As they talked, Prospero inhaled the fustiness cocooning the old bachelor’s quarters. Dogs’ coats contributed to it and so did a tang of gunpowder and memories of fruit. It was a complex, masculine smell quite unlike the one in his own rooms in Rome. Pasolini offered brandy from a bottle frosted with lichen which, when scraped with a fingernail, released a chill, subaqueous gleam. Earlier in the day, he had ridden his horse across a stream, which was why his boots and britches were steaming by the fire and he himself in need of a restorative glass.
‘You’ll join me, Monsignore? I suppose I call you that now?’
Prospero, forestalling the old Mason’s irony, explained that his was a purely titular rank since his diocese – Philippi – fell outside the control of the Holy See. Like other Roman administrators, he had been awarded a bishopric in partibus infidelium – though, indeed, distinctions between real and titular had faded since Italian bishops were so often prevented from taking up their duties.
‘Some would say, Doctor, that this is infidel country.’
The doctor mused. ‘Infidel? But to what can people be said to be unfaithful at a time of change? For you it’s simple, but I, you see, consider that we had a right to seek unity and that we now owe loyalty to the king who achieved it. Some, however, want further changes.
Prospero laughed. The doctor shook his head. ‘I know, I know! When we squabble, you feel triumphant. But that doesn’t prove you’re right.’ Pouring himself and Prospero a little more plum brandy – it was fiery stuff – he said, ‘Speaking in confidence, some are up to their old games. Not here. Close to Rome on our side of the border they’ve hidden guns. A certain prefect found out and telegraphed his superiors for orders, and do you know the answer he got?’ Like paper exposed to heat, the doctor’s face shrivelled darkly.
‘They told him to help the gun-runners!’
‘Bravo, Monsignore! You understand the world!’ The doctor lowered his voice. ‘Turin is giving the Democrats rope. To crack down on them would divide our ranks. Besides, they can be used. Last spring, if the Pope had died and an uprising taken place in Rome, our troops would have gone in to put it down and, naturally, once in, they would have stayed.’
Prospero was not surprised. Conspirators, Mérode had told him, were spending a fortune trying to corrupt the Army. And certain cardinals were being vetted and courted. The Italians wanted to see the tiara pass into pliant hands.
It was then that Prospero had confronted Amandi with a straight question: was he intriguing? Amandi had furiously denied the charge and they had not spoken since.
*
‘Omens …’ Cesco was saying.
His brother didn’t listen. His mind was in the doctor’s brownish room where muzzles rested on padded paws and golden eyes flicked. He thought of the dogs as weaving the old man into the landscape from whose mesh they would retrieve any game he might shoot and to which they surely returned with each blink of those mild, vigilant eyes. Sometimes, a limb twitched or a canine groan seemed to sense and vent their master’s feelings – for the old conspirator was a prey to melancholy. Political triumph was as ashes in his mouth – and how could Prospero not rejoice? His joy, though, was tempered. He longed to taste those ashes himself!
As he and Cesco finished breakfast, they were joined by Nicola and talk about being thirteen at table was revived. Cesco was impatient for the parocco’s answer, but Prospero refused to harry the priest. Instead, he shifted the topic to some silver which his brother had bought. It had belonged to Il Passatore, a brigand who had got his name from his secondary activity of smuggling – ‘passing’ – men across borders in the days before unity. When he was killed, the police sold off unclaimed objects from his ill-gotten haul. Cesco displayed tableware from which unknown monograms had been erased, then recalled legends about the outlaw whose defiance of papal troops had given him an ambiguous appeal. Withdrawing after each outrage to die reedy thickets in the marsh, he and his band were credited with acts whose immoderacy roused awe. They had enjoyed hospitality in safe houses all over the province where, it was claimed, they had dined with their women on the finest fare brought by accomplices from who knew where? The kitchens of great palaces perhaps? Conceivably the Legate’s own? Menus of these banquets had been celebrated in broadsheets which were bought by the hungry and angry as finite substitutes for prayer. Food was what the popular imagination relished: cakes, roasts, jellies, sweetbreads and kidneys swimming in gravy. Dreams about these fed the fantasy better than any Eucharist. Spleen pâté flavoured with anchovies and capers, thrush pie, roasted eel and those fanciful roasts consisting, say, of larks inside pigeons inside guinea-hens inside geese: an ascending image of hierarchy whose ultimate human eater enjoys the supremacy of a lion. Sometimes, it was alleged, the bandits had distributed basketsfull to the needy, and the surplus from their banquets had fed a village. People hung chromolithographs of Il Passatore on their walls alongside those of Garibaldi and Bassi, ‘the honest priest’. Of the three, the bandit was the most congenial. A creature of the night, he focused old fancies about witchlike figures who defied the laws of probability and avenged the grim lives of the downtrodden. When your oppressor was a priest, you could, said Cesco, be driven to paganism, since religion ceased to console.
