The Judas Cloth (36 page)

Painstakingly, a nucleus of probable fact was assembled: Bassi had said that he had not received a trial but stood falsely accused of having been caught with weapons; his fellow prisoner, Captain Livraghi, also faced a false charge. He was considered a deserter by the Austrians because he had once fought under their flag. The priests took less interest in his case.

On the evening of the 7th, General Grozkowski returned from Mantua and next day took formal leave of the city’s notables. By then Strassoldo had arrived and an interregnum prevailed. In the hot white stillness of the August day, Nicola was glad to have a message to deliver to Monsignor Bedini at the legatine villa at San Michele in Bosco where he could catch a breath of air. During the slow, uphill drive, his coachman spotted General Grozkowski’s carriage on the road ahead of them and when they arrived at the villa the general and Monsignor Bedini were closeted in a farewell meeting. No sense waiting, the
major-domo
told Nicola. He might as well leave his letter. So Nicola left, his heart lightened by the success of his mission for Monsignor Amandi, now that Grozkowski was as good as gone. The breeze was refreshing and the carriage horses seemed to trot at an expanded, high-stepping gait.

As soon as he entered the city, he knew something was wrong. By now it was that tranquil, digestive hour of the afternoon when the heave and sigh of deep breathing should have been all-pervasive; a lazy ticking over of the city’s pulse. Instead, there was a tight silence as though breath were being held. Shutters and blinds were shut but awry as though to accommodate a discreet and vigilant watch. Knots of people dissolved as he passed. In a sliver of shadow Father Tasso – back from his spiritual exercises – waved his hat and mouthed with shocking indiscretion: ‘They shot Ugo Bassi!’

‘What? Shush. Wait.’

‘Murdered him.’ Tasso climbed into Nicola’s carriage. ‘Didn’t you hear the firing squad? Yes. Bassi.’ The priest repeated his information with a cold restraint as though to show that a new way of dealing with things must be learned. ‘They can’t have held a trial. If they did it was
illegal, for the Church wasn’t informed – was it?’ The priest had a moment’s panic, then: ‘No,’ he reassured himself, ‘it couldn’t have been.’

‘But General Grozkowski is no longer governor. He was at the legatine villa just now taking leave of Monsignor Bedini.’

‘Well, Father Bassi was shot at noon. In the Cimitero della Certosa. Shot and shovelled into the ground. I want you to take me to the cardinal. That general must be excommunicated. Protests must be sent to Gaeta.’ Tasso dredged up words he had never thought to apply to his own town or time. Barbarism,
sacrilege
!
Did Nicola realise …

But Nicola was further along the road to disillusion than Tasso. Seeping into him was the knowledge that someone had used him to trick Oppizzoni. Who? Amandi? The Austrian? Or – who?

‘Bassi,’ whispered Tasso, weeping.
‘Il povero
Ugo
!’

‘Come into my office,’ offered Nicola when they reached the
archbishop’s
palace. ‘This is the cardinal’s nap-time. We’ll have to wait.’

In the palace, indignation was being ground out between locked teeth. The priests’ wrath was turning towards the door behind which the old cardinal lay under the four faded cloth pineapples which topped the posters of his curtained bed. He had not yet learned the news.

The
Notificazione,
which until now had bothered none of them, had begun to look sinister. Was a purge of priests to be carried out by the secular arm for the hierarchy and at its nod?

A thin priest, called Padre Farini, polished his eyeglasses with a striped handkerchief. Perhaps he felt his vision needed adjusting? He was one of the two who had exulted at General Grozkowski’s removal.

‘Sapiens
tacebit
usque
ad
tempus
!
’
he quoted meaningfully. ‘The wise man waits for the right time – time for
what?’

Nobody answered. Time worried them. Had they paid insufficient attention to it? Failed to see that eternity was made up of an infinity of tricky bits of it? Bassi, said Tasso, had been a saint and a martyr.

‘And a scapegoat,’ said Farini shrewdly. ‘Catholic Austria could not kill all its prisoners, nor take revenge on the Pope who blessed their arms. A military chaplain is the perfect stand-in for both.’

