The Judas Cloth

by Julia O'Faolain

  A loyal Catholic

  Rossi folded the paper. That’s how they think, he told himself. That’s the good old Roman gutter. Venomous scorpions are coming out of the woodwork.

  ‘You’re right,’ he told her. ‘What you must do is engage some ex-soldiers as footmen and take them wherever you go. Meanwhile, show yourself in public with the boy. I shall see less of you. Let’s try not to torment each other.’

  She embraced him. ‘What about your safety?’

  ‘I promise to be careful,’ he told her – though how avoid a dagger? The spies’ dossiers he had been reading emphasised the difficulties. Their contributors were all terrified.

  To the boy he admitted that the state of the state was worse than he had supposed. ‘I’m going to have no time for private life, yet everything in this city is done by contacts and, though this may surprise you, more influence moves up than down. Small men – clerks, stewards and accountants – think for the rest. They know everyone’s business, while the great landowners don’t even know their own, so what’s said in the counting house and sacristy will be thought tomorrow in the papal court. Frequent them for me, Stanga. Keep your ears open. Drop a wise word when you can.’

  The city was lurid with rumour.

  In the evenings when Madame de Menou’s guests left, Rossi and the boy lingered over a last glass of port to compare what they had heard. Prospero’s naïvety rid the other two of their fears as it set them laughing at his.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said one evening, ‘but I can’t see why you invite men like the Principe di Canino to your house. That fat little beast is scattering money in all directions in the hope of having you killed and himself named leader of a radical Italy. The police and dragoons have pocketed bags of his gold.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Rossi, ‘it can’t be easy to be a minor Bonaparte. I’m told he’s a good naturalist. That’s probably his true vocation. The rest is theatre. Pretence. The real danger is small men.’

  ‘Well, he pays them,’ said Prospero. ‘There’s a cabinet-makers’ shop in the Monti district where people go to plot after dark. Galletti, the ex-minister of Police, drops by, but the moving spirit is the prince. He invites the ringleaders back to his palace. They’re so indiscreet that I could get invited myself.’

  ‘Theatre!’ Rossi nodded. ‘They need a public’ Sometimes he felt the city shake like canvas as he walked through it.

  Madame de Menou had heard of other conspirators meeting in the piazza del Popolo and – but Rossi distrusted spies’ reports. ‘When they say “conspire”,’ he argued, ‘they may mean “talk”. Remember that there is no tradition of free speech here.’

  More dangerous were the veterans from the volunteer corps. These were now half-disbanded, and the men, embittered by defeat, felt betrayed and, speaking in confidence, had been. By Pius.

  ‘You’ said Dominique, ‘are the target for the resentment he arouses. You,’ she said mischievously, ‘are his chandelier!’

  Prospero, taking the city’s pulse, found it feverish. October had emptied the great palaces. All that was left were disgruntled civil servants kept to prepare Rossi’s reforms. He was working round the clock himself, but they were used to their October vacation and in their small way added to the disaffection. Things could take on a momentum … Seeing Madame de Menou blench, Rossi made signs to the boy. Hush. Prospero stopped. She turned and caught the count signalling. They laughed. Their sessions, counterparts of those in the palace of the Principe di Canino, had the thrill of a cabal.

  Prospero was impressionable and Rossi reflected that young minds did tend to thresh about like Laocoön’s sea serpent. To be accurate, though, the one grappling with ancient coils was himself.

  What grew increasingly useful were the boy’s accounts of the city’s byways which, venturing where the other two could not, he diligently explored. Up and down grimy stairways Rossi followed him in his mind, corkscrewing through palaces where dried turds – feline and human – hollow beetle-shells and less diagnosable droppings crackled into dust, and stone steps were so worn as to seem to the deluded eye to undulate like festoons. Here clung ancient odours of the dried cod left to soak for the twenty-four hours preceding every day of abstinence. Laundry dripped in inner courtyards. Women sang. Artisans conspired and Jesuits lurked. Prospero had found one who, loath to leave with his fellows, had locked himself in a room where he was recording the evil being done during the Society’s exile. He had his eye on Rossi. Retribution would catch up with him, he assured, and prayed for this daily when celebrating mass on a chiffonier.

