The Judas Cloth

by Julia O'Faolain

‘Feelings,’ said the man, ‘don’t come into this. The Church has too much truck with feelings. It’s a fad and a weakness.’

  *

  Nicola Santi had begun to visit the apartment of a priest who needed a clever student to assist his secretary. The visits were forays into a world of singularity and possible loneliness. For Don Eugenio, unlike the Jesuits, had his own household. Nicola observed it with a zoologist’s care.

  In its hall were two crackled, smoky portraits of Don Eugenio’s parents wearing black dresses and powdered wigs. They were got up like this because the father had been a papal employee who, though free to marry, was, according to the convention of the day, expected to wear clerical dress. The wife may have thought of herself as belonging to the prelacy in a subsidiary way.

  The apartment was almost as dim as the portraits. Its windows were made up of small panes of beer-coloured glass. To Nicola, the tinted air seemed thick with domestic promise for it was the colour of the cake which he was sometimes given on arrival. The walls were hung with yellow damask which yielded pleasantly to the touch. Sometimes, surreptitiously, he tried on Don Eugenio’s three-cornered hat.

  It was in the study, under the eye of a grimy bust of Pope Pius VII, that the secretary, Don Federico, briefed him on what he must know before he could be put to work.

  Today Don Federico’s lesson was about sealing wax: mode of application, removal of stains therefrom, and dimension of seals. There were six sizes in use at the Secretariat of State to which Don Eugenio was attached. Of these the largest was for official use, the next for letters to a correspondent of a rank below that of the signatory. The third was for a correspondent of almost equal but still inferior rank, the fourth for equals, the fifth for superiors, while the smallest was for letters to a pope or king.

  ‘One makes oneself small when dealing with the great‚’ explained Don Federico, who was stirred by the order typified in these distinctions. He left Nicola to memorise them.

  Picking up a quill pen, Nicola began instead to sketch a letter to Bishop Amandi.

  ‘Illustrissimus et Reverendissimus,’ he wrote. An earlier lesson with Don Federico had turned on the distinctions between men eligible to be so addressed and those who could be called Excellentia Reverendissima or, more grandly, given all three titles at once.

  Despite my reluctance to importune Your Excellency with my humble concerns, circumstances oblige me to ask who I am. Insinuations have led to the perhaps presumptuous conclusion that I might be related to Your Exc …

  Here his pen made a bashful blot which he at once made into a doodle, thus spoiling the letter which was a doodle too since he would never dare send it. Folding it up, he tore it into bits.

  In this bachelor establishment, everyone petted Nicola who was greedy for affection and sought it with shy, thrusting moves. Even small kindnesses encouraged his hopes which throve on very little, just as eggs can be warmed and hatched in an invalid’s bed.

  He felt able to talk openly to Don Eugenio.

  ‘Your father was a married abate then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know who mine was. I’m sure it wasn’t Santi, the notary. I think he must have been paid to let me have his name. He’s dead now. But he never showed any interest in me. Never visited.’

  Don Eugenio did not contradict this.

  ‘I’ve wondered if my father was a bandit or a headsman: someone people think I wouldn’t want to know about.’ Nicola waited, then: ‘Or a priest. I’d be an embarrassment then. And I wouldn’t be able to be one myself. They don’t want the illegitimate.’

  Don Eugenio didn’t answer and Nicola began to wonder whether he might be thinking that Nicola thought he was his father! Oddio! How mortifying! Nicola pretended to examine his shoe. Embarrassment over his error deepened with the thought that it might not be one. After moments of shy, suppressed turmoil, he shot a look at the man’s face and was relieved and disappointed by his smile.

  ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said Don Eugenio. ‘Innumerable illegitimate men have become priests and bishops. Besides, you have Santi’s name.’

  ‘You think I should stop wondering?’

  ‘Just be ready to accept what comes – or doesn’t. It will matter less soon. You’re at the age when young men leave their families, at least in spirit. They fly with their own wings.’

  Rome, 1848

  It was spring. The Feast of the Epiphany had come and gone. Its lights had smudged the sky with a reflected radiance, and a din of tin whistles floated teasingly into the embattled Collegio. Were they omens? Perhaps, for within days a plague of revolutions was sweeping Europe. First Palermo revolted, then Paris, then Vienna, and when Milan followed suit it appealed for help to rid the peninsula of Austrian rule. Inflamed by example, an invigorated mobile vulgus was soon enjoying the mild weather in the Roman streets. Threats to burn the Collegio were again flung in. They were written on scaps of paper wrapped around stones.

