‘I then realised how distinct he kept the two sides of his life. I belonged to Dominique’s and so became an intruder once the legitimate family appeared. And he can never have expected much of me. He had real secretaries at the ministry and I – was his boudoir lapdog.’ Prospero could have been about to lose control.
Giving him time to recover, Nicola talked about himself. He had come to Rome in search of Maria but found no trace of her.
Prospero, however, was intent on his own troubles. He had been caught between fears: that he was presuming by blaming himself and that he was truly to blame.
‘For his death? How?’
‘I spent a lot of time with him. So did she. We might have contributed to the way he felt.’
‘But it wasn’t a suicide!’
‘Wasn’t it? He didn’t take precautions. Not really. He was on the point of victory in the Chamber. He knew this and knew that it increased his danger. He’d had warnings. It was like Caesar.’
‘So what could you have done?’
Prosperou’s skin burned. ‘He may,’ he burst out, ‘have thought I was sleeping with Dominique.’
‘Were you?’
‘No. But if he thought so, it could have been the last straw.’
After the murder, he had gone to see her, hoping to be reassured. But she was feverish, having heard that the assassin had been smuggled away by a rabble which was now parading around the city shouting, ‘Blessed be the hand that slew the traitor!’ They had chanted this outside the windows of Rossi’s house and the Civic Guard had not chased them away.
‘They didn’t come here!’
‘Forgive me,’ said Prospero. ‘I … need to ask … It’s that he may have thought you and I …’ He couldn’t get it out.
Her finger on his lips surprised him. ‘Hush!’
‘Dominique!’
Again the finger pressed his lips. She drew him into her bedroom. ‘It’s all right,’ she whispered. ‘I think he expected this. He thought of you as our lightning deflector. Instead you attracted it. We stood too close.’
‘Did you believe her?’ Nicola marvelled.
‘I wasn’t sure. He was such a politic man. It was a strange moment. The assassins were being feasted and toasted in the city. We could hear it going on. Rowdiness. Torchlight processions. Threats. I ended up thinking that making love to her was somehow being done in his memory. At least we loved him.’
‘Did you go to the funeral?’
‘Yes. It was quick and furtive. There was a danger lest the assassins create a scandal there too and by then his family had fled to Civitavecchia. It was in the Church of San Lorenzo in Damaso. She didn’t come.’
Their love-making, said Prospero, had saved his sanity. Cut off from the city, which was going through its own fever, they stayed inside for ten days. Servants brought food. They had no shame. In between making love, they talked of Rossi. ‘I imagined that I was him. Or that he was in me and we were both making love to her. “This,” she told me, “is the only eternity there is! Take it now, now, now!” She meant it. It’s only looking back that I see that for her it wasn’t just bed talk.’
‘That woman’s a pagan!’ Nicola marvelled.
‘Yes. Another time she said: “He was too wise for jealousy. He knew what mattered most for him. It wasn’t this.”’
She was, said Prospero, an intoxicating creature. Golden-fleshed. Her limbs moved like shoals of fish. Opalescent light fell through rippling curtains, splashing her as though she were in a forest – or were a forest. They ate Rossi’s grapes, the ones he had brought from Frascati, sliding them from mouth to mouth and letting the juice dribble so that they could lick it off and learn the contours of each other’s flesh. She knew more about the arts of the bedroom than the poor professional who had initiated him. This, despite what people said, was a lady’s game. You needed hot water, leisure and fresh sheets regularly supplied by servants. Apart from his dash to Rossi’s funeral, he stayed locked in with her, sweating out his lust fever. Silly, in his exhilaration, he told her how cannibals had given St Thomas Aquinas food for thought. The Divine Doctor had worried about how, for the body’s resurrection, eater and eaten could be restored to carnal integrity.
Furious at the thought of Rossi seeking her at the throne of judgment, he nailed her to stake his claim. She was his!
‘Yes,’ she had tried to console him, ‘but there’s only now. This life isn’t a vestibule! The old Romans knew. Carpe diem!’
He wouldn’t have it. She was amused. His vigour too amused her. Only a nineteen-year-old, she informed him, could have kept up this rhythm. And how often did a woman like her find herself in bed with one? She had been Rossi’s mistress since she herself was nineteen and had been married two years before that.
