*
Distaste drove Nicola to help Reali. Also pity, since the ex-canon would probably antagonise most of those to whom he made his appeal. Could Passaglia too be like this? Rabid and a little mad? It seemed unthinkable – yet, the theologian, who had begun as a conciliator, was now a propagandist for our enemies. Why? Could it be that men without roots become magnetised by whatever factional flotsam came their way? The thought was alarming and meant that, nowadays, the risk on leaving the fold was not of being eaten by wolves but of becoming one.
*
Cardinal d’Andrea proved receptive to Nicola’s appeal. He was an impetuous man and, on this account, thought dangerous to know, for he talked too openly, being a relic from the days when great aristocrats had been a law unto themselves. Also, as a southerner, he lacked that sly, affable, two-faced Roman caution.
Son of a marquis who had been Finance Minister to the Royal House of Naples, His Eminence had the genial vivacity of a man who, after being educated in France, had received the red hat at forty – eight years ago now. He assured Nicola that he would do anything he could to remove the blinkers from the droves of clerical mules and donkeys surrounding the Holy Father. Men who stood on their own two feet were a rarity and needed protecting. He was ready to resign from the Congregatio Indicis rather than condemn Passaglia. Reali too, though a less likeable figure, deserved support.
‘We are not monks,’ said His Eminence, ‘so preaching monastic humility at us is hypocritical. If the Curia wants power, which it does, then it must try to understand it. Ergo, it must tolerate some freedom of debate. I don’t say Reali is right, only that he should be heard. He’s not turning the other cheek – but then the Holy Father doesn’t set us an example of humble pacifism, does he?’
The cardinal said all this in loud, easy tones, taking no notice of his own footmen who stood, as if carved, here and there in the suite of saloons through which he chose to reaccompany Nicola. ‘I’m told H.H. has had a vision of St Philomena. That may explain why the Holy Spirit is failing to make itself heard! Too much traffic in the holy head, eh? I’m glad,’ he said with amiable condescension, ‘that you came to see me.’
*
Prospero was less glad. His smile was forbearing. Nothing I say can be new to you, reproached the smile, and it is tedious of you to make me say it. At the same time, it delivered a quite opposite message, which one would miss if one were to close one’s eyes. The glow of Prospero’s charm led people to ascribe to him a cordiality which was in fact in them. It was their response to his good looks. He began to lecture Nicola about corporate loyalty to the Temporal Power.
‘But if it’s nearly gone, surely one must deal with reality?’
‘One must deal with principle. I cannot be a party to an act alienating something for which I am answerable to another.’
‘Do you mean God?’ Nicola grew exasperated. ‘Don’t you see that you’ve made something mystic out of property? The Temporal Power is becoming the Eighth Sacrament!’ He shouldn’t have said it. Unlike Cardinal d’Andrea, Prospero was affected by words. Once said, they became hard, irreducible things and got between you and him for whom the word really was made flesh – or something which chafed the flesh, like a burr! He went cold now and bitter, so that Nicola was provoked to say worse and ended by shouting that, though Christ, by dying for us all, had made us spiritual equals, Pius was behaving towards men like Passaglia, with a feudal arrogance. ‘That’s the outcome of the Temporal Power!’
‘You’re shouting. You could be heard.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry,’ said Nicola, but knew that this would not mollify Prospero. ‘It’s not Passaglia’s fault that I shouted,’ he pleaded. ‘All he wants is freedom to speak his mind.’
‘But see how pernicious freedom is!’ triumphed Prospero. ‘The faithful have a right to be protected against errors which could make them lose their souls. You need protecting from them. Don’t mock!’ he raged, for Nicola was laughing. But it was only because his friend looked heroic when he grew heated and this amused him. Here was Prospero, a prig and a pillar of righteousness, benefiting from the chance fact that legions of painted – then widely copied – St Sebastians and Stephens and Aloysius Gonzagas and Christs had been endowed with his particular cast of North Italian features, pallor and fair hair. These, as a result, evoked aesthetic suffering, and it was likely that the faithful, who all over the world were now being urged to contribute to St Peter’s Pence and succour the ‘martyred pope’, pictured him as looking like Prospero. Whereas, in reality, thought Nicola, martyrdom must often have reduced people to the sweaty ignominy of the ex-canon Reali on whose behalf he now made a last appeal.
