And on he rattled in the hope of melting Prospero, who had stiffened as though in a private frost.
‘Here’s to friendship.’ Martelli raised his glass. ‘Nicola and I mingled our blood once, which was thought shocking at the Collegio Romano. So, to fraternity!’
But Prospero said the word was so contaminated by ‘Liberty’ and ‘Equality’ that he agreed with whoever had said that if he had had a brother he would call him ‘cousin’.
Martelli laughed. ‘You’d be following in your father’s footsteps! Didn’t the Carbonari call each other cousins? I paid him a visit on my way here, by the way. He sends his greetings.’
He waved his napkin as his stufato di asino arrived in a fume of fragrance. Too many topics, he said, were booby-trapped. Fraternity! The dinner menu! It was a sign of the times. People were sick of petty restraints. Small things rankled, he told them and sniffed his stew. ‘Pinpricks!’ He ground pepper into it. ‘I’ve had my ear to the ground, and all I hear are rumblings of irritation. Can you credit that the archbishop here has had several young women shut up in the Good Shepherd Home for Fallen Women? Young women who, if anything, had risen rather than fallen. They were the concubines of solid citizens!’
The other two said nothing and for a while Martelli was busy with his stew. Then he returned to the attack. One girl, it seemed, had had her hair shorn and her protector had said that, if anyone else had touched a hair of her head, he would have cut their balls off, but how do that to the archbishop?
‘He was trembling like a whippet!’
‘The peasants,’ Prospero said severely, ‘say a woman’s pubic hair can pull more weight than a team of oxen. Indifference to sin is the sin of our time.’
Martelli tiptoed to the door and stuck out his head. Drawing it in again, he said, ‘Do you know why I ordered stew? It was to give us a chance to talk confidentially. I’m glad you know the force of a pubic hair.’
Nicola saw Prospero colour. Martelli, though, seemed to mean this as a compliment. It was important, he said, to remember things like that. Ordinary things. Many no longer did – emigrés who spent their days in the backrooms of cafés in London and Zurich arguing with Irishmen and Hungarians and the victims of Tsar Nicholas. ‘They discuss something called “man”, which is unlike any human who ever lived. They’ve lost touch with how things are.’
‘Do they matter?’
‘Yes, because they are spurred on by agents provocateurs, false friends who – I must tell you, Monsignori – are sometimes friends of yours.’ He told his guests that he was here because he hoped they would help dismantle a plot in which both sides had a hand, revolutionaries as well as priests.
‘Priests!’
‘Exactly.’ Pleased to have roused their interest, he ordered more champagne.
‘You’ve started something,’ said the waiter. ‘A crowd in the big room wants stufato di asino. They smelled it and the padrone is on pins and needles because they won’t take no for an answer. They’ve had a glass or two, so he doesn’t know whether to be more afraid of them or the police. If it were up to me,’ said the man, ‘I’d throw it in the pigswill. But …’ Touching his elbow, he winked and grinned. His employer, tight as the skin on a bent elbow, hoped to save the stew for tomorrow.
He left and Martelli resumed his story, which concerned Felice Orsini, a man who, at the time of the Roman Republic, had had the thankless job of disciplining his own side. Well, Republican refugees, with nothing to chew but the cud of old resentments, had since given him the cold shoulder. In power the spoils of office kept men together, but exiles fell out. Orsini, brooding and chafing, could be provoked into imprudent action by, Martelli lowered his voice more, ‘your friends.’
Nicola guessed: ‘The Jesuits!’ Martelli said ‘maybe’. Something was brewing and the Pope’s supporters were capable of engineering an attack on Pius himself. They needed a counter-scandal to swing attention from the Mortara case and stop Napoleon removing his garrison. Not long ago a man had tried to knife Cardinal Antonelli – so why not the Pope? ‘They say the cardinal paid the man to stage the attempt so as to blacken the nationalists.’
‘But the cardinal had him executed!’
‘Of course.’
