‘He was a friend of Mazzini’s!’ said Monsieur Maur. ‘His funeral is tomorrow. Elise wouldn’t let me go alone. Now I can tell her I’m going with you.’ He could not, he explained, upset her too much. She worried lest he be taken ill. There was a rigmarole about why she couldn’t come herself. ‘Fate sent you!’ he concluded.
‘I’m not sure I can.’ Nicola, fresh from the seminary, did not want a scandal preceding him to Rome, where his career had already been mapped out. How say this, though, to the ruined priest who was now excited about tomorrow? The girl at the counter was listening to every word. Curiosity? If this had been Rome, Nicola would have guessed her to be a spy – then he saw that she was making eyes at him. He blushed. In the seminary he had forgotten about girls.
‘Wear secular clothes,’ commanded his friend. ‘He was condemned by two popes, don’t forget. And though he had a fashionable following in his day, you won’t see any duchesses tomorrow. But the people will come and won’t tolerate priests. It’s to be a pauper’s funeral. That’s what he wanted.’
Nicola’s efforts to beg off failed. They caused Don Mauro to choke in a coughing fit, then when he suggested bringing some wine upstairs to the woman, Elise – she might be an ally – Don Mauro said no. She was a lace-maker and gone to deliver her work.
‘I’m ill!’ He gripped Nicola by the elbows. ‘You can’t refuse me!’ There were red, fever spots in his cheeks. ‘Yes or no?’
So, Nicola had to say ‘yes’.
*
Next morning, his carriage made slow progress, due to the number of streets being dug up to facilitate the improvements ordained by M. Haussman, the new Prefect of the Seine.
‘You’re late,’ accused Maur. ‘And you can’t wear that cassock.’
The patron of the café was somehow browbeaten into lending lay clothes and at last a disguised Nicola, smelling faintly of old beer, was on his way to the funeral of one renegade priest in the company of another. He had paid off the carriage. They were to wait here for the hearse to pass, then fall in behind it. He prayed ardently that there would not be trouble.
Then it arrived, a poor-looking contraption. A police officer called: ‘Constable, remove that man.’ And a priest was hustled off.
The procession walked down the middle of the street. Men wearing aprons and smocks came out of shops and manufactories along the route and stood with bare heads as it passed.
Don Mauro said: ‘He didn’t believe in hell.’
Outside the graveyard, another crowd was waiting and when the two mingled, disorder broke out. The police seemed to be clubbing people at random and word was passed down the line that very few mourners would be let into the graveyard.
‘There’s the poet Béranger!’ someone shouted.
Nicola craned his neck and glimpsed an old man leaning on the arm of a companion. ‘Do you want to take my arm?’ he asked Don Mauro who was galvanised with excitement.
‘Can you imagine a better funeral for a revolutionary,’ he said, then reddened. Had he been thinking of his own?
A quick-eyed fellow in a cloth cap caught his wrist. ‘Come on,’ he said in Italian, ‘we’ll squeeze in with the bigwigs.’
Quickly, he drew them past a police barrier in the wake of Béranger. Just behind them two or three gentlemen who had had the same idea were driven back and one shouted that he would sue the police. He had received a blow of a baton across his wrists as he tried to push back the barrier.
‘Bolognese, aren’t you?’ said the spry Italian and shook hands. ‘My name’s Viterbo.’
Nicola gave his name and, when Viterbo called him ‘Signor Santi’, felt ashamed of his disguise.
There were two squadrons of police armed with sabres on the left and right of the hemicycle. The coffin was lowered on ropes into a trench already filled with a row of coffins, and there were no speeches. As the grave-diggers shovelled in the earth an official told them, ‘Leave space for a child in case we get one.’ The filling in and levelling off was finished in silence.
‘Are we to put a cross?’
‘No.’
A grave-digger tied a bit of paper with the name Lammenais on a stick and planted it in the fresh earth.
Viterbo caught up with the other two outside the graveyard. He had been nosing about and learned that the coffin had cost eight francs and the hearse-driver been surprised to see a silver plate of false teeth in the corpse’s mouth – a queer thing for a pauper.
