Mindful of this, Nicola forbade himself to rile the unspeakable Randi who might yet – it consoled him to think – have to suffer his own share of humiliations, since the Italians, if they took Rome, would not be tender with men like him.
*
Gianni begged Nicola to forgive him if he didn’t serve out his notice. He would forgo pay, but must leave now. He was a small man and had a family to look out for. ‘Please believe me, Monsignore, if anything I said could help His Eminence, I’d say it. As God is my witness, I would! But it wouldn’t, would it? Justice, Monsignore, is something we’ll all see in heaven, please God!’ Then Gianni began kissing the bishop’s hand and weeping all over it. ‘I’ll pray for His Eminence,’ he promised. ‘I’ll have masses said for his soul.’
Two footmen were leaving too. Having, like most of their kind, worked for tips only, they had no pay to forgo. Questions threw them into a mute terror. A third man who had been present when the cardinal was brought back denied having seen any sign of blood or foul play. None, Monsignore! Staring Nicola in the eye. Their departure was like a last funeral rite for, without the livery they had worn in Amandi’s service, they dwindled to near-invisibility.
That same evening the news was that six more bishops had left Rome. All were members of the Opposition.
15 July. Evening
Darboy had gone to the Vatican with like-minded bishops – Mainz, Dijon, Lyons and the Primate of Hungary – to plead for changes to the form of the definition which would make it acceptable to the consciences of the Minority and secure a unanimous placet on the 18th.
‘It’s an olive branch,’ his secretary told all who came for news. ‘We must pray that His Holiness will not refuse it.’ The Church was infallible. All agreed about that. But were there two infallibilities? Papal and ecclesiastical? Or, more reasonably, was the Pope infallible only when he had consulted his bishops and spoke as the voice of tradition?
16 July
The sun blazed. Piazze were griddles and jokes about the fires in which Pius was roasting bishops no longer amused anyone. There was a scum of sweat on the horses which drove Nicola to the Council, and when he pointed this out, the coachman was so surly that he feared he too might be about to give notice. He put off thinking about this, though, for the public crisis was peaking and by the session’s end, when Prospero fell into step beside him, the two felt a precarious bond. Both were sick of strife.
This morning, each bishop had been handed the text of a protest, signed by the five Council Presidents, against pamphlets which impugned the Council’s freedom. Cardinal d’Angelis then read it aloud with indignant relish. ‘Calumnious’, ‘disgraceful’, ‘falsehoods’ and ‘filthiest lies’ were the only official responses to the Minority’s anguish. The bishops were then asked to stand up in token of approval and to sign and hand in their copies for the Vatican archives ad perpetuam rei memoriam.
Nicola, caught unawares, was already on his feet when he heard Majority members yell ‘Anathema!’ at those who had failed to rise. Only then did he see that the Council was being tricked into attesting to its own moral unanimity and that this was Mastai’s answer to yesterday’s delegation. Promptly, he sat back down and held hard to his seat when men next to him tried to wrestle him up.
‘Don’t be foolish!’ called Prospero. ‘It’s too late!’
‘All have stood up!’ shouted a bishop.
‘Not all!’ protested several voices.
‘All!’ bayed the Majority, maddened by victory. And indeed the seated men were concealed by those who stood and their voices smothered by the roar.
When members streamed out, the younger men who sat on the lower benches were ahead. Prospero told Nicola, ‘I said mass this morning for Amandi.’
‘Do you believe he died of a heart attack?’
Prospero’s eyes flinched. ‘I won’t pretend not to understand. I felt as you do when Count Rossi died. But, later, I saw that I had gone a little mad. Won’t you come and talk about it? This evening?’
Nicola agreed gratefully, for he did feel a little mad. Also unshelled and lonely, so that the prospect of an evening alone was almost as bad as joining the Minority in their ingenuous huddles, where they would shame him by their surprise at the Curia’s new manoeuvre, and by the pity or contempt or whatever it was that foreign bishops felt for men who lived here. Probably contempt. For why think their equation of doctor Romanus with asinus Germanus did not apply to him? Amandi, who had known the courts of Europe, had been one of themselves. What, without his patronage, could Nicola seem but a providentially strayed asinus?