‘It’s a sacrilege,’ said Tasso, ‘he wasn’t defrocked.’

Padre Farini held up the
Gazzetta
di
Bologna.
‘Not quite.’

‘You mean …’

‘Read it. How can there be a protest on behalf of a priest who is said by his own bishop to have been untrue to his cloth?’

‘He’s not named.’

Farini laughed.

‘Don’t weep for Bassi,’ said the cardinal. ‘I’m sure he died gloriously. Men like that do.’ He let a hand rest on Nicola’s shoulder. ‘They blame me, don’t they? Don’t take it hard. Just tell yourself that I have been fifty years at the head of this diocese and that the most useful thing I can do for it now is to magnetise blame. That’s politics,
fili
mi
! Your confessor despises it, as did Ugo Bassi, who used to ride his white horse up and down the front line and write poems which I thought it wise to read. They’re irreproachable,’ said the cardinal, ‘and not much good. His poem was his life. He had a muse: a married lady, I believe. But his love was disembodied, which is the worst sort since it can never be dealt with and saps the soul. He wasn’t quite adult, which means he was one of the little children whom Christ calls to Himself. And I’m the Judas who’ll be to blame for his death. Judas or Caiaphas? Both perhaps. But Judas first, for he – you should know – is the secret patron of all active prelates since he was the man of whom Christ said that the thing had to be done but woe to him who did it. Poor Judas! I often think of him managing the disciples’ money and losing track of the long view. Serving the Church Militant has its risks. They’re angry aren’t they?’ He nodded towards the outer offices. ‘They want me to
do
something. Me, not Monsignor Bedini whose province it is, because they’ve no hopes of him. Me!’

‘They want the general excommunicated!’

‘No less!’ Oppizzoni laughed. ‘Ah well, they’ll end up no doubt on Christ’s right hand. With Ugo Bassi.’

‘But Eminenza …’

‘Yes?’

‘Surely whoever is to blame should be …’

‘Whoever is to blame?’ Oppizzoni held Nicola’s gaze so firmly that Nicola dropped his own. ‘Even me? Or you? Who,’ said the cardinal coolly, ‘did not come here as fast as you might have done. Don’t explain,’ he interrupted. ‘Explain to your confessor. Reports were sent to me about your journey, but I didn’t read them. I have to keep my mind clear of small things. For you, however, this may be a big thing, so you’d better tell Father Tasso why you spent two nights in Modigliana, which is not on the main road. If you had not done so and had got here earlier, the general’s last day would have been the 6th not the 8th. Everything
might have been different. Don’t cry. You must learn not to give way, or you will never be the foxy defender of the faith that Cardinal Amandi hopes. He sent you to me to learn to be that. From the first I took this as a rather painful judgment of myself – but also as a gift, since a young innocent is a delight to have around. Now I must destroy your innocence; it is refreshing in the young, but dangerous in older men and if let loose like Bassi’s wreaks havoc. No. I’m not being hard-hearted. I shall say masses for him. Publicly, however, don’t expect me to join in the
Bassicult
which I have no doubt will soon start up.’

‘Eminenza, do you really think I’m …?’

To blame? My poor Nicola, we’re all to blame for Christ’s suffering. Our sins drive in the nails. And,’ added the cardinal, ‘so does our stupidity.’

Father Tasso had spent the night trying to comfort Father Bassi’s
‘confortatore
,’
Don Gaetano Baccolini, a bookish man who had had the misfortune to be assigned the task of administering the last rites to the condemned priest. It had been his bad luck to be to hand when his pastor, who was getting ready to celebrate a sung mass for the soul of a parishioner, received a message from the police. Two priests were wanted at Villa Spada.

Tasso’s skirts cut the air like blades. ‘Think of it!’ he invited Nicola whom he had again dragged from the confessional. ‘Baccolini had been working on a series of sermons. Apart from dashing into church to say mass, he hadn’t left his room for days and hadn’t heard of Father Bassi’s arrest.’