  ‘They’ll do it yet.’

  The porter spoke with zest. A martyr’s death offered a man in his nineties the best of both worlds. ‘If Austria sends troops to restore order, that lot out there will make a real revolution!’ With the side of his hand, he guillotined himself in mime. ‘What we are is bait.’

  ‘Hark at them.’ Martelli cocked an ear. ‘They’ve no idea why they’re shouting. The piazze,’ he said, ‘are controlled from certain palazzi.’ He was disillusioned. It seemed his cousin’s friends might be outflanked. Rival groups were fighting for possession of a revolution which had not yet happened.

  A number of pupils had been withdrawn from the school, but this only made the Father Prefect more exalted. He spoke of those left as ‘the faithful’. ‘Blessed are you‚’ he quoted, ‘when men persecute you and, speaking falsely, say all manner of evil against you for my sake.’ It did not occur to him that this blessing might not appeal to the families of young boys. Once, he raised the knot of his hands to intone: ‘Oh God whose only Son annihilated himself to help a world in perdition, should we not accept your will if you decide to annihilate our Society?’

  His pupils were shocked. This, surely, was going too far?

  Another time, he raised a face bleared with enthusiasm to share ‘a cheering thought’. It was this: ‘Joseph would never have had to flee with Mary into Egypt if Jesus had not been with them! Is it not the same with us now and an occasion of the most exalting joy?’

  ‘He’s soft in the head,’ said Martelli.

  What had happened to the Church’s elite corps? Had it lost all backbone? Even rebellious pupils were disappointed. Their pride was invested in the legend of cunning, powerful Jesuits.

  The hope was that the Society’s leaders were holding secret talks with the Pope. And when, in mid-March, a Te Deum was sung in the Collegio chapel, everyone guessed that he had promised them support. On the 19th, which was St Joseph’s Day, Nicola’s division was taken on an excursion outside the city walls. We could not, said the Prefect, stay cooped up forever.

  The outing became a celebration. Sweet St Joseph’s fritters were selling at open-air booths and the Prefect bought some for everyone. Then the boys wore themselves out playing the strenuous games they had been missing. They were in high spirits, and even the walk back was a pleasure for the air was fizzing with smells from hidden gardens and from the hayricks which were still numerous in the city’s heart.

  A crowd blocked their way through piazza Venezia, and word went down the line that they were, at all costs, to stay together.

  A priest stood on a cart in front of the Austrian Embassy.

  ‘See there!’ A woman pointed at a pale patch on the wall behind his head. ‘That’s where the Austrian eagle used to be. It was torn down when news got here of the revolution in Vienna. The crowd dragged it the length of the Corso, beating it with sticks.’

  A man laughed.

  ‘What’s there to laugh at?’ She was offended. The eagle had been burned in the piazza del Popolo. ‘From patriotism!’ sh
e told the mocker.

  ‘Well, if that’s the extent of their patriotism‚’ said he, ‘the Austrians can sleep on both ears.’

  ‘Austro-Jesuit!’ The patriotic woman spat.

  Nicola and his friends edged away from her, then found that they were no longer with the rest of their group.

  ‘Who’s the preacher?’ they asked and were told that he was the abate Gavazzi, a Liberal priest who had the ear of the Pope. But, a dispute arose about this. Some contended that the Pope had imprisoned the abate who had only just been released.

  ‘But if Gavazzi’s one of his advisers why would he lock him up?’

  ‘Because the Holy Father’s shillyshallying.’

  ‘And has advisers who think differently.’ A young man looked askance at the Collegio uniform.

  Clutching Martelli’s coat, Nicola found his nose being rammed into breasts and backs. An elbow caught him in the ribs. His hat tilted over his eyes. No touching was countenanced in the Collegio and now here was this smothering flesh. At moments, he was pushed out like something newborn only to be reingulfed. This, he thought, is the secular world.

  ‘Stop shoving, you boys!’

  But Martelli, propelled by the buttress of his friends, forged forward until, breaking through to open space, they fell to the ground. The crowd commented disparagingly. Hands yanked at their collars. Members of the Civic Guard were lined up around the speaker’s cart.

