*
Her story started in the century’s second decade when she, as a child, was spending much of her time mooning in her parents’ garden in Rome, which was so overgrown that the air looked like pond water and the mossed statues were as plump as kitchen maids. Her family belonged to that Roman aristocracy which someone had compared to lizards living in the dried-out carapace of an ancestral crocodile. And indeed her earliest memories were of complaint. Times had, it appeared, been palmier once, and the brocade draperies in a better state. Now her relatives lived by improvisation and spent their best energies addressing formal supplications to each other for such favours as tax-exemptions, state pensions and ceremonial sinecures. Recurringly, they marvelled at the good fortune of their only resourceful acquaintance, the Marchese de’ Lepri who, being unable to pay his cook, had granted him permission to open a restaurant in his palace courtyard, which was now the most profitable eating place in Rome. The unpredictability of that delighted them. It was like winning at the lottery and spurred them to ponder lucky combinations of numbers in the hope of a like windfall coming to themselves.
Such hopes had nothing to do with greed. Cutting a fine figure was a duty imposed by their caste and by the papal court which required that outward signs of divine favour be kept up. Ceremonies were lessons for the illiterate and playing one’s inherited role in the pedagogic pageant was a defence against social upheaval.
Requirements were a matter of custom, not choice. Prelates of a given rank must, for instance, have three footmen when they drove out on certain feast days, so the less affluent would hire some loiterer to squeeze into their livery and make up the number. This, observed Donna Geltrude, was of course still true of cardinals. Then, it had also affected the lay aristocracy. She remembered only too well the cost of such masquerades and the skimping which went on in secret. The French occupation had imposed taxes and abolished entails, thereby reducing some of the greatest families to penury; and when Pius VII returned from exile to an empty treasury, it was again the aristocracy who paid the price. He simply refused to honour the banknotes issued years earlier to depositors of gold and silver specie, thus pauperising many more families and dissipating enthusiasm for his restoration.
‘How could we feel loyalty to the papacy after that?’ demanded Donna Geltrude, who had, Nicola remembered, Republican leanings.
Cynicism had been the order of the day and she and her brothers grew used to thinking that they had been born into a ruined world. She had three brothers. The eldest was to become the Father Prefect whom Father Santi knew from the Collegio Romano, and the next and nearest to her age was her brother Cesare, with whom she enjoyed an intimacy so close that there was no need for speech between them. The eldest brother was too pious to play with them and the youngest too young. So, they were thrown together.
‘He had asthma!’ Donna Geltrude laughed, choked a bit, then laughed again. ‘As I do now!’
When she was fourteen, Pope Leo XII was raised to the tiara and set about moralising the city. No need to remind her listeners of what was notorious. Sunday card-playing could get a peasant ten strokes of the whip and, as there were myriads of such laws which nobody observed, nobody had any morality at all. The law was an ass and everyone knew it. If a peasant could get ten lashes for playing cards during mass, what punishment was left for a real crime? This, anyway, was what Cesare said and Geltrude believed him, for he was three years older than she and took the lead in all their games. The one he proposed shortly after Pope Leo’s accession did not surprise her at all. At first it seemed childish – a relapse into nursery play – and by the time she saw that there was more to it, they were lovers.
The word, said she, might seem shocking, but the reality brought no more guilt than going for a ride on their ponies. Public impropriety was what the pontifical police were after and Cesare and she were privacy itself. They were always either in their parents’ palazzo in Rome or in the country on their own land. They had governesses and a chaplain to chaperone them, but these were lazy and when the children ran away from them, held their tongues so as not to be blamed. The chaplain was their confessor too and naturally Cesare and she did not embarrass him by confessing their sin of the flesh. Besides, repeated Donna Geltrude, she had never thought of what they did in those terms. After all, so much of life was private – wasn’t it? – out of consideration for other people. One did not parade one’s intimate functions. One kept up a front.
‘Am I taking too long?’ Donna Geltrude sighed and speeded up. She had finally confessed all, she said, when she was pregnant with Flavio, and been advised to repudiate the fruit of her sin. This was much later though and, by then, her luck had long run out.