Turning into a small tabac, he and Don Mauro made the speeches which the dead man had forbidden at his graveside. They were garrulous and expectant as though the denuded funeral had left them dangling. Don Mauro was soon flushed with drink and kept saying that they must rid their minds of that ‘last orthodoxy, the notion of a good death’. When Nicola said he had to leave, Viterbo asked, ‘Does your old woman keep you on leading strings? We can’t,’ he urged, ‘let the poor corpse rot without drinking to his safe passage to the next world. He went without the help of the black beetles!’
‘What have you against priests?’
‘Joker!’ Viterbo elbowed Nicola in his borrowed waistcoat.
He promised to take care of Maur and a last glimpse showed the invalid to be in congenial company. By now other mourners were around the pair and an aviary of hands making signals so graphic that, even from afar, Nicola could read a convivial cynicism in the shaking of steepled fingers and in the irreverent sign of the fig.
*
When Nicola gave her a small gift of money, Maur’s woman revealed that her companion was ill in ways hard to understand. It was mental. ‘Monsieur,’ she called Nicola, although he had resumed his cassock, which showed she had no grounding in the religion lying at the root of her friend’s trouble. He, she disclosed, was in a sick panic lest, despite Monsieur Lammenais, there be a hell and Pius IX have the key to it. ‘Why,’ she sighed, ‘is the Pope so cruel?’ Maur, who would not bow the knee to the papal turncoat, was torn between this world and the next. He had nightmares. ‘He wouldn’t want you to know.’
Nicola could only pray, blasphemously, that his friend would continue to find solace in making the defiant sign of the fig.
*
Before leaving Paris, he took his remorse to a teacher at the seminary, a French Legitimist with a linenfold face, who warned that the World, the Flesh and the Devil had new disguises, namely Freedom and Love. Always remember, warned this Gothic figure, that indocile priests could cause a schism! Some were actually advocating the surrender of the Temporal Power and wanted His Holiness to be a purely spiritual leader! The priest spoke with pity for these soft-heads who wanted Pope Pius to divest himself. Was he to be a mere Italian bishop? Without land or independence! How then could he deal with Catholics living in other states? How pretend to be impartial? See where the false light leads! The Frenchman’s mouth compressed itself into a crack so taut that the top of his head looked in danger of falling off.
*
In Rome, Nicola found the same row raging, for Republicans had informed the people that the Gift of Constantine – which their priests had always told them was the basis for the existence of the Pope’s state – was a fable. This knowledge, though not new, was dangerous to disseminate at a time when Garibaldini were once more plotting to seize the Pope’s territory.
Besides, said Prospero, the habit of scepticism was bad for the simple. Legends were cohesive. ‘Tailors say you should think nine times before cutting your cloth and I say the same about throwing out a good legend. The one about the Emperor Constantine is very good. He,’ reminded Prospero, ‘was converted from paganism when he saw the cross shine in the sky with the words “In this sign shalt thou conquer!” He then did conquer his enemies and in gratitude gave the Church its own lands. We need a new vision like that.’
Prospero smiled. They were in his apartment – not the one in the Collegio dei Nobili Ecclesiastici; he now had his own. ‘May I offer you something?’ He stepped towards the bell pull. ‘No?’ His cassock suited him for
he had a waist like a girl’s. He was making headway in the Church. Already, he had taken his degree in utroque iure, had practised at the bar for two years and was launched on the ceremony of entering the prelacy, a leisurely affair which he described lightly, while admitting that it had been an ordeal, since he had had to submit himself to the separate scrutiny of the seven voting prelates of the Signatura Iustitiae, at each of whose lodgings he had been required to call. He had worn black. Only when His Holiness granted him a position would he put on a purple mantelet which – he could not resist showing it – he had already purchased.
‘In hoc signo vinces!’ quipped Nicola, fingering the cloth.
Prospero’s opinions were consistent. ‘We need less scepticism,’ he had told Nicola recently, ‘and more visions.’
