‘L’homme du juste milieu!’ Don Bibi pulled out a chair for Rossi. ‘A dangerous thing to be. Have you ever witnessed a bullfight? The matador has nothing at his back while the men who stir up the bull stay near the fence so that they may vault over it.’
‘Yet men like me are accused of sitting on fences.’
Don Bibi bent towards him. ‘The man in the middle,’ he instructed, ‘annoys everyone. He seeks to reconcile but it is not in our nature to be reconciled. We are fruits of the Fall! Ours is a nature designed to be godlike then spoilt by Lucifer, the first revolutionary. We’re a mix, a mess, and have an itch in our arse which keeps us on the move. You shuttled between countries. Your agility was your defence. Beware of settling.’
‘Here?’
‘For the world. It’s a cave of shadows. A Limbo and a vestibule. I remind myself of this daily,’ said the fat man. ‘If I didn’t I’d go mad at its stupidity. I’d lay about me with an axe! Ours is a wise religion. I derive infinite comfort from it.’
‘You’re speaking to a politician, Don Bibi. We have to deal with what you call shadows.’
‘I’, said the priest, spooning into his ice-cream, ‘have only one message which I repeat. Remember Monseigneur Affre, the Archbishop of Paris. He was killed, you’ll recall, in the riots of last June. People are calling him saintly becasue he went out to mediate and was killed by a stray bullet. I say a man who can’t defend himself can’t defend his institution.
After a while the count left for Lepri’s restaurant. He decided that Don Bibi was simply advising him to throw in his lot with the Curia. The question was would it do as much for him?
Don Bibi’s last remark had been, ‘Beware of tolerance, Count!’
He meant tolerance of revolutionaries, but one must presume both sides were plotting. Arms – whose? – had been discovered in the palazzo Sciarra. Embittered volunteers were rampaging through the northern Legations; the war was lost; the state coffers were empty and the Pope, having warred a bit and reformed a bit and chopped and changed his policies, was turning to Rossi to save him. How work with such a man?
Rossi reflected that his was not a new dilemma. Perhaps he should study Castiglione’s advice to courtiers on how to navigate the shallows around an unreliable prince?
And how deal with the mob? Firework shows were one method. Watching one last Easter, he had been struck to see a protest organised by democrats dribble away when the great Catherine wheel surged over St Peter’s followed by a huge VIVA PIO NONO! Waste, at a time of war and hunger, did not trouble the crowd. Seeing them applaud, he knew them for what they were: an ancient and unreliable rabble. They, no doubt, thought of him as chillily Swiss.
Outside the restaurant, the streets were poorly lit. It was, however, only a step to where footmen with lighted torches stood outside the palace where his friend, the Comtesse de Menou, was holding a reception. This connection was a weakness to which some might have warmed: a sign of humanity in the cold Rossi. But they would not have the chance. A Protestant wife was compromising enough without letting the town know he had a mistress.
The startling radiance of light and colour might have charmed him less if he had come by carriage. After the dark streets, the effect was entrancing. Prudently cool, he did not linger with his friend. Not greeting her with the intimacy he craved caused an ache which spread desolately along his nerves, then gave way to a sensation of pleasure. This sensuous metamorphosis always caught him by surprise. It was a paradox of the body which puzzled him as much as he puzzled others. Ravished for moments by narcotic bliss, he felt unable to respond to those around him with more than a gelid bow. He was considered haughty and remote.
Dutiful, he joined some ladies who were being lively with a trio of prelates. Death was their topic. A French prelate listed the heroines of Italian literature, marvelling at their poor health. Were real women here as prone, he asked, to die young as Clorinda, Laura and Beatrice? He dared hardly address those present lest they go into a decline and oblige him to write propitiating elegies to their ghosts. It was a safe parody of courtship and the Italian clerics smiled at his dexterity.
A pert, ringleted French lady intercepted Rossi. Was it true that the French Government had opposed his becoming the Pope’s minister and that he had dictated conditions to His Holiness?
The prelates melted away.
