The Judas Cloth (18 page)

Bassi gripped his hand. ‘The ultras are calling Gavazzi the Anti-Christ. I say he’s Christ in the temple. He preaches dangerously against some of the higher clergy.’

‘He doesn’t go far enough.’

‘How far would you go?’

‘I,’ said the lawyer, ‘would get rid of the Church and of property too. Half measures are a waste of time. And false friends worry me more than enemies: the Pope, for instance.’

Bassi, when hurt, looked like a girl. His hair curled over the small, white collar of his black habit and his eyes grew sad.

‘Now you’re attacking me,’ he told the lawyer. ‘How do you think I manage to survive when I’m attacked by the
oscuranti
and then by you? Not by myself. How could I? I keep going, thanks to my faith, and so do the people. It’s all we’ve got. Why do you want to take it from us? God sent a Liberal pope to guide and unite us. It’s a miracle. It has given the people courage. I’m going to the front with the troops to help them fight, not for Piedmont, but for their own freedom and the freedom of the Church and for Pius IX.’

‘And if he lets you down?’

‘We’ll fight anyway and pray.’

The lawyer shook his head. ‘A holy innocent! Bound for the slaughter!’

Bassi grinned at Nicola, nodded at his companion and said, ‘A doctrinaire!’ Then he shook hands with both of them and left.

At the hotel, a carriage was waiting for Nicola, so, saying goodbye to the lawyer, he climbed in. A crowd blocked the strada Maggiore and he caught sight of Father Bassi standing on a balcony.

‘Thanks to Signor Rossini,’ he was shouting, ‘we don’t have to listen to German music. We can play our own. Shall I write and beg him to return to our city?’

‘Yes,’ yelled some of the crowd.

‘No,’ cried others. ‘Let him stay away with his tart of a French wife!’

‘I’ll write then,’ said the preacher and signalled the crowd to let Nicola’s carriage through.

From Prospero’s diary.

A guest is expected: one of our distant cousins.

Cold last night. A hand-warmer was passed around but was, as usual, ineffective and, anyway, causes chilblains from which I – milksop – suffer. My father, hoping to harden me, will not have a fire. The ancient Romans, he claims, were hardy. Else how could they have conquered Gaul, Germany, etc? Rome, he raved to Minghetti during M’s last visit, may again lead the world. If France and England don’t help our just cause, it is because they fear this. Our generation will see great things. ‘I mean‚’ he corrected himself, ‘yours. You must be thirty years my junior.’

That surprised me. I had thought M nearer his age. My father makes people seem old. It is as though they stayed on guard in his presence, as one does with children and volatile substances. M talked of how he and colleagues in the new ministry yearn to change
everything
, but that His Holiness resists and suspects laymen.

My father grew miffy at this. The Pope’s liberalism is
his
contribution to history. ‘You’re getting changes now,’ he says.

‘Small changes and small change is all we get,’ said M. Arms and money, he said, are the crying need.

Shortly after this he resigned from the cabinet and went north to join the Army. Before leaving, he recommended me to a man likely to be called to head the government: Count Pellegrino Rossi, who, it seems, needs a secretary. I haven’t told my father.

The Villa Chiara, mottled in tints of peach and plum, was set, as though for its own good, among symmetries of box. Further containing it, old,
over-arching trees tied it to the sky, so that this too came to seem part of a dogged regulatory plan.

Nicola’s first impression was of a convulsion in the foreground.

‘That,’ said the coachman, ‘is the Contino Prospero.’

A cassocked youth was doing somersaults on a trampolene.

‘He’s delicate. That’s why his father got him that thing to bounce on.’

The last black somersault formed a circle and, in the quiver of noon, could have been mistaken for a bee swarm. Uncoiling, the young man came to help Nicola out of the gig.

‘You’re Santi? I’m Prospero Stanga, a disgraceful show-off. No modesty! I thought it best to let you know.’

In a small procession – two footmen carried Nicola’s bits of baggage – they moved through spaces where cracks of light lit galaxies of dust. There was a smell of mildew and their shoes rang on tile.

‘Look!’

Beyond a flight of rooms, light eddied in a mirror: a sword was being agitated by a gentleman whose paunch had burst the buttons of an ancient dress uniform. He had a peg-leg.

‘Captain Melzi!’ whispered Prospero. ‘He fought with Murat during the Hundred Days. Thirty years ago! Imagine! He just tried to join up!’

The two laughed.

‘How old are you?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘I’m eighteen. Old enough to fight. My father wants me to. Here’s your room.’

It had a window painted in
trompe
l
’
oeil
. The real one looked onto a prospect of distant hills.

Prospero left Nicola to wash in a tub filled from jugs carried in by the footmen. Assorted clothes lay on a chest. They had, said Prospero, been his. ‘My uncle wrote to say you’d need some.’