‘All I ask is for your Congregation to hold its hand a while.’
‘I’m only a consultant.’
‘The Cardinal Prefect is sympathetic.’
Prospero’s jaw tightened and Nicola remembered, too late, that d’Andrea, being bound by an oath of secrecy, should not have told him this. He began trying to repair any damage he might have done, and when Prospero interrupted him, forced himself to listen submissively while his friend excoriated and blamed the wrong cardinal. Amandi, for some reason, drew his wrath. Did Nicola know that he, because of his culpable laxness, had been Cavour’s choice as the next pope? ‘It’s no recommendation! And I say that, even though he’s a cousin of mine!’
This, opined Prospero, was a time when personal ties should be set aside. ‘Even if he were your father …’ he told Nicola, who saw that he was being told that, in Prospero’s opinion, Amandi was. Although the notion was not new, it upset him in ways he hadn’t time to disentangle for – the St Sebastian now was himself – a multiplicity of arrowy reproaches were contained in it, among them the charge that he was loyal to a man rather than to the Church and hoping to benefit from Amandi’s possibly being the next pope. This, said Prospero, was being predicted in the more knowing sacristies of the city. Such talk was close to criminal. Consider the implications for the present pontiff’s safety! And Prospero recalled how two cardinals tipped for the succession – the conservative, Della Genga, and the Liberal, Santucci, had died suddenly, one from apoplexy and the other from a heart attack. He interpreted this to mean that someone was clearing the way for a still more Liberal candidate which – given that both had in fact met their end after, and possibly as a result of, fierce scoldings by the choleric Mastai – made no sense to Nicola. However, he did not argue. Instead, for the sake of Passaglia, d’Andrea and Reali, he kept his temper, let the exchange simmer down and, not wishing to leave on a sour note, asked after Prospero’s father.
‘How is he?’
‘As irresponsible as ever,’ he was told. ‘Pleased with the new regime. So is my brother. I doubt though that they’ll like the new royal taxes. They’re much heavier than the papal ones.’
*
Nicola’s forbearance turned out to have done little good for, though Cardinal d’Andrea resigned in protest from the Congregation of the Index, Passaglia’s and Reali’s books were then condemned and when Passaglia, who had returned to Rome in the – vain – hope of being allowed to defend himself, refused to submit to the decree, Mastai called him ‘an impious traitor’. Friends advised the ex-Jesuit to flee before an order for his arrest could be issued. Miss Foljambe, with whom he had been staying, got him a herdsman’s clothes and members of the National Committee smuggled him out in the early hours of the morning. Accounts of this event varied, the more lurid claiming that he was wheeled out in a barrow under cover of a malodorous load of cat meat.
Unable to side wholeheartedly with either the Curia or the nationalists, Nicola envied those who could. Old clerical Rome now seemed the weaker party, so how betray it? He felt an anguished pity for his fellows, knowing that sooner or later, if there was no conciliation, there must be another siege. Walking in the city, he sometimes found himself touching the rough stone of an old palace and thinking how easily it could be reduced to rubble.
1862
&
nbsp; Truth’s True Friend, a paper which advised Roman families of the better sort to take out three subscriptions – one each for drawing room, kitchen and stables – had begun challenging its readers to think for themselves: a novel notion but necessary, now that the tides of modern mendacity were upon us. It was their duty, said the paper, to learn to distinguish truth from sophisms. For example, Rome was the Capital of Christendom, a proud title. Did they want to trade it for that of a trumpery kingdom like Italy? They should also reflect on the fact that the Catholic world embraced 200 million souls who expected its head to be an independent sovereign.
‘So we’re to be sacrificed to the 200 million, is that it?’ asked a gentleman in the Caffè Nuovo, at a time when it was full of customers come in to escape the bone-chilling tramontana which had been raking the Corso all day. Consuming warm alcohol in the hope of thawing themselves out, they must have grown befuddled for, afterwards, none of them could recall who it was who said that the best use for the current copy of the Friend, the one containing the Pope’s latest speech, was to use it to clean his bum. Perhaps more than one person said so? A police spy reported as much, but the men he named had witnesses to prove that they had been elsewhere that afternoon and the gentleman who lowered his trousers to suit his actions to his words was apparently a stranger and quite unknown.
