The Judas Cloth (40 page)

He began to have dreams in which the Pope’s evil eye subjugated him. These began after the accident – later to be called die ‘miracle’ – at Sant’Agnese Outside the Walls. Here, in April 1855, the floor of an upstairs room gave way under Pius and a number of his cardinals. Amandi had been standing diagonally across from him, next to Cardinal Wiseman of England, when he saw the pontiff’s gaze fix in a dull, trance-like stare on their corner of the room. He was wondering whether Mastai might be feeling indisposed when, with a slow splintering of woodwork, the floor began to tilt and sink like a tipped raft so that the entire company were soon slithering at a stately gait down its slope. The low point was where Amandi and Wiseman had been standing, and the Englishman must have scrambled aside, for Amandi found himself alone in the path of a cupboard whose doors flew open as it fell, encapsulating him with the neatness of an upturned boat. His cassock, with its pelerine and double sleeves, was pinned under the sides, so that he could neither move his hands nor attract the attention of rescuers, while his shouts were drowned by the noise which, for all he knew, could be signalling the death of half the Curia.

As it happened, almost nobody was hurt in the freak event, but later, in the cardinal’s dreams, the anguished experience grew horrific and, in
their darkness, Mastai’s staring eyes multiplied, swarmed like luminous fish and gleamed with menace.

Amandi grew claustrophobic. This happened slowly for, at first, fear stayed trapped in nightmare. Then, one day, at a ceremony in the catacombs, losing his Roman indifference to dust and skeletons, he became unable to breathe and had to leave. After that, he could not go into a confessional and, not being what the Romans called a ‘confession priest’, that is, obliged to attend to pastoral duties, did so rarely and then only in order to train himself to overcome this weakness.

The collapse of the basilica floor under the Curia’s feet was a dangerous metaphor which had to be wrenched from the use to which the ill-disposed could have turned it, and Amandi could only applaud Mastai’s shrewd insistence that what had happened be seen as a miracle for which hymns of praise must be sung and thanksgiving ceremonies devised. Had not the papal court been saved? It had! So this was a sign of divine favour. Monies were straightaway found to repair the damage and a mural commissioned to commemorate the happy event.

‘A
baiocco,
your Reverence?’ A beggar, wearing a beggar’s badge, was demanding his due.

But Nicola had been distracted: ‘Diodato!’

Lingering on after he became a duke, Flavio’s old foundling’s name was both congratulatory and a joke. Diodato: God’s gift! It was an apt commentary on the fact that his mother had tried to give him back to God. For Donna Geltrude, having for years concealed her maternity, had continued to deny it until faced with witnesses in court. Even then, she denied that her husband was Flavio’s father, which looked like leaving him no father at all – no human one anyway, for, as Roman wits observed, laying him as an infant at the door of the Holy Ghost Foundling Home must, if seen as an attempt at affiliation, make him a half-brother of Jesus Christ.

Blasphemy goes down well in holy cities, and Flavio’s law suit had rivalled the lottery in popular appeal. The case had been heard before the Sacra Rota and, even as elsewhere in the world the wheel of fortune was spinning as never before, the Eternal City remained agog at the findings of the Tribunal of the Holy Wheel.

Those were the years when France became an Empire, the English built a Crystal Palace and held their Great Exhibition, and, up and down the west coast of North America, the Gold Rush spread hopes so dizzy that whole crews jumped ship and left the hulks to rot in the San Francisco docks. Railway track was being laid all over the Western world; experts on apparitions pondered the Spectre of Communism and the Virgin at La Salette; and still Roman attention was trained on the bedroom activities of the Duchessa Cesarini in the year before Flavio’s birth – or rather on her alleged lack of such activities.

Naturally, the proceedings were secret and, naturally, they leaked out.

For months, processions of friends and servants bore solemn witness to the duchess’s claim that she and her late husband had not, at that time or for a year previous to it, had had any sort of marital relations. Even the late duke’s mistresses were called to testify. He had had two at once: sisters who were pleased to recall enjoying an attention so constant as to leave him neither strength nor leisure to have serviced a wife as well. Then Donna Geltrude admitted to having herself had a lover: a Russian gentleman, now long back among the watery flatlands of his distant estates, where he no doubt shot teal and reminisced to
neighbours
about the time when he had kept watch with cocked pistols in the anteroom to the one where she was giving birth to Flavio.

