A Trembling Upon Rome

by Richard Condon

  Tomas Cossa was a one-eyed man who had been a sea captain it the family business, but whom the duke had judged to be too smart to stay at sea, there being plenty of other men to do his job. Tomas was a ruffian who was burned to dark leather by his lifetime in the sun. He had a hanging left eyelid which had frightened many people before he had killed them. His voice was coarsely hoarse from drinking Greek olive oil. He was the Cossas' chief intelligence agent and employed dozens of sub-agents in the seaports of Germany, France, England, Spain and North Africa, to locate and evaluate shipping destined for the Mediterranean. He passed this complex information to the Cossas on Procida. Knowing when and where the Cossa fleet would sail out and plunder these ships. Tomas was probably responsible for my mother's drowning, but he was a Cossa and death meant nothing to him. Baldassare Cossa was the same, throughout his life. He killed at will but he offered his own life as forfeit if he failed; The family trade must have brought all the Cossas to that view.

  3

  The popes! The cardinals! The bishops! The curia! All because of the Jews and Constantine. Christianity was the religion of a Jewish sect who saw themselves as the true Jews: they thought God had granted them the right to bring the saving work of the people of the Old Covenant to a conclusion because they had found the Messiah. The other Jews merely referred to them as `the Nazarenes'. Questions of agonizing urgency began to bother this sect, but the biggest question was whether Christianity should supplant Jewish orthodoxy or whether it should remain distinct from but closely linked with the Jewish community, its synagogue and its traditions. By the third century Anno Domini, by their counting, they were regarded as a heretical sect by other Jews. These Christians, disowned by the Jewish people, at last, three hundred years after their leader had died, called out to convert the whole of mankind to their Lord's message, in order to survive. Then the whole thing. the entire misunderstanding, was made legitimate by a politicians accident.

  It is almost impossible to believe that because Constantine claimed to attribute his cavalry victory at the Milvian bridge to the God of the Christians, who had been nurtured so feebly in Rome by a handful of renegade Jewish fanatics, we must now suffer hundreds of cardinals, thousands of bishops and tens of thousands of indolent priests and monks, in all of the arrogance of their plump wealth; it is almost enough to shatter the spirit. But Constantine, the shrewdest of all the politicians, on the 28 October 312, AD, became the father of institutional Christianity in the crass version by which we now, late in the fourteenth century, know it, by rigorously enforcing its dogmas and-doctrines across the face of Europe -although he himself did not bother to become a Christian until he had fallen into a coma and the eager priests baptized him on his deathbed.

  That about sums up Christianity, in my humble opinion. It has changed a great, deal since then, but if they didn't know they had a good thing when they were Jewish, I – mean, as my father told me, why try to improve on the real thing? How could a few centuries, more or less, be expected to accomplish; anything except to make the countless executives of the church worse? Worse they became, believe me.

  By the time we made it that far through our lives to get to the Vatican palace, Christianity had become complicated, complex, big business. Bishop Piero Tomacelli, the Cossa family's unofficial representative to the papacy, worked only at night in the new papal palace on Vatican hill, near St Peter's. He was the curia] officer in charge of the administration of the rota romana, preparing cases for appeals to the pope from all over Christendom. His department, the audientia litterarum contradictarum, had maintained diligent files over the centuries. It examined and, ruled on objections and exceptions to appeals.

  At midnight on the day after our arrival, Tomas took us to the Vatican palace for a private audience with Bishop Tomacelli, the expensive friend of the Cossa family. Tomacelli was the blandest man I have ever met or seen. He was tall, elegant and handsome; of a noble Neapolitan family, although not of the Cossa family's rank. He was ten years older than Cossa, which made him two years younger than me. `Tomacelli is not over-learned,' the duke had explained to us, `but he is courteous and affable and certainly knows where the money is.' '

  The luxury in which the bishop lived impressed us deeply. I could see Cossa shivering with the pleasure of imagining how cardinals must live. Seeing Tomacelli, a young man, covered with jewels and line clothing, surrounded by so many servants in such an opulent setting must have settled the matter of Cossa entering the Church in his own mind. It had never been real to him before. The Church was the place for sandalled dolts such as Father Fanfarone, but this – this was living! I would have to agree with him if living without women was living.