‘If I were younger,’ said Rossi to the bubbling lady, ‘I would hope you had frightened them off so as to be alone with me.’ He felt like an old horse taken out to canter over low obstacles. Still bubbling, she offered her fortune-teller’s advice.
‘Your fortune-teller is probably a spy.’
‘They say that here of every second person.’
‘It is true of every second person.’
‘Then which of us two is one?’
‘Surely the one asking questions!’
‘Well, to disarm suspicion I’ll tell some gossip about a person with influence in High Places, a rival to your learned self.’
‘A lady, naturally?’
‘A nun.’ The ringlets shook. ‘They say she prophesies. In exchange, will you tell me some stale old gossip? Is it true the Countess Spaur used to have some influence?’
‘Oh, I imagine she still has. She has for a long time been a friend in what you call High Places. Shall we say HP? We should have a code. Masons have a glossary of words which mean one thing to the initiate and another to the generality. “Money” for instance means “weapons”, “charity” freedom and “secrecy” revolution!’
‘Gossip has it you were a Mason yourself.’
‘Gossip is wrong. If I had been I would not have been accepted as ambassador here nor now as minister. My enemies would have ferreted it out. As it is, they merely spread it about.’
‘How interesting to be a man! Here, as they were saying when you came in, there are only two roles for a woman: to die and become a Beatrice or to give birth and be a Mamma.’
‘Or a nun.’
She made a face.
‘Or, like Lord Byron’s friend, Teresa Guiccioli, dilute your respectability. Become either more holy or less respectable,’ he teased. ‘That’s all I can suggest.’
‘Yours is a dangerous influence. I shall pray for the Pope.’
She left him, laughing, and now, at last, he talked to his hostess, a lady who had come to Rome for his sake and gave receptions like this to help his career.
‘I have a bad feeling,’ she said. ‘Details are coming out about the troubles faced by the last ministry. Whoever takes over risks being a scapegoat. For the Pope, reform is bitter physic. He knows he needs it yet cannot swallow it.’
‘You’ve been listening to gossip.’
‘Of course. What would you have me do? Read the papers which contain nothing but accounts of who kissed his slipper? Gossip comes hot from my footmen, who use the same sources as the police – other footmen.’
‘Do they spy on as well as for us?’
‘If they do they must be bored.’
Resentful! His discretion mortified her. But what could he do?
‘My dear, I’m obliged to ask you to rise to new heights of discretion.’
She was ahead of him. ‘Whom do you want me to seduce?’ Brisk. Game?
Plodding, yet tempted to pretend it was a joke, he suggested she feign interest in an agreeable young man. ‘If your footmen think he has been made happy, it will distract their attention from me.’
‘You haven’t much shame.’
‘We agreed to have none.’
‘And is this … puppet to be privy to our secret?’
‘No. He’s nineteen and, I’m told, amiable. I haven’t met him yet but Minghetti vouches for him and his father used to be a friend of the Pope’s. Officially, he is to be my secretary. The idea only just came to me of using him as a chandelier – you remember Musset’s play? Cover! A fig leaf.’
‘In the play the lady and the chandelier fall in love. Will you risk that?’
‘What choice have I?’
‘You could give up your ambitions.’
‘If you ask me to, I will.’
‘I am asking. Will you?’
She doesn’t mean it, he thought. The hope of power is what draws her to me. Without it, what am I? An old man with a face like a paper bag. But might she enjoy the power of refusing power? Maybe she too gets that thrill which I find in tormenting myself?
‘If you ask, I cannot refuse you.’
But what about my sons and Charlotte? he thought. I need a position. Paris is closed to me. All my protectors have fled. My teaching posts are forfeit. Switzerland would be difficult. I am sixty-one and too well known. And – I have no money. Not enough. Aloud, he said, ‘All right! I’ll give it up.’
‘Will you hate me?’
‘How can I say?’
Eye stared at eye. They knew each other too well. This was the braccio di ferro where each tried to force down the other’s arm. There was no gender here but a clash of wills and a testing.
‘So. Put me out of pain.’
