad to attend a scientific congress – too many free-thinkers there, you see – and illegal to discuss the reforms which we all knew were needed. Even goodwill tended to get bogged down. As the future censor put it in one of his secret jingles: