He pushed open the photographer’s door. A bell jangled and a youth in an apron, answering from the gloom, gave an address which dispelled all doubts. La Diotallevi, said he, had provided those photographs and would know the models.
So off went Nicola to lay a ghost and perhaps find luck for the papal loan: a mixture of motives which drew him like a rope.
*
La Diotallevi and he assessed each other in her small hallway, for he had found her cloaked and bonneted and unsure whether she could spare him a minute. Relenting, she said he might walk with her to the ferry, so they took a narrow path along the river, but were held back by a cart lumbering ahead of them, which, being laden with stones, swayed slowly from side to side.
Nicola showed her the photograph he had bought and explained that he did not want to meet the model but only to have the address of her parish priest. The reasons concerned an old debt.
‘Ah!’ smiled la Diotallevi, perhaps remembering old adventurings of her own. A teasing gleam came to her eye and she laughed girlishly and quickened her step – but just then the carter in front of them came to a dead stop because of some difficulty with his horse.
Impatiently, she asked, ‘Shall we try and get by?’ Not waiting for an answer, she skipped up the grassy slope and passed the cart, which suddenly – had she startled the cart-horse? – swerved, tipped over and, borne down by its load, hurtled into the river. Trapped in its harness, the animal gave a bone-chilling, equine scream. The carter too let out a howl, then everything sank under the swell of racing yellow waters. It was astounding: a moment of suspended time. Then Nicola was down the slope. Slithering and scrambling, he hung onto some willow saplings with one hand, while edging out in the water to where the carter was thrashing and gulping, and, by extending a stick to him, slowly eased him back to safety. Hauling laboriously, while skinning the hand which still grasped the willow, he got him up the bank. Then, for moments, they both lay there, gasping with delayed terror.
*
‘I confess …’
It was some time later and Nicola and la Diotallevi, drawn close by shock, had warmed and soothed themselves with hot cinnamon wine.
‘… to Blessed Mary …’ Her voice produced the blunted words with a renovating vigour. ‘… that I have sinned grievously.’
She had. To start with, she admitted to having made a number of false confessions. This, she swore, was a true one.
Nicola, whose wrung-out cassock was hung somewhere to dry, sat wrapped in a blanket, wondering if he was being unwise. She had insisted on her dire and present need of spiritual succour and he was unsure whether this was what she did want. Possibly, he had to allow, after the brush with sudden danger, she had felt a need to get close to the only man to hand and taken this way of doing so. If so, God’s strategy might have her in its grip. No doubt her ears, like his, were throbbing with the cries of the rescued man who had gibbered and mourned his dead horse and seemed to be in such despair that he had had to be spoken to firmly and given money and ordered to go and change his clothes. Else, as he kept threatening, he might have jumped back into the river.
It was then that she had taken charge, insisting that the dripping Nicola come back to her house. They were bound now by their adventure, while the irruption of mortality, even if only that of a horse, had apparently moved her to confess. It was now or never, she said and, on hearing of her past sacrilegious confessions, he was bound to believe her. She had, she pointed out, had little choice about these since what she had to confess was a history of denouncing the innocent and colluding to destroy them. Colluding with whom? She named Monsignori Matteucci and Pila. How, she asked reasonably, could she have safely made a confession implicating them? Her faith in the secrecy of the sacrament was nil.
‘I trust you,’ she said, whereupon he distrusted her.
Amazed at his imprudence, he imagined the papal police bursting in to find him dressed only in a blanket with a known harlot on her knees before him. What if there were spies behind the foliate candelabrum or the Chinese screen? He feared a flash of light and being fulminated by Monsignori Pila and Matteucci. Reassuring himself, he recalled that the circumstances leading to this had been fortuitous. The photograph, the carter’s accident. No, no, if there was a design here it must, as she seemed to think, be God’s. Ashamed, he saw that her motives were purer than his own.
‘Why,’ he asked ploddingly, ‘confess at all if you couldn’t do so truthfully?’
