The Judas Cloth (39 page)

That was in March. Next day Mastai-Ferretti and Antonelli performed a ceremony which both thought unobserved. But nothing, as they should have known, goes unobserved in our palaces, which are full of hollow places and listening posts, often known only to the generations of servants who initiate each other into the secrets of their caste. This ceremony echoed the one whereby each new Doge of Venice used to conciliate the sea by flinging a ring into its depths. Mastai, in much the same spirit, presented Cardinal Antonelli with a very fine emerald ring. ‘An ocean of an emerald’ was how one secret observer described it and, later, all who saw it on the cardinal’s finger agreed, adding only that this compressed ocean glowed as if it contained a sunken sun. Mastai, while presenting it, vowed never to be separated from Antonelli and confirmed his tenure in the office of Cardinal Secretary of State.

With hindsight, one sees that what was being conferred was one of the two papal keys, the one to things temporal, and that the cardinal, in accepting it, took up a challenge to struggle, intrigue and perhaps sacrifice his soul for the sake of this attribute of the papacy which he secretly knew to be doomed. His was not an ignoble act.

So Amandi’s hopes were dashed, but his downfall was unlike
Rosmini’s
for, whereas the abate had found himself invisible, Amandi was treated with regard since it was expected that he would exercise an informal – and so perhaps more powerful – influence. Worldly wisdom deceives itself with old paradigms. It now looked back to the last reign when the Pope’s barber had been the man to know. Though Gaetanino was no longer shaving Pope Gregory when his ascendancy was at its peak, this did not stop people picturing an intimacy of cool fragrances, hot towels and susurrations of advice hissed at close range into a foam-flecked papal ear.

Mastai, however, had quite another idea of his role. Wishing to preserve parity with kings, he was surrounding himself with high-born prelates and, on the eve of his return to Rome, began choosing new private chamberlains – in practice his secretariat – all four of whom would be noble, and one, Xavier de Mérode, the son of a man who had been in the running to be King of Belgium. Spiritual nobility would be manifested by its temporal equivalent. Respect for hierarchy led to respect for heaven. He was halfway to believing that the ills of our time were due to the breakdown in the chain of command, whereby
God
anointed
kings had formerly passed divine authority to their peerage, and through them to lesser men, so that even the petty nobility to which he and Amandi belonged had been invested with a measure of it. Power was conferred from above, not below. In short, he was sick of the mob.

Speculation about the new appointments may have prompted the action now taken by a schemer who, fearing the ascendancy of men like Amandi, sent Mastai an anonymous letter. It alleged that His Eminence had consulted a French quack about His Holiness’s mental instability and that this quack would bruit abroad the indiscretions which the cardinal had traded for his unrepeatable advice which the letter
proceeded
, nonetheless, to repeat, to wit that, in the quack’s opinion, epileptics should be castrated to prevent – pardon the grossness, Holiness – their wasting themselves in solitary practices. The anonymous delator finished with a flourish so compunctious and verbose as to leave no doubt of his being a man who had had, at least, a notary’s education.

Reports of Mastai’s reaction varied. Described, echoed, then flatly denied, the scene ballooned into legend, bobbed across the mental landscapes of titillated clerics, then was recognised as the transcription of an account of an epilepsy attack from one of the very books which the quack had quoted and, on that basis, regarded by some as spurious, by others as all the more likely to be true.

Was Amandi really struck in the face by the papal slipper? Old curial myth mingled with Moreau’s lore. A learned Jesuit recalled that ‘it’ was probably the oldest recorded brain disorder, having been mentioned as early as 2080
BC
in the Hammurabi laws. The Jesuits were still smarting at having been expelled from Rome and let down by Mastai. He hadn’t defended them in their need, so why should they defend him?

But had he got ‘it’ at all or ever had it? What were the proofs? His reluctance to be recruited for the Russian front and the testimony of venal witnesses, servants or corner-coves, who swore they had seen him fall down in a frothing fit, but were the sort who would sell their souls or balls for a scudo. The Mastai family had surely bribed them to say that so as to keep him out of the Army. Stop. Not so fast! There was also the testimony of the Scolopian Fathers. Mastai-Ferretti had been a boarder in their school in Volterra until he was sent home on account of having fits. Father Inghirami, the headmaster, remembered the case.