‘He gave them something solid to dream about.’
Prospero let this pass. He held his peace until Cesco said, ‘They say he was the Pope’s bastard.’
‘Who?’
‘Il Passatore. He looked a bit like Papa Mastai and …’
Prospero was outraged. ‘The Italians,’ he hissed, for his voice was failing him, ‘are brigands and their defence is to call their victim the father of a brigand! Venal hacks lie and idiots listen!’ The other two looked shocked. ‘It could,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘be lethal!’
‘Lethal?’ Nicola, cutting himself a slice of bread, was taken aback.
‘Just think about it!’ ordered Prospero. ‘We know the plans of the Pope’s enemies! They were in the Opinione of last April for all to see. Counting on his death, they kill his reputation as a prelude perhaps to worse! Like it or not, though, his health has recovered.’
Nicola, his knife poised in wonder, asked, ‘Why wouldn’t I like it?’
Prospero left the room. He might have left the villa if this had not meant leaving the parocco to dine alone with Cesco and his priest-baiting friends. Nicola too needed protection, though for the opposite reason: he could fall under their influence, being in some ways a nincompoop! His orphan-state had, in Prospero’s opinion, left him without instinct. A fallen nestling, reared by hand, cannot be safely returned to the wild.
Back in his room, he confronted his locked box. It was, he thought, like Pandora’s, then caught himself. No. Things were not like any more. Things were. This was infidel country! The metaphors had grown real. Words poisoned. Words killed. And nobody had the right to be innocent.
Rearranging his pamphlets, he fancied that his fingers tingled at the contact. The French ones were the most dangerous, since they misled the Emperor’s electorate in the hope that it would oblige him to cease protecting the Pope.
Outside the window, a horseman in dusty black was jogging up the drive. The parocco! Eager to reach him before Cesco did, Prospero locked his box and ran down. His father, however, had got there first. The count, whose days were spent vaguely pottering, welcomed any diversion.
‘I’ll call Daniele,’ he was telling the visitor. ‘He’ll take your horse. Brisk day isn’t it? Who did you say you were?’
The parish priest said he was the parish priest.
‘No,’ said the count. ‘He doesn’t come here. He’s a bigot and I’m told a bit of a rustic who’s not really up to a parish like this. We used to have the Pope here once. He was our bishop. This is my son, Monsignor Stanga. Prospero, this gentleman is looking for the parish priest. I’ve been telling him that he won’t find him here, but it’s come back to me that there was talk of inviting him so we wouldn’t be thirteen at tab
le. Do you know about that?
Prospero managed to get rid of his father and tried to apologise for him, but the priest was not in the mood for soothing.
‘I have been thinking,’ said the priest, ‘of Christ’s command to pray for those who persecute and calumniate us. A man can become obsessed by petty things. What, after all, is a dead dog stinking up one’s well when compared with His Passion? Or petty insults? I will dine with you.’
Clearly, he was indifferent to the whys and wherefores of the invitation he was accepting in such a sacrificial spirit. Its Prime Mover did not, he had decided, dwell in the villa.