  The count’s unpopularity with the Society had started when he helped suppress their schools in France but now a new crime was being laid at his door. This was the Church Property Mortgage, a measure which had been introduced before he came to power and for which he was not in the least responsible. He was blamed for it, though, by priests who saw it as the greatest blow levelled at religion since the fall of Jerusalem. What had happened was that last spring there had been a run on the Banca Romana which the state – being in debt to it – had allowed to function without a reserve. The bank ran out of money. Foreign loans were unobtainable and the Pope, in desperation, authorised the floating of a loan for two million scudi, using Church property as security. The first payment was now due and the mortgaged property in danger of being sold. To prevent this, Mastai begged the clergy for a contribution of 200,000 scudi and they, reluctantly, agreed to make the treasury a gift of four million, payable over a fifteen-year period, so as to free their assets of all liability: an astute move.

  ‘If they hadn’t paid off the mortgage now,’ said Rossi, ‘a more radical government could confiscate their property later. I praised their shrewdness in my address of thanks.’

  ‘It might have been more tactful to praise their generosity.’

  ‘Oh, they won’t forgive me anyway. Especially since I have set up a commission to reform the tax system and abolish exemptions. You can’t imagine the fury. I’m reforming the law courts too and the Army and police. More fury!’

  ‘The police? You’re provoking the police?’

  ‘Not provoking. Reforming. People want reform. Everyone says so. They want industry, railways and telegraph lines and the advantages of modern living, but they still want tax exemptions. Well, they can’t have them.’

  His eyes swivelled, reviewing projects in his mind. He was tired. Hadn’t been sleeping. Hadn’t made love to her in – how long? Sixty-one years old! Racing the clock.

  ‘What are they saying in the drawing rooms?’ he asked her.

  ‘It’s all stale. Most people are away.’ She no longer spoke to him of conspiracies.

  ‘Bologna,’ he said, ‘is in a frenzy. The “victory” went to people’s heads.’ His eye glittered with irony. He liked to deflate a myth. Myths did damage and he stepped on them, as he might on a puff-ball or a kelp-bladder. Pff! Out oozed the airy lies. ‘Intelligence sources show that Austrian orders were not to occupy the city lest the Anglo-French mediation over the armistice be affected. Even before the skirmish their troops had been told to retreat. Yet, now, a legend has been born. The brave populace wins through. David defeats Goliath. Republicans are puffing the people up and the idle poor are not only holding onto their guns but demanding payment for “keeping watch” over the city. How is your father?’ he asked Prospero. ‘Villas are being burgled and worse.’

  Prospero thought his father could look out for himself.

  The count said he had ordered the arrest of the demagogues, Garibaldi and Gavazzi, who were fomenting trouble up there.

  Later, while driving on the Pincian Hill, Madame de Menou lamented to Prospero that the count, being the only man of calibre in the government, had to think of everything. ‘If the conspiracies don’t kill him, over-work will. He’s sixty-one.’

  That was ten years older than Prosperous own father. Until now he had not thought of his patrons as having ages at all. Astounded, he stole glances at her as she rustled from her car
riage and again as she raised the parasol which threw scalloped shadows on her neck. Young enough to be Rossi’s daughter – or granddaughter!

  ‘In a way,’ she said, ‘he’s creating a constitution.’ She shook her head over the oddity. In a true parliamentary system no one man would have had such a burden. An absolute monarch perhaps – but he would be properly protected.

  *

  In mid-October a baker, who had somehow found himself in the confidence of desperate men, came to Rossi to reveal an antiquated sort of plot. Carabineers and dragoons were to march to the Quirinal and demand that the Pope renounce his temporal power. All cardinals and princes would be seized and a republic declared. The plan was demented. Perhaps it was a mere provocation?

  Yet the baker gave details which inspired confidence and, though the designated date passed without trouble, Rossi, writing in the Gazzetta di Roma, menaced those who might be ‘tempted to carry out certain projects’. Was he foolish to dare them?