Nicola and Father Tasso were climbing the Montagnola to get some air. Reaching the summit, they stared down to where the Austrians had been defeated a year ago. Bassi had been shot on the anniversary of the battle. A tasty revenge!

Nicola listened with resignation. He had come to confession full of his own scruples, only to find that his confessor couldn’t concentrate on them. He refused to say whether Nicola should or should not have left Maria to be raped.

Baccolini and another unpractised priest had been taken to prepare ‘two delinquents’ to face the firing squad. This was bad enough. Worse followed when, after cooling their heels for an hour in the great saloon of the Villa Spada, they learned that the delinquents were Father Bassi and Captain Livraghi who had just been informed of their sentence. The four were then brought together, whereupon Bassi had to protect the
‘confortatori’
from Livraghi who was ready to throttle the ‘Austrian priests’. Bassi, convincing him that he was dying as surely for freedom
as if
he had fallen in battle, managed to calm him as he had calmed the dying on battlefields in Lombardy, the Veneto and Rome. He even comforted the men sent to comfort him.

Baccolini, said Tasso, had dwelled painfully on his own inadequacy. Over and over. Weeping, saying his
mea
culpa,
drinking port. By the evening’s end, Tasso had the account by heart and repeated it now, then broke off to wonder where Bassi had got his courage. Was it the priest in him or the soldier who had dealt so decorously with death? Without him, Livraghi would have died cursing, for the official
‘confortatori’
had, by their own admission, been as useless as a brace of ganders.

Bologna knew of the execution right away. The closed police carriage was seen driving to Villa Spada and, later, people recognised the beat of loose-skinned drums as the condemned men were taken to the cemetery. Then they heard the shots.

Over night the people’s hero became their saint, and Austrian grenadiers, posted by the ditch where his body was interred, were kept busy chasing away women who came with tricolours and wreaths. Bitter graffiti appeared on walls whose owners had to remove them on pain of a fifty scudi fine for a first offence and twice that thereafter plus a spell in gaol.

A smoky contagion compounded of patriotism and piety prickled the air. It was hot, even for August. There were rumours that cholera had broken out and that the authorities had discredited themselves with God. Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate were mentioned. A legend was taking shape and the authorities hastened to abort it.

‘The Zelanti want Baccolini to say that at the end Bassi repudiated his political faith.’

‘Which Zelanti?’

Tasso didn’t know. Bedini? The cardinal? Who knew which of those two was the puppet and which pulled the strings?

Nicola spoke up for Oppizzoni who was no zelante, but Tasso said, ‘Don’t tell me he’s not an old fox!’

‘He says he’s a fox for God.’

‘Barc
a
!’

Twinned by its image, a toy sailboat skimmed the pond while a child of maybe six struggled to get around and meet it on the other side. ‘
Barca
!’
the child shrieked again then, finding he had lost a shoe, flopped down on sodden ground, dug it from the mud and began laboriously putting it on. Hair fell across his eyes. This must be Prospero’s
stepbrother
. When he stood up, the seat of his britches had a muddy patch.

‘So,’ Prospero had been asked in the inn where he changed coaches, ‘you missed your father’s wedding?’ Inquisitive eyes slid sideways. ‘Likely he didn’t think you could get away. Not with what’s going on in Rome!’ Then the gossips asked about
that.
Discreetly though. Weighing their words, for Bologna was under martial law. ‘How’s Rome?’ they asked.

But Prospero’s news was stale.

‘If he’d been expecting you, the Signor Conte would surely have delayed the wedding.’ He read their thoughts: the count’s fancy woman was now his wife. How was the son taking that? ‘It was a quiet wedding,’ they told him.

Well, so it should be! A widower-bridegroom, even of the count’s station, could be subjected to the charivari: a serenade of saucepans. His impulsive father was as vulnerable as the toy boat which was now listing to one side. Ten to one, he was agonising about what to say to Prospero who, in turn, had been worrying about putting
him
at ease. Needing time to prepare a spontaneous face, he had had the coachman put him down some way from the villa. Walking through familiar vegetation, he was nipped by the immediacy of known sounds and smells, every one of which reminded him of his mother. Mushrooming with her,
blackberrying
, heaping up mounds of leaves into which he could then thrillingly dive. Sailing the toy boat.