This caused a sensation. Who, after this, could deny that Romans had temperament and needed the firm hand of the Church? These were the years when tedious old laws repealed by the Republic were being reinstated, and the duchess’s case was grist to the clerical mill. Rarely can the downfall of an illustrious personage have pointed so many timely morals, from the demon dangers of lust to the connection between spiritual and carnal depravity.

Father Gavazzi had been Donna Geltrude’s confessor and she, affected by the contagion of his opinions, had begun frequenting Republicans, with the result that her only daughter had married one. Indeed, it was to preserve the family fortune for this daughter that she was so brazenly confronting the tribunals of the Sacra Rota and public opinion.

Conversely, it was to wrest this same fortune from Republican clutches that the Jesuits, among them the duchess’s own brother, had taken the case to court.

A strange case! For why did Donna Geltrude go to the risk and trouble of repudiating Flavio? Normally, married women foisted spurious issue on their husbands without more ado. Simply palmed them off. It
was the easiest thing in the world. From time out of mind, ladies had adulterated their blood with that of their lackeys and gentlemen theirs with that of chambermaids. In the process, scandal was avoided and tired stock renewed. Feudal living afforded innumerable chances for blood-mixing and there were cases – who knew how many? – where the baby in the lackeys’ quarters and that in the ducal nursery were half siblings. Such arrangements, like gossip itself, provided relief from a tight, strangling system and had been available to the duchess. Why had she not availed herself of them? After all – and this made the question harder to answer – the adulterating in her case was not with plebeian blood at all. Her Russian lover was a man of impeccable descent.

He, while this speculation was going on, was sent a writ by the court demanding to know whether he acknowledged having been her lover during the time indicated. Excitement simmered. Would he understand what was wanted? A Russian? So far away, living no doubt on one of those unimaginable estates where serfdom persisted and Tsar Nicholas ruled with an iron hand! He had travelled of course. He was a Westernised gentleman and must have assumed that he should answer with gentlemanly discretion, for back came his answer that indeed he had been a friend of the
nobildonna
Geltrude – to whom he took the opportunity of conveying his devoted homage – but his relations with her had not overstepped the bounds of propriety. He added, for good measure, that when he knew her, she had been on excellent terms with her husband!

This, if believed, would have left Flavio with no father but the aforementioned Holy Ghost. It was a defeat for Donna Geltrude who was, however, a woman of resource. She summoned her confessor – not Father Gavazzi who at this point, anyway, was in England apostatising – but an old friar to whom she had confided her dilemma, during the crucial year, all that time ago. He was a barefoot Carmelite from the convent of Santa Maria della Scala, too weak to appear in person but who revealed, in a notarised statement, the confession that she had made to him at the time of Flavio’s birth. It confirmed what she had told the court: Flavio was a bastard and not her husband’s son.

Public opinion was outraged. The Russian lover had shown more discretion than the Roman friar! Confessions should not be revealed, and certainly not at the convenience of penitents! After all, if they were, penitents could tell a confessor whatever suited them, then call him into court to testify! No! Eh no! Donna Geltrude, her friar, and her friends became dangerously unpopular and were for a while afraid to walk the
streets. Flavio was taken to the public’s heart and the prelates of the Sacra Rota fell back on the safe old rule of jurisprudence whereby the father is the man indicated by the legal marriage bond:
pater
est
quem
iustae
nuptiae
demostrant.
Flavio was thus declared to be the legitimate son of the late duke and eligible to inherit from his deceased elder brother whose will in favour of their sister was set aside.

All that had been five years ago. And now here was Flavio again. Passing through Bologna on a wet November afternoon, Nicola had been bolting across the street to shelter from a downpour and from melancholy memories of the years when he had worked here for the late Cardinal Oppizzoni. Clouds scudded. Grey light made stone pillars and vertical rain seem to exchange substances and he had an impression of something similar happening to the polarities of his mind. He was now a Monsignore with purple stockings, piping, cummerbund and buttons, and corseted by as many certainties as he could wrap around himself – but also gnawed at by doubts.