‘You’re in pain?’ She smiled.
‘Well?’
‘I want you to take power.’
It was almost a let-down. He had been so taut. Fluids in his body made themselves felt as they boiled or curdled or flowed back to where they should have been. He might have been about to have an attack.
‘You mustn’t do this to me again.’
Her hand brushed his sleeve, delicately, imperceptibly. A feather touch. The footmen would have nothing to report. ‘No. It was because of what you just asked.’
‘I am still asking it.’ It was his turn to be hard.
‘I understand.’
‘His name is Prospero Stanga. I shall bring him tomorrow.’
‘Very well.’
They walked in different directions. He talked to various people. The originality of this drawing room was that it was one of the few open to people of different persuasions. Prelates met Liberals. Democrats met great noblemen. The stiff conservatives were curious and came. Political men came for Rossi.
The French prelate approached him and nodded to where, in a corner, Rossi recognised the ex-priest who some months before had told him of his unfrocking.
‘A sad case,’ said the prelate. ‘Perhaps you could invoke lenience on his behalf?’
‘You’re asking the wrong man. My argument is that the Pope should leave temporal matters to the laity. How then can I intervene in religious ones?’
‘But if he is sympathetic to reforms, surely he will be sympathetic to priests like Don Mauro? Don’t you agree that we must go forward or back? That there is no half way?’
‘No,’ said Rossi. ‘I don’t. That’s a religious way of thinking. Feminine and visionary. I have a theory as to why most visions are of the Virgin and seen by girls. It’s because men respect hierarchy and are ready to work their way up. Girls hope to rise in one leap. If they are religious, they see the Virgin. If not, they try to marry a powerful man. The Virgin is the prime interceder and bypasses all rules by being conceived immaculate then whisked up to heaven in the teeth of bureaucracies and the laws of gravity. Something similar, to be sure, can happen to popes.’
The French prelate laughed. ‘My mother,’ he said, ‘has two sons. My brother is an ambassador and able to receive her in some state. She prefers, however, to stay with me. She says I am like the daughter she never had. Other priests’ mothers say the same.’
‘I am not,’ Rossi objected, ‘casting a slur on femininity. Women – but what can be said on the topic is well known.’
Across the room, Madame de Menou was teasing a cardinal.
‘What do you think your mother meant?’
‘Perhaps that clerics make better friends than other people. A priest I know says he is in love with friendship: amoureux de l’amitié. That savagery which I notice in heterosexual love – a bit tigerish, don’t you think? – is absent.’
Tigerish, thought the count. Is she? Why am I throwing this youth in her way? A breath of jealousy caught in his throat.
Leaving the drawing room, he retired to a small study to wait for the guests to leave. Half dozing, he sipped Marsala. How old was she now? Twenty-nine. They had known each other for ten years. She – her name was Dominique – played her game with skill. She was childless. That fund of attention which women give their families now held the Curia in its sights, the Republicans, the Prince of Canino’s clique, and the Pope.
On the wall hung a portrait of her painted some years ago. She wore a ball dress, was downier than now and flirted, questingly, with the world: russet hair, feline eyes, sloping shoulders, silky skin. Optimistic, her upper lip rose slightly to reveal small, even teeth. He suspected her of underrating a factor which, talking to her, he called ‘Fortuna’ and talking to Pius, ‘God’. In his mind he thought of it as impish: a disruptive daemon which defies good planning. Despite a lifetime’s rational behaviour, it stimulated him in ways he would not even try to explain to her. Instead, he would follow all her wise advice then, like a Theseus whose Ariadne has furnished him with too short a threat, would proceed fearfully but determinedly alone.
*
Monsignor Amandi, back from investigating visionaries, found some of their threats realised. The honeymoon between Pope and popolo was at an end, though Pius could not see this. Friends grimaced behind their hands. He still walked among the rabble on foot! And was impervious to advice.