When he reached die pond and saw it, a phantom on silken waters, a jostle of feelings choked him. But, meanwhile, here was the small usurper in difficulties. Prospero had been observing him from behind a tree. Up and down the shore stumbled the short, stubby legs, for the craft was marooned in mid-pond. There were weeds there, Prospero remembered, and the only way to reach it now was by rowboat.

‘You’ll have to be your brother’s keeper,’ Nicola had joked when they met this morning on Prospero’s way through Bologna. ‘And your
father’s!’ Nicola had been sent by Cardinal Oppizzoni to warn Prospero that his father was making last-ditch efforts to win the Pope back to Liberalism. ‘It’s too late for that,’ he warned. ‘He’s drawing attention to himself and that, in the present climate, is unwise. Especially, if he’s up to anything else.’

‘Nicola, my father supports – no, idolizes, the Pope.’

‘Yes, but the pope of today is not the pope of last year!’ Nicola reminded him that old portraits of Pio Nono were being collected and destroyed, the ones where he said ‘God bless Italy’ and blessed the troops. ‘He doesn’t want embarrassing reminders. Your father could become one.’

Prospero wasn’t sure whether to dismiss this as sacristy gossip. Besides: his thoughts about his father tended to be laced with irony. This helped dissipate the enfevered murk which was the count’s climate. As a cuttlefish sprays ink, so the old conspirator had always darkened the atmosphere around himself and Prospero’s adolescence seemed to him now to have been a long, frustrated fumble towards the light.

Seeing his stepbrother ankle-deep in the water, he remembered that the ground here shelved and, emerging from behind his tree, introduced himself and said that the thing to do now was to take a rowboat. When they were settled in it, he asked the child’s name.

‘Cesco.’

‘And how do you come to be alone?’ Prospero was poling them towards the middle.

‘Daniele was with me. The soldiers took him.’

Prospero knew Daniele, his father’s gamekeeper.

‘I hid,’ said Cesco. ‘I’m good at hiding. Like you.’

Where was his mother, asked Prospero. At the house, said Cesco.

‘Well, there’s your yacht, free.’

Launched on the syrupy surface, a wake fanned behind it, as neat as a printer’s caret. Prospero swung the boat around, and it was then that they heard pistol shots.

‘Bang!’ cried the child. ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’

So, in the end, there was no ceremony to Prospero’s meeting with his stepmother. The noise which brought Cesco and himself running to the villa had given their father a seizure and he was stretched on a couch when they edged open the door. Someone had ridden off for the doctor and a woman who must be the new contessa was holding the invalid’s
hand. Seeing Prospero, she gravely and just perceptibly tilted her head towards Cesco who was straining to be let run to her. Take him away, said the head-tilt. Prospero, who knew what it was to be confronted by a felled parent, did.

‘Is Papa dead? Did the soldiers shoot him?’

‘No, but we mustn’t disturb him.’

‘They didn’t shoot him?’

‘No.’

‘Who did they shoot?’

‘They shot in the air. It’s a thing soldiers sometimes do.’

‘Could they hit God?’

‘No, he hasn’t got a body.’

‘They could shoot birds. Daniele shoots ducks. I help him pull off the feathers.’

‘Well today they were only trying out their guns.’

‘Did the noise make Papa ill like it does Cook?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think I’ll go and see her. She may be ill too.’

‘That’s a good idea. If she’s well, ask her to give you supper.’

‘It’s too early.’

‘Ask for a
merenda
then. Don’t bother Papa. He needs to rest.’

‘Why do you call him Papa?’

‘He’s my Papa too.’

‘Yours? Your Papa?’

‘Yes.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’

The square, freckled face considered Prospero, who guessed that the thought towards which Cesco was groping was, ‘So I’ve got to share’. He guessed it because he had been thinking it himself.