  ‘Let’s go to Frascati,’ proposed Madame de Menou. ‘We’ll drink that lovely wine. It doesn’t travel at all,’ she told Prospero. ‘If you drink it here it’s not the same.’

  Could the baker have been settling a private score? Or was there a plot within the plot? Prospero knew from his father that in secret societies there was often an inner core whose plans differed from those discussed with the rank and file.

  *

  ‘He’s had another anonymous letter,’ said Madame de Menou. ‘Something unpleasant. He won’t show it.’

  Again they were in her carriage. The hood was down. They saw veterans wearing a characteristic oilskin known as a panuntella. That meant ‘oiled bread’ and seemed to horrify her. It was as if they were sandwiches looking for meat. Some lacked shoes. By now those who really wanted to fight had re-enlisted and gone north.

  Her sunshade would not stay open. Taking it from her, he tested the device on its shaft. Pink and silky, it expanded like a sea urchin, and light, falling through, coloured the cloth of his trousered thighs. She leaned a little way towards him so that the silk shaded them both. Then the toylike thing snapped shut. ‘I’m foolishly superstitious today. Is it broken?’ Her scent hypnotised him. The silk and the kid of her glove seemed as live as grass. The carriage was a moving boudoir and people in other ones stared. A lady raised her lorgnette. Shyly, he moved away from her; then, aware that this manoeuvre too would have been noted, pretended to be intent on the wayward movements of the parasol.

  He thought: she doesn’t understand the small-mindedness of this city. There’s the Duchessa di Rignano observing us now. And Prince Volkonsky. Fumbling at the sunshade, he became aware that his embarrassment amused her.

  *

  The letter which Rossi had received ran as follows:

  So, count, we find

  You’re the horned kind!

  Your luck won’t hold,

  Cuckold!

  So now

  Bow

  Out to youth,

  As, in truth,

  Age must.

  You’ll soon be dust.

  Trust,

  Vox populi

  Rossi felt as though he had been dipped in a privy. To be sure, vox populi was only mouthing the lines he had fed it, but its readiness to do so upset him. He did not show Dominique the jingle, for what pained him in it was a measure of pity. It could have been more abusive. Such things usually were. He found himself adding to it:

  Don’t you see

  That he could be

  Your son’s son!

  You’re sixty-one!

  Truth wrote as woundingly as vox populi – and indeed, maybe vox populi was a friend.

  He left for Frascati, refusing to let the other two come. He feared they too might have received jingles and be hiding them. Collusive pity could play Cupid, but he would not think about this. The Chamber was to reconvene on 15th November.

  In Frascati, he drove about in a hired carriage, showing himself everywhere in the company of his wife, who had come from Switzerland to help him play the judicious and solid citizen – he had, to be sure, become one – of this theocratic state. In tall hat, frock coat, lawn shirt and discreet waistcoat, he manifested propriety. This was the State of the Church and he was its Minister. The visible manifested the invisible and he, who hoped to reconcile the Rights of Man – some of them, anyway – with the Commands of God, had better be winning in his ways.

  Before leaving Rome he had gone to see the Pope and found him evasive. Possibly he was planning to replace him as minister. With whom? There was nobody even half as capable. But Mastai lacked realism. He had betrayed his last government, had betrayed his soldiers in mid-war, and might well betray Rossi.

  Mastai’s lower lip had protruded damply and he had made puns. They were his passion and, thought the minister, suited the doubleness of the priestly ruler’s vision. Did he hope to turn this state back into the police state he had taken over two years ago? Interestingly, he was believed to have the evil eye. People, meeting him on his walks, sank on one knee, doffed their hats and, in the shelter of the hat’s crown, made the horned sign with index and little finger. If able to do so with discretion, men touched their privates and women their keys. There was, thought Rossi, a logic to God’s vicar having demonic properties. Christianity had, after all, inherited the city from paganism and small gods been subsumed. Why should not one be in attendance on Mastai?

  Rossi spent his week in Frascati visiting acquaintances – all capable of writing anonymous jingles. Innumerable nephews were recommended to him for employment. On asking what the man had done so far, he was always told:

  ‘Nothing, but if he were less indolent, he could surely do anything at all.’