When he left, Prospero returned to his room, where he spent the next hour reading a summary of an English pamphlet printed on cheap paper which blurred the ink. It had been published in Holborn, London, and was entitled: Revelations by Alessandro Gavazzi, ex-Friar of the Barnabite Order concerning the True and Veritable Origins, Life and Deeds of Pope Pius IX, based on the Author’s own Privileged Knowledge, together with Documents obtained during the Roman Republic from the Archives of the Apostolic Chancery and Other Sources:
In this brochure, the writer who, after being a priest of the Catholic faith, became a missionary for the Protestant one, brings to light an episode in the life of the Roman Pontiff to which few are privy.
Lest any wonder why the author waited until now to reveal what is narrated below, it was from reluctance to divulge privileged information. Such scruples, however, have been swept away by the publication of the Syllabus of Errors wherein Mastai throws down the gauntlet to the modern world.
In 1831, patriots in the Papal States were encouraged by the French Revolution of the previous July and a body of them began to march on Rome, heading first for Spoleto, where Mastai-Ferretti was archbishop. Misinformed about their strength and fearing for his life, he fled to the hills where he took refuge in a Capuchin convent. What happened there has not until now been told.
It was March. The nights were cold and to this convent had come scores of other refugees. Driving their animals before them, they converged on the convent which was soon so packed that latecomers had to sleep in barns and haylofts.
Your author was there too and dined with the archbishop, who was in a feverish state and strolled out after the meal, saying that he wanted to clear his head.
Prospero pushed the thing away, drew it back and sighed. Gavazzi had made a name for himself in England and America, where his preacher’s talents gave force to his renegade’s rage. The story – Prospero ran a practised eye down the pages – combined stock elements with some odd enough to suggest that this episode had not been invented from whole cloth. Gavazzi described a group of women who had found accommodation in a wash-house, their efforts to make themselves comfortable, his own good offices, and the indiscretions of a young nun who had befriended a girl with whom, alleged the ex-abate, Mastai now made love in a shooting blind. She told him the girl’s story: a sad one of incest or near-incest with a clerical uncle living in the mountains some way from here. The nun was from these mountains herself, which was why the girl had confided in her. She understood the shifts to which people could be driven by isolation. Now, the girl had wandered off and Gavazzi helped look for her. However, it was a bright night. People had lit bonfires and it seemed unlikely that she could fail to find her way back. A more pressing danger was that rebels might come here in search of food. Accordingly, he and one or two others resolved to keep watch. They posted themselves some way from the convent and it was during this vigil that he portrayed himself as indulging in musings which prepared his later apostasy. A crisis of conscience. A description of a faith’s first, premonitory stagger. He was a young man then and affected, as much as anyone, by the uncertainty of the moment – as much, he implied, as Mastai himself.
It was possible, remember, that the march on Rome might succeed in separating the sceptre from the tiara. A pope had just died and the voices of the old popes had diminished authority. As the abbé Lammenais wrote of a papal encyclical, ‘its lines are like the swaddlings of a mummy: it speaks to a world which no longer exists; its voice is akin to those dim sounds which echo in the sacred tombs of the priests at Memphis’. Why should choices made in the past bind the present? How could men who could not foresee it legislate for a changing future? These were the questions agitating me on that clouded night.
Meanwhile, here I was, a sentinel on the watch lest the volunteers of a new order come to rob us. Rob? Requisition? Emancipate? Free? It would be another decade before I could resolve those doubts. Luckily, nobody came except my replacement who relieved me just after dawn. I chatted with him a while, then returned slowly to the convent, for I was in no hurry to get back to those sad huddles of people whose bonfires would have gone out, whose babies would be crying, and whose doubts and fears would force me to seem more authoritarian and sure than I felt. As a priest, I represented the regime and wished I didn’t.
Prospero resisted an impulse to tear the thing up. Its slyness infuriated him. Also its apparent sincerity. Undoubtedly, it would be read and would do harm! The story was like an opera libretto. Abstracted in his troubled thoughts, the ex-abate now stumbled on the shooting blind where the archbisop and the girl had spent the night. Instinctively, he hid behind a rock – for, said he, a poor preacher does not willingly antagonise an archbishop – and saw first one, then the other, emerge. Later, the women in the wash-house told him that the girl had returned safe and sound. She had been overtaken by darkness and, fearing to lose her footing and fall into a ravine, preferred to wait for daylight before returning. She had, said her friend the nun, spent the night in a shooting blind. A sensible girl, the abate observed. Yes, said the nun, she’s resourceful enough.
