‘This is my son,’ he was saying. ‘The apple of my eye. But he’s off to war. We’re sending our best!’ The boy did not seem embarrassed. ‘Mmm!’ said his father, kissing him and making eating noises. ‘I could eat him.’
In the next room the abate Gavazzi was telling how he had waylaid the Pope at the door of St Peter’s and begged a blessing for the volunteers who were in the Vatican gardens. ‘He smiled graciously and came and blessed them. They were all deeply moved. Then I asked for an audience and he told me to come back this evening. I’ve just seen him now. He was warm and open but said we must not ask for reforms which diminish his authority since he must transmit that intact to his successors.’
The abate’s listeners began exchanging anecdotes about the Pope’s warm heart. Then a gentleman with a dissenting eye said, ‘If he cannot diminish his authority, he cannot grant any reforms.’
‘That’s the ex-French ambassador,’ whispered Martelli who had joined Nicola. ‘Count Pellegrino Rossi.’
‘How can I get the abate’s attention?’
The abate was talking of a veiled crucifix which the Pope had given him, saying he was not to uncover it until Italy was free.
‘It’s not a good moment,’ decided Martelli.
The ex-ambassador asked: ‘Are our volunteers to cross into Austrian territory where the fighting is?’
The abate frowned. ‘His Holiness is reluctant to go so far.’
‘In that case, it will be hard for them to join the war.’
To Nicola’s dismay, a footman now whispered something to the abate who left the room. He started after him, but had trouble moving past the animated talkers. He bumped into several, then found himself hedged behind three immovable backs.
‘Excuse me,’ he begged, but the backs did not budge. Beside him was a closed door. He turned the handle, slipped through and into an alcove where Gavazzi was teasing a fellow priest.
‘But I do listen, Filippo,’ he was saying. ‘To prove it I’ll tell you what you’re about to say. You’ll say: Don’t rely on the good will of the Supreme Pontiff who will change his mind the minute we leave the city. Secret forces are at work. The General of our order wants me suspended. I’ll end up in prison. I mustn’t preach against Austria. Also, my hair is too long. I don’t keep my eyes lowered and my clothes smell. See. I remember. But what can I do? The order keeps me short of money. Preaching in out-of-the-way places, I have to lodge where I can. I can’t afford sheets …’
‘Alessandro, they’re biding their …’
‘I know, Filippo, and ruining our friendship because – yes?’ The abate had seen Nicola. ‘Forgive me.’ He put a hand on his friend’s arm. ‘The youth are our special concern now. Are you planning to volunteer?’ he asked Nicola.
Nicola, blushing and stuttering, managed to explain why he was here, but as he did so the priests’ faces grew chilly. The one called Filippo whispered something to Gavazzi who said, ‘My friend asks if you were sent by the Jesuits? He thinks you’re a spy.’
Nicola started to deny this, then paused. Trying for accuracy, he repeated what Father Curci had said. The two were sizing him up. Desperate to explain his need he said, ‘You asked if I would join up, but how can I until I know who I am? I might have Austrian blood. Forgive me. I know you’re an important man.’
The abate asked, ‘Haven’t I seen you before?’
His friend said, ‘He was in the piazza Venezia. I recognise him. Who knows what his masters are up to. They’re as mad as wasps! And they think your influence devilish. They’re all spies at the Collegio Romano.’
The abate smiled. His friend’s anxiety seemed to amuse him. He turned to Nicola: ‘See what mutual suspicion breeds.’ His tone was mocking. ‘Are there spies in the Collegio?’
‘No.’ Nicola, seeing the one called Filippo frown, added quickly, ‘Well, there’s one. I think. A man called Nardoni.’
The faces sharpened. This was serious. Nicola went cold, then hot. What had possessed him? But there was no withdrawing now. He told what he knew. He felt mesmerised, yet untrustworthy.
‘You hope,’ the abate was forthright, ‘to trade secrets. But the one you want to know isn’t mine. I deplore this, because mysteries breed scandal. Listen.’ He gripped Nicola’s arm. ‘These are times for looking forward, not back. Your generation will see the fate of Italy decided. That is more important than any individual story. ‘All of us alive now are lucky …’
‘My mother’s name. Please. You must know that. Foundlings’ fathers aren’t always known, but their mothers – who gave you the task of delivering me to the wet nurse?’