  Often the man was thirty or thirty-five. ‘Ah‚’ quipped Rossi, ‘the state has a great reserve of indolent men!’

  ‘Well‚’ the supplicant’s friend would argue, ‘why not? The prelates who run it receive no practical training.’

  ‘But we all know,’ Rossi would reply, ‘that a prelate is good for anything. More is expected of a layman.’

  His irony was too mild for them. Roman aristocrats – possibly the idlest in Europe – had not exerted their wits in a long time and were uncomfortable when a fellow wouldn’t come out with what he thought. Till now, they had had no role in government and their lands were farmed by agents who had begun to form the nucleus of a new class. Cardinal Antonelli, one of the cleverer prelates, had sprung from it and Pius who seemed to trust him might trust Rossi too if only he could believe him capable of holding the state together. Faith was what was needed. Confidence. To secure it, Rossi was pinning his hopes to the programme outlined in a speech he planned to deliver to the Chamber tomorrow and to the Pope this afternoon.

  At the thought, he felt his hand make the horned sign.

  After seeing Pius – he was thinking this on the drive back to Rome – he would make love to Dominique and exorcise the phantoms which had come between them. He was bringing her a basket of Muscat grapes not unlike the colour of her flesh.

  *

  Order in Bologna had broken down.

  ‘It’s not even political now,’ lamented the cardinal. The latest death was that of a night watchman in a sawmill. ‘They tell me he was a harmless poor fellow and the father of two. He was knocked on the head!’

  Nicola asked the name of the sawmill and, on hearing that it was the one he had mentioned to Captain Melzi and Count Stanga, went cold. Was he to blame for another death?

  Garibaldi, complained Oppizzoni, was back in town. ‘Staying at the Pensione Svizzera. Rome wants him arrested. Him and Father Gavazzi!’ He groaned at the folly. ‘We’d have a revolution in the piazza. I’ve managed to persuade General Zucchi to take Gavazzi only.’ There was a pause. ‘I want you,’ he said quietly, ‘to warn him to slip away. He’s in the Barnabite convent. I’ll give you a letter for the Father Provincial to

  get you in. Then you must alert the abate. They’ll aim to trick him, so he must trust nobo
dy. On no account compromise me.’

  Nicola hurried to the convent – only to find a police carriage already at the door. Two policemen and an official-looking gentleman were talking to the porter.

  ‘I need to see the Father Provincial.’ Nicola waved his letter.

  ‘It’s a bad moment.’ The porter slid his eyes from the gentleman to Nicola. ‘Nobody is to go in or out.’

  ‘I’m on the cardinal’s business. It’s urgent.’

  The porter was in a quandary and Nicola about to resolve it for him by skipping past, when Father Gavazzi arrived in a state of high excitement.

  ‘You wanted to see me?’ he asked the important-looking gentleman.

  ‘We have a message from His Holiness. He wants to consult with you and we are to convey you to Rome. There is a letter at the government palace.’

  Gavazzi looked at the police carriage.

  ‘For security,’ said the gentleman, ‘in these troubled times.’

  Nicola now greeted Gavazzi. But the abate’s attention was all for the bearers of the papal message. One of the men turned to open the carriage door and Nicola, who had been making warning signs, was caught out and had to pretend to have been stung by a bee. Shyly, rubbing the fictitious sting, he hummed the Dies irae. Gavazzi, however, wasn’t listening. Irritably, he waved away Nicola and his bee and begged the police to tell him more about the Holy Father’s summons. Did it mean that Pius had had a change of heart? Was he eager for a first-hand report on the fighting?

  As a last resort, Nicola began to stroke the police horses and launched’ into a sort of clowning parody which had been popular at the Collegio: ‘Beware,’ he warned them. ‘Put not your trust in masters, for they are fickle and you, dearly beloved dobbins, could easily end in the knackers’ yard. Even the noblest humans lack your Hippie candour and if you could but see into their secret minds, you would make a run for it now!’ Here he had to stop for a policeman laid a hand on his arm, while Gavazzi raised his in a hushing gesture. Holding himself erect, the abate was marvelling, ‘So His Holiness wishes to see me?’