Raising his boot, Martelli asked, ‘What do you suppose is in this? I know it’s confidential, but we may surely speculate. I say it’s about scudi and that Antonelli wants compensation for the annexed lands. The trouble is that Italian coffers are empty too. The war cleaned us out. So with what are we to pay?’
‘Could a great international Catholic financier help?’
‘Does such an animal exist?’
‘I’m told he does. Why don’t your people look into it?’
Martelli nodded. ‘He could raise cash for both our masters. Compensation could be paid and the seizure of papal lands condoned.’
‘It could lead to peace.’
‘And our keeping the dialogue open will have been worthwhile.’
‘A lot of people would be against such a peace.’ Nicola was restraining his own optimism: ‘Garibaldini, the Jesuits, Mérode … Why are you for it, Martelli?’
‘Logic. Italy is Catholic, so a modus vivendi has to be found. Why are you?’
Nicola wondered whether to say that he, like the ex-Professor of Dogmatics, hoped the papacy would grow more spiritual once it no longer needed such worldly pomps as land and possessions. This did seem in keeping with the gospel’s message – unless he had got hold of the wrong end of the stick? Padre Passaglia’s thought processes were notoriously elusive and, exalting though it might be to think of the Pope renouncing riches, if he needed cash to bring this about, might he not have to welcome in by one door the vain pomps ushered out by the other? Even at the height of his prestige, Passaglia had been thought fond of unsound German ideas which could lead him too far – and perhaps had? They had certainly led him away from Rome.
So Nicola’s answer was evasive. ‘I’d like all my friends to be able to sit down at one table.’
Martelli clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Put down some young wine and let’s hope it’s drinkable when the day comes. I won’t have breakfast with you. I have to find a barber before I leave.’
Nicola walked out with him, then stood a while in the courtyard which gleamed in the moonlight and smelled, since it was Thursday, of the dried cod which had been left there to soak. ‘A fish out of water!’ he heard himself say and realised that he had been thinking of Passaglia. For where could the eminent theologian now go but out of the Church?
Upstairs, feeling too stirred-up to sleep, he opened Martelli’s copy of the Civiltà Cattolica and read the piece on Liberal sympathisers. The noblemen among them, said the Jesuit writer, could only be nincompoops. As for Liberals of the middling sort, these were either ‘men of letters whose smattering of knowledge has addled their wits, doctors mad to exchange the task of prescribing enemas for the nobler one of running a province or estate managers who fancy that dealing with herders and horse-manure has fitted them for government, plus a mob of idlers who, lacking the means to feed either themselves or their vices, welcome change of any sort. To these join a throng of unruly schoolboys and you’ll have the roll call of factious Rome.’
Nicola wondered how then to account for himself.
*
A peace formula had been worked out. Still secret, it was the fruit of the patient ingenuity of Cardinal Antonelli and Prime Minister Cavour, and its terms were as follows: the Pope would regain sovereignty over his old territories but delegate civil powers to the king who thus became the Vicar’s vicar. Anti-Church laws were to be repealed and indemnities paid. The genial simplicity of this and the speed with which it had been agreed surely proved that heaven was helping men of good will to help themselves. Gold had been sent by Cavour to ease the way with minor officials, and agreements reached about compensation to Cardinal Antonelli’s family for the losses it must incur, once such monopolies as the bank and railways passed from its control.
Meanwhile, the war party, knowing nothing of all this, was putting its trust in the Zouaves and had kitted them out with with new uniforms consisting of baggy trousers, red cummerbunds and braid frogs, which gave them the look of fanciful figures devised to give interest to paintings of the Colosseum or to advertisements by traders in Turkey rugs.
Those who knew that they need not, after all, depend on these swashbucklers, were able now to see them with a less exasperated eye. It was as though the city were playing charades, for the new plans had emptied the present of reality. Foreign voices, floating from the barracks on warm evenings, added to the feeling of carnival. Songs invoking a sanguinary, but now – God grant! – obsolete, future filled the initiate with a relieved and tremulous joy:
Oh we’ll hang Garibaldi on a high short rope,
Hang Garibaldi for crimes against the Pope!