Prospero didn’t believe any of this. He said the imagination at work here was coloured by reading the ancients: Suetonius, Procopius. Maybe even The Arabian Nights! Men who read didn’t act. Martelli disagreed and said moderate men must stop the lunatics, or anarchy would ensue. Prospero was on his way to Paris and London. He could discreetly warn the police there. If there was no plot, where was the harm? If there was, think of the damage prevented! But Prospero, sipping brandy, had a sceptical smile.
‘You don’t trust me,’ lamented Martelli, ‘because I’m an Italian nationalist. But let me tell you something. Sooner or later we’ll get our nation. That’s my belief. Or we won’t. That’s yours. Either way, we’ll have to live together in this peninsula and that will be easier if wild men are prevented from embittering matters. Your father agrees.’
But Prospero wouldn’t listen to Martelli’s appeal which, for all he knew, hid a trap. Mention of his father made him more adamant. No. Well, at the least, begged Martelli, would he warn the nuncio in Paris? ‘As you may imagine,’ he said reasonably, ‘I can’t do it. I wouldn’t be believed.’
Prospero was pondering this modest request – Nicola had already agreed to pass Martelli’s suspicions on to the police in Rome – when the conversation was interrupted by a commotion in the main restaurant. There were shouts and the sound of falling chairs and a hubbub so loud that Martelli went to investigate.
No sooner was he well gone than two men in plain clothes entered the cubby-hole, closed the door behind them and told the priests that their orders were to convey them out of this place with maximum discretion so as to avoid a scandal. Stanga began arguing that if it was because of the donkey stew, he had a dispensation … But their rescuers deprecated the very idea. Please, Monsignore, don’t embarrass us who are obliged to invoke your indulgence for the special circumstances which … And so forth. Vague phrases edged smokily towards an undefined threat, while the two were eased from the room, down a back stairway and into a waiting carriage. One of the gentlemen in plain clothes – clearly, they now saw, a cleric and a policeman – explained, between further apologies, that everyone else in the inn had been taken into custody and that if the two of them had either been arrested or seen not to be arrested, this could have given rise to sonnets and epigrams which would have been at best indecorous and at worst subversive of good order and respect for our holy regime.
Nicola asked about Martelli.
‘He’s an agent,’ said the policeman. ‘Here to stir up trouble. We’ve had him under surveillance, and the meat-eating gave us a chance to arrest him without scandal. He will be taken to the border and released.’
What about the other men arrested? The policeman shrugged. Small fry. The law would take its course – which meant that the landlord would be fined and the sinners – depending on rank – given a few days in gaol. Those who had jobs might lose them.
‘Indifference to sin,’ he said, nodding his head wisely, ‘is the sin of our time.’
Nicola looked to see how Prospero liked hearing his own words on the policeman’s lips, but his friend’s face gave nothing away.
Two days later a note from Martelli begged him to persuade Prospero to look into the matter they had discussed and to alert the nuncio. The Paris Opera House, said the note, was full of Italians. It mentioned the name of a doorkeeper there who would be helpful. Nicola passed this on without comment for he knew that his advice would carry little weight. Prospero was stubborn.
Paris, January 1858
It seemed to Prospero that his soutane drew frosty looks. Cautiously, he watched the gaudy Parisians. Their zest abashed him and so did their sharp, chattering voices. They reminded him of birds with their beaky mouths from which sounds burst like bullets. A century’s scepticism
had sent them into spasm. The women, to be sure, were built on more fluent lines – but then women, even here, could probably not afford to show much character.
The day before he was to leave for London, he received a note from Madame de Menou, from whom he had not heard in nine years. It was a petit bleu and contained only her address and the hour at which she would be at home this afternoon. There was a woman of character with whom he had shown a lack of it! He no longer believed her to have been a potential poisoner and marvelled that he ever had. His imagination had been inflammatory – like his father’s. Confessors had since warned against this and, for years now, he had kept it under so tight a rein that friends would have ben surprised to know he had any at all.