His uncle was Monsignor Amandi which might mean, might it not, that Nicola and he were connected too? Nicola was eager for relatives.

The clothes were adult and secular and, having put some on, he stared in surprise at the grave young man in the mirror. He ran downstairs.

At the turn of a landing, something prodded him in the stomach. A voice cried, ‘On guard, Prospero! You need to stay alert!’ Then: ‘Bugger, it’s not Prospero.’

Nicola saw a blade shiver between himself and the officer with the wooden leg.

‘Sorry,’ mumbled the old man.

Nicola continued cautiously down.

‘It’s his last campaign,’ Prospero explained. ‘Getting me to join the Army. He may kill me to prove I’d be safer at the front.’

He had taken off his cassock, to which, he admitted, he had no right. ‘I may even be breaking some law. Maybe I’ll get caught by it? Like Hercules by the shirt of Nessus.’ His father, Nicola’s host, would be here this evening. ‘Meanwhile, I’ll show you round.’

They began at the stables where they cradled horses’ velvety muzzles in their palms. These smelled like freshly baked bread.

‘You will witness a row or two while you’re here.’ Prospero pressed his face into a horse’s. ‘They happen at dinner. I thought it best to warn you.’

Nicola, who had no idea how relatives behaved, thought a row would be instructive.

Prospero showed him a secret apartment – the door was in a fireplace – in which conspirators had met during the late pope’s reign. It smelled of mice and damp.

‘Organising the future,’ mocked Prospero. ‘Think how heady it must have been! Shall we go for a ride? The old mare won’t throw you. She’s as stately as a nun.’

Returning from this – Nicola was elated at having roused the mare to a ponderous gallop – they passed a shrubbery where, said Prospero, his mother had been shot.

‘Your mother?’

Nicola had a moment of panic. Was he being mocked? Or somehow tested? Prospero made his horse caracole.

‘She died of my father’s plots.’

Could
that be true?

Prospero touched Nicola’s knee. ‘You have to be told so you’ll understand when we get carried away. You see, all through my childhood there were plots. Strangers slipping about. Mysterious comings and goings.’ It was not, he said, that any of them came to much. ‘What they did do was attract the attention of the
Centurioni
who, unknown to us, were patrolling our grounds. Then, one evening – it was my birthday and I had been allowed to stay up late – she and I came out here with my dog, Renzo. It was drizzling and she wore a cloak with a hood, so the
Centurioni
may have taken her for a man. Anyway, when she stepped
into a clearing to whistle for Renzo, who had taken off after a rabbit, they shouted
Alt
! She ran towards me and they shot her.’

Nicola was stunned by the fragility of this briefly evoked mother.

‘My father can’t get over it. Which‚’ said Prospero, ‘is why this house is such a shambles.’ Aunts, he said, had offered to come and
housekeepers
been recommended, but the count would have no woman here who could seem to take her place. ‘It goes to show I’m unfair to bear him a grudge. We upset each other horribly.’

Nicola envied them. A mother to be mourned was better than a blank: a mental quicksand which drew you in.

‘Our trouble is that he wants to be an atheist.’

‘Wants to be?’

‘So as to be a man of the Enlightenment. But it means he cannot hope to see
her
again, so
I
am his only future.’

They were back at the stables. Prospero said, ‘Her bedroom is kept as though she were still living in it. A shrine! It’s as if
his
sorrow crowded mine out. Oh, I know I’m ungenerous.’

‘Where did you get your cassock?’

‘It belonged to a tutor I had.’ Prospero unbuckled his horse’s bellyband and handed Nicola the saddle. ‘Can you hold this? Under the last pope,’ he explained, ‘it was prudent for a Liberal like my father to engage a clerical zealot to teach his son principles opposed to his own. It was a sporting compromise and gave the authorities a chance to win the child’s mind – as my tutor might have if he had been astute. Instead, poor man, zeal undid him. He was a glutton, you see, and had qualms about enjoying our table and allowing his sins to blind him to ours. From sheer scruple, he threatened to report my father for reading English newspapers obtained from smugglers. He had a list of “
disadvised
” periodicals issued by the Office of the Cardinal Secretary of State.

‘Since the smugglers had worse to hide, my father agreed to abide by the list which turned out to disadvise everything he wanted to read. All he could have were
The
Freeman,
The
Dublin
Evening
Post
and
The
Catholic
Herald.
As it happened, he didn’t have to put in orders for any of these because I got into a fist-fight with my tutor and broke his nose. Monsignor Mastai had to smooth things out with Rome.’

‘And the tutor left without his cassock?’

‘Yes.’

Their laughter stirred Nicola, who was often unsure what to feel.
Purposeful people amazed him. Prospero clearly
felt
things. Nicola would have liked to be recruited by him as Martelli had recruited him.