Luckily, ordinary Romans, many of whom had an intense admiration for Garibaldi, knew no English and listened as they might have done to zoo creatures when the foreign riffraff took to roaring in Polish or Breton or other barbaric tongues. The French volunteers were better born and their refrain had a ring of the nursery:
C’est le bataillon morbleu
Des diables du Bon Dieu!
Some were as young as sixteen and Pius adored their company. Last spring, his health had been bad and bets laid that he wouldn’t last the summer. Cavour was thought to be counting on the Church electing a more accommodating pontiff next time. It stood to reason. If the new peace plan was to work.
Instead, in June, confounding all expectancy, he died himself: a bolt from the blue, for he was only fifty-two.
The hand of God? Or the devil?
‘Is there a chance,’ Nicola asked Cardinal Amandi, ‘that His Holiness will carry on with the peace plan anyway?’
But Amandi had already pleaded for this and got short shrift. ‘I kept saying, “Santità, can we not repropose the formula? Simply submit it to the new ministry in Turin?” But no. Cavour made a bad death. Ergo everything to do with him is contaminated. He who touches pitch, etc.’
Already the network of communications had been dismantled. Mastai was uncompromising. Contacts must cease. Amandi had been retired from his curial functions; Nicola was to be moved to the Ministry of Finance – Flavio’s hand was possibly to be seen here –, and Martelli forbidden to put foot in the shrunken papal state.
Cavour, on his deathbed, had tricked the Church, so neither he nor his works could be trusted. Not even Talleyrand had done anything like this. On the contrary. On his deathbed, twenty-three years before, the great tergiversator had made his peace, as always, with the incoming regime which this time was God’s. He was, after all, a man of the old stamp. Cavour’s free-thinking was more modern and disconcerted Mastai. There was something underhand about his death.
News of it had reached Rome in a telegram from the nuncio, Don Gaetano Tortone, to the effect that the deceased had duly received the last sacraments. This was edifying and the Pope thanked God. Cardinal Antonelli then urged Don Gaetano to make sure that Count Cavour had repented of his crimes against the Holy See. The nuncio discovered that he had not. How, asked the cardinal, could a man under ban of excommunication, have received the sacraments? Back came the reply: Padre Giacomo, a friend of the count’s, had taken it upon himself to administer them and was now nowhere to be found.
The scandal was soon plastered across the pages of the Liberal press while, throughout the Catholic world, bishops wondered whether to sanction requiems for the dead prime minister and nuncios’ telegrams sought advice from Rome. At last Padre Giacomo reappeared and was summoned to an audience with the Pope, who had persuaded himself that the priest must have been hiding, not from him but from the Liberals, and that it was from fear of their reprisals that he was denying the only possible truth, namely that the dying man had indeed disavowed his godless policies.
But the priest dispelled this illusion. Cavour, fearing to be refused burial in sacred ground, as had happened to a colleague some years before, had laid his plans in advance. Padre Giacomo had promised to shrive him when the time came and had kept his word. That was the long and short of it.
A sacrilegious deathbed confession!
Pius couldn’t get over it. Had the count no fear of God? Had the priest no fear of him? No. Both, it appeared, were at ease with their consciences. Padre Giacomo claimed not to have known that he should ask for a retraction – and, to be sure, many priests were imperfectly acquainted with canon law. But Pius guessed that this ignorance was wilful and, behind the blank face, divined a political thought, namely, that the count had been excommunicated for reasons which were no concern of religion. Temporal reasons! Politics.
Pius was outraged to find the logic of the peace-talks intruding into a spiritual matter. Clearly, the count’s motives had not been religious at all. At the very moment when he was about to meet his Maker, Camillo Cavour had been less concerned with God’s kingdom than with the one he had made himself. His confession had been designed to validate in the minds of his people his objective of ‘a free Church in a free State’. Coolly and with malice aforethought, he had secularised the sacrament for his own ends.
The old pontiff was stunned.
