Rangone’s voice was keeping tune too. Rangone was in step and always would be, thought Nicola, whose mind lagged behind what the rest of him already knew. Tum tarara! The brass underscored the repetitiveness of experience. These were the volunteers marching back. The cardinal had been worrying about them all week! He had been warned to expect as many as 4,000, all armed and unruly after their failures at the front. Turbulent.
‘… Nicola …’ That was Maria!
She was not calling but talking about him. The bed was moving in time to the band which was drawing close.
‘He … won’t … know!’ panted Rangone.
‘He’s a … nice boy!’
‘Of course he is! And what harm are we doing him? Eh? Tell me. Hmm?’
‘Don’t … Oh!’ Maria gave a little yelp.
‘No harm!’ The band had moved past and the words were now clearer. ‘I’m keeping you warm for him. I’m not one to keep things for myself. Warming you up. Teaching you … new tricks.’
‘What new tricks? Think I didn’t know that one?’
‘Think I don’t know any others?’
‘Let’s see then.’
Moving more quietly than when he came in, Nicola let himself out the door.
*
‘When we truly love,’ Nicola’s confessor told him, ‘we want to save the soul of the one we love. Not the earthly envelope.’
Why, he wondered, did confessors all talk to him of love? Was it because he revealed some excess of eagerness in their sly, tenebrous play-box where he lurked as tensely as he had sometimes done in cupboards and cubby-holes when playing hide and seek? A hope or need?
*
He visited the Villa Chiara which seemed to have shrunk. Count and captain looked wistful and smelled of dog. They had a new one now and were busy training it – perhaps from lack of anything else to be busy with? Their inaction, which he had not noticed before, was palpable and it was as if they could not quite find ways to fill their days. They were excited, though, by the news of Bologna and grateful for his visit. His status had changed. He could feel this as his story dilated in their minds. It blossomed there, its colours brightening as they exclaimed and slapped the table. He told them of the white-coats he had seen herded along and how wretched they had looked. He had heard later that seventy had been taken prisoner and had seen the ruins of a burned-out house where they had put their dead before turning it into a pyre.
‘People say there were one hundred and fifty corpses.’
They called the footman to fill his glass. This was a rite of passage. He was telling them.
In turn they spoke of how Prospero’s prospective employer, Count Rossi, had been offered the highest position open to a layman in this realm. One created by the new reforms.
‘He’s a moderate,’ said Stanga. ‘Prospero would never work for what he’d call an esaltato, meaning a man like me!’ His chin bobbed in amused resignation. ‘Well. He’s seeing life. Visiting drawing rooms. Maybe he’ll fall in love?’ This was the count’s hope, just as his fear was Prospero’s becoming a priest.
‘We think there may be something in the air,’ said Melzi.
Nicola smiled to think of them scanning Prospero’s letters for reticences. But the word ‘love’ felt like heat on a nerve.
When the count took his new dog for a run, Melzi confided, ‘He’s stopped seeing his cousin. That’s for Prospero’s sake. She wants him to marry her, but he’s reluctant to bring in another heir. Meanwhile, he’s lonely. Prospero,’ the captain murmured, ‘should be more attentive. Write. Visit. You should let him know.’
Later, it was the count’s turn to confide. Poor Melzi had been devastated by the news of Guidotti’s death. A bad business. And he reproached himself even now for having envied his old friend’s promotion. What had happened was that the general, though devoted to the idea of Italy, failed to hold the line at Piave and was blamed by his superiors. Crazed by the disgrace, he brooded for some days then, putting on his dress uniform and medals, made a mad sally out under enemy fire. Pride? Suicide?
Whatever it was, out he went and Bassi, the chaplain, had to coax him to take shelter by insisting that, if he would not, Bassi would stay with him, at the risk of his own life. To be rid of him, Guidotti returned to safety, then rushed back towards the bullets. Back after him went Bassi and so on, back and forth, ridiculously, until the general was dead and the chaplain had three wounds.