Surprised, she reminded him that, to stay on the government payroll, she must obtain an annual certificate proving that she had done so. She had, for the same reason, made a sacrilegious communion every year as well. Did he absolve her?
Only, said he, if she promised to put right the wrongs she had done. There were men in gaol – Fausti for one – because of her. How absolve her while they continued to suffer? Yet he knew that asking her to take back her lies was unrealistic. She had handed him a dilemma and he was stumped by it. Slowly, an idea dawned. Did she think, he asked, that Monseigneur de Mérode knew of the crimes perpetrated by his henchmen? If not, she should confess all this to him who would, on finding the sins on his own conscience, be obliged to deal with them – which he had the power to do.
She began to moan and protest.
‘But as a priest,’ Nicola assured her, ‘he’s bound to forget, on emerging from the confessional, what he learned within it. You don’t trust him?’
No, she trusted nobody, except, it seemed, Nicola himself, because of his selfless bravery just now in helping the carter who could, she pointed out, have dragged him under.
‘My heart was in my mouth!’ she said. ‘Seeing you on that slippery slope with nothing but a few willow twigs between you and – can you swim?’
He could not but hadn’t, he realised, been afraid at all. Too excited. But he was frightened now, feeling caught, like herself, in a web of dubiety. If he were to tell Mérode, he would still have to name her and … No, she implored. Mérode could have her re-arrested. He could revive the old charges of spying and falsifying the Queen of Naples’ photograph and …
‘But would he?’
Mérode, objected Nicola, was a gentleman and … But la Diotallevi knew too much about gentlemen to be impressed. Knew them up close, Monsignore. And as for moral codes, she knew how notions like the greater good, a just war, the interests of the Church, etc., etc., could be invoked to justify anything. ‘Anything at all, Monsignore!’ She had seen it happen. Over and again! She knew.
Humiliated, Nicola asked, what if she were to write out several copies of her confession, sign and give them to him for use if anything happened to her? It would be a protection and …
‘And my salary? I have to live. He’d cut it off.’
‘I could ensure that you received one from the Treasury instead.’
She said she’d think about it and he gave her provisional absolution. Then he accepted some more hot cinnamon wine with a slice of lemon and a spoonful of sugar, and they sat quietly for a little, chatting as if they had known each other always. She had spirit. He liked her and would have liked – oddly – to be friends with her, but that, to be sure, was out of the question.
1863
‘This is where the barberi are caught.’
‘Barbarians?’
Nicola laughed. ‘No, no, Barbary horses. They race here in carnival week. Without riders.’
Langrand-Dumonceau’s agents marvelled, and he explained that the animals were urged on by spiked metal balls which hung from their backs to prick and madden them so that they rushed down the city’s main street, known on that account as the Corso, to where a canvas was stretched to stop them. Was it true, asked the Belgian, that, formerly, leaders of the city’s Jewish community had run this race on foot? His smile acknowledged an ómen in men of God engaging in a temporal struggle and perhaps imperilling their health.
Nicola wondered if they were abreast of the latest rumours. An incision made in the Pope’s leg to help th
e discharge of matter had begun to close and this, said his doctors, could cause his erysipelas to attack his vital organs. At Easter, he had collapsed while giving his solemn blessing urbi et orbe and, as the National Party was thought to have plans to take over the city the minute he died, the Curia was laying their own for a break with custom whereby a Conclave, held cadavere presente, could elect a successor before the public knew of his death.
Such talk could worry investors who must, therefore, be steered away from the whispering galleries where guesses were rife and names of papabili bandied like those of horses. On the Conciliatory side, d’Andrea and Amandi were heavily tipped and d’Andrea had confided to friends that this made him fear for his life. Most people, however, put this down to His Eminence’s Neapolitan flair for drama.
‘Talking of barbarians,’ said the Belgian’s companion, a quick little lawyer from Pest, ‘our hope is that Rome will treat modern powers of finance and industry as they did the fourth-century invaders, namely baptize them!’