So he looked forward almost with tenderness to the evening with Prospero and arrived full of expectancy of small, consoling intimacies and silences and ease: things for which he only now knew he had been aching. Even talking nonsense together would be cheering! Even being sad! But, almost at once, he sensed that Prospero was on, rather than off, duty and found himself wondering whether he had been invited from friendship or policy and whether he and Prospero were still friends. It would be hard if new associates thought him an asinus and old ones a renegade!
Cheated then of inconsequentiality and closeness, he had to listen to a defence of the Sodalitium Pianum, an experiment which, said Prospero, though shelved pro tern, must one day be revived. How else keep a check on the hordes of foreigners who now came here to vote? There was already talk of de-Italianising the Church! And in the name of what? As he spoke, Prospero kept looking expectantly at Nicola who only half listened and would not reply.
‘Do you think men who disagree as much as we do,’ he asked instead, ‘can be friends? Or is friendship another “Liberal fallacy”?’ Laughing, he held up his glass as though hoping for Prospero’s body and blood or at least a toast to old cordiality. But all he got was Marsala which he drank too fast while his friend said something dampening about charity and how attachments could offend against it. Nicola, said Prospero, let his heart rule his head. Witness his mad suspicions over poor Amandi’s death. ‘You thought of him as a father, didn’t you?’
We had too many fathers, groaned the needy and now slightly inebriated Nicola. And brothers in Christ. ‘It’s a stolen vocabulary,’ he complained. ‘Stolen! Even Grassi calls me dilecte fili! In his mouth it sounds like a lie. Everything does.’
‘That’s because Jesuit militancy envisaged persecutions of a simpler sort than those we see today. Grassi would make a splendid martyr but won’t get the chance.’
‘So instead he sacrifices others.’
‘You are sour! Is it because you think Amandi was your father? He wasn’t, you know. He wasn’t your blood father.’
‘I never – how do you know? What …? You were cousins. Do you know something?’ Nicola felt strangely out of control. His body seemed to have got news which hadn’t reached his mind. ‘Blood father,’ he repeated, and his blood effervesced while his mind viewed this phenom enon with surprise. At the same time, he felt annoyed that, having come to find a friend, he should instead be deprived of a father. Not that he had thought of Amandi as literally that. Especially not since learning about poor Sister Paola. That conjunction was not likely. But he had loved him like one and no mere begetter was going to displace the dead man in his loyalties – which must be Prospero’s aim! He was on duty all right!
‘Even if you do know something,’ Nicola warned, ‘it won’t change my sense that Mastai and the climate he created were to blame for Amandi’s death. And don’t ask if I’ve lost my faith, because the faith we have now isn’t in Christ. He was meek, but Mastai wants to win! Remember his foot on the Melkite patriarch’s neck, and how the Armenian bishops had to flee from his police!’
Prospero came and held Nicola’s shoulders. ‘You’re talking away faith,’ he warned. ‘You’re like a man who needs cold water thrown on him. So I’m going to tell you something to give you pause. Mastai is your father, your spiritual father, but also your father of the loins. I wouldn’t lie about this.’
Nicola made him re
peat what he had said and felt the words tear at his flesh. He also felt something harden in his throat, then nausea. ‘Wouldn’t you lie about it?’ he wondered slow-wittedly. ‘I suppose not. Unless it’s a parable? Is it? No?’ There was a long moment of silence, during which the nausea got worse and he had trouble breathing. Then he asked, ‘Have you proof?’
He didn’t want it, felt befouled and humiliated – yet saw a symmetry here. It was as though the divisions and turmoil which had for years been moving closer to the city had now reached inside his own head. His skull thrummed. It was an assaulted belfry, a sickened aviary, and through its din he could just hear Prospero tell about ‘pamphlets which …’ Distaste kept cutting off that voice. Then words slid through. He heard ‘most were patent bosh’, then the word ‘censorship’ pulled him up, for was he not engaging in it himself? He, like the sick body politic, was baffling off the inevitable. He started to listen then and learned, without surprise, that the Abate Gavazzi was Prospero’s source and that, though he had not named Nicola in his pamphlet, Prospero’s inquiries among his own aunts and cousins had supplied and confirmed the identification. ‘After all, your mother was a connection of ours.’ Prospero, though loath to root in the midden of scurrility, had had to take the Gavazzi pamphlet seriously, for professional …
‘Can I see it?’