Malicious fingers turned the pages of the
Corpus
Iuris
Canonici
which stated, black on white, that a candidate so afflicted might not be a priest,
but that – see Grat. dist. xxxiii, c.2, c.3 and c.5 – he might if cured. So had he been cured? And relapsed? This was treasonous talk. Republicans could turn it to account. Maybe they’d started it? But then what did happen? Did anyone really know? They didn’t. Amandi was back in Rome and the Pope was still in Gaeta and when, at last, in April 1850, the Pope came back to Rome, Amandi seemed to have business in places like Bologna and even Paris. Confidential missions? Or was he keeping out of the way? Who knew. Speculation could be dangerous. Touch your balls.

Father Tasso was leaving to live in Austrian territory where an unjust government could, being secular, be opposed without sin.

Nicola said: ‘There’s shit daubed on the archbishop’s palace.’

‘Because the reprisals against “tainted officials” were a flagrant injustice!
They
’re no more tainted than the Pope! But, as people can’t take their shit to Rome, the archbishop gets it. Do you want my copy of
Le
Pape
?’

This was goodbye. Nicola had called in on his way to the cathedral where he was to help the cardinal vest for high mass. The vestments handled like armour for they were stiff with gold thread and had taken nuns in enclosed orders years of eye-straining work.

‘Do you want this wine?’ Tasso was clearing his room.

‘He wants
practical
work!’ the cardinal had observed with amusement. ‘Imagine. I have served my time in the world and know when a man has an aptitude for it. Father Tasso does not! I shall advise his new bishop to let him teach in a seminary: a bigger box than his confessional but still a box. He should not be given his head.’ His Eminence was remembering Bassi who should not have been given his either and had, in the end, lost it.

Tasso too remembered Bassi and dreamed, shyly, of carrying on his torch. Strangely enough, Nicola saw, he did have a sort of inner light but, somehow, it was ridiculous. You thought of a turnip lantern. He neglected himself – which could be why he smelled. Someone should tell him.

‘Will you take the wine. No? Is it so bad? Should I offer it to someone else? I have no palate.’

Nicola said, ‘Throw it out.’ He feared it might be his duty to mention the smell too, but felt unequal to this. Anyway the confessor was now talking of his visits to the Albergo San Marco to hear the confession of
Ugo Bassi’s mother. ‘She thinks he’s alive and imprisoned in an Austrian fortress. They’ve organised a conspiracy of pity at the hotel.’

‘What happens when she goes out?’

‘She’s bedridden. She keeps giving me letters to General Strassoldo, begging him to let her see her son. I tear them up. But now she is threatening to drag herself from her sickbed to go to Strassoldo herself. Here are some books to remember me by.’

Nicola took them, embraced Tasso, despite his reek, and left for the cathedral.

Mass was at eleven and the air already hot. Candles consumed it. Fans moved it, but there was no freshness to be had, and there were the usual cases of ladies swooning and having to be carried out. The choir was in full fig and soaring voices spun bonds of unity. At the ceremony’s end, communicants, weak from fasting so late, were lining up to approach the altar, when someone whispered, ‘That’s Ugo Bassi’s mother, Donna Felicità! There, see, coming down the nave. That’s his sister and her husband supporting her. She’s mortally ill. I’m surprised they let her out.’

‘People are making way for her.’

Straight to the altar rails went the invalid, flanked by her minders who must be hoping to prevent her getting into a conversation with anyone who would tell her the unthinkable truth. They had – Tasso had said – spun her such a consoling fable about the privileged conditions her Ugo was enjoying in prison that an irruption of reality was likely to be fatal. Perhaps – people guessed as they watched – these fictions had been less than convincing. Perhaps contradictions had slipped in? At all events, the old lady was restless and when she saw the communion wafer proffered by Oppizzoni, put out her hand, blocked its approach and begged,
‘Eminenza,
won’t you help me to see my Ugo before I die?’