When Amandi came to plead in favour of continuing the peace-talks, he found him suffering something close to a seizure. The Pope’s plump face could, in a swell of indignation, seem as fragile as a paper bag caught up by alien winds. Such winds, Pius now saw, were blowing within the Church itself. For minutes he could hardly speak and his speech, when he did recover it, mumbled in shock at Padre Giacomo’s insolence.
Retailing the thing to Amandi, Pius held himself in like a coiled spring, fearfully, husbanding his forces as he now must. For here was how Jansenism trickled into the Church. Protestantism. Indifferentism … All heresies were linked and he, he whispered, must, somehow, smite them all. Scales had fallen from his eyes. He had been too tolerant before.
*
Amandi sighed. ‘There’s no talking to him,’ he told Nicola. This being so, he was not sorry to be going to the provinces. He had been given Imola, a diocese in the Kingdom of Italy, and was to live among the Pope’s enemies. Well, at least, he was unlikely to be debarred from taking up his duties, as more conservative bishops had been, now that their flocks, as some bitter wit had put it, ‘were no longer sheep’.
‘What will happen to Padre Giacomo?’
‘Suspended. He’s a casualty of war. We can’t help him. What we can do is take up negotiations again, this time unknown either to Mastai or Antonelli. We can prepare the way for an understanding as soon as the opportunity arises. I can’t do it alone.’
Nicola reminded him that he was to join the Treasury.
‘An excellent place,’ said the cardinal delightedly. ‘The duke and his emissaries will be coming and going. He’s eager to raise a loan for us, isn’t he? Well …’ Amandi smiled. ‘What better cover could you have?’ Then, checking himself: ‘Say straight out if you’d rather not help. I shall understand.’
Nicola did not believe he would. People had grown passionate about their strategies and he, who had joined the Church in search of certainty and fellowship, felt continually and painfully torn.
‘You should know,’ said Amandi, ‘that Pius dislikes me now. His last words were: “No doubt you’ll do things differently, Eminence, if ever you’re in my shoes. For now, though, they’re to be done my way!” So if you help me you may be risking your career.’
‘I’ll help,’ said Nicola.
From the diary of Raffaello
Lambruschini:
The shrunken state tottered on as best it could. Cardinal Antonelli compared it to a dwarf’s body trying to sustain a giant’s head, and indeed Rome’s needs had swollen, for its ministries were as active as ever and salaries still being paid to hordes of civil servants who had fled from the lost provinces and converged on the capital. What with refugees and plotters and foreign defenders, the city was crammed and the most illustrious asylum-seeker, the deposed King of Naples, was all three in one, like an unholy Trinity. He had come with his court, as if to reclaim the old debt incurred by Papa Mastai when he found shelter with the King’s father, Bomba. And he was plotting. Spending a fortune on it. Men in his pay went out regularly to stir up trouble in his and the Pope’s lost dominions. But most of these agents were bandits and did the loyalist cause more harm then good.
Meanwhile, counter-plotters wanted Rome for Victor Emmanuel, to whom an address on the occasion of his coronation as Italy’s first king was stealthily circulating. It begged: ‘Sire, if a nation has a right to choose its capital … Rome cannnot be denied to Italy. Rome awaits you, sire; she opens her arms to you and calls for your flag, the flag of Italy, to fly over the Campidoglio.’
Father Passaglia had written it. Through living in Turin, he had lost touch with Rome – but had the illustrious philosopher ever known ordinary folk anywhere? – and supposed citizens would sign it. Few did. On the other hand, the papal police could not get their hands on a copy. Neither signing nor squealing, the populus romanus was lying low.
November 1861
Cardinal Amandi had driven north to his diocese, in a convoy of drabbed-down carriages from which the red bits had been painted out and the panel crests removed.
Back in Rome, Nicola tidied His Eminence’s affairs and received visits on his behalf. One was from a man whose finger-nails were as black as his cassock. Il Canonico Reali was in mourning for many things – including perhaps his sanity.
‘It’s over!’ These were his first words on being introduced into the drawing room. ‘Non possumus is the watchword from now on. We – that’s to say Pius – can’t and won’t budge! No argument. Finis!’