Bystanders admitted that they had seen him bare his bum. Indeed, they told the police, they had been so mesmerised by the impropriety of it there in the middle of a decent café that they had failed to notice the face going with it. That would not have been visible at the crucial moment and, later, in the disturbance, both disappeared.
Anyway, a face, Signor Direttore, is a normal thing in a café. What struck us all was the bum. What was it like? Oh, no distinguishing marks! Quite ordinary. Neither fat nor thin. Speaking with respect, it was a bum like yours or mine.
The manager had not witnessed the incident and, though interrogated at length, was unable to shed light on the matter. He was fined and given a warning.
*
Nicola, who was shortly to be posted to the Treasury, listened, like everyone else, to the rumours which are the small change of history. The city, though livelier, had altered little since his boyhood. It was now gaslit and crowded, being filled with French officers with bright epaulets and spurs, befrogged Zouaves and Neapolitans from the exiled Bourbon court. In essence, though, it was as he had always known it: lazy, grimy and as vibrant with rumour as a great boarding-school. It was also riddled with spies. The French military police were watching the pro-Austrian faction, and the papal police the pro-Italian one – which had now split – and both, as happens with fishermen, found a lot of useless game in their nets.
‘You,’ Prospero warned Nicola when they met at a ceremony at the Minerva Church, ‘figure in one of the recent police bulletins about the day’s events. These are submitted to Cardinal Antonelli, but also to Monsignor de Mérode who has won the loyalty of the Director General of Police. I expect you to keep your own counsel about my mentioning this.’
‘Why do I figure there?’
‘Because of the duke.’
‘Flavio?’
‘Yes. They’re watching him.’
Prospero said no more. He was close to Mérode, with whom he had once nursed cholera victims during an epidemic, and was informed about a great range of matters including the burning topic of the day, which was Mérode’s rivalry with Antonelli, whose office the Arms Minister coveted with an openness which aroused – well, truthfully, what it aroused was hope. The Cardinal Secretary had been in power for a dozen years. Promotion at the bottom of a hierarchy can depend on shift at the top, so the prospect of a change heartened those whose careers might otherwise remain stuck.
For the moment, the Arms Minister’s men were few but, in his mind, theirs was a mystic mission and a challenge to God to help them help His cause. To keep their battle-will alive, Mérode wanted a larger share of the state’s military budget but, as most of this had been allocated to the garrison provided by the French Emperor, the hard-pressed, papal Finance Council refused to disburse.
Mérode’s response was to run up bills and by this means he had managed to build his men a barracks, a hospital and schools for their children. His colleagues fumed, but a man ready to bully God and Mammon – incarnate in the Finance Council – is hard to gainsay. As he saw it, a holy war was in progress so, like an officer in the field, he commandeered.
In the process, illustrious feathers were ruffled and the murmur grew that his hostility towards the French garrison, which was defending this state, disqualified him from ever governing it. He failed to sense this and soon observers were relishing the spectacle of a man frantically scaling the heights of an ambition from whence he must, at any moment, fall. His ladder was not grounded in firm reality. He was reaching madly for the moon and became widely known as ‘the lunatic’.
Opinion, however, was not steadfast. Waverers were heard to say that one man’s lunatic was another’s saint. Moreover, Mérode was congenial to the Pope, so in the end a party of key prelates, including Monsignor Matteucci, the Director General of the Police, threw in their lot with him.
This fresh factionalism was soon spreading an unease which was compounded by the roughness of Mérode’s manners. He had learned them as a captain in the French campaign in North Africa – where he should perhaps have stayed. If he had, his prowess among the untrammelled adventurings of a colonial war might have led to a crop of statues of le Colonel or even – why not? – le Général Mérode gracing French municipal parks.