Metternich, Pius liked to remind would-be advisers, had had to flee. Months ago now. Off he’d had to lollop with his tail between his legs to London. So had Guizot and Louis Philippe. And here was he whom they had presumed to advise, four, five and six months later with his good people still cheering him. Ha! No thanks to himself, to be sure! As he said so, he would tilt an ecstatic face heavenward in a way maddening to ministers, since it was how he brushed their opinions aside. How could facts and figures compete with the doctrina infusa floating down to him like gold beams in a sacred painting?
Cardinal Gizzi, his first Secretary of State, had resigned after twelve months. He had been succeeded by Pius’s cousin, Gabriele Ferretti, who later fled in the night. The present Cardinal Secretary, Soglia, couldn’t wait to resign.
‘I’ve been hoping,’ Soglia confided to Amandi, ‘that you might relieve me. I could go then with a good conscience.’
Amandi was named Consultor of the Holy Office.
‘It could,’ hoped Soglia, ‘be a precursory token?’
Amandi, though often invited to dine in the Quirinal Gardens, doubted that Mastai would turn to him. Perhaps he was reluctant to trust himself to a man who had influenced him in the past? The great complaint about Pius was his lack of constancy.
‘He doesn’t just lack it,’ Soglia confided, ‘he dislikes it. He feels that, as the spirit bloweth where it listeth, we should all bend like reeds. Just now he wants me to resist Pellegrino Rossi’s attempts to deal with foreign affairs. He hates a layman to have power – but why then ask one to govern? I ask only to go back to my diocese in Osimo,’ said the cardinal on a warm evening in the Quirinal Gardens when the trees were hung with lanterns and the footmen’s livery glowed like fruit. ‘Osimo!’ He sighed and squashed a mosquito on his red silk thigh.
Nobody cared to stay in Rome in October, when infections were rife, though less so on the Quirinal Hill than in the Vatican, where the mal aria was at its worst.
*
The count, whose inner self ached, received young Stanga with courtesy. The boy was handsome, just as Minghetti had said he would be. The young, he told himself, are another species. Their skin covers them differently.
Prospero, seated on a divan, gave a lively account of events in Bologna, was deferent and drank a jug of barleywater without observing his host’s distress. Meanwhile, to Rossi’s distracted eye, he looked, at moments, like a satyr. Through layers of summer clothing, the host could, or thought he could, see the stirrings of rampant flesh.
Not for a
moment, though, did His Excellency’s thoughts betray themselves. Old habits stood to him and he smiled his affable smile. ‘Later on, we’ll pay a visit to a friend of mine,’ he told the boy whose skin, on closer inspection, was not so perfect. ‘Madame de Menou is French but knows this city and can introduce you to its ways. Go with her to the Corso tomorrow and learn the names and political persuasions of the people she will point out. You mustn’t be embarrassed to ask quite simple things. You’ll be of no use to me until you’ve learned your way round.’
‘He was open and easy with me,’ Prospero told Nicola later. ‘He had a reputation for haughtiness, but I never saw that. He was kindness itself and so was Madame de Menou.’
‘He thinks of me as a mother,’ Dominique told the count. ‘I’m not saying it to reassure you. The poor boy’s shocked by the city whose perfidy I at once described. He’s devoted to you already and full of righteous indignation. Your squire! He sees us as a couple and thinks we’re the same age.’
‘Does he attract you?’
‘Now you’re trying to make something happen which would do nobody any good.’
‘It might bring you some enjoyment.’
‘To you, I’m young. To him, old. Which do you suppose I like?’
‘You might enjoy changing his opinion.’
‘I might if I had nothing else on my mind. As it is, I have just learned that plans to murder you are being toasted at the Osteria del Forno in Orvieto wine.’
‘Your footmen may invent such things to earn your gratitude.’
‘Do you think they invented this?’ She handed him a letter in a manifestly disguised hand.
He read:
Filthy Jacobine,
Your lover is no fit minister for this state. How can a mongrel turncoat who, not content with taking a Protestant wife, deceives her with a French atheist, be loyal to God’s Kingdom?
You will perish in the city you pollute and so will he. Be warned,
The Judas Cloth Page 23