What happened was that one hot September morning, when Cesare and she were supposed to be studying with the chaplain, they persuaded him to let them go cool their feet in a stream which ran about a hundred yards from the villa garden. It was no distance to let them stray and he, favouring his arthritic legs, sat on a bench to wait and fell asleep. Meanwhile, their father and his steward came by with guns in search of the wild fowl which they liked to eat, after these had been spit-roasted between sage leaves, bacon and oiled bread. The foliage by the stream was so dense that they might have shot the lovers had they not been alerted by the vigorous rippling of a clump of reeds. Suspecting a poacher, their father crept forward stealthily and pounced.
‘He was,’ said Donna Geltrude, ‘a man of iron restraint. He said nothing, gave nothing away. He simply prodded Cesare’s naked backside with his boot, waited to catch his eye, then withdrew silently and led the steward off in another direction. He even said something to the chaplain, as he passed him, about the dangers of sitting in the sun. Next morning he left the villa without saying a word and, returning ten days later, announced to Cesare that, asthma or no asthma, he was to join the Austrian Army as a private and serve under an officer who would ensure that his spell in the regiment either killed him or turned him into a man.’ The officer was a notorious martinet and Cesare could look forward to getting the sort of discipline which he, his father, had culpably failed to provide.
‘To me,’ said Donna Geltrude, ‘all he said was that I was to be locked up until he could find me a husband, which he did within a month. The duke was thirty years older than I, and knew at once that I was no virgin. He had, he told me, deflowered so many that I could not have hoped to deceive him, but in deference to their memory he would not complain. He had, however, married so as to have children and wanted these to be his own, so he was taking his sister out of her convent to keep an eye on me day and night. This horrified me. I had met the sister at our wedding and she was a spiteful poor creature with a squint who could not forgive the world for its prejudice against the squint-eyed. I told him that if he would leave her in her convent, I would undertake neither to foist a bastard on him nor to take a lover without letting him know. I think he was amused. In the light of all the married and unmarried women he had slept with, he could not hope to find more virtue than the sort I was promising. After all, a city without brothels and full of celibate prelates can be forced by popes like Leo XII to keep up appearances but never to change its ways. “Very well,” he said, “if you give me your word of honour.” So I gave it to him and did my best to keep it.’
Donna Geltrude sighed. She must be coming to the worst part of her story. She had, she said, two children by her husband and then Cesare came back. He had spent three years in the disciplinary regiment being subjected to the regime of kill-or-cure, but the outcome had been neither. He had run away, been caught and punished horribly, and now his face looked flayed. It was desiccated, lean, superficially humorous and deeply, intimately sad. He had lost a front tooth. Although he never spoke of his time with the Austrians, he began to conspire with their enemies – those were the years when the activities of Carbonari and Masons were at their peak – and was imprudent and, no doubt, ineffective. After the papal police had raided a meeting and arrested him and proven to
him that half his group were spies, he threw up politics and astounded his family by becoming a priest.
‘“Well,” he said to me when I wondered at this, “all the preferment in this town is for priests, so why shouldn’t I have some of it? I presume that as our father generously raised your dowry to make up for your damaged state, he will equally generously endow me with the property qualification needed to attain the Prelatura!” Then,’ said Donna Geltrude, ‘he caught me by the throat – we were in my father’s palazzo – and asked, “Do you prefer your old dried-up debauchee of a husband to me?” And when I resisted him, he raped me. He was very strong now and brutal and he kept his thumb on my windpipe until I thought I would choke. My asthma dates from then.’
She did not consider that the rape broke her promise to her husband, but she now kept out of Cesare’s way. He seemed to her demented. His character had changed and he had developed a hatred against her whom he thought of as having betrayed him. He told her that while he was living through hell in an Austrian military gaol, he had imagined her pining and waiting for him and had been in despair when he heard of her marriage. She had broken their pact and when she said there had been no pact, he was outraged. They had understood each other as children, he said, and repeated this over and over as though nobody had understood him since.
‘My husband had a villa in the Legations, and it was while I was there one autumn with my children that Cesare turned up again. He simply arrived one wet evening in a dripping carriage like a black bird of prey. He was by now a priest but had not acquired the violet stockings he craved, for my father was refusing to put up the money. They disliked each other and had had one of their worst rows – which boded ill for me. My husband was in Rome pursuing an amorous interest of his own. We had already begun to live apart and I was reluctant to have my servants throw Cesare out. He counted, to be sure, on my eagerness to keep up appearances – was it not, after all, what had led me to betray him? I would give into it again, he reckoned, and now it would serve his purpose.