‘Monsignor Amandi.’
This was circular. Back to the bishop.
‘And my mother?’
‘The less you know …’
‘Why? Is she married? Mad? Diseased?’
‘She’s a nun. In an enclosed order.’
Now the door opened. Several people came in and Nicola was pushed aside. Other people’s business was, apparently, every bit as urgent as his own. Forgotten, he walked back to the first room where scraps of argument blew about his head. ‘Tooto!’ exclaimed the English clergyman whose eye was as wide as an owl’s. ‘Tootee!’
Nicola collapsed in a chair. Behind him Gavazzi’s voice was raised to its rhetorical pitch. ‘Christian revolution …’ it cried.
Nicola burned with fury against everything Christian. An enclosed nun! Shame upon shame! His Maker had botched His job. He wished he could disbelieve in Him. As of course he could. He had been warned often enough how easily faith is lost and now he was drawn to that magnetic nullity. In his mind, even as he sat here, he could begin the process and, slowly, God would cease to exist for him, just as Nicola had ceased to exist for his parents. A nun! Oh Christ, who could the father be? Some convent handyman? They were usually semi-morons, chosen on that account.
The egoism of his reaction began to shame him. It was, surely, a contagion of this loud prideful place – the Englishman was still twittering and Gavazzi declaiming. Painfully, Nicola began to contrast the abate’s self-concern with the kindness of the Jesuits. Guileless men in chalk-stained cassocks, they had not, it seemed to him now, produced in all the years he had known them one fourth of the rhetoric he had heard tonight.
*
The footman, who was carrying their lantern, said there was some disturbance near the Collegio Romano. Ah, said Don Eugenio. One of the mob’s little tantrums? No, said the man, from what he’d heard it was serious this time. There might even have been a murder. The city was excitable, as was to be expected, with all the volunteers getting ready to leave for the front.
‘Well,’ said Don Eugenio, ‘we’d best walk home another way.’
*
Nicola couldn’t sleep and was up so early that only Don Eugenio’s factotum was about. This old fellow’s mind was tottery and his head permanently bent sideways. He was cleaning the hearth when Nicola came on him and had stirred up a cloud of dust. The room was cavernous. Claw-footed furniture gripped the floor and the man’s shoes, which were too big for him, looked as though they too might be concealing claws. His stockings were stuffed with false calves which had swung round to the wrong part of his leg.
‘You’re wondering how I got my crooked neck.’
‘No.’
‘I was half-hanged is how.’
Nicola had heard this story several times. The reason why Cencio – that was the factotum’s name – had been condemned varied but the rescue was always the same.
It had happened long ago, before the French brought in the guillotine: a novelty which would have done for him if they’d had it here then. ‘You can’t be half-guillotined!’ Cencio’s eyes popped at the thought. Then he described his great moment in the public square and how, just as the rope was tightening around his neck, he’d heard the crowd cry ‘grazia, grazia’ and then ‘Viva San Marco’ and thought he was dead and in heaven. Only he wasn’t. He’d been saved by the Venetian Ambassador who had happened to
pass at the right moment and made a sign to the hangman who, instead of climbing on Cencio’s shoulders, cut the rope. Ambassadors had that privilege. But Cencio, being blindfold, understood nothing except that St Mark was being praised. So for all he knew the Venetians had taken over heaven – or hell, because that could just as well have been his destination.
‘So the crowd begged him to save you.’
Cencio spat. The crowd, he said, liked a surprise. ‘They’d have been as pleased to see me swing. Or topped. Did you know that the guillotine was made famous by a Jesuit? Well, it was. A man called Guillotin. They say the crowd here in Rome killed a Jesuit last night. A message came for you. You’re to go round to the Collegio. They’re leaving today, so you’d best hurry.’
He handed Nicola an envelope.
*
‘Did you come to gloat?’
Nicola had been seen at the Circolo talking to that rabble-rouser, Gavazzi. Father Curci, dressed in layman’s clothes, stood on the Collegio steps waiting for a carriage.