Oppizzoni didn’t recognise her, so she had to explain that she was the mother of Ugo Bassi. ‘They won’t let me visit him!’

The cardinal could make nothing of this request to visit a dead man. His hand still held the wafer when she grasped his wrist, and,
inadvertently
knocking down the paten which a sub-deacon was holding under it for just such an eventuality, shook the wafer to the ground where the flustered Oppizzoni stood on it.

In no time, his enemies were spreading the scandal: a priest had trampled the sacred host! He had stepped on the body of Christ! That
this was an accident was no defence, since what were accidents but signs and what could this one mean but that the lambs of God were in the hands of evil shepherds?

Messages accompanied by black crosses appeared on the houses of Zelanti who had to spend money having them removed – which was no great harm at a time when so many were indigent and work scarce.

Tasso and Nicola now left for seminaries. The priest was to teach in one in Mantua and Santi to study in, of all places, Paris, which would, advised a letter from Cardinal Amandi, be a testing ground for the bad times ahead. The clerical career, warned His Eminence, would soon cease to be comfortable in this peninsula, as it had long ceased to be in France. ‘Think of yourself,’ he advised, ‘as training to work in a mission country.’

So Nicola prepared by spending four years in an isolation akin to that of an African missionary or a man in gaol. These were years lived outside of time, for seminarians, being expected to fix their minds on the City of God, were denied news of the cities of men. Rumours did, to be sure, filter in when Louis Napoleon’s
coup
d’état
changed his mandate from President to Emperor and plunged their own city of Paris into a bleeding turmoil. That, however, was a brief temporal parenthesis in what Nicola would later remember as a ritualised eternity mimed in an odour of boiled greens and damp – he missed the Roman sun – soot, smoke, polish, lye, paraffin and incense, among youths who would have been incredulous if he had told them – which he did not – some of the things he had witnessed in the diocese of Bologna. His classmates were embattled, pious, all of a piece, and took to their regimented lives with a single-minded ambition: they hoped for parishes. Some were boisterous and their wrists erupted like malignant growths from the containment of inadequate sleeves. All feared the Republicans who could be heard building barricades to defend the state against Louis Napoleon’s
coup
of December 1851, only to be mown down two days later by his troops. Throughout the massacre, the seminary stayed closed, but sounds of fighting were sometimes just outside its walls.

There was no pretence of impartiality when news came of the legitimate government’s fall and the transportation of 10,000 prisoners to Algeria. For the seminarists, a republic, legitimately elected or not,
was a threat to their careers and evil, and if any French Catholics thought otherwise the news did not reach them.

Not much did. Unlike their fellows in Rome who could live with relatives while attending classes or, like Prospero, have apartments in a comfortable college, these French youths were austerely isolated from the world and so was Nicola, although two visits from Cardinal Amandi in four years gave him prestige. He had no others but received letters from Prospero from which censored bits had been removed with a nail scissors. All but four hours of the day were spent on religious services and the image of Roman life which his fellow seminarists treasured astonished him.

He got no letters from Father Tasso, but when he left the seminary, two intercepted notes were released to him. By then, Tasso had been hanged by the Austrians, after being defrocked by Bishop Giovanni Corti of Mantua, a Liberal whose heart, he told friends later, had been broken by having to do it. It had not, the bishop confided, been the order from Rome which sapped his resistance – he might even have defied that – but the threat from Vienna that several more priests would be executed if he failed to comply. In desperation, Monsignor Corti implored the Pope by letter and Marshall Radetzky, whom he went to see in person, to intervene with the Austrian Emperor. It was all to no avail and, meanwhile, Tasso had been in gaol six months with fetters on his feet and so had the other endangered priests. Their crime was that they had conspired against Austria by clandestinely raising money for Mazzini’s movement. Father Tasso had kept a scrupulous register of contributers and this was their undoing, for, though the register was in cypher, the cypher was revealed and this led to further arrests. A rumour got about that the priest himself had broken under torture and given it away. He denied this, but the charge lingered and poisoned his last days, just as Monsignor Corti’s days were poisoned by the bitter letter which Tasso sent him from his death cell. Times had changed since Ugo Bassi died with such serenity. Nobody, as Amandi pointed out to Nicola when relating all this, could count hereafter on having an undivided conscience.