This was an allusion to the visionary Caterina da Sezze, whose fortunes had prospered since Cardinal Amandi first investigated her case. Now famous and fashionable, she travelled regularly between her village and the papal court where she enjoyed the hospitality of the Pope’s steward, to whose children she was godmother and where her readiness to tell fortunes earned her a flow of cash which was managed by an entourage of three priests and a friar. Cardinal Amandi believed her to be an impostor, and had given Nicola the task of finding proof.
‘Don’t talk about it,’ His Eminence had advised and Nicola hadn’t. Yet his friend had said ‘We need more visions!’ Chance?
‘Everything about this case is delicate!’ Caterina, said the cardinal, had a great sway over His Holiness whom she kept exhorting to defend the Temporal Power. This message, supposedly relayed from heaven, was suspiciously timely.
If hers was an imposture, her attendant priests must be collaborating in it. Others too perhaps? The scale of the potential scandal was daunting. Souls could be troubled. ‘We must pray,’ said Amandi and, having done so, decided that Nicola should seek the truth in Caterina’s village.
*
It had taken him a while. Local reticence had had to be circumvented. Her village, a huddle of mucky lanes, owed it to her if it was on distinguished persons’ maps. For a foreigner – and anyone from over ten miles away was that – to ask probing questions could raise hackles. So, instead, he let it be known that he was writing a pious booklet about her and hoped to gather the sort of detail which, if one waited for her sanctity to be declared, would be surely lost. Her first tooth? Her early charity? Anything, he assured, was welcome.
‘I’m like a squirrel,’ he told the parish priest, recalling his schoolboy nickname. ‘I gather my hoard in the fruitful season.’
The priest, a poor devil in a patched cassock and shoes so scuffed they seemed to have sprouted scales, was overjoyed to have a Roman priest stay in his comfortless presbytery whose mattresses were stuffed with corncobs. They went shooting together, warmed themselves with plum brandy and played passionate games of draughts. Slowly, from scraps and hints dropped over weeks, a picture took shape. Caterina, far from being simple and humble, had had some education. Her priestly bodyguard kept her isolated. No, the parish priest had not recently heard her confession. She had her retinue for that. Nor could he remember much about the innocent days before she saw the apparitions which had been so frequently described. It was only after the three priests took her in hand that she had developed her fluency at relaying what her voices said. How had the three priests first heard of her? They had come to preach a mission and it was during this that she had first seen the Virgin. Now you could only approach her through them.
The priest, being human, felt pique. There was talk, he let slip, about her domestic arrangements. Mind, he told Nicola, he had reproved the gossips. But it had stuck in his head. He shook this self-reprovingly. Then, surprisingly, for the hour was late for a man who had to save charcoal and count candles, asked Nicola to hear his confession. Yes, here and now. He needed to deliver himself of the buzz in his mind.
Plopping on his knees, he told under the seal of secrecy the story being whispered from village to village in that desolate, superstitious, brigand-ridden region. It was that the saint was no saint but the concubine of three cassocked devils who gave her powers to tell fortunes, predict the weather and perform small, surprising acts which gained her sway over people’s minds including, Lord save us, that of the Pope, to whom she gave bad advice so that he would end up losing the Gift of Constantine.
‘How,’ marvelled the priest, ‘did people in this village hear of that? I myself had forgotten what it was and had to look it up!’ Uneasiness widened his ingenuous eyes and his upper lip quivered. But his information was hard to dismiss. It came from the woman who laundered Caterina’s sheets. ‘She says Caterina has a lover!’
*
When Nicola left the village, the parrocco was like a man bereaved. He would miss their games of draughts and Nicola’s company on long hikes and lonely evenings. He had no hope of ever again finding so engaging a companion.
‘It’s a Godforsaken place,’ he joked bravely, as they embraced. ‘That’s one reason why I don’t believe in Caterina’s visions. Why would God cease to forsake us?’ Then he pressed a bottle of home-made brandy on his departing guest and, for dipping in it, some local biscuits hard enough to break a tooth.
Nicola who, for professional reasons, had set out to win the man’s heart, felt a mixture of elation and remorse.
In Rome, he told Amandi under the seal what he had learned under the seal and they agreed that they lacked evidence. Perhaps a reliable witness had better be slipped into the papal steward’s household. This move, though made with caution, must have come to the attention of Father Grassi, S.J., for he paid a call on Nicola and, coming quickly to the nub of his concern, asked why he had chosen to enter the Church.