‘The worst of it is,’ said the count, ‘that Melzi has a visceral hatred for priests. And now here is our old hero making a bollocks of things and the priest a hero. Prospero would laugh.’
Nicola turned to the matter which had brought him here: the guns. Glibly, he told how the name of the old Centurione, which he remembered from here, had turned up on one of the lists at the Curia. ‘I guessed this must be his son. He was employed by one of the charities we’ve set up. Digging …’ The pay was poor, twenty baiocchi a day, so Nicola had gone to see the family, knowing they must be in want. He had discovered that the guns were hidden at a saw-mill and, in the present climate, dangerous.
‘I didn’t tell the cardinal because it would be difficult for him. Compromising …’
‘How,’ asked Stanga, now restored and businesslike, ‘did the man come to tell you about this?’
‘Fright,’ said Nicola. ‘The Austrians, you see, threaten to shoot people who hide arms, so when I mentioned your name, he told me …’
‘We’ll have them moved and rehidden,’ decided the count, ‘where neither side can get them. Luckily, I still have connections. Peace is what this pope needs. We’ll take them into protective custody.’ He was rapturous at having something significant to do.
*
Nicola saw Maria at the Montagnola, which had become a place of pilgrimage. Idlers re-enacted the battle, reliving the highlights of 8th August. She was listening to one of these myth-makers and he, remembering how she and he had spent that afternoon, grew absorbed in a myth of his own. Yearning back to before their Fall, he began dreaming of an Eden – then remembered that even that day the Fall had begun, perhaps more through his fault than hers. He had felt – what? Undated. Depressed. Had she guessed?
There she was. He could have touched her. She hadn’t seen him. Light, falling through the weave of her hat, threw golden flakes on her skin, and her tongue, edging forward, lolled on her lower lip. A strand of hair fell across her eyes and, taking off her hat, she tossed it back with a movement which brought her body so cosily into play that he again felt the fever which she could rouse but not satisfy, and turned, unhappily, away.
The city was divided between warring factions and so was some elusive part of himself over which he lacked control.
*
God was at His game of suspending help so that men might help themselves and the diocese, though perhaps not in the forefront of the divine mind, was being tried. In the end, the cardinal had left the Gavazzi–Bassi dossier with Nicola, for it had to be kept up and His Eminence’s eyesight prevented his doing this himself.
One of its thornier items was a run of letters from Venice, where the volunteers were fighting the Austrians and their chaplain, Bassi, had, with unpriestly verve, referred to the city’s pro-Austrian patriarch as a lickspittle. Since Bassi enjoyed his commanding officer’s protection, the patriarch had applied for help to Oppizzoni.
Meanwhile, letters from Rome announced that, since the chaplains had been expelled from their order, they were now under His Eminence’s jurisdiction.
‘Oh, no they’re not!’ cried Oppizzoni. ‘Until they’re informed of it, the expulsion has no legal effect, and I shall not inform them. For now, we must stay on the good side of Father Gavazzi who has agreed to persuade the populace to give up their arms. Write,’ he instructed, ‘copies of letters telling the Venetian Patriarch and the Roman Congregation what they want to hear. Then file them. We shall claim the originals were duly sent and lost. Everyone knows the post is disrupted.’
*
> Nicola went to hear Gavazzi urge the Bolognese to give up their arms and noted that the better class of citizen seemed greatly soothed by this appeal.
‘They’re clutching at straws,’ said Rangone who was there too. ‘Can anyone believe that those who have arms will give them up?’
‘I’m not imaginative,’ said Nicola. ‘What people do often surprises me.’
Rangone gave him a look. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘You can surely guess.’
‘No. I’m not imaginative either. Tell me.’
The scene was tedious. Nicola walked back to his office. Lies, he thought furiously, prevailed everywhere. Even in his own head. Even in his passion for Maria. From the beginning, she had been frank enough. It was he who had chosen to deceive himself. It was not concern for her soul which kept him awake at night and made him gnaw his knuckles and see her name in the syllables his pen was tracing on curial stationery. Maybe the notion of soul was simply a word for emotional intensity: something like the steam which rises from an over-heated body then condenses in clammy drops? He could well believe that, swinging from a fierce idealism to distrust of the spirit.
