Scarpia
Page 35
‘Not the price you think, Mario. I will confess, yes, I was once Scarpia’s lover – once, on one night. But now and forever there will be only you, and to prove it – see!’ She drew back her shawl to uncover the darkening stain on her bodice.
Cavaradossi looked down at the blotch of congealed blood, then up again at Tosca.
‘What is that?’
‘His blood.’
‘Scarpia’s?’
‘Yes. He is dead.’
‘You killed him?’
‘For you.’
A flush came onto Cavaradossi’s face. ‘So the monster is dead. Brava, Floria! You are now truly a patriot.’
Tosca looked into his eyes, hoping for an expression of love rather than republican esteem. And she was rewarded. ‘Brava, Floria,’ he said again, and embraced her.
‘Ah, my love,’ she said.
‘Yes, yes.’ He let go of her. ‘And I am to play dead? Play dead and then come alive and leave Rome?’
‘Yes.’
‘What if Scarpia’s body is found?’
‘I hid it behind the curtains.’
‘But the curtains will be drawn at dawn.’
‘Yes.’
‘We must move quickly.’ Cavaradossi went to the door of his cell and hammered on it with his fist. ‘Soldier, I am ready.’
The door was opened by Spoletta. ‘If you will follow me. And you, signorina, might like to watch the rise of the sun from the battlements or, if you prefer, and turn the other way, see the act of justice.’
Tosca smiled. Yes, she would watch the charade. With a last smile at her reconciled lover as he was led off by a squad of soldiers, she climbed onto the ramparts overlooking the basilica of St Peter’s – pink in the light of the rising sun. She heard the roll of drums. She saw Cavaradossi reappear, blindfolded and his hands once again tied behind his back, escorted by ten soldiers. She watched as he was stood against the wall of the tower that crowned the castello and the squad of soldiers was lined up to face him. Their muskets were raised. She heard Spoletta shout the order to take aim and then fire. She heard the shots. She saw Mario fall. Joy filled her heart. He lay there motionless. How well he feigned death. Spoletta handed over the command of the soldiers to a corporal who marched them away. Tosca waited. How long would it be before he rose? She saw that Spoletta had remained. Would he give the signal? Nothing happened. Mario did not move. She stepped down from the ramparts onto the stones of the small square and went to Spoletta. ‘Can we now go?’
‘Of course. You have your passport.’
‘And Mario?’
‘He has already left. He is on his way to Hell.’
Tosca turned towards the inert body of her lover. ‘But he is alive,’ she said. ‘Scarpia promised.’
‘I had my orders too,’ said Spoletta. He turned away.
Tosca ran towards Cavaradossi. He lay face down with no marks on his back but a trickle of blood ran from under his body. She turned him over. The blood came from six holes in his breast. His face was pale, his eyes unfocused. Cavaradossi was dead.
‘Dio mio,’ cried Tosca, ‘Mario. He promised me . . . he swore on his honour.’ There was no one to hear what she said, except perhaps a voice within Tosca: ‘This is Scarpia’s revenge.’ And another voice, that of the peasant from the Veneto, which said that she still had the passports and safe conducts, and that lingering by the body of her dead lover would accomplish nothing. She stood and walked back towards her coach. Spoletta was talking with the officer of the guard. What the officer said seemed to agitate him; he turned and crossed the courtyard to Tosca.
‘The baron is dead,’ he said. ‘He has been murdered.’
Tosca stepped back. She saw a twisted look on Spoletta’s face – a blend of anger and anguish.
‘He is dead?’ she asked lamely.
Spoletta looked straight into her eyes, and what he read in those eyes led him to lower his glance and see, in the light of the risen sun, the blotch of blood on Tosca’s dress. ‘It was you. Of course. Who else?’
Tosca looked down at her bodice and pointed towards the corpse of Cavaradossi. ‘It is his blood.’
‘That is not fresh blood,’ said Spoletta. ‘It is caked and dry.’
Tosca turned to climb into her coach, but Spoletta seized her by the arm. ‘You vile whore,’ he shouted. ‘What did you hope for? To escape? To claim a crime of passion? An appeal to the Rota? A pardon from the Pope? Is that what you imagined?’ Spoletta laughed and with his two huge hands took hold of Tosca by the waist and lifted her over his shoulder. She shrieked and struggled but could not escape his grip. Spoletta took seven strides to the castellated ramparts, lifted her high above his head, and threw Floria Tosca over the wall.