‘I destroyed it.’
‘You can’t have! You were reading for the Congregatio Indicis! Surely you’re not allowed to do that!’
‘What kind of a waxwork dummy do you think I am, Nicola? I destroyed it because of you! Putting books on the Index draws attention to them and I didn’t want you ever to see this one. I couldn’t foresee this conversation, could I?’
‘There must be other copies?’
‘In England? Maybe. Though the thing was ephemeral. Printed on paper destined to end up wiping bums. You could track Gavazzi down. But take my word for it, the story fits. As for your mother …’
‘I know about her. Don’t say anything!’ Nicola was offended that Prospero thought of the secret as ‘a midden of scurrility’. At the same time he felt something like this himself – but not because of poor Sister Paola.
‘You know who she was?’ Prospero clearly doubted this. He thinks, guessed Nicola, that I fancy it’s some lady who does me credit: Donna Clara Colonna or the Countess Spaur.
‘I know it was the nun.’ This, he saw, had taken some wind out of Prospero’s sails.
She, said Prospero, as though pedantically eager to establish that they meant the same nun, was in the news again. ‘She is the object of a local cult and people are calling her a saint.’
Nicola closed his eyes and saw her palimpsest of a face. Greyed and roughened like salt cod, it used to glow as she reminisced. Sister Paola! Her he had accepted without difficulty, for an affinity had been growing between them even as he was reading his story into the tapestry of hers. He had not, it seemed, read it aright and her ramblings would have to be wrenched into a new pattern. Unless Prospero was wrong? Nicola prayed for this. Better the boy Bonaparte or even the incestuous uncle, both of whom were safely dead! She too, poor gallant creature, must have had felt this and confused the trail. She had brought him a new dimension of himself, a new Santi – though, to be sure, that name was false. Should it be Mastai? The mockery scorched him. The Pope’s bastard! It was like the name of some obscene sweetmeat such as those cakes called Nun’s farts or – stop, Nicola! Yes, he must stop – yet was intensely curious about his story and would later, he promised himself, put together the scraps he had in his head and find his truth. She – almost as if she’d known! – had given him the clues.
‘One trembles to think – well, better not even to consider the possible ramifications!’ Prospero was referring to the people’s cult of the dead nun and how a makeshift shrine had had to be removed. ‘I presume you know about what has been happening in Imola. Your Vicar General must have written.’
But Nicola had been neglecting the diocese and letters from it. The two fell silent, for the story was explosive and repugnant to them both. Turning to less charged matters, Prospero talked of his brother and of how he never visited the villa now. Why go to quarrel? ‘If I couldn’t stand my father’s Byronic patriotism, how put up with Cesco’s? Those rigged elections! Church property taken by fraud! No doubt, he knows on which side his bread is buttered! That’s why I have always thought of you, Nicola, as my true younger brother. Personal ambition moves neither of us. I hope you believe that of me, and even,’ smiling, ‘of my friends.’
‘I can’t believe it of their leaders. Manning …’
But Prospero said the Englishman was dedicated to strengthening a Church which often, these days, could seem as frail as St Peter’s did during the silver illuminations.
He was referring to that phase of festive evenings when the lanterns ranged along the basilica’s contours first began to glow. Lit earlier but invisible until dusk, they emerged with the slow radiance of stars, and for moments this figured a heartbreaking fragility before being overtaken by a conflagration, ‘the golden illumination’ which pyrotechnists made to whirl along columns and cupolas in a river of fire. It was, of course, charged with meanings, for this was a city of symbols which of late had begun to say different things to different people.