Trying to stun himself with work, he spent the afternoon roughing out replies to the letters in the file. The one from the Barnabite General was sour. Why, it permitted itself to wonder, had His Eminence not acknowledged earlier ones? Might the General humbly beg His Eminence to do him the favour now of letting him know through one of his secretaries that he had received the present communication? Maria, thought Nicola angrily, Maria! Wishing to express his deepest sentiments of veneration, the Barnabite General kissed the cardinal’s sacred purple. Ridiculous monkey! Nicola, hearing himself exclaim aloud, was unsure to whom his annoyance was addressed.
The chaplains impressed him. They risked their flesh for disincarnate passions, whereas he was even more shamefully carnal than Rangone, who seemed able to nibble at pleasure then move lightly on. Nicola, a would-be cannibal, wanted to devour and annihilate Maria.
The thick, creamy paper was her skin. He wrote on it: ‘I acknowledge receipt of two rescripts from the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars concerning the Secularisation of the two religious, Fathers Gavazzi and Bassi.’
A letter from Bassi to his Barnabite superiors had been forwarded as no longer concerning them. ‘By God’s grace,’ claimed the chaplain, ‘I have till now lived a blameless life here in Venice. Neither taverns nor cafés have had a glimpse of me …’
Nicola filed this with the chaplain’s attack on the Venetian patriarch, who had claimed that all established authority, including Austria’s, must be taken to represent God. Such a doctrine, argued the priest, gave credence to Montesquieu’s claim that Catholicism suited tyrants and Protestantism suited republics. This could lose us the allegiance of all high-hearted and generous young men. But … Nicola was pondering the word high-hearted and whether it applied to himself, when there was a knock.
‘Wait.’ He locked up his file then opened his door to find Rangone outside it.
‘I realise you must have guessed.’
‘I didn’t. I heard. I came to your rooms when you and she were there.’
Rangone turned away. ‘Hell!’
‘It has been, rather.’
‘Is it any good my apologising?’ Rangone looked him fitfully in the eye. ‘I’d offer to keep away from her, but I imagine you think her tarnished or something. Different? I could, if you didn’t think this wormbase of me, prove to you that it’s not so.’
Nicola felt tired.
‘Sit down,’ he invited and slumped morosely in a wooden chair.
‘I wish I could undo it. It was self-indulgent and not really much fun.’
‘It sounded like fun.’
‘Shit!’
‘Oddly, I get the impression that you want something from me. Absolution?’
‘Have I lost your friendship?’
‘Were we friends?’
‘You’re sour. You don’t mean that.’
‘You want us to shake hands? Or go drinking? A conciliatory ceremony? You probably had them in your family as a child? I never had a family and don’t know how to play.’
‘Is there something I can do?’
‘A penance?’
‘If you like.’
‘Give her money. As much as you can afford. You’re far richer than I or I wouldn’t ask. It’s for her family. They’re poor.’
‘It’s not very moral,’ said Rangone. ‘Encouraging her to sell herself. All right, all right!’ He fluttered appeasing hands. ‘I’ll do it. I’m only wondering if you know …’
‘… that she had other lovers. That’s what you’re going to say, isn’t it? I see it in your eye. But why should it be more moral for her not to get money for her family?’
‘Oh, her family …’
‘I know about them.’
‘Do you want me to stop seeing her?’
‘No. Don’t drop her! That would be cruel.’
‘I don’t think she expects much from me.’
‘But she may from me – and you’ll have to make it up to her.’
Rangone laughed. ‘This has been like going to confession to a quite immoral priest.’
‘Oh, there are different sorts of priests and moralities now,’ said Nicola, thinking of the dossier.
‘None I think who would say “Go and sin some more”.’
‘I just don’t want her to be lonely.’
‘Like yourself? Why don’t we go out to dinner or something? There are more fish in the sea, you know. I could get you another girl. That was more what I expected to do.’