  Aloft on it, the preacher loomed full-blooded and muscular, like a creature which could have stood between its shafts. His nostrils dilated. His role was to link God and man, and the movement here was clearly from below. He spoke soothingly. These, he said, of the Collegio boys, were only children. Let them listen now that they were here.

  So, with the Guards’ grip on their necks, the six had to stay put while the abate used them to instruct his audience. Italian youth, he said, must be helped shake off a bad old heritage. ‘Young men,’ he exhorted, ‘free yourselves from dead ways of thinking lest you be like the corpses who walk our streets pretending to be alive. Try to live as God meant so that we may all be brothers instead of plotters and spies!’

  Nicola felt queerly hollow as if what had been most secret inside himself had been pulled out for public display.

  ‘Si!’ yelled the mobile vulgus, whose embrace was disconcertingly seductive.

  So were the abate’s arguments as he challenged the Jesuits to stop plotting with Austria. ‘I challenge them!’ he cried and his eye roamed. ‘Let them not say that this would be to pander to the world, for the world is no longer the corrupt old world we have known. It has become new, young and hopeful. This, my friends, is truly a time of hope!’

  There were cheers. Martelli joined in and Nicola too, though reproaching him with a dutiful nudge, felt exhilarated by the prospect of a young, hopeful world waiting for them both. It was sad, of course, to think of the Father Prefect and Father Curci as corpses and corrupt – meaning, surely, no more than soft like decaying fruit – but how deny that an aura of doom clung to these good, unmanly men?

  Meanwhile the preacher was promising an end to poverty. Cheers. More promises. Then shouts so deafening that he had to use the full resources of his lungs and it was as if he were inhaling his listeners’ energy with his black, pumping nostrils. Nicola lost track of the sermon which mentioned war and tariffs. The preacher, glowing with sweat, managed to look both bull-like and heroic, which might well have been how Zeus had looked when he took the shape of a bull to woo Pasiphae and beget the Minotaur.

  ‘As God created light by naming it,’ cried Gavazzi, ‘so shall the cry of this generation restore life to a nation which was once the light of Europe and the world!’

  This, though obscure, glowed in the imagination like old coal. Nicola was stirred and so was the piazza which went silent for a pent moment. Then someone called ‘Bravo!’‚ someone else cried ‘Now!’ and from all sides the word ‘Italia!’ began to explode. Mouths jutted. Lips trumpeted and, like birds volleying from cover, the syllables whirred. It was impossible not to join in. Nicola, caught off guard, was like someone whose foot taps to an enemy tune.

  ‘By God, young man!’ A floppy old face leaned into his. ‘I’ve prayed for the day I’d hear a Roman crowd shout that! Ten years the Austrians kept me in gaol.’ The old man’s eyes watered and his jaw shook. ‘Ten years of eating soup with cooked worms floating in it! But today,’ he touched Nicola’s shoulder, ‘I feel as young as you. God bless your youth, boy.’ The gummy smile was impossible to snub.

  ‘God bless you too,’ Nicola answered and wondered whether God or he had turned coat.

  ‘Viva l’Italia e Pio Nono!’

  Drunk on this man’s vision, the random collection of gawkers, agitators and – possibly? – paid demonstrators felt the touch of history. They were the Roman people.

  Then, disappointingly, it was over. The speaker was whisked off and his admirers faced an empty afternoon. ‘Can we go too?’ Perversely, Martelli defied the exultant mood which the crowd was still savouring.

  ‘It’s over, isn’t it?’ he insisted.

  A guard – still dazed – continued to hold him and several people gave him black looks.

  Abruptly, Martelli wrenched free. The guard reached for and hit him, possibly by mistake. There was a hubbub.

  ‘It’s the Jesuit boys. They’ve attacked the Civic Guard.’

  ‘To think that at this moment in Milan young fellows are fighting Austrians while these …’

  Someone hit Nicola on the nose and blood began to flow.

  ‘You,’ Martelli harangued the guards, ‘are meant to keep the peace …’

  Nicola wished he would pipe down. A squad of fellows, older than they, hemmed them in between the cart and the wall of the Austrian Embassy. With faltering authority, the guards cautioned everyone and the newcomers began amusing themselves. Slow banter was tossed about like a knife in the hand.