This meant that they wanted some sort of accolade for Langrand-Dumonceau – medal, blessing, title. Nicola smiled and kept quiet. He had grown good at this over the last months, during which he must have met a dozen agents sent from the financier’s centres of activity in Brussels, Paris, Vienna and Pest. Some were figureheads, like today’s Belgian, whose name rang like a motto and whose face had the shape of an escutcheon. The real business was left to men like the lawyer who buzzed with purpose and had, over lunch, described Hungarian flatlands which Langrand was buying up to resell in small profitable lots. Almost lyrically, he had evoked pale waterlogged demesnes which could be regenerated by land-hungry men who had never, until now, owned property. Was this, he exulted, not a reconciliation between the spirit of the times and that of the gospels? Church lands in Hungary could benefit from a similar scheme if only the local clergy could be made to see that wealth locked in land gave no return. If it were mortgaged and the bonds sold by Langrand’s enterprises …
The Belgian, affable in a haze of cigar smoke, talked of Langrand’s being such a good family man, devoted to his boys and to his fat little wife, Rosalie, who looked like a pile of buns! But what vision, Monsignore! What energy!
‘Our companies,’ murmured the lawyer, ‘know how to recompense those who help us in our mission.’
Nicola pretended not to hear.
‘You could do worse than let us raise money on Roman property.’ The lawyer puffed his lips as though ready to kiss something. ‘Prayer-book and pocketbook!’ He wanted to marry them. ‘Morals and money!’ It must circulate, he said. Practising what he preached, he had donated 20,000 francs of his companies’ money to St Peter’s Pence – now the mainstay of our economy – and to several churches which the Pope was having restored. Pius was fond of saying that the generosity of the faithful was a silver lining to current clouds, but the Belgians’ gifts only sharpened the doubts of Ferrari and Antonelli, whose notion of a silver lining was a knife between the ribs.
Turning back down the Corso, they passed San Carlo’s Church where a handbill had been pinned to the door. Nicola read: LETTER FROM EMIGRANT PATRIOTS TO THE PEOPLE OF ROME. Profiting from the agents’ momentary interest in a beggar, he stepped closer and ran his eye down the smaller print. ‘Rome … owes it to herself to crown the Italian Revolution by a spontaneous insurrec …’ Here a breeze curled the paper, concealing a paragraph. Further down, he made out the words, ‘a new conciliatory pope …’
Flushing – some unsavoury-looking characters were amused at his interest – he moved off and caught up with the lawyer who returned to an argument started earlier when they had witnessed accredited beggars receiving their daily allowance. Giving them money, he repeated, was not the thing. One must make it possible for them to earn.
Nicola’s mind slid away. Amandi’s appointment to Pius’s old diocese had been presented as a chance for the cardinal to recover his health. But now that the invalid was Mastai, the thing took on other aspects: plotting in the provinces; exile in the hostile kingdom! That could be how the excitable old pontiff would see it.
To whom was loyalty now owed? Clearly, not to a man but to the institution. Jokes were circulating about God’s summoning Pius to Himself and his refusal to obey.
But Nicola should be attending to his birds of passage. They had reached the Caffè Ruspoli, so, proposing a refreshment, he waved them in. ‘Ruspoli,’ remembered the lawyer. There had been a prince of that name recently in Pest. Sent to stir up revolution!
People turned to listen and Nicola warned the Hungarian to lower his voice. But he had gone ahead and didn’t hear. ‘I met Kossuth too,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian revolutionary. He’s our Mazzini. A man of ’48.’
Nicola, almost knocking down the Belgian, pushed forward, through a thicket of chairs, and hissed, ‘You mustn’t talk about men like that.’
‘Oh, I assure you,’ cried the insensitive lawyer, ‘my interest was mere curiosity. One meets such men as one might go to the zoo.’
The waiter, sticking to them like a limpet, must surely be a spy? No, he was only making sure that they got a good table. Am I mad, wondered Nicola, to think that being seen with men who have met Ruspoli and Kossuth could discredit me? After all, I’m here at the behest of Ferrari and Antonelli! But could they save me – or would I sink them? Maybe that’s the plan? These fellows – Belgian envoys after all – could have been put up to this by Monsignor de Mérode! Across from him, the mirrored face of la Diotallevi smiled recognition. He thought, that’s it! She’s following me! For him! The confession was a … No. Why no?