But Nicola said he had to dine with the cardinal.
Eleven
The war was now a side-show, for only the Republic of Venice was holding out. A ritual. A morality play. Nicola, unscrolling it in his mind, imagined Father Bassi, to whom Garibaldi had given a horse, riding unarmed in the front line. A man of forty-seven. A poet whose hair curled over his collar. Some of his verse turned up in the dossier. Discovering that he could have made a soldier had banished priestly humility. Intercepted letters from him showed a closed world expanding and the mind’s walls blown down.
Nicola, like a spectator at a play, would have liked to warn him that he was riding for a fall. He couldn’t, of course. It would make trouble for the cardinal. But neither could he quite bring himself to disapprove of Bassi whose excitement was infectious and whose failings brought him close – for instance, he craved praise. Writing to a friend, he exulted in his physical courage – a surprise? – and complained at not being mentioned in dispatches. More selflessly, he pleaded with the military authorities to improve the men’s conditions. Poor lodging and sanitation demoralised them, he argued, and, with practical charity, hammered at the indifference or inefficiency of GHQ.
Sanitation! Nicola used the word to punish a riot of rhetoric in his mind. It also led him to ask the cardinal whether Maria’s father could have a job sweeping the cathedral. The present sweeper was old and in need of a helper.
‘But dear boy,’ cried His Eminence, ‘that position is one whose bestowal requires at least as much politicking as the appointment of a bishop! Who is this candidate of yours? Can he handle a brush? It’s no sinecure, you know. People spit and litter and, though I’ll spare your blushes, do worse in the cathedral. Would he be prepared to do a little spying?’
‘In the cathedral?’
‘Indeed! You’d be astonished what goes on there, especially now that there is all but a schism in the Church. I speak freely because it would be tedious to have to watch my tongue with you. I leave it to your sense of honour to let me know if I should.’
The cardinal, who had from the first enjoyed Nicola’s eagerness, noted a wistful quiver to it now and diagnosed religious doubt or some such teething trouble due to youth and a generous spirit. Not my business, though Oppizzoni comfortably. Let his confessor take care of it. He relished that quiver though. And because he did, Maria’s fa
ther became the cathedral’s second sweeper: lo scopatore sostituito.
*
‘Gavazzi,’ noted the cardinal, ‘is being accused of pocketing funds raised for the Army. I fancy his trouble is poor bookkeeping. I don’t suppose, do you, that he can be good at sums? Here he’s been teaching us charity and scolding shopkeepers who sack their assistants in thin times! Now, he must refute charges made, no doubt, by those same shop-keepers. He’s learning that it’s easier to preach than do.’
*
It was September and Rome had a new ministry whose mainstay was Count Pellegrino Rossi.
‘Perhaps he is tired of life?’ said Oppizzoni, whose own experiences coloured his outlook.
‘Perhaps,’ said a priest known for his patriotism, ‘things look more hopeful to those in the know.’
‘We know enough,’ said the cardinal with asperity. ‘We pay enough spies, God knows, to know. You can take it from me that the national question will be his downfall. Patriots including, I think, Your Reverence, are pressing for the war to go on and never asking from whence the money is to come. Rossi’s friends won’t forgive him if he doesn’t fight, and if he fights and loses, neither will they forgive that.’
Shyly, Nicola disclosed that a friend of his was now the count’s personal secretary.
‘Does he write to you?’
‘Not much,’ Nicola admitted. This disappointed him but the cardinal praised discretion in the employees of great men.
‘If you do hear from him,’ he added however, ‘let me know.’
Rome
Pink clouds, sphery as cherub’s limbs, were heralding a storm. It was hot and close and Count Rossi, finding the Caffe Venezia crowded, was pleased to be hailed by someone with a spare place at his table. This was Don Bibi Abbondanza, a priest whose violet legs twinkled in motion like those of a marsh bird. Just now, he was at rest and his belly, bright in the swathe of its cummerbund, had a reassuring stability. People liked Don Bibi.
The Judas Cloth Page 22