While further exploring the villa grounds, he brought the conversation back to Prospero’s mother who had, it seemed, been Piedmontese and spoken French.

‘English too. Her father was an ambassador.’

What about my mother? Nicola wondered. Why did these polyglot relatives neglect her? But as Prospero spoke, the mothers fused in his mind.

‘In summer we went for walks. I had a sailboat which I would sail on our pond and she would sing
“Y avait
un petit
navire / Qui
n’avait
ja-
ja-
ja-
/
Qui
n
’
avait
ja-
ja-
ja
/
Qui
n
’
avait
ja-
ja-jamais
navigué
/
Oh
é
,
Ohé
!”’

Nicola clapped. ‘I think I prefer not understanding. The meaning – expands.’

‘That’s a romantical notion.’

‘What’s that? A new heresy?’

‘Yes. Its followers look for the infinite in the finite. As you might expect, they’re disappointed.’

Idleness twitched in Count Pellegrino Rossi and the city too was twitchy: inactive, yet animate like a dog growling in its sleep. To his left, in café windows, he could see his pale, circumspect face; on the right, wheel spokes spun and churned. He was back on the Corso where people in carriages smiled greetings. It was the hour of the promenade and he was only half here, for he was roughing out an essay in his head. It would take the form of an open letter to Teresa Guiccioli, Lord Byron’s last love. Rossi had known Byron, translated a volume of his verse, and heard him describe the Italian struggle as ‘the very poetry of polities’.

A wheel spattered dung. That, in popular superstition, meant gold: perhaps the salary he would receive from his soon-to-be-made
appointment
? Pensively, he scraped it off his boot. Livery-braid, brass harness-fittings and crested door panels swayed past at the pace of a river whose surface movement belies an underlying torpor.

‘
Buon
giorno‚
Eccellenza
.’

Androgynous gentlemen dressed in the bright silks peculiar to the papal household were succeeded by ladies, one of whom was reputed to have the Pope’s ear. Contacts here were everything, for this was the ark: last gaudy remnant of a world swept away elsewhere in 1789.

‘Come and see me, Conte!’

‘With delight, Contessa.’

That was the Contessa Spaur whose upholstered carriage gave off a scent of the boudoir. The Corso, for the duration of the promenade, was one enormous salon with the advantage that those not on visiting terms could still scrutinise each other. Up and down went the two rows of carriages between the piazza Venezia and the piazza del Popolo, round and round like a carousel. After a few tours, they might enlarge their orbit to take in the Pincio gardens, where another ring of victorias, berlins, calashes and phaetons mimed an image of life as cyclic, circumscribed and fairly easily controlled. The names of passengers echoed those of nearby palaces: Bonaparte, Salviati, Torlonia, Lante, Doria, Chigi, Odescalchi, Ruspoli and Niccolini. Here in one hour the whole of good society could roll by on its afternoon airing. Here skill and merit had never been valued, which was why these affable people had nobody to defend them against the results of their improvidence.

Earlier, Rossi had sat in an apothecary’s shop among men whose frock coats had stains so ramifying as to resemble the design in watered silk: meandering logs and maps of their owners’ vicissitudes. They were discussing the latest revolution in Paris which looked like toppling the government which had toppled his. The topic didn’t hold them though, and soon a young man was complaining about his mother-in-law’s having tied a bag of badger hairs around his son’s neck to scare off witches. A black-eyed youth with a three-day stubble, he kept clenching angry fists.

‘While I was away she got the upper hand. I left my wife under her roof, so now, according to her, I haven’t a word to say!’

‘Leave it,’ he was advised. ‘Your own mother probably hung the same gear on you and you’re none the worse for it.’

‘Superstition,’ shouted the father.

‘Some of these old women know a thing or two.’

‘Balls!’

‘You don’t need balls for everything!’

Laughter. The talk wrangled on, then turned to the war which could be a shambles. Father Gavazzi’s sermons were lovely to listen to, but why were we fighting? For the Milanese? What did they ever do for us? They were half Austrian anyway.

‘They want to get rid of the Austrians,’ instructed the young man who had complained about his mother-in-law. ‘The Piedmontese are helping them and the Neapolitans! And so must we.’ He mentioned ‘Italy’ and
was shouted down. What was ‘Italy’ anyway? And who believed the Neapolitans would ever truly fight? They’d turn tail before reaching the field of battle.

‘Maybe.’

‘There’s no maybe to it. Did you see them go by? Crawling up the peninsula as if they were on crutches! Their king,’ said a cynic, ‘only sent them because he had a revolution on his hands. But revolutionaries go home. They leave the piazza and what they won gets taken back. You’ll see.’

Rossi watched the apothecary weigh out a measure of powder, wrap it in a twist of paper and sell it to a small boy who had come in with a note. Then, slowly, he withdrew a barley-sugar stick from a jar. The boy’s eyes were like those of a stalking cat.