Postscript
Barnaba Chiaramonti, elected Pope in Venice on 14 March, took the same name as his predecessor and was crowned with a papier mâché tiara as Pius VII. He then sailed on an Austrian ship, the Bellona, to the port of Pesaro from whence he travelled by coach over the Apennines to Rome. He reached the Eternal City on 3 July 1800, returning to the seat of St Peter two years and four months after the exile of his predecessor, Luigi Braschi Onesti, Pope Pius VI.
Eight days before his return, a large crowd had followed the coffin containing the body of Floria Tosca from the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle to her grave. The way she had died as reported by the governor of the Castel Sant’Angelo – throwing herself from the ramparts after the execution of her lover – was an operatic drama suddenly transposed to real life. Canon law forbade the burying of a suicide on consecrated ground, but there was no cardinal or bishop in Rome who dared hold Tosca responsible for what she had done. To the grieving crowd, she was indistinguishable from the heroine she had played so well in Nina, o sia la pazza per amore. Tosca had been driven mad by love.
In contrast to the grandiose interment of Tosca, the funeral of Baron Scarpia at Rubosa was simple, conducted by the Oratorian priest, Father Simone Alberti, and attended only by his widow, his two children, his brother-in-law, Prince Ludovico di Marcisano with his wife and children, and Guido Spoletta. It was officially announced that he had been killed by a Jacobin assassin as he was sitting at his desk – an assassin who then escaped – although soon all Rome believed the alternative version put about by the servants at the Palazzo Farnese – that he had been stabbed by Tosca. But why? Some said it was in revenge for ordering the death of her lover; others that he had tried to ravish her and she had killed him rather than submit. The circle around Prince Paducci, the Chevalier Spinelli and the Contessa di Comastri preferred this version. So too did the Romans.
The death of a man who had served the legitimist cause with such distinction would normally have led to public obsequies organised by the state, but in the interregnum there was no one to give such a command. Prince Naselli had left Rome, Cardinal Ruffo was in Naples, and those cardinals who were in Rome awaiting the arrival of Pius VII had no wish to tarnish the new pontificate with an unseemly scandal. Sir John Acton, in Palermo, having inherited the baronetcy and estates in England from his cousin, was preoccupied with arrangements for his marriage to his thirteen-year-old niece. Queen Maria Carolina was in Vienna. King Ferdinand, who had remained in Sicily, was busy hunting.
With the consent of his wife, Paola di Marcisano, Guido Spoletta took the body of Baron Scarpia back to Sicily in a lead-lined coffin where it was placed in the family sepulchre at Castelfranco alongside ancestors. The title of Baron of both the Papal States and the Kingdom of Two Sicilies passed to Pietro Scarpia together with the properties that had belonged to his father. Paola continued to wear black long after the prescribed period of mourning for her husband had ended and never went into society, devoting her life to charitable works and religious devotions. Her only extravagance was the commissioning from the sculptor Canova of a fine monument to her husband in Carrara marble. It was erected in the chapel at Rubaso and every year on the anniversary of his death Paola, Pietro and Francesca came from Rome to Ruba
so to attend a Mass said for the repose of his soul.
Acknowledgements
The idea of writing the story of Baron Vitellio Scarpia came to me after reading Susan Vandiver Nicassio’s book Tosca’s Rome: The Play and the Opera in Historical Perspective. In this superb study of Puccini’s opera, Tosca, Professor Nicassio establishes just how inaccurate and partisan is its portrayal of the political realities of the time. The libretto was based on a play, La Tosca, written in the late nineteenth century by an anti-clerical Frenchman, Victorien Sardou: thus the chief of police of the Papal States, Baron Scarpia, is the sadistic agent of reaction while the republicans, Cesare Angelotti and Mario Cavaradossi, are heroes. Angelotti and Cavaradossi, she tells us, were based on real historical characters with similar names while Baron Scarpia, a Sicilian, appears fleetingly in histories of the time as the leader of a guerrilla army fighting for the Bourbon cause.
Can one perpetuate an injustice on a historical character? Could an English novelist do something to redress the calumny of a French playwright, filling in the gaps left by history with invention? This is what I have tried to do, and I wish to thank Susan Vandiver Nicassio not just for giving me the idea for this novel, but for the richly detailed portrait of the period to be found in her book.