  'How I long to see Naples again,' the bishop said: `But you and I by our service, Baldassare, must put that past behind us. You have been chosen by His Holiness to study at Bologna, to transform yourself into an instrument of the Church.' Tomacelli's voice rode upon exquisite Latin, although a few years later, after I had perfected my own, I didn't rate it so highly. He was striking a bargain with Cossa.

  `There is no career to equal what the Church can offer a brilliant young lawyer,' Tomacelli said. `Canon law is the skeletal structure of the Church. It is the oil which, has been rubbed into her by her lawyers, keeping her agile for more than a thousand years.'

  We crossed the bridge of Sant' Angelo at about one fifteen in the morning. The horses were lively in the night air. Cossa was still excited by the audience. `Did you notice his shoes?' he asked us. `At first I thought they were painted on his feet but after a while I saw that they were made of silk.'

  `Shoes?' I said. `What about the furniture? How about the paintings?'

  `Yes!' he said. `And I thought to myself that Margaret of Durazzo, ruler of Naples, cannot have better than that. Where are we headed, Uncle?'

  `Your father told me to put you on a woman,' Tomas said. `That's where we're going.'

  `A woman?'

  `You'll like it, my lord,' I told him.

  `You've mounted women?' he asked me with astonishment. `Well, after all, I am twenty-two years old,' I told my thirteen year-old master.

  `Who."

  A couple of your cousins.'

  We clattered through the night streets past the closely packed houses of the burgo, with their gables and sloping roofs facing the streets, most of them made from pilfered Roman ruins. Tomas stopped us in front of a two-storey house which had an outside marble staircase to the upper floor, in the street of the Blessed Santa Denisetta di Grellou. It had a small garden in front of the house with one olive tree, one fig tree and one apple tree. Tomas led Cossa up the outside stairway. Halfway up, Cossa stopped him. 'What's her name?' he asked.

  `What do you care?'

  'I have to know the name.'

  `Bernaba.'

  'Bernaba what?'

  `Are you going to marry her or just wrestle with her: Her name is Bernaba Minerbetti. She comes from Bari, the pope's home town. She's so new to Rome that hardly anybody knows she's in business. You are lucky – she is a beautiful little piece with a lot of life in her. The reason you are going to get to have her at this time of night is because her protector – if you can imagine a fellow who thinks he has bought a whore all for himself – is a Sicilian protonotary apostolic named Piero Spina who works the night shift at the Vatican.'

  `I wouldn't want her to be too much of a whore.' Cossa said.

  `She'll be whatever you want her to be,' Tomas told him. `That's her business.'

  Tomas knocked at the door at the top of the stairs. They waited. `Why is she taking so long?' Cossa asked.

  The door opened. A tiny, dark, very pretty sixteen-year-old woman wearing a sheepskin, and holding a guttering candle opened the door. `Where you been?'she said. 'You got me all horny waiting for you.'

  Tomas patted his nephew on the shoulder. `I have a virgin for you, he said to the girl.

  `Ah, Uncle Tomas,' Cossa said. He didn't want to say that he had screwed many of his cousins because one of
them was Tomas's daughter.

  Tomas pushed him and the girl pulled him inside the door. It closed on my upturned face at the bottom of the stairs.

  Tomas went home. I fell asleep in the garden waiting for Cossa to finish: Several hours later I was awakened by a racket above me.

  Cossa told me later what had happened. He and the girl fell asleep in each other's arms after he had done four or five times what she had found out he could do quite well (and he spent the rest of his life perfecting it). They came out of sleep the same time I did, like stones from a catapult, when the door splintered open and two violent men broke into the room.

  The girl sat straight up. `Spina!' she yelled. It was the protonotary apostolic who was paying the rent. Cossa told me Spina's eyes were popping out of his head at the horror of his personal disgrace. He had been conditioned to react this way: he was Sicilian.