Cesco put a thumb in his mouth, then said, ‘Is my Mamma yours too?’

‘No. I had a different Mamma.’

‘Where is she?’

‘I’ll tell you another time. Now you’d better see Cook.’

Cesco left.

In the courtyard, soldiers were looking hangdog and their white coats were dirty, no doubt from looking up chimneys and through hay lofts. Their officer apologised for what had happened. It had not been one of his men who fired the pistol but a local man who had enticed them here with assurances that the count was hiding Garibaldini. The fellow, said the Austrian, had now been sent packing and would not have been listened to in the first place had there not been previous reports of odd activity in the Stanga grounds. Queer lights and movements had been seen after dark.

‘We had to investigate.’

Prospero said he hoped his father might now be left alone, adding that the count was a friend of the Pope’s. At this, the officer saluted and marched away his men. Friendship with this pope was not, in Austrian eyes, much of a recommendation. As they left, the soldiers made way for a carriage belonging to the doctor, a nimble old man, who jumped out without waiting for the step.

‘Where is he?’

Prospero accompanied him to the drawing room, then waited with his stepmother who admitted that she had perhaps been over-zealous in sending for the doctor – but women were expected to fuss, were they not? ‘Do you hate having a stepmother?’

‘It’s too late for you to do the bad things stepmothers are accused of doing.’

‘Yes. You’re too grown up.’

He reflected that his father had kept her hidden for years on his account and that living in furtive solitude could not have been easy. She talked of his father’s health, guessing now that the seizure had been no more than a little palpitation. Prospero wondered whether his father had reason to be worried by the soldiers’ visit and whether she knew.

She wore a peony-shaped crinoline and her face was frilled with laugh lines. Running his eye down her friendly figure, he saw that she was pregnant. Seeing him see this, she blushed.

‘I’m delighted for you both.’ Looking shyly away, his mind swerved towards Dominique who must be about his stepmother’s age.

Just then the doctor came to report on his patient. Dottor Pasolini had, like the count, been an ardent
Carbonaro.
‘He’s all right,’ he told them. ‘He had a fright for sound reasons. Not medical, but something should be done about them.’ Then he asked Prospero to come with him as far as the gate, so the two walked in single file, between the ruts, while the carriage ambled behind.

‘She’s a good thing,’ said the doctor. ‘Jokes about old men’s wedding songs turning to dirges don’t apply. I suppose you knew they’d been together for years?’

‘Well, the boy must be six.’

‘They were together long before the boy. Your mother agreed to it. Oh yes. Your parents’ wasn’t a love match. It was a pooling of resources for political reasons. Don’t look shocked. Your father’s passion was all for our struggle – or so he thought until he met Anna. Your mother had money which he needed for a cause in which they both believed. She, as a woman, couldn’t act on her own account. It was a fair bargain.’

‘Until he betrayed it!’

‘Until history betrayed them both. Conspiracy fell out of fashion. The
Centurioni
who killed her were chasing shadows. An appalling thing. Your father couldn’t get over it. That’s why he took so long to marry Anna. I thought you might not know.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Well, now you do and had better ensure that Anna too knows what she needs to. She was always kept in the dark about his conspiracies. It was part of the bargain with your mother. That was
her
province. It’s too late now for secrets, but
he
can’t see that, so it’s up to you.’ The doctor smiled and, as Prospero felt unable to say anything, they walked silently as far as the gate where they embraced. Then the doctor drove away.

Prospero did not go back the way he had come, but, returning to the pond, took the boat out to the middle and sat staring into its shadowed waters. He didn’t think of what he had just been told, but the liquid darkness soaked soothingly into his mind. After a while, he rowed back, moored the boat and returned to the villa, approaching it through the kitchen garden where the air was heavy with smells of wind-fallen plums and evening-scented stock; a mix which seemed to typify the domestic life which would now go on here without him. Oh, he would visit. He would bring gifts for the new baby and for Cesco who, no doubt, would one day farm the place. Why not? Prospero had never been interested in it. His was the melancholy of the dog in the manger.