Grassi’s face was purposeful. There was a jut to his jaw and his eyes were like gun bores. Did Nicola, he asked, want to destroy or to restore our power? This was the only question now. And closely connected to it was whether French Catholics could make their Emperor keep his troops here to protect us from Garibaldi. We must not make it hard for them. Miracles were salutary and necessary.
‘But not tricks?’
No, no, said the Jesuit irritably. Of course not! But to the eye of the sceptic truths could look like tricks. Sceptics had a way of getting hold of the wrong end of things and taking the part for the whole. Remember the story of the three blind men and the elephant. Each thought he had the whole truth, but one felt only the trunk and another the tail. Anyway, there were myths on both sides. Take the rubbish being talked about the death of Father Bassi! Bassi died howling! Shaking like an aspen tree!
‘I spoke to Father Tasso at the time,’ said Nicola coldly, ‘and he said otherwise. He had spoken to the confortatore!’
‘Tasso was a mythomaniac. I,’ said Grassi, ‘spoke to Monsignor Bedini who talked to the Austrian firing squad.’
The two men were themselves shaking like aspens. Then Grassi changed tactics. He had not, he said, Nicola’s art of winning people. ‘I am not seductive,’ he said. ‘It’s a gift which carries responsibilities. You’d better be sure you’re right.’
Nicola was now sure that Grassi knew of his visit to Caterina’s village. The source must be her priestly acolytes – who else visited the place? – which in turn proved their connivance with the Society of Jesus.
Grassi said sadly, ‘I have succeeded only in making you suspect me. Yet, as priests, our aims must be the same: to preserve the faith. Just remember that the cult of “truth” can be a fetish! One may be holding the elephant’s tail!’
Nicola was troubled, and might have been influenced by the Jesuit’s appeal, if Amandi’s spy had not discovered that Caterina was pregnant, which put an end to his role in the affair. Events took their course and in February 1857 the Holy office condemned her to prison ‘for deliberately inventing apparitions of the Most Blessed Virgin and Jesus Christ, for laying fraudulent claims to prophetic gifts and for immorality’. Her friar and priests got three years’ penal servitude api
ece, but the Jesuits got off scot-free, although they had probably engineered the whole thing.
*
Donna Geltrude, a faded beauty, was bloomless but elegant, with eyes like cobwebbed pansies.
Nicola was grateful for the ritual of tea which allowed him to get his bearings while sampling thin sandwiches and remembering Flavio’s account of his single meeting with his mother. He imagined her, who was still fine in a sketchy way, proffering the tips of her fingers for a kiss, then simply walking away. She had an insubstantial look, as though ready at any moment to do just such a disappearing act – and must have become skilled at performing it. She had been living in retirement, she told him, in her villa near Imola and also in Paris. It was there that she had heard that Flavio was planning to marry a circus performer.
‘Miss Ella? I suspect,’ Nicola told her, ‘you have been misinformed.’
‘Ah?’ Her teacup rose, then paused. ‘You have heard of her?’
‘Flavio and I are old friends.’
‘I suppose your own mother was so close that you cannot conceive of a mother like me?’
Nicola explained that, on the contrary, he, like Flavio, had been brought up in institutions.
Air evaded Donna Geltrude who began to cough. Getting it back with difficulty, she managed to say, ‘I have no feelings now. Only maladies. Tell me, Father Santi, have you any idea what Flavio feels about me? Please be candid.’
‘If he feels anything,’ said Nicola, ‘it is anger.’
‘I see!’ More catching for air. ‘Is that what may make him marry a circus rider? Revenge? A shaming of our name which I tried to deny him? I have been wondering whether if he knew why – there is a why – he would feel less bitter?’
Miss Foljambe now offered to withdraw but her friend said she was welcome to hear what she had to say. People, Donna Geltrude knew, thought her a monster, but their imaginings were more monstrous than the truth which, for good or ill, she wanted to tell to Father Santi, who could decide whether to pass it on to Flavio.
The Judas Cloth Page 38