He was dripping sweat. ‘What’s that opera of Signor Verdi’s?’ he asked. ‘Un Ballo in Maschera! That’s what we’re all in. Dancing to his tune.’ The canon’s mouth slid sideways and one saw that this tic douloureux was the ghost of a habitual smile. He was – no, had been, and the correction set off the rictus once again – a canon of the order of the Canonici Lateranensi but had been expelled, and news of this had been prematurely published in the Gazzetta Officiale, which was a violation of the rights of canons!
‘Hihih!’ The ex-canon’s mirthless whinny skirled and he wiped foam from the corners of his lips. He had heard that the thing had been done at the Pope’s personal behest!
‘Forgive me. I should have introduced myself: Don Eusebio Reali at your service. Forgive my emotion. I’ve had a shock. May I sit down? If you’ll bear with me, I’ll disarm your distrust. You see before you a loyal Catholic. Sincere, obedient, I submit my judgment to that of the Head of our Church. With the docility and humility of a son! Yes. I assure you that I do, when it is his judgment, Monsignore! His! But how can I believe it to be that when he speaks in the accents of that foul rag? You know the one I mean? Of course you do! For twelve years the compilers of the Civiltà Cattolica have been exploiting the majesty of the Supreme Pastor for the benefit of their own clique. I show this in my book which is now to be put on the Index. I’ve been warned in confidence by a clerk. Only the lowly know things in today’s Rome. One has to crawl on one’s belly to lick up news. Keep one’s ear to the ground. Nuzzle in muck! And the muck is rising, Monsignore! It’s rising! Adam was made from clay. And when Christ’s Vicar turns religious questions into personal ones, he ceases to be the Vicar and reverts to being the man of mud!’
The canon apologised, sweated, coughed and accepted a glass of water. No, thank you. Nothing more. Sorry, Monsignore. He knew what a wretched figure he was cutting – but who was to blame? His persecutors. The Jesuit clique. Cardinal Amandi would vouch for him. Reali would have come to him if he had been here. As it was, knowing Monsignore’s friendship for His Eminence, he had taken the liberty of throwing himself on his mercy.
He produced a document issued by the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars stating that as he, Eusebio Reali, had returned to his vomit, the Pope felt obliged to isolate the mangy sheep – ovem morbidam – from his fellows.
The words ‘vomit’ and ‘mangy’ incensed the ex-canon who explained that his ‘vomit’ was Liberalism and the return to it the publication of his
book, Freedom of Conscience with Regard to the Temporal Power of the Pope. Now that one Congregation had stripped him of immunity and privileges, another, that of the Index, was about to condemn his ‘vomit’.
Reali bent towards Nicola so that his breath revealed the labouring anguish of his insides.
‘The truth is, Monsignore, that the Ultras don’t trust the Pope and are trying to get him to alienate Liberal opinion. Then he will have nowhere to turn but to them!’ To Nicola’s relief, he leaned away and confided that Padre Passaglia’s work on the same topic was under the same threat. Indeed – Reali had this from an impeccable source – it was to be condemned as anonymous so as to deny its author the right to self-defence conceded by Sollicita ac of Pope Benedict XIV’s Bull, Provida. Why? Simply and solely because, as all Rome knew, no theologian could get the better of Passaglia, so none dare face him! Reali laughed bitterly. See what we had come to! Again he leaned forward.
Cardinal d’Andrea was Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation and Monsignor Stanga a consultor. Would Monsignor Santi solicit their good offices? Put in a good word?
Nicola’s first thought was, This man has been sent to trap me into an indiscretion! Then he felt ungenerous. Then, once more suspicious. He said he would need to think about this. Reali, looking knowing, said he understood.
Leaving, he paused in the doorway. ‘People will ask whether it is wrong to try to reform our house when it’s under attack. But, if we don’t, is it worth saving?’ He wiped his face with a red check handkerchief which seemed to have been wrung out and re-used. Then his fist closed tremulously on the cloth which, for a moment, had the look of something live. When he had gone, a whiff lingered as if he had been dossing down in insalubrious places.
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