Clinging to dullness like a sick man to his pills, he was glad to have steered clear of the arena of private feeling – just as he was glad he had evaded Martelli’s efforts to draw him into his imbrogli. Prospero needed to live under orders and away from emotional anarchy such as, no doubt, pullulated here in Paris. Impulse! Vo-lup-té! Horses’ hooves hammered out the syllables in sensual French. The city struck him as smeared with it. Chestnut buds had a sticky shine. Pigeons looked like bits of erupting pavement. Human juices – he witnessed a whore committing fellatio – were insufficiently contained.
Yes, his escape had been providential. Poor Dominique! How old had she been? Thirty-one? He wondered if the mad husband was still alive. Heading for her house, he thought of their meeting as one where she would grant him absolution.
It was more uncomfortable than that, for it soon became clear that she was expecting something from him. Letting silences settle, she grew ironic as he rattled on about this and that. Small talk. Politics. As if in pity, she rang for tea. Armed with a cup, he looked and saw that even in the filtered light she was no longer young. Her husband had died. Yes, poor man, she said, to prevent him doing away with himself, he had been put in a strait waistcoat. Backing away from the past and – he now began to fear – present implications of that, Prospero asked about the Peace Conference which had been held here in Paris to wind up the Crimean War. This caught her interest, as during it she had, she told him, met Cavour. Was Prospero still a patriot, even though …
‘Though I’m a priest?’ Nearly all Italian patriots now were anti-clericals. But she must know this.
‘Ah,’ she nodded, ‘the great impediment!’ Half laughing.
He didn’t follow.
‘Gaston,’ she named her husband suddenly, ‘was like a clever dog. He could smell things out. He knew, for instance, that he was an impediment to me. When I came back from Rome he tried to kill himself. Then he calmed down until last year when he tried again.’
Her failure to protect herself left Prospero unprotected too. Like a mouse in a clock, a bit of emotional anarchy slid into his mind. In the dimming room, flashes of her old beauty gleamed but were clearly as little to be relied on as a wig in a wind. She must, he calculated, be forty.
She told him that she hated God.
‘Before,’ she said, ‘I didn’t believe in Him. Hearing you were going to be a priest gave me back my faith. Hating is, I’m sure, regarded as better than not believing, am I right?’
He saw he was being baited – or courted. Outside the window – he had retreated to it – the streets looked like a haven.
Love, she was saying, was a persuasive fever. ‘I have lived for nine years with a madman who was perhaps no madder than I. Poor Rossi too was a victim of madness. I mean that of his killers. He himself was dangerously sane – too sane to predict what the mad might do.’ She paused. ‘I reminisce too much. I became trapped in a past which I mistook for the future. I thought, you see, that you would come back. Well, now I shall be cured of thinking that. I can see that you are embarrassed. Never mind, Monsignore. I know this visit is painful for you. Suffer it as a kindness to me. A sort of surgery is being performed as you stand there looking wistfully at the street.’
Prospero, finding tears in his eyes, turned to display them. They were his defence – and less dangerous than words. He could feel her avidity and knew it must not be encouraged.
However, her face quickened. Was he crying, she asked, for the past or for now? ‘I have no shame,’ she warned. ‘Shame is trumpery when set against a chance of happiness. I thought once we could marry. Then, when I heard you had been ordained, I thought I could be your concubine. Lots of priests have arrangements like that. You don’t want me though, do you?’
‘No, Dominique.’
Somehow – shame blotted out the moment – he was released into the last of the Paris afternoon. He felt that it should have been midnight for he had surely spent hours in that drawing room. Yet it was not even dark. Mist haloes furred the gas lamps, trapping rather than shedding light. It was the hour after the Angelus, the Ave Maria, which in Rome was reckoned as the start of a new day. Here in Paris the evening commerce was starting up. Streetwalkers looked hopefully at him as he plunged uncertainly about and drew his cloak tight to hide his purple. Twice he turned to go back – then didn’t because what would have been the point? He seemed unable to focus properly and such was the ferment of his nervous distress that he imagined himself starting to scream or run or plunge into the river. Instead, he walked along a dank pavement, slipping on rotted leaves and wondering how much of the misty magnitude of things was due to his erratic vision. Then he hailed a cab and, for want of a better idea, gave the address of the Théâtre de l’Opéra, rue le Pelletier. It was – he forgot why – in his pocket with the name of a Roman doorman who, presumably, would help him find a good seat.