‘“Surely you can’t want to force my affections?” I asked. “Why do you want to spoil the past and my feelings for you?”’
‘“You spoiled mine!”’
‘He threatened to tell my husband about his rape of three years before which he would not, of course, describe as a rape. Then he raped me again – and again. He stayed for a month, wreaking his rage and lust on me at irregular intervals. I became numb. No, it was worse. It was as though he had sucked me into his nightmare and as though I had lost my will. I began to see that this could go on for the rest of our lives because I was also losing my ability to distinguish disgust from pleasure and, in between, I hated myself and him. I didn’t go to confession. How could I? I didn’t know a trustworthy priest – and didn’t see how one could have helped me if I had. I saw only one decorous way out – and, remember, I was brought up to put decorum before everything – so I adopted it. I began to poison him with acqua di Tofano di Perugia, slow-working arsenic, which I gave him in regular doses in his food. I saw a symmetry there. He was poisoning my mind and senses and I was poisoning his. As he grew weaker, I recovered. My numbness faded. I began to hate him increasingly and in the end I refused myself to him and he was too weak to force me. I went on giving him the poison. It is, of course, a common one, used frequently by jealous wives, and is said to be impossible to detect. Certainly, nobody saw anything strange about Cesare’s death and I think my parents were relieved. Looking back, I see now that, even during our childhood, he was slightly mad. I think my father must have seen that the day he found us among the river reeds. It explains why he chose to give me a good dowry, even though his own finances were not flourishing, and found me a considerate husband. It would have been cheaper and easier to shut me up in a convent – but he chose not to.’
Donna Geltrude paused. ‘I should hate to think that Cesare’s heritage is poisoning Flavio’s life too – but how do I know whether telling him all this would merely embitter him more? I don’t know him. I couldn’t let myself. I was trying to honour my promise to my husband not to let his name and possessions pass to a bastard, and Flavio, as you must have guessed, is Cesare’s son. You,’ she told Nicola, ‘must decide whether or not to tell him.’
Defensively, she added, ‘I did pay a lump sum to a family which engaged to bring him up in modest comfort. Such arrangements are common, but this one went awry. A middleman pocketed the money.’ She wheezed and sighed. ‘How could I have explained this when we met? Just when I was preparing to deny his legitimacy?’
Her remorse, Nicola saw, was all for the living. A practical woman. Some might shudder at the acqua di Tofano, but Miss Foljambe apparently did not. She had her arms around her friend’s shoulders and was suggesting brandy, but Donna Geltrude wanted to keep her mind clear. There was more to tell.
It was during Cesare’s funeral – which she did not attend; it was not the custom – that she learned she was pregnant and had better take steps to conceal the incestuous source of her condition.
‘I had to protect the reputation of my own blood kin.’
Miss Foljambe nodded. To be sure. She had, said Donna Geltrude, gone hotfoot to Rome where she tried and failed to rouse her husband’s interest. Her friend’s smile was a miserere. How glad she was she had stayed a spinster! Donna Geltrude, a more active one, had spun a web of deception. Desperate for a putative sire, she now encouraged the attentions of a handsome but-not-very-sharp Russian and, to her husband’s undoubted relief, since his own affections were engaged with the sisters who would one day testify at the Sacra Rota trial, flaunted herself with this new lover.
‘An old shift!’ she admitted.
The custom of having a cavalier sirvente, though not as common as formerly, had not died out and, anyway, great ladies enjoyed freedoms denied ordinary folk. Besides, the rigid reign of Leo XII had finished and a reaction set in. Rome had defeated him. Morals were relaxing and cafés serving ices and taverns wine, as merrily as if he had never forbidden such possible occasions of sin.
The gallant Russian, supposing the child to be his, helped her give birth in secrecy, sent his manservant to leave it temporarily at the Foundling Hospital, then sent him back to arrange to have it boarded out with a respectable family. It was this man who pocketed the sum entrusted to him, unknown either to his employer who was soon on his way back to Russia or to Donna Geltrude who, supposing the child to have been provided for, put it out of her head. Nobody would ever have been the wiser had it not been for the ‘Russian’ Jesuit who had been her Russian lover’s confidant and guessed that Flavio – who resembled her – was Donna Geltrude’s son.