‘It didn’t take you long to turn coat!’ The priest was beside himself. He showed Nicola a letter, saying that he must recognise it, as indeed he did. It was the one Martelli had asked Gilmore to post and then, somehow, himself conveyed to the police. Father Curci, it seemed, had a penitent who worked for them and – but never mind the circumstances. Here it was. Black on white.
‘But Father …’
‘Don’t call me that! This,’ waving the letter, ‘is clearly the source for the lunatic lies told about us last July. Who put you up to it? Martelli’s cousin, I suppose. We wondered why his family left him here. Now we know. But you! My own penitent! And your lies have led to a murder! Take a look at your handiwork!’
The priest drew Nicola to where a pinkish mess was smeared onto the side of the wall.
‘Those are the victim’s brains!’ he said. ‘The work of the crowd. Your work. They smashed his head there and the Civic Guard either couldn’t or wouldn’t protect him. I don’t understand. For six years you’ve been my penitent and I couldn’t see this venom in you. Well, I can only suppose that God wishes me to see the vanity of human affections. I thank Him for the lesson.’ Father Curd’s face was alarmingly red. ‘Do you hate us?’
Nicola opened then closed his mouth and fumbled for reasons which had seemed cogent once. ‘We thought’ – how feeble it sounded – ‘that the guns had been planted here …’ But the words lay like stones in his mouth. For Father Curci there never had nor could have been guns. Erect and steadfast, he looked, in the rampart of his borrowed greatcoat, like some figure in feudal armour who could all too easily be felled by mean and mobile men. By me, thought Nicola, and saw that the things he wanted to say could not be said. He had lost another father.
Just minutes ago, on reading Curci’s note, he had felt a rush of affection for his teachers and, on learning that the worst had happened, intended offering to help in any way he could. Already others had rallied and the Father General been whisked away in an English gentleman’s carriage. He was wearing a wig.
‘Come quickly,’ the note begged. Clearly written before Curci spoke with his informant from the police headquarters, it must have been dispatched last night. ‘We leave tomorrow and must establish reliable contacts within the city. Dear son, I think of you as one of our most trustworthy. L.C. SJ.’
Greeting his confessor, Nicola started to commiserate. But the priest sprang from his embrace. ‘Why did you come?’ Father Curci’s eyes were bloodshot. With bent head, he peered through thick brows like a beast gone to cover. Pointing at Brother Pietro’s lodge, ‘The corpse is in there,’ he said.
As if accepting his confessor’s last penance, Nicola went in and saw a body with a mashed head lying on Brother Pietro’s table. There was no sign of the porter himself. Two policemen sat in his place. Looking at the dead man, he recognised him as the one who had asked him to post a letter for him last June.
‘Who was he?’ he asked the policemen.
But they would say only that they were waiting for a police carriage.
Did Father Curci not wonder what the man had been doing in the Collegio? Or, perinde ac cadaver, did he ask no questions?
And now a carriage did come. Not the police carriage but one to take Curci and several other disguised Jesuits out of the state. In their borrowed greatcoats, it struck Nicola that they looked like orphans. They waved, but not to him.
*
Leaving the square, Nicola bumped into someone. It was Ciccio, looking more squint-eyed and broken than ever.
‘Did you tell the Jesuits? Was it you?’ Nicola, remembering that Ciccio had worked in a ministry, began to shake him. But the small man evaded his grip. He didn’t pretend to misunderstand.
Why would he tell them now? he asked reasonably. The Jesuits were finished. He was glad he hadn’t seen the Rector that time. And as for denouncing Martelli and Nicola, why would he? They were known, he said admiringly, to be in with the new powers. They’d played their cards well. He, alas, had not.
‘That’s why I came. I wonder,’ he asked hopefully, ‘could your friend, Martelli, put in a word for me? I have,’ he promised, ‘something to tell which will interest him.’
Since neither had money for a café, they walked about, heading first for the meat market where a dog gnawed at some fur and another lapped at a gutter. Further on was the marble torso of Pasquino. There were no papers stuck on it today, perhaps because censorship had been relaxed.