My gratitude also goes to those historians on whose works I have drawn in writing this novel: Maurice Andrieux’s Daily Life in Papal Rome in the Eighteenth Century and Daily Life in Venice in the Time of Casanova, both translated by Mary Fitton; The Bourbons of Naples (1734–1825) by Harold Acton; The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, Volume XL, by Ludwig, Freiherr von Pastor, translated by E. F. Peeler; History of Naples from the Accession of Charles of Bourbon to the Death of Ferdinand I by Pietro Coletta, translated by S. Horner; Memorie Storiche Sulla Vita del Cardinale Fabrizio Ruffo. La contestazioni dell’abate sanfedista alle opere di Vincenzo Cuoco, Carlo Botta e Pietro Coletta by Domenico Sacchinelli; Goethe’s Travels in Italy, translated from the German by the Rev. A. J. W. Morrison and Charles Nesbit; Memoirs of Comte Roger de Damas 1787–1806; The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt; Nelson and Ruffo by F. P. Badham; Imperial City: Rome, Romans and Napoleon, 1796–1815 by Susan Vandiver Nicassio; and Jacques-Louis David by Anita Brookner.
I would also like to express my gratitude to my agent, Gillon Aitken, for his faith in the novel; to all at Bloomsbury, in particular my editor, Michael Fishwick, for his inspired insight into how early drafts might be improved; to John Warrack, who corrected my errors about eighteenth-century opera; to Lucy Beckett for her sound advice.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Piers Paul Read is best known for his number one New York Times bestseller Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which documented the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 and was later adapted into a film. He has written sixteen novels which have won a number of awards, among them a Hawthornden Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award and a James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Most recently he published The Dreyfus Affair, a compelling non-fiction account of the infamous case of a miscarriage of justice in France in the nineteenth century. He lives in London.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FICTION
Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx
The Junkers
Monk Dawson
The Professor’s Daughter
The Upstart
Polonaise
A Married Man
The Villa Golitsyn
The Free Frenchman
A Season in the West
On the Third Day
A Patriot in Berlin
Knights of the Cross
Alice in Exile
The Misogynist
NON-FICTION
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors
The Train Robbers
Ablaze: The Story of Chernobyl
The Templars
Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography
Hell and other Destinations (Essays)
The Dreyfus Affair
Also available by Piers Paul Read
The Misogynist
Jomier has reached the age of retirement, his children are grown up and his wife, after having an affair, has left him. Embittered and humiliated, he lives alone in London, mourning the disintegration of his marriage as he broods about the past and the present. When he falls for Judith, things begin to improve. Yet he still cannot escape his old habits and it is only when his daughter falls ill that he begins to reassess his feelings towards those he loves and his ability to forgive.
Darkly humorous, ruthlessly satirical and surprisingly moving, The Misogynist is a perceptive exploration of the ways in which we can unintentionally let past disappointments affect our present, and how difficult it can be to move forward.
‘It confirms Read as probably our leading Catholic novelist since Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess’
Sunday Times
‘A beautifully observed portrait of a man at odds with the world … It is at once eloquent and entertaining, intelligent and incisive’
Tatler
‘Beautifully written and intelligent’
Scotsman
http://bloomsbury.com/author/piers-paul-read/
Click here to order
Also available by Piers Paul Read
The Dreyfus Affair
A rising star in the French artillery, Captain Alfred Dreyfus appeared to have everything. But his rapid rise had also made him enemies – many of them aristocratic officers in the army’s High Command who resented him because he was middle-class, meritocratic and a Jew.
In 1984, torn fragments of a memo containing military secrets were discovered in a waste paper basket in the German embassy in Paris. Captain Dreyfus, on slender evidence, was found guilty of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment on the notorious Devil’s Island.
A story rife with heroes and villains, the Dreyfus affair divided France and unleashed violent hatreds and anti-Semitic passions which offered a foretaste of what was to play out in the long, bloody twentieth century to come.
‘Compelling and tense’
Sunday Times
‘Masterly and eminently balanced … Piers Paul Read’s narrative is compelling. He disentangles the complicated web of the Affair and is just to both sides … I can’t think the story could be better, or more fairly, told’
Spectator
‘He guides us through the giddying twists and turns of this complex story with skill, and brings the large cast of characters vividly to life****’
Mail on Sunday
http://bloomsbury.com/author/piers-paul-read/
Click here to order
First published in Great Britain 2015
This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Piers Paul Read, 2015
Piers Paul Read has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square
London
WC1B 3DP
www.bloomsbury.com
Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4088 6750 1
eISBN 978 1 4088 6752 5
To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will fi
nd extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.