‘Are you all right, Monsignor Santi?’ asked the waiter.
How, thought Nicola, does he know my name? Suspicion whirled in his head as he stared coldly through la Diotallevi who was greeting him indiscreetly, nodding and waving. Frowning, he turned away.
‘A glass of water?’ The waiter proffered it.
It tasted odd. Did it? Under Nicola’s clothes, his sweat had gone cold. Pulling himself together, he remembered that the waiter had worked here for years, knew him as a customer and had even talked to him about his hobby, which was keeping pigeons.
‘I’m all right,’ he told him. ‘Just a moment’s dizziness.’ Having ordered lemon sherbet for them all, he looked about for la Diotallevi to make up for his boorish discourtesy. She had left.
There was no plot. Spooning into sweet, granular globes of frozen citrus juice, he stared beneath the tables at the reassuring ordinariness of cassocked, hoop-skirted and trousered knees supported by brightly coloured ankles and heard, yet again, the gospel according to Langrand: all evils came from failure to free capital from entails and mortmain. How reassuring monotony was! Their minds moved like clock hands.
Thirteen per cent of our Belgian shareholders, they told him, were priests. Too many legacies to the Church were being challenged in our courts, so now we advise the pious to sell their property and use the proceeds to buy our bonds, which yield four and a half per cent during their lifetime and can be handed to their priest on their deathbed. Greedy and godless next-of-kin are foiled!
‘I see,’ said Nicola, who didn’t quite.
‘The merchants are back in the temple but as saviours.’
And now it came to him that these could be the agents not only of Langrand-Dumonceau but also of an older and more dangerous agency which was about its old business of kidnapping souls. He was sorry he had snubbed la Diotallevi, who had given him her trust.
*
He had left the businessmen back at their hotel and was on his way to the ministry when he felt a pull at his elbow.
‘Monsignor Santi.’
It was Viterbo, whose tone was challenging as if daring Nicola to take offence. He looked unhealthy. Eye-bags, soft and grey as small, dead field-mice, bulged beneath his eyes.
He was, he said, here with his sister who had come to see her son. The Mortara boy. They let her see him now. They were so sure of him! Viterbo
grinned with a wheedling aggression, as if eager for Nicola to confirm his worst expectations. His character, thought Nicola sadly, had been damaged. The likeable man he remembered from Lammenais’ funeral was as thoroughly buried as the heretic priest! Persecution did not improve people. Was it true, the printer asked, that the Rothschilds were not, after all, to float the new loan?
‘They tried to use their influence on our behalf. Naturally, it was a blow when we heard that they may be replaced by this Jew-baiting Belgian, who …’
‘Nothing’s decided,’ Nicola told him.
Viterbo had put on weight, but it was slack and hung about him like pockets of chaff. ‘Will you see my sister?’ The question came out like a bullet. ‘You won’t have to go to the Ghetto. That rag-and-bone market distresses her. In Bologna our people live with dignity now. We can meet at the Englishwoman’s. Miss Foljambe’s. Is that discreet enough?’
His rudeness was like a smell – pervasive, elusive and impossible to remark on. Perhaps it was a form of pride? Or perhaps he was unaware of it.
Nicola agreed to come and later in the afternoon made his way to the Palazzo Spada, where Miss Foljambe was holding a gathering.
The first voice he heard was Cardinal d’Andrea’s. Booming with convivial indignation, it was audible across the courtyard. ‘Eight thousand, nine hundred and forty-three priests,’ His Eminence was saying, ‘signed the address to the Pope last year, begging him to reconcile our people’s two heartfelt cries: “Long live the Pope!” and “Long live Rome, capital of the new Kingdom!” That was despite fear of excommunication. How many, Monsignore,’ he called to Nicola as he came in, ‘would have signed if they had been free?’
The Judas Cloth Page 48