‘You are my youth,’ she told Prospero. ‘I haven’t had it until now. My husband too was older.’
‘Where is he? Dead too?’
‘As good as dead. Locked up. Mad.’
That sent a chill through Prospero.
‘Can’t you get an annulment?’
‘It’s difficult.’
‘Could you?’
‘I came here for that. But one needs influence.’ She and Rossi had been waiting for a judicious moment. ‘Now I’ll never get it.’
‘Mad?’
‘Raving.’
Prospero feared he too could be infected. ‘I resent your having a soul,’ he heard himself say, ‘because I can’t possess it.’
She laughed and her laugh shocked him. ‘You do possess it,’ she said and that shocked him more.
He went back to his rooms to collect some clothes and found a letter from his father. While he had been in bed with Dominique, there had been time for news of Rossi’s death to reach Bologna and for his father’s letter about this to reach Rome. It said Prospero must return to the villa.
‘I couldn’t,’ he told Nicola. ‘I had no avowable reason to stay in Rome, but I couldn’t leave. I raced back to her and stayed for several more weeks. Again we hardly went out. The city was dangerous. Factions were taking over. The Pope was in Gaeta. From there he appointed a Commissione Governativa which the Romans ignored. Then they appointed a Giunta di Stato which called for a Constituent Assembly. It was like those games children play, forming and reforming groups. Giunta di Stato, Giunta di Stato! You could pat ball to the sound. I hardly paid more attention to the papers the servants brought in than to the rhymes the doorkeeper’s son was chanting out in the courtyard. Authority seemed meaningless. At the same time, I became possessed by a desire to distinguish myself from the ant-like crowd. It seemed to me that only by reaching some peak of passion could I do that. She encouraged me. I’m telling you this so as to show myself how corrupted by passion I had become. One can more easily be sincere with someone else than with oneself.’
‘With her?’
‘Yes, but she encouraged my folly. She was keeping me. Oh, with great delicacy. She pretended that I was protecting her and so must share her purse. She claimed to owe me money – used all sorts of subterfuges to save my vanity and perhaps none of this would have mattered if I hadn’t needed her so much. She affected me like a fever. I mean this. I couldn’t see well. My mind too was blurred and I was all the time possessed either by satisfaction or need, always either drained or on the boil. The two alternated. I felt hot. My skin tingled. Meanwhile I dreamed about Rossi, my adoptive father, and couldn’t answer my real father’s letters. I felt an urge to do some violent thing: castrate myself, kill her, take ship for Africa. Absurd, childish impulses.’
‘Why,’ Nicola asked indignantly, ‘say one is not sincere with oneself? Or are you insincere now? You’re turning her into a succubus!’ He hated to see the story dwindle into a parable and felt that, given Prospero’s wonderful good luck, he would have risen better to its challenge.
‘I only mean that one has an ideal self and likes to pretend one is living up to it. Looking back, I can see how egotistic I was. Think of her, bereaved, gene
rous, trying to make me happy and being blamed for it. She couldn’t placate me because it was my passion I hated: not the sin, but the loss of control. That and the fact that Rossi had used me for cover – if he had. But then if he hadn’t, what I was doing was even more reprehensible.’
In the end – here Prospero’s voice sank until it was almost inaudible – deliverance came from a third party. Don Vigilio, seeing him as a likely customer, told him that he had proof that his mistress was sending letters to her family in France, begging them to get rid of her husband. ‘It seems that they might have been prepared to do it. He showed me a letter.’
Prospero stood up. ‘Shall we take a turn in the city?’
Nicola followed him. Outside the café, people were talking agitatedly. News had come from Bologna.
‘It’s fallen.’ A man leaned from a carriage window. ‘I’ve come from there. The Austrians sent the keys of the city to the Pope.’
Someone began to curse and Prospero took Nicola’s arm and drew him down one of the streets leading to the river and the Ripetta harbour. ‘It’s better this way,’ he said. ‘Some sort of calm will be restored. Your cardinal will be pleased.’
‘Your father certainly won’t.’ Nicola thought of Don Mauro and Father Tasso. Even Rossi. ‘People,’ he told Prospero, ‘had great hopes of this Republic. Surely,’ he hoped, ‘this city won’t fall?’
‘It will.’
‘You sound pleased.’