Instead, he had come here to engage in what he conceived of as a nobler struggle and had enticed his old commanding officer to follow him. General de la Moricière, the hero and ‘captor of Abd el-Kader’, was now training Zouaves and struggling with skinflint papal bureaucrats. If only for his sake, Mérode felt it incumbent on him to do as Romans did, namely intrigue.
That anyway was the gossip which reached Nicola while he awaited his posting to the Treasury – a ministry directly under the control of Mérode’s rival, Cardinal Antonelli.
The gossip was fuelled by reports of the practical jokes, some tasteless and one featuring rats, which the Minister had played on officers of the Imperial garrison. Such pranks were not peculiar to him. Others, it transpired, could put them to more sinister use.
In February 1862, several European monarchs and other prominent persons received through the post packets of lewd photographs of the ex-Queen of Naples who was living with her deposed husband in Rome. Since the papal police knew the ex-king to be trying to destabilise the regime which had ousted him, their suspicions fell on men who supported it and on whom they already had an eye. Sure enough, it soon came out that the so-called Action Committe had commissioned a certain Signor Diotallevi to fabricate the images by attaching a likeness of the queen’s head to that of a nude body belonging, they guessed, either to a woman of ill fame or to the photographer’s own wife.
The incident caught the imagination of the city’s preachers. Father Grassi was particularly struck by the role played by science, which rationalists often aimed to substitute for faith as a path to truth. Science, they claimed, could not lie! And yet – Grassi’s eyebrows knitted passionately as he leaned from his pulpit – without Monsieur Daguerre’s photographic process, could this slanderous chimera have had the impact that it had?
‘Who have we here?’ he demanded. ‘Chi? Chi? And his voice shrilled like an owl’s. ‘We have a Chimera!’ Modern thought was just such a fire-breathing monster as the Chimera with her lion’s head, goatish body and serpent’s tail! ‘Alas, dearly beloved!’ he mourned, ‘for what have we exchanged our precious birthright of faith?’ Over and over, during a series of Lenten sermons, he brought his congregation to tears by describing how the young queen’s beauty and innocence had been demeaned by the instruments of modernity. The camera was Lucifer’s gift.
Cardinal Amandi too had been sent the photographs, and Nicola came on th
em while sorting a bundle of his post. The lard-pale body disturbed him. Its lewd poses were ridiculous and compared, say, with Miss Ella’s, upsettingly clumsy. Its nakedness – he had so rarely seen nakedness – seemed unnatural, a violation and, like the flayed carcasses at San Eustachio, evoked butchery. The navel was like the gouged eye of a peeled potato. What was shown here was a misused lump of matter which haunted his mind. There was a familiarity to it too and though, at first, he thought this traceable to some painting of a martyrdom, discomfort led in the end to a personal memory, Maria.
Did this body resemble hers? He could not have said. It was older – but then so would hers be now. He burned the photographs, but a memory of them oozed back and stole the substance of everything white, so that milk, mashed parsnips, paper, pasta, clouds and linen altar-cloths took on a protean tendency to form themselves into contorted hunks of thigh or buttock. Anxiously, he consulted his confessor, who asked if he was relishing this and, when told that, on the contrary, it was a torment, said that there was no sin here. Maybe not, said Nicola, but there was anguish.
‘It’s a cross, then,’ said the confessor comfortably. ‘Bear it.’
Bearing it, Nicola walked through churches, looking at marble and canvas flesh, in the hope of matching up the limbs which had begun to haunt him, and so leaving them behind with those which grateful supplicants donated in the form of silver simulacra of hearts, livers, lungs, legs and other parts which specialised saints had cured of their disorders.
Could Maria be the photographer’s wife? Signora Diotallevi? Or the loose woman whom the Diotallevi couple swore had come for one sitting and then disappeared into the city’s underworld? Nicola decided against trying to find out.
Once he had so decided, the pale image ceased pursuing him, or did so only intermittently, as it must be doing with half the men in Rome while the judicial inquiry continued to dig up facts. Costanza Diotallevi had a past. As the mistress of an aide-de-camp to General Goyon, Commander of the French garrison, she had spied both for the French and for the Action Committee and now, to obtain a pardon, was ready to reveal what she knew about both.
The Judas Cloth Page 46