  'Sfregia!' Spina shouted.

  The girl moaned like the night wind. 'Sfregia?' Cossa said blankly.

  'He's going to cut up my face!' the girl shrilled, moving backwards and upwards in the bed. 'No, Spina! This is only a boy. He is from my village. He is my brother, Spina. He had no place to sleep.'

  Spina took out a knife. He moved slowly around the bed towards the girl's side, motioning to his companion to move in on Cossa. The other man took out a knife and moved towards Cossa. By this time I had made it to the top of the stairs. I banged the companion over the head. He went down. Cossa,, naked, had leaped out of bed, picked up a heavy wooden chair and charged at, Spina, holding the chair before him like the horns of a fighting bull, running over the top of the bed to crash the chair into the soft front of Spina's head. and knocking him to the floor unconscious.

  'Do something!' the girl yelled, as if we had just been standing around. 'He is a Sicilian! He will hold a trentuno to get his revenge! Oh, shit, and I just set up business in this town.'

  'What's a trentuno?' Cossa asked.

  'He will come back here with thirty men from the Vatican and they'll rape me one after the other.' 'Impossible!' Cossa said.

  'You have destroyed his honour and he brought his own witness to see it,' Bernaba keened. ''Listen he is the most rabid kind of Sicilian. It could even be a trentuno reale, a continuous rape by seventy-nine men. I won't be able to work for two weeks! Then he will burn the house down. Oh, shit, those poor people downstairs.'

  'Get dressed,' Cossa said. 'You'll come with us,'

  'Where?'

  'Bologna.'

  'Over the mountains? Where it snows?'

  'If you want a trentuno reale, then stay here.'

  `Ah, shit.’

  Cossa scrambled into his clothes: I kicked both, men in the head to make sure they stayed unconscious. Cossa wrote a note.

  `Get me a pin,' he said.

  `What are you writing?'

  He took the pin from her and knelt beside Spina's broken face. He pinned the note to Spina's chest. 'It's in the best Latin,' he said, grinning, and he had such a smile, as I said, that the girl, despite all the trouble she thought she was in had to, smile as if somebody had handed her a gold florin. `Listen to this,' Cossa said. 'The entire male family of Bernaba Minerbetti have just performed a trentuno upon every orifice of your body. You have lost your honour. We are revenged."

  `You knew my name!' the girl said with. immense pleasure. `But that really does it. Spina will spend the rest of his life trying to avenge this.'

  `Let's get out of here,' I: said.

  We left Rome with the escort one hour before dawn. We reached Bologna four days later without incident.

  4

  As we were riding north, 1 said to him, 'Your father wouldn't like it if he knew that, on, our second night in Rome, you made an enemy of someone in the Vatican.'

  `It being the second night in Rome had nothing to do with it,' Cossa said. 'The fact that I was there on my second night in Rome is my father's fault. He wanted me to have a woman. As for making an enemy in the Vatican, the man came at me with a knife, so he must have been my enemy before I could be his. You might as well blame my Uncle Tomas for not taking me to an ugly girl who had no friends.'

  As you car, see, it was always difficult to talk about serious, moral things with Cossa because the nature of his mind resisted them.

  'Was she kidding about snow in Bologna?'

  Well, in the winter, sure.'

  `And I suppose the dialect is different?'' `Why not?'

  'How's the food?'

  I shouted to Palo, who had previously been sent to Bologna by Cossa's father to get everything set up for us, `Hey, Palo! How is the food in Bologna?'

  'You are not going to believe it until you taste it,' Palo yelled. 'It is like ninety times better than Neapolitan food.'

  'Well, they have snow so they should have better food, 'Cossa said.

  Aeneas had not crossed into Italy, Ascanius had not built Alba nor Romulus Rome, when Bologna was already the noblest town in Tuscany, the chief city of the Etruscans. It extended as far as the foot of the Apennines, flourishing and fruitful, abounding in vineyards and olive groves. Unpolluted by marshy vapours, its soil was fertile, producing more than enough for the people of the plain: eater was brought into the city by the Canale di Reno. The city was famous for its square towers even more than for its arcaded streets. There were more than 950 towers; for the most part built of wood, often within five feet of their neighbours. The upper stories of the houses projected over crooked, narrow streets, the more pretentious made of brick decorated with terra cotta. There was no marble.