Ciccio’s tale centered on the guns which had been removed from the Collegio last June. They had reached the police during an interregnum when some old employees were still around and new ones already come, yet nobody wanted to take decisions until they saw how the political cat would jump. The upshot was that the guns had been hidden, then lost.
Ciccio, his face quivering as though it, like the carcasses in the San Eustachio market, had been flayed, explained that the ministry where he had still been employed had been in disarray. Papers were getting shuffled around and humble pen-pushers getting to know more than they should.
On they walked, winding like Ciccio’s narrative, and came to the piazza Montanara, a meeting place for country folk, where scribes rented their skills to the illiterate and there was a smell of donkey droppings. Red aprons. White head-dresses. Peasant girls and agricultural implements. A barber cut swathes of lather off a customer’s chin and Nicola realised that he was being offered the guns. What, he thought, could I do with guns?
‘I need help,’ explained Ciccio who was out of a job.
‘Maybe Don Eugenio could use you?’
A thought stirred in Nicola’s mind. Gavazzi needed guns. As army chaplain, he was already fund-raising to try and buy some.
*
Martelli, on hearing of Ciccio’s offer, rushed Nicola to the Barnabite convent of San Carlo a Cattinari, where the abate was saying his last goodbyes before setting off with the troops.
‘What have you to lose?’ he asked, when Nicola hung back.
The abate, euphoric, with a tricolour crucifix on his chest, was packing and trying to rid himself of a hanger-on.
‘Try Padre Ventura,’ he was saying. ‘He has His Holiness’s ear. I’m leaving. I respect you, Don Mauro, which is why I won’t give you false hopes.’
Martelli whispered something to him and the abate looked interested. Beckoning the man he had addressed as Don Mauro, he murmured in his ear, then turned to Nicola.
‘Don Mauro,’ he told him, ‘is from the same part of the country as Monsignor Amandi. He will tell you, at leisure, more than I could last night. You were conceived in turbulent times and now the turbulence is back. Perhaps God has marked you out to take part in it? Your friend tells me that you have assistance for us. Good. Christ is suffering in the persons of our beleaguered brothers who are struggling against tyranny. It is our duty to come to their aid. After all, His Vicar is with us, so how can we have doubts? Don Mauro too needs help. You might recommend him to your patron. God bless
you both.’ The abate took both their hands in his, then turned briskly away. He had many calls on his attention.
Don Mauro, a small, vaguely clerical-looking man, smiled at Nicola. We have been given short shrift. I lodge at the Palazzo Spada in the apartment of an English lady called Miss Foljambe. My days are utterly idle. Come tomorrow if you like.’
As Martelli and Nicola walked through the Barnabite convent, priests gathered to stare at them. Clearly the abate’s visitors were a source of scandal.
‘Who is Don Mauro?’
‘A defrocked priest.’
‘What did you tell the abate?’
‘What Ciccio told you. How to get the guns.’
Nardoni’s smashed face came back to Nicola. But it was too late to worry about him. Since infancy, he had been praying at the end of every mass that God should thrust Satan back down to hell. Now the Austrians were to be thrust back to Austria. Guns would be needed.
‘Shall we watch the troops leave?’
‘All right.’
Martelli warned that they were a bit of a ragtag. ‘But the useless ones will drop off as they march north. And they’ll be getting some training.’
And they’ll get our guns.
‘Yes.’
After the troops had left, they stared at some gentlemen who, in honour of the martial occasion, had pinned decorations on their frock coats. Martelli, sotto voce, quoted the lines:
So here’s what’s new in Fortune’s pitch and toss
The thief’s no longer hung upon the cross!
While Mary weeps and Jesus grieves,
Crosses are hung on clever thieves!
They were still loose in the city when the Ave Maria bells rang and windows began glistening like mica in the darkening air. Martelli, drunk with such unwonted freedom, confided that he planned to fake his age and join the troops up north.
Seven
Old grime filtered the light and the air was the conniving colour of weak tea. Count Pellegrino Rossi sat in a spice shop patronised by returned emigrés. Earlier, finding himself heading for the Quirinal Palace, he had done an about-face and, returning to the Corso, avoided the places which ministers were likely to frequent. A man without a position could start living by proxy.
The Judas Cloth Page 13