‘That’s to be expected,’ Amandi had told him, but Nicola, looking around him at the comfortable drawing-room
abati
who populated Rome, did not believe this.

To combat those who, in London, Zurich, Paris, etc., were mapping the predicted course of the Spectre of Communism, he had been assigned Amandi’s old task of doing the same with the prognoses of those who reported sightings of the Virgin. At first he had eagerly accepted this assignment, being exalted by the prospect of working with the innocent and unspoiled who, at the very least, took their religion passionately. By now, however, the tedious sameness of the rural pythonesses had begun to depress him. The idea of a comparative study of their insights and foresights had been abandoned. There was nothing to study or compare.

The sight of Flavio was just what he needed: a truer and more stimulating apparition! Flavio burst out of a café as Nicola passed, flung his arms around him, thumped him on the back, shouted, kissed him, exclaimed at his purple trimmings and drew him into the warm fug of a semi-private alcove spicy with vanilla, coffee, hot chocolate and
cinnamon
. After the grey exterior, the plush and glitter dazzled.

‘… circus,’ he heard Flavio say and thought the word a metaphor. But no: Flavio was here as a patron of the Circo Ciniselli whose chief attraction, here in this very alcove, smiling and extending her gloved hand was the equestrienne, Miss Ella, whose fame had reached even
Nicola’s provincial ears. From close to, she was a muscular, blonde girl clad in a riding habit.

‘You must see her perform!’ Flavio insisted. ‘If you think
I’
m
an apparition, Miss Ella will ravish you! She’s a phenomenon! A dancer as graceful as la Taglioni except that she does it all on horseback at the risk of breaking her delicate swan’s neck! She’s performing this evening at the Teatro del Corso. You can sit in my box, back in the shadows so as to hide your purple and scandalise nobody. She’s the only member of the fair sex whom I wholeheartedly admire,’ said Flavio kissing Miss Ella’s hand. She was, he added, an American from Louisiana.

Flavio, though now a duke, could have been the circus performer. His pale innominables were as taut as skin. His waistcoat was watered silk. His watch fob glistened. He was a gilded creature: a living challenge to the grey, stony, papal town.

‘What happened to your mother?’

Oh, said Flavio, no doubt she flourished like the green bay tree. He hadn’t seen her since the trial, nor Rome either. ‘I had to flit! The Jesuits expected me to join or at least divide my fortune with them. They might not have sponsored my case otherwise. Mobilised their
connections
. Pushed it through. I had to conciliate them – or so my Jesuit uncle explained. Poor man, he was torn, being himself unworldly. The Society, on the other hand … Damn! Sorry. Shsh!’

Flavio moved swiftly into the café corridor just next to the alcove where they were sitting. ‘If anyone wants trouble,’ Nicola heard him say, ‘I’m their man. Swords, pistols or a punctured nose!’ For moments he could be heard patrolling the corridor, then he came back. ‘Gone!’ He flung out his hands. ‘Evaporated!’

Miss Ella smiled.

‘That imbecile,’ said Flavio, sitting down. ‘Did you see him? He walked past three times. Three! He’s mad for Miss Ella. Infatuated. Well, why not, you may say? But this idiot has been threatening to blow his brains out during the performance! He sits in the front row night after night. If he did – not that he will! – imagine the effect on the horses! More champagne? What were we talking about? Me, I expect. Let’s change the subject. Miss Ella knows all my stories.’

Miss Ella’s Sphinx-smile had not relaxed. Maybe she knew no Italian? Or was half a horse? Yes, thought Nicola uncharitably – he had had one of those inexplicable physical revulsions on touching her gloved skin – a female centaur, a demi-mare!

But he agreed to come to this evening’s performance. Meeting Flavio
again was to be made the most of and at least, in the theatre,
she
would be some way away. People talked of first love but, from what Nicola had learned in the confessional, the aftermath of
that
was often oblivion or loathing. First friendship, on the other hand, was surely more lasting. Flavio had first shaken Nicola into consciousness – as Martelli too had done in a more obvious way. Hard to say how, in Flavio’s case – perhaps just by giving off that extra charge of the life force which one picked up from healthy young animals. And he had been shocking! Shock, when one was young, freed the spirit. It made one question things – though who could say, thought Nicola gloomily, whether that was such a bounty after all?