What they said to Mastai was that he must prepare to be martyred. This, said Prospero, explained his harshness with the Opposition whose concerns could only seem petty to a man engaged in a dialogue with invisible powers. ‘The external world can seem like an encumbrance. He deals with it summarily.’
‘Including, if your story is true, myself.’
‘We can’t judge, Nicola! We can’t imagine the circumstances. There are moments outside of time which, when time takes up again, reproach a man forever.’
‘Amandi thought him mad!’
‘It’s only a word. Randi used it of you. It’s late. I’ll walk you home.’
They walked towards the river whose shrunken current gleamed like a lazy reptile. Reeds rattled in a pre-dawn breeze. Prospero pointed to some lighted windows. Plots?
‘The Minority? Surely it’s too late?’
But Prospero had been thinking of the Italians.
Nicola asked, ‘If you found you had a son you’d never known about – it could happen – what would you do?’
Prospero thought about this. ‘Nothing. It’s usually the safest course. If he were in need I would do something for him. Anonymously. As we both know from that source of everyday knowledge, the confessional, this city is full of such cases. Blood is a materialistic fetish and significant only in your case because of your loyalty to someone you mistook for a blood relative. Mastai probably doesn’t know about you.’
17 July
It was the eve of the final vote. Archbishop Darboy was ill and Nicola feared missing him altogether since the bishops would start leaving after tomorrow’s vote if not before.
In the morning, he attended a meeting of the Minority leaders where, in Darboy’s absence, the Hungarian, Haynald, urged a course of action of which he would have approved. This was that all go boldly to tomorrow’s Solemn Session and, following their consciences, in the face of God, Pope and the representatives of the world’s peoples, forthrightly maintain their ‘non placet’.
‘Hear, hear!’
Haynald’s infectious courage had carried the meeting, when Bishop Dupanloup came in late in a state of sickened scruple and argued that although having voted non placet five days ago, they could not vote placet now, neither could they vote non placet in defiance of a revered and threatened Pope. The Catholic world would be scandalised. The word, Nicola saw, worked like a ‘close Sesame’ on bishops’ minds. Limply – for, with Lord Acton gone and Darboy absent, there was no one strong enough to ginger them – the very men who had been acclaiming Haynald’s proposal now agreed to Dupanloup’s compromise, which was to draft a letter to Pius and stay away from tomorrow’s Public Session.
The letter, they agreed
with relief, would register the Council’s lack of unanimity and could be used, when it reconvened, as grounds for challenging the decree. The fight could be deferred. Nobody need go out on a limb. It was the perfect middle way.
Leaving the meeting in angry disappointment, Nicola made for home. He seemed to be coming down with malaria and certainly mal aria was what all had been breathing, rather than the breath of the Holy Spirit on which Mastai was still counting.
Feeling increasingly feverish, Nicola was about to take to his bed when he received an unexpected summons. He was to go to the Vatican this evening for an audience with the Pope.
*
‘Tonsured lackeys!’
The hiss mingled with the engine’s steam.
The Opposition bishops were in full retreat and extra carriages had been hooked up to the train to accommodate those leaving Rome before tomorrow’s Solemn Session. The Stazione Termini was filled with valises, trunks, boxes of china, books, bedding, favourite chalices and vestments donated by pious patronesses. In orbit around each departing bishop wheeled friends, servants, secretaries and commiserating sympathisers come to see them off.
‘… lackeys!’
Monseigneur Dupanloup tried to think he had imagined that hiss, which was not impossible since he had lately grown very thin-skinned. Since coming here, he had been pointedly snubbed by Pope Pius, who was well aware of Dupanloup’s personal fondness for him – not to say ‘love’. That was a word often taken in vain, but Dupanloup, a fiery, tender man, had opened his heart to it. In France, where the great effort of his generation of priests had been to reconcile their country with their church, he had found souls tempered in that difficult combat and bound himself to them in ways which, it was sometimes said, smuggled some of the devotion due to God into relations with his fellows. But was it due only to God? What about loving one’s neighbour? There it was again, sibilant and sour! This time, definitely, he had heard the hiss.
The Judas Cloth Page 68