  Ancient Bologna, on the Aemilian Way; was at the intersection of four provinces: Lombardy, the March of Verona, the Romandiola and Tuscany. It was the point at which the great lines of communication between the northern entrances of Italy and its centre converged. Students of the law from Norway to Greece who were to take their places in power throughout Christendom became our friends there.

  The University of Bologna was the most famous centre of learning in southern Europe. Its rivals were Oxford and Paris. It taught the codification and administration of the laws on which the Church had survived for a millennium. It ignored theological speculation. Religious thought, which would have been only an illusion in the lives of these fledgling canon lawyers, had no substance. Theology was theoretical. The law took its nature from the material opportunities it represented. The student lawyers would graduate as doctors of canon law, then go on to become prelates bishops, archbishops and cardinals of the Church, stoically unaware of the spiritual side of the extraordinary complex they served, yet preserving and extending it by the attributes of their legal practice.

  By banishing theological speculation from its curriculum, the university also banished all heresy to which such speculation gives rise and extinguished all interest in the purpose and meaning of the religion which the young lawyers were being trained to serve. The scholastic year lasted from October to the end of the following August. We needed to write no lies about Cossa's scholastic accomplishments in the letters which I dictated to Father Fanfarone for forgery into Cossa's hand. Cossa was renowned as a scholar.

  Bernaba had brought her own money and a small collection of jewels. Spina had been generous. She thanked Cossa for his offer of hospitality in the same spacious, well-furnished house as we occupied, which Palo had found, four streets from the university. She told us she had to leave to get her business organized. `It's always hard to get started,' she said, `'but. I did it before and this looks like a pretty lively town.'

  `You need a manager,' Cossa told her.

  'A pimp?' she asked, without resentment.

  'Watch your language, Bernaba,' I told her.

  'Then what does he want to manage?' she asked. Am I a singer?'

  'I have introductions to a lot of important people in Bologna,' Cossa said… `After I establish myself with them, I could introduce them to you.’

  'What do you get out of this?'

  `Information.'

  'No money?'

 
'Information is money.'

  `Then you won't take my money?'

  `You're goddam right he won't take your money,' I told her.

  `I didn't say that,' Cossa told her smoothly. 'Franco Ellera said it. That is business. You are a talented woman at your kind of work. I'll put up the money to set you up in style – see what I mean? It's like my father fitting out a ship for raiding. We'll agree on how much you earned in Rome and I'll allow you that much free and clear. But I'll take fifty per cent of whatever, you make over that, because of my investment and my key introductions, which will, after all establish you in business in a strange town.'

  'What about trouble – you know, complaints, noisy drunks and women beaters?'

  `We have Palo for that.'

  `It sounds all right to me,' Bernaba said. `I will need all the protection I can get. But I'm not clear on, what kind of information you want.'

  'That will develop naturally,' Cossa said. 'Let's concentrate on the business side for now. Like maybe you could add two or three more hot-looking cortegiani to your stable. We would finance that and protect their operation under you and take twenty-five per cent of what they make. You provide them with our money and our muscle and a nice place to work – and keep the other twenty-five per cent for yourself.'

  `Cossa, hold on a minute, here,' I said.

  `What's the matter?' he had the arrogance to ask me.

  `I want to get something straight with you. This has nothing to do with fitting out a ship for your father's business. Even if it did I would still say that to make money from the business which drowned my mother is better than living off the shame of a woman who rents her body to men for the uses of their filthy lusts.'

  `Filthy?' he said indignantly.

  `Shame?' Bernaba said with shocked astonishment. `I am eating now! I have a, place to live and I had that before I met the two of you.'

  `This is not personal, Bernaba; I said. `I want to be sure that Cossa understands. something important.'