  ‘But I agree with you!’ was Martelli’s response to a comment about Jesuits. He did too. He was the least ‘Jesuited’ of their pupils.

  But agreement was not wanted. ‘Sneaky, eh?’ said one of his tormentors. ‘Trying to pass for one of us. That’s what the Jays teach them,’ he told his friends in mock surprise. ‘That,’ addressing Martelli, ‘is how we know you’re spies.’

  Suddenly, the boy next to Nicola was knocked down. There was a lull. Any move now could trigger a free-for-all and the Civic guards were refraining from making one.

  The man who did came from nowhere, and, before anyone knew it, had an arm around the throat of the chief lout. His other hand grabbed and held the lout’s knife. Astonishingly, he wore a cassock.

  ‘You,’ he told the guards, ‘look sharp about doing your duty or I’ll report you for fraternising with troublemakers. Escort these gentlemen to their school party which is by the Corso. These buffoons,’ he tightened his arm around his prisoner’s throat, ‘aren’t worth locking up.’ Releasing his victim, he prodded a knee into his spine. ‘Disperse. Now. Fast, before I change my mind. And that,’ he told the bystanders, ‘goes for you all.’ Still holding the confiscated knife, he climbed onto the cart to supervise their retreat.

  He was a lean man, a bit ungainly with a crooked eye, a long nose and the face of a stone crusader. ‘Quick!’ he chivvied. Jumping down, he caught up with the six boys as they reached the Prefect of Studies and introduced himself. He was Xavier de Mérode, a novice who until three years ago had been a serving officer with the French in the Sahara. He smiled and the Father Prefect did too, pleased to recognise a man of his own sort in this champion. Mérode? Surely, he must be related … And indeed it was soon discovered that they had a distant but definite connection.

  Rain, rattling down like staves, now drove everyone into a covered courtyard where the conversation quickened. Nicola, brimming with the stimulus of the day, felt his imagination enticed in a new direction: the Sahara!

  The Prefect too had been ignited. Cousinship drew him back to the world:
an odd region of it scattered through France where grandmothers tended the flame of memory, prayed for relatives guillotined sixty years ago and turned their châteaux into shrines. ‘They mourn their dead saints‚’ sighed the Jesuit. A class had been consecrated by blood. ‘Your maternal grandmother – a Grammont, was she not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rain lashed the ground outside, and golden horse droppings frothed and leaped. If you squinted they could have been flames.

  The Prefect began a game of naming families, matching them like cards in a suit. Had Mérode an ancestor who had died at the siege of Maestricht? Or was it that of Landres?’

  ‘Both! Both!’ The novice’s ancestors’ deaths had conferred panache on half the battlefields of Europe.

  The guards stared morosely at this heraldic creature in the crumpled cassock who, it emerged, was also descended from the royal saint Elizabeth of Hungary. One thought of all the church statues which, during this Lenten season, were hidden under lumpy purple cloth. Mérode too could have descended from some niche. He had, he said, attended today’s sermon, for a purpose.

  ‘If we,’ said the ex-officer, ‘do not listen and report what we hear, how will princes keep informed?’

  The Prefect looked nervously at the guards and Mérode told them curtly that they could leave.

  ‘Gavazzi,’ he said then, ‘is dangerous. Last month, as you know, the Holy Father used the words “God bless Italy” in a public speech. Harmless words, one might think. But Gavazzi has been twisting them to mean that to bless Italy is to curse Austria whose presence in this peninsula makes a free Italy impossible. Arguing that the Pope has thereby launched a crusade, he recruits young men to fight in it and then tells the Pope that it would be dangerous to check the tide of patriotism which he himself has unleashed. He’s viperous! A snake!’

  ‘I heard‚’ said the Prefect, ‘that they’re calling him Peter the Hermit.’

  ‘It’s only half a joke. People are enrolling to fight and giving money for his “crusade”. A crusade against a Catholic country! Launched by the Pope! It’s demented,’ said the novice, ‘or deeply cunning. Because, such a ragtag army could only fail – and out of failure comes revolution. We in France have seen what the Gavazzis do. They pit the Son against the Father and the Sermon on the Mount against the Ten Commandments. They smuggle revolution inside the Church.’