‘Maybe I’m pleased to have proof that she was wrong with her carpe diem. This is a Vale of Tears. Ours are the right metaphors. Look at the facts. France isn’t fighting for us and the rest of Catholic Europe is on the Pope’s side: Spain, Bavaria, Austria, Naples. They all believe we’re rabid beasts.’
‘You think you’re a rabid beast!’
‘Was, was! Now I’m repentent, as they’ll all be soon. This is how he planned for it to turn out.’
‘Count Rossi?’
‘No, not him. The Pope,’ whispered Prospero, ‘lost his nerve towards the end. He wanted to undo his reforms, but didn’t dare. He feared bringing a hornets’ nest about his head like the one he brought when he reversed his policy on the war. So – this is a guess – he began to hope that something appalling would happen: something so catastrophic that he could call in the Catholic Powers to restore him on the old terms. And it’s happening! France alone is trying to keep the terms from being the old ones. She wants him to preserve some reforms and make some concessions to Liberal ideals – but her government is divided and she won’t prevail. The Pope will get his way. Rossi is more useful to him dead than alive. Pius can point to his death and say “See where reforms lead!”’
Nicola was appalled. ‘Prospero, what are you telling me?’
‘Nothing. I’m giving you a chance not to hear. This is dangerous and useless information. It’s like knowing that the king in the old story had ass’s ears. Remember the barber who discovers the secret and can’t keep it to himself? It rots inside him. It chokes and suffocates him, but he has been threatened with death if he passes it on, so what he does is go into the country and lie on the ground and whisper: “King Midas has long ass’s ears.” Later, willows grow on that ground and whisper the secret to the wind so that the barber is in trouble. I’m the barber,’ said Prospero. ‘You’re the ground. If you breathe a word the wind will catch it.’
‘Tell me how you broke with the French lady.’
Prospero thought back to the afternoon when the spy-broker had come to see him. Don Vigilio’s back was hooped; his bones looked too big for his skin and his facial wrinkles were dirty as though drawn with soft charcoal. There was a smudgy spill from the funnels of his eyes. ‘Sorry,’ he would always say deprecatingly in the days when he used to come up to Count Rossi’s table in a café. ‘Forgive me, gentlemen, but …’ By then he would have insinuated himself into their company.
‘He’s a jackal,’ Rossi used to joke, ‘and I’m his lion. He thinks he will pick up scraps from my kill.’
Rossi had been wrong. He was no lion and his killers, the men who crowded round him on the parliament stairs, weren’t lions either, but cat’s paws – and who knew what king of the Roman jungle had sent them out? Republicans? Jesuits? The remark made by Pope Pius when he heard of his minister’s death had left some people pensive: ‘Well, who knows where he would have led us!’
Don Vigilio had approached Prospero without preliminaries.
‘Madame de Menou has been writing letters.’
They were in the Caffè Ruspoli and the broker sat down unbidden. He held a folder. ‘They have fallen into alien hands.’
She was being spied on. Unsurprisingly, her letters were being opened for political reasons, but what Don Vigilio had found was not political. ‘Her husband,’ he confided, ‘is under the care of relatives who seem to be under her influence. She is a persuasive lady and has suggested that they “put him out of his pain”. It would appear that she has reasons for wishing to be nubile. There is a possibility of marriage – not a legal one, to be sure.’ The broker’s breathy voice could have been coming from inside Prospero’s head. ‘A widow,’ he instructed, ‘may not marry the lover with whom she had relations during her defunct husband’s lifetime. Canon law forbids it. The impediment is intended as a safeguard to the husband’s life. Perhaps you should let the lady know?’
He left.
Prospero, who had not had the presence of mind to say a word, saw a letter in Dominique’s handwriting half unfolded on the table among the yellow crumbs of Madeira cake.
‘His impudence,’ he told Nicola, ‘stunned me. I suppose he was working for someone who wanted Dominique to leave Rome. That could have been anyone from the Pope to the Republicans. Or wanted hush money from her? Nothing was spelled out. Though, to be sure, he implied that we – she and I – were contemplating murder.’
‘You were going to tell me what her letter said?’