There were, though, no tickets to be had, for tonight was a gala occasion. The Emperor was expected. Hadn’t he known, exclaimed an official with brisk, French surprise. Prospero asked for the doorman, guessing that, unless he had lost his Roman ways, he would have a few places to trade for bribes. The man, he was told, would soon come on duty and indeed, within minutes, ‘Monsieur Angelo’ had arrived in a glow of brass buttons and eau-de-vie. He greeted Prospero in bad French and Roman dialect, assuring him that he was always delighted to help a distinguished compatriot. Delighted and honoured, he repeated, while waving away, yet managing to pocket, a gratuity. Yours to command, Excellency. Prospero said he was not an Excellency and Monsieur Angelo winked and bowed and beckoned.
Guessing that he was being taken by some back way to a seat, Prospero followed him up stairs and down corridors to a room where he was told to wait while his guide disappeared amid promises of a speedy return.
‘Un momentino, Eccellenza! Un piccolo attimo!’ Smiling like some Mephistopheles understudy at a rehearsal.
The door closed, then opened again to admit not the brass-buttoned Angelo but another operatic figure dressed in stage attire. This was a ruddy-faced girl of sixteen who dropped him a parody curtsy. ‘I’m Jeanne!’ Smiling radiantly from a mouthful of alluringly crooked teeth. ‘Excellency – I mean Monsieur.’ Clearly, Angelo had given her speedy instructions.
There was, Prospero now noted, a couch. Where were they, he asked. Whose room was this? Oh, she said, it was one we used. Who was ‘we’? Us. The girls in the chorus. Monsieur Angelo knows our timetable.
‘And promised you a little present.’
‘Bien sûr!’
‘I see! Well … will you sing me one of your songs?’ He was wondering whether a little sin might not keep off worse. Clearly, Jeanne, a plucked rose, would suffer little in the process.
‘What would Monsieur like?’
But she didn’t know the songs he named. Meanwhile, his hand was somehow lured inside her bodice, to feel the caky resilience of gooseflesh, and he grew a little sad to find how simple things could be and what an infinity of tender consolation lay in cuddling this adaptable creature who could be a gipsy – she was dressed as one – or nymph or peasant as the evening’s bill required.
He was, it seemed though, too slow in his dalliance.
‘Better look slippy,’ she warned, ‘if you want to take you
r seat by the time the curtain goes up.’
Then she drew the pins from her topknot and shook out her hair, releasing a smell which he found moving and reminiscent, somehow, of childhood kitchens. It was a little fatty, a bit like the coat of a dog, and the mood was comfortably domestic as she suddenly swept it up again and twisted it in a knot. This was a teasing move. Hurry, it implied, or I’ll shut up shop. Next she asked him to help her stick back her hairpins. There was no mirror.
‘There!’ she directed. ‘No. More to the left – Jesus! What was that?’
He had imagined it might be to do with the opera – a thunder sheet perhaps? But: no, she told him. No!
There was another explosion. Then another and another and sounds of shattering glass.
‘Let’s go!’
This, he saw, was the real Jeanne who had shed her stagy manner and bundled him out the door in seconds. Down the wooden stairs they raced, but were stopped at the corner leading to the rue le Pelletier. Mounted soldiers had closed off the entrance. Horses reared. Carriages were backed up. Someone shouted that the lights in front of the Opera House had been shattered. People hung out of carriage windows arguing.
‘They’ve killed the Emperor!’
‘Who?’
‘English bombers!’
A sergeant de ville shouted, ‘Everyone off the streets!’ The wounded were to be taken to an apothecary’s shop. ‘Clear the way,’ he yelled.
‘Come on!’ Jeanne drew her customer into a café just as the shutters came down.
Here too the news was garbled. Customers drank spirits to restore themselves and someone came in with a report that the latest detonation had been nothing but a pistol shot, as a horse was put out of pain. So how many injuries were there? Nobody knew. There was so much fraternising of every sort that Prospero was unworried about being seen with Jeanne.
The Judas Cloth Page 41