On leaving the seminary Nicola, who had been away from the world, had to catch up with its news. But not from too close! Priests in Rome, whither he returned after his ordination, were warned against trimming between the secular and religious spheres, and asked to show their
allegiance by their dress. The cassock was now favoured, the old rig of knee breeches, redingote and tricorne hat merely tolerated, and civil servants were expected to shave off facial hair.

Tit for tat: in Piedmont the special courts for the clergy had been abolished and the Archbishop of Turin fined 500 lire for denouncing the new law. In Rimini, a statue of the Virgin was seen to throw up its eyes.

Gaslight and the electric telegraph had been installed. Change was speeding up, but Roman ministries watched it closely and edicts kept track of the smallest matters. Viz:

These were the years which allowed Cardinal Antonelli to consolidate the ravaged fortunes of the state and extinguish the public debt. He was an energetic minister whose skilled management of the day-to-day affairs left others free to aim for spiritual glory. He seemed to accept this bargain easily.

Though nobody knew what had passed between Cardinal Amandi and the Pope, people guessed at a mutual discomfort being given time to heal. Hence, concluded observers at the papal court, the missions which so often took Amandi away from it. Hence too, perhaps oddly, his respect for Cardinal Antonelli. Amandi acknowledged that he could not have worked for Mastai with the abnegation displayed by the Cardinal Secretary – who, to be sure, was profiting by his status as a layman and growing richer by the hour. He and his brothers were doing very well indeed from the planned state railways while less well-placed investors lost their shirts.

Amandi intended no irony. The Temporal Power was Antonelli’s domain. He was doing well for it and if he also did well by it, the price was small. Better a man who could help the Treasury and himself than one who could do neither. Who would want to employ a cook who didn’t eat?

What did shock Amandi was what Mastai himself was doing. Quietly, he was changing the nature of the papacy. Authority was being
centralised
, bishops in other lands Romanised and their national Conferences eliminated. Bit by bit, thread by thread, Mastai drew power into his own hands and in December 1854 sprang a surprise on the Catholic world. He defined a dogma, single-handedly and without the collaboration of a Church Council. This was the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, and his aim could only be to test the acquiescence of Catholic opinion. To be sure, he had taken soundings in advance, but he had also forbidden public discussion on the matter! Then, one fine day, ‘off his own bat’, he elevated the doctrine to a dogma. He was extending his powers, taking, as the peasants put it, a step just a bit longer than his leg. Yet he got away with it and the reason – did he guess this? – was the enormity of the scandal there would have been if he were to be brought to book for it, plus pity. Times were hard and theologians loath
to challenge a beleaguered pontiff with unsteady nerves. It was only four years since Mastai’s return from the exile while had caused his character to set in a new mould. He had grown crafty and was still stubborn, impulsive, charming, and often sick. He had exceeded his powers and, by so doing, created a precedent.

The dogma’s message pleased his new allies. If only one human creature had ever escaped nature’s flaw, then hopes of progress were illusory and strong rulers needed to save humanity from itself. Catholic princes took the point. Queen Isabella sent a gift of a tiara, “Bomba” of Naples let off artillery salvoes and the episcopacy, on whose prerogatives Masti had encroached, failed to protest.

Amandi blamed himself. It had been he who, when Pius was a Liberal, had suggested that he go over the heads of his bishops and pay court to the lower clergy. Indeed, Amandi had started the process during his trip to La Salette when he engaged Father Dubus as his man in the Diocese of Grenoble. Father Dubus was not his man now. He was Pius’s man and so were growing numbers of his fellows who had a craving for an authority which would defend them from their bishops. Amandi, for the second time in his dealings with Mastai, had started something he couldn’t stop.