The Jesuits had then converged like eels or gulls on the inheritance – which in the end they didn’t get. ‘I wasn’t surprised when Flavio outfoxed them! He’s Cesare’s son!’ She stopped, then visibly bracing herself, said: ‘They immediately began spreading the word that my daughter and I were Republicans, which was the worst thing you could say about anyone that year. Remember, it was just after the fall of the Roman Republic. And it was a lie. My daughter and her husband have always been moderates.’
‘But you were Father Gavazzi’s penitent?’
‘Ah,’ said the duchess, ‘there was a man without guile! He wanted me to say who the father was! Imagine. I couldn’t – if only because my mother was still alive. And what did honesty do for him? He had to leave his country and his Church!’
This was prickly territory and Nicola chose not to venture onto it for it was his duty – her story had convinced him – to save Donna Geltrude’s soul. The question was how? Tact was called for and kid gloves. She was embittered, having suffered at the hands of the Sacra Rota, and it was likely that he was the first priest to whom she had spoken in years. Awed by the challenge, he murmured, ‘I can give you some comfort. Flavio won’t marry the circus rider. I can’t tell you how I know this. But you may rely on it.’
‘You’re a man of secrets!’ approved Donna Geltrude. ‘So keep mine
too – except from Flavio.’ Catching his wrist, she drew him so close that he was shocked by the cutting gleam of her eye. There was a secondary ambient one from a diamond choker designed to conceal the ruins of her neck. ‘I would like to think of him as like you, because,’ she said, ‘you are an agreeable man. Sensitive. I imagine orphans often are. After all, they have to seduce the world, don’t they? Nothing’s given to them!’ Her laugh startled him. Before he could muster a reply, she was telling Miss Foljambe that she would have that brandy, after all.
*
Afterwards he knew he had failed Donna Geltrude. The word ‘sensitive’ had stopped him in his tracks. And her laugh! Unnerved, he had not dared offer the spiritual consolation which she was likely to rebuff for, surely, she must have grown sceptical of clerics’ appeals and, like a flayed creature, impossible to touch. Yet how leave her to a cynicism which must lead to her damnation? Must it? Would God condemn her for what had come about as a direct result of living in His state?
At several points, Nicola had been ready to intervene in her narrative with uplifting words – which died on his lips. It didn’t lend itself. They would have sounded like cant. Anxiously, he unscrolled her history in his mind: Pius VII had ruined her family by failing to honour his debts; Leo XII discredited morality by demanding the impossible; the requirement that her ruined family manifest eternal values by keeping up a decorous front had contributed to her brother’s cynicism. Inexorably, conditions prevailing in this state had trapped her – and Flavio. So how blame either of them for sins or cynicism? As for the cynicism of the Sacra Rota – but here he stopped himself. Blame was soaring dangerously high. Checking wild thoughts, he leaped out of bed – which was where the thoughts, profiting from his disarmed and drousy state, had found him – and flinging himself onto the floor, made a heartfelt act of contrition. He saw now that he had opened himself to mental temptation and that the contagion came from her, an unbridled creature who should have aroused horror rather than pity. For was her suffering not her own fault? The result less of misfortune than of resisting it, and of following her own lights instead of yielding with a good grace? For what had she gained? Nothing. If, as other women did, she had passed Flavio off as her husband’s son, things would have been at the beginning as they now were at the end – and without troubling people’s faith. But no: she, come hell or high water, had had to keep her promise to her husband – and to her own self-pride. Hers was the disruptive modern spirit incarnate: a force as dangerous as a cholera virus because it was powered by such obstinacy that it would burn itself up rather than give in. Lucid, insubordinate, contagious and wrong! See the outcome! She was a revolutionary of the bedroom! Nicola, still on his knees, acknowledged to himself that he had briefly surrendered to a half-filial attraction to Donna Geltrude. Because of that cold, suffering flame in her and because she was a lost mother like his own, he, whose thoughts should have been on winning souls for Mother Church, had instead let them nuzzle around this ruined flesh. Despite her tart style and fissured face, he had felt his own flesh stir as he wondered what it would be like to be Flavio, and about incest and the young Cesare and how she must have looked when aged fourteen. Before trying to save her soul, he had, he saw, better look to his own. Turning for aid to the Virgin, he recited a rosary before returning to his bed.
The Judas Cloth Page 39