Months later, finding himself near the nuns’ convent, he called on the young pretty one and was received in the parlour.
I have forgotten her name and perhaps had already forgotten it then. A sworn celibate has to be an athlete of oblivion and I was as quick to detect the onset of temptation as a shepherd to sniff snow on the wind. When I did, I turned tail. How do otherwise? I was already locked in a struggle with one fever: the doubt which was, eighteen years later and after many vicissitudes, to bring me here to England. But that is another story.
I asked about the girl and the nun avoided my eye. She too had lost her candour and was now as glumly forbidding as any Mistress of Novices could have wished. The girl, she lowered her voice, was to have a baby in a few weeks. And then? She shrugged. I left and, although I met many such cases …
Here Prospero’s pencil wrote in a furious comment: ‘Many? Author tries to portray old Papal States as sink of immorality, whereas they were, notoriously, as chaste and decent as old patriarchal Rome!’
… this one stuck in my mind: the sad pretty girl and the sad pretty nun. By coincidence …
‘Ha!’ wrote Prospero’s sceptical pencil.
… while preaching near Bologna, I stayed at the villa of Count Stanga …
Abashed, the pencil slipped from his hand.
… an ardent Liberal who had contacts with my order. We, the Barnabites, partly because of our old rivalry with the Jesuits, were inclined to Liberalism and, because of our access to the pulpit and the confessional, were able to subtly spread news and ideas. Also, because of our itinerant life as mission preachers, we often smuggled letters for our friends. It may seem an odd activity for members of the regular clergy, but ours was a state where the very authorities which we were obliged to venerate as our spiritual superiors were often corrupt and oppressive as temporal lords.
Countess Stanga’s maiden name, being the same as the girl’s, brought her story to mind and when I told it, she recalled having had cousins, now dead of cholera, who must have been the girl’s parents and said another relative, Monsignor Amandi, might know more. She put us in touch. I again told the story. The Monsignore promised to investigate and, some weeks later, asked me to do him a favour. He wanted the child delivered to a wet nurse and, desiring to pu
t as few people in the secret as could be managed, turned to me who was already cognizant of it and whose movements, since I was a travelling preacher, would not attract attention. I agreed. He provided a carriage and a female servant for the journey and I duly delivered the infant who received the name …
This time Prospero did not resist his impulse, but burned the pamphlet in his charcoal hand-warmer, scorching his sleeve in the process. It was filth. One did not fulminate anathemas at filth. Pouring water from a ewer, he washed his hands which were black with the pamphlet’s ink and a residue of ash.
*
Cesco’s birthday dinner was not a success. The count had taken too much laudanum. There were thirteen diners and news of Cesco’s engagement unleashed some unseemly ribaldry. Prospero, distrusting his emotions, sat at the other end of the table from Nicola, the doctor and the parocco, and so was unable to monitor their conversation, although the words he did catch revealed its topic to be dogs.
The count’s hand seemed to lose co-ordination and he kept feeding himself with an imaginary spoon. ‘Qui n’avait ja-, ja-, ja …’ he sang under his breath.
In a freak lull, the doctor’s whisper flew up the table confiding that, while doing his rounds, he often persuaded people to ignore Rome’s orders and come to terms with the new regime. ‘I tell them to vote!’ Had he said this? Nicola and the parocco looked insufficiently shocked and Prospero was prevented from hearing more by Martelli’s chatter.
‘Charity …’ argued Martelli.
Prospero blotted him out. He would not bandy words with a man who sat in a parliament dedicated to the seizure of Rome.
‘… jamais navigué!’
‘What breed?’ the doctor asked the priest.
‘Oh, it had been dead for weeks and was unrecognisable. Big though. It could have been a gundog.’
The Judas Cloth Page 53