‘It did talk of putting him out of pain. But that’s ambiguous, isn’t it? She said it referred to die opium he needs for his agitation and neuralgia. There had been difficulty importing it. Customs trouble. The letter was about that. So she said. I don’t know,’ said Prospero. ‘We had an appalling scene.’ He shuddered and walked away from Nicola.
Boats creaked. They paused at the Ripetta harbour where there was a groan of wood and ropes yielding, then being jerked back by the suck of the tide. Masts tilted. Water splashed on stone. There was an odour of mud and, from the meadows across the river, of freshly mown grass. Rome was an oddly pastoral town, thought Nicola, comparing it in his mind to Bologna which, he remembered mournfully, had now fallen to the Austrians. Unlike Prospero, he resented this bitterly and was feeling less at one with his friend.
Walking through fecal smells in the lanes behind the via Ripetta, Prospero went on with his story which, it turned out, was not a love story after all. Dusk brimmed in alleys, while in piazzette and larghetti the airy silhouettes of free-standing statues caught a last luminosity from the sky. Madame de Menou, shocked by his lack of trust, had left for Paris.
‘I was frantic. I needed her as her poor, mad husband needed his opium – but I hated my own need too much to follow her. Besides, she had left no address.’
‘Then why didn’t you go back to Bologna?’
Prospero merely shook his head.
Sitting on a fountain edge, they trailed their fingers in suspect water. A group of young men passed, arms linked, singing a martial song. Reminded again of Bologna, Nicola felt a spasm of melancholy. Ought he to be fighting? Like Father Bassi? A vein of pessimism ran through him, planted by his teachers. Prospero had it too but for other reasons. His father had used up the dash and hope that should have been his. Passing the Pantheon, they crossed in front of the amber-fronted Minerva Church and turned towards the Collegio Romano, which was now being run by secular priests.
‘I’ve decided to take orders,’ said Prospero.
‘You’re mad!’ shouted Nicola, suddenly rowdy with sh
ock. He was upset by this turn. ‘Why?’ he harried. ‘Are you running for cover?’ This was meant to provoke Prospero, but he merely looked melancholy. ‘What about what you said about the Pope and Count Rossi’s death?’ Nicola challenged. ‘What about Madame de Menou? How,’ he urged, ‘give up something so powerful? So rare?’
‘But I,’ Prospero told him, ‘see those stories as reasons for giving up the world. It’s disorderly, and I’m disorderly myself. I’m too much like my father – a maimed romantic. Dominique frightened me. Maybe I am running for cover, but I don’t see that as disgraceful. Do you?’
Rome, 3 June 1849
Emile Aubry, Rome correspondent for La Solidarité Républicaine, was unable to keep up with events. On 29th May – he had been officially assured – the French envoy, Ferdinand de Lesseps, had signed a treaty with the Roman Republic on behalf of France. By its terms the city gates were to be opened in return for a pledge that France would respect the Republic’s rights. However, no sooner had the ink dried on Aubry’s report than news came that Lesseps had been recalled to Paris and the treaty repudiated. Why? Embassy officials were not prepared to say.
One might as well read tea leaves as official communiqués, decided Aubry, whose clever eyes were set in a face like a good-looking whippet’s. He wore a snuff-coloured greatcoat, a shot-silk waistcoat slightly frayed, and spent his time in the Caffè degli Artisti, calling for ink and writing his articles there and then on a smeary tabletop. He doubted if they would be published. Paris was fabricating new truths.
Professional pride, however, impelled him to note down the facts –? – supplied by touts. Commodities were scarce in Rome just now, so they were pleased to sell him all the information on which they could lay their hands. Foreign money was a powerful inducement and, as his readiness to pay for notizie became known, he was besieged by servants eager to sell their masters’ bedroom-, alcove- and even pantry-secrets. Haphazardly, he recorded irrelevancies, feeling like a junk-dealer who hopes to find a diamond in the dross. If even a fraction of what he was hearing was true, he could set up as a blackmailer. Great ladies, it appeared, were receiving comfort from their coachmen while their husbands, in Gaeta, gave theirs to the Pope. Requisitioned convents had revealed scabrous secrets, and as for what had been found on the premises of the Holy Office, all his informant would say was that the sight of its cellars had turned the Republican inspectors’ hair white! Horrors! Cose dell’altro mondo! Worth more than a few scudi, eh?
The Judas Cloth Page 28