‘Mastai’s ruthlessness,’ he exclaimed dispiritedly, ‘makes up for his lack of brains. Did you know I’d been suspended in spiritualibus et temporalibus?’
Yes, said Nicola, and warned that, although the Pope had promised to restore d’Andrea’s functions once he had publicly repented, the cardinal had better not delay. Now, when Garibaldi might strike Rome at any time, lingering in the company of Italian prefects and generals could be seen as treachery.
‘The generals I meet,’ the cardinal pointed out, ‘are the men who will restrain Garibaldi!’
But both knew that such distinctions were beyond Mastai.
*
Journeying back to Imola, Nicola pondered the lie he had told about d’Andrea’s having the dossier, while knowing it to be among his own papers. Justified lies were now common in Rome, and his own scruples were due to a personal habit of truthfulness which he attributed to the scarcity of facts in his early life.
A foundling without a true family name, he had hated knowing that he was a false word made flesh and yearned for facts to be unshakeable. No doubt many of the Pope’s subjects had since come to feel the same way.
Disoriented, as familiar reality absconded, they longed for reassurance. And now this was to be given them with the new – or, according to its promoters, old – dogma which would freeze truth so that it could never again mutate or alter or develop into something capable of flinging men at each other’s throats or into an anguish of doubt.
Was this water in the desert or a mirage?
As the train chugged, and smoke shivered like ostrich plumes, he concluded with some sorrow that what men like him might once have received gratefully now brought no balm, since the grid which Pius proposed putting over their perceptions could only prevent them keeping up with the shifts of an unstoppable world. Lies, if only because the liars knew them for what they were, were less deceptive than the truths of men like Mastai.
‘Poor beast!’ he had said of Cardinal d’Andrea when Nicola obtained an audience before leaving for Naples. ‘For his and my souls’ sake I had to chasten him. Cardinals are a pope’s creatures, so we are answerable for them to God! What choice have I? Authority carries responsibilities and freedom is a danger to most men.’
Then he beamed his celebrated smile on Nicola who, feeling his lips curve in assent, was surprised to sense a small contradictory hardening, a knot of disagreement form deep inside him, which had since spread through his limbs and brain, until he recognised an inner arming against the treacheries of his response to power.
Imola
At five one morning, Nicola was awoken and told that a band of policemen had caught the nuns’ guardians by surprise – or perhaps the guardians had grown tired of the farce and connived? Anyway, the nuns had been taken in a police carriage to a fortress some miles away. He left instructions with the Vicar-General to telegraph Rome, asking whether they could not be accommodated in some convent there. Then he drove to the fortress where a polite young officer explained that the convent had been set on fire and the police had been obliged to rescue the inmates. They were asleep now, having been given morphine. Several had burns, but none was serously injured. They would, promised the officer, be safe under his protection and made as comfortable as possible.
As it happened, Nicola had no choice but to accept this offer of hospitality, for Rome’s answer to his telegram was a refusal to have the nuns in a city already overcrowded with refugees. Italian law allowed exnuns to finish their days in their former convent and, if their community was too small, to join another one. This option, said the message, must not be accepted in this case. The controversial community must be dispersed. Where to? wondered Nicola. But a request for further guidance received none.
On St John’s Eve there was a firework display visible from the episcopal palace. The Prefect and other Italian officials were presiding on a platform in the piazza, and Nicola and a party of clerics discreetly watching through an open window, when news came that Sister Paola was ill and a priest needed to hear her confession. Nicola said he would go himself.
Taking a young priest with him for company, he drove into a night which was rosily aglow, not only because St John’s is the shortest night of the year but because the sky had been dyed by rockets and Roman candles in the red and green colours of patriotism. As the king’s initials blazed, the younger man recalled that not long ago all sky-writing had been religious.
‘They’re taking over the heavens!’
At the fortress a party was in progress and it was clear that the women invited were of the light and cheerful sort. A tittering group passed the priests on the stairs and a girl paused to ask about Sister Paola. ‘She’s a saint!’ said the girl to Nicola and pressed money into his hand to say a mass for a secret intention.
‘Come on, Gatta,’ called a companion and the woman ran off.
Who knew, murmured the young priest, what her secret intention might be? His severe young face deprecated invoking divine aid for such a pig in a poke. This reminded the Coadjutor of the scandal attaching to Sister Paola and he told the young man to wait while he saw her alone.
‘She’s had a shock,’ said the captain who had guided them.
Nuns were praying outside Sister Paola’s door. One waylaid Nicola to explain that, earlier, a rocket had fallen in the sick woman’s window. He went in. Florets of steely light were spraying the ceiling and, through the window, came a cacophony of sounds from different parts of the fortress. Cheers cut across the boot-beat of a military song – the rank-and-file at play – while, intermittently audible behind the stubborn orisons of nuns, spiralled the hankering, decorous strains of a waltz. Sister Paola’s face was hot.
‘War …’ she murmured. ‘It began with one.’ Her delirium was labyrinthine. He explained about St John’s Eve but saw that she had taken off on some spiral of her own. ‘I let him,’ she said, ‘attribute paternity to the dead.’
‘The Fifth Sorrowful Mystery!’ intoned a nun and he went to shoo them away. Returning, he told her to say an act of contrition and that they could dispense with the confession of her sins.
‘My mind,’ said she with sudden lucidity, ‘is as clear as a bell. I want a message sent to His Holiness.’ He had written, she said, asking whether she had received any revelation concerning his personal infallibility, and when she said ‘no’, written back saying that what inspiration she did receive might be from the devil.
‘Now, I want him to know this. He became my spiritual father in lieu of what he should have been. He told me to put human affections aside. He made me become a nun and cannot now, in all justice, refuse to let me and my sisters finish our lives as a spiritual family. It is too late for us to return to the world. Tell him we want to go to Rome.’
*
The Coadjutor looks startled, thought Sister Paola. God, she prayed, do You want me to keep my lips sealed until I go to my grave? So the voices which elected to speak for You always said.
I always wanted my uncle to make love to me. Why not? He had done everything else for me, having brought me up from when I was one year old and my parents died of cholera. He surrounded me with himself and, being a priest, led me to You. Living in a mountain presbytery was as lonely as living on a ship. He learned to knit so as to teach me.
Then, when I was thirteen, I saw him make love to his housekeeper. He meant me to see. He was a man who played three musical instruments and knew four languages and she – well, she was the ground in which he chose to bury his talents. A plump peasant past her prime! She had wens and warts. Sleeping with her must have been like entering the grave.
I came to see that he had done it so as not to sleep with me. Incest would have frightened him. Why? It’s in the Bible! Taboos meant nothing to me. He saw this and reproached himself, since it was he who had made me the way I was. In his fright he turned to her and let her turn me out.
I suppose pride rules me, acknowledged Sister Paola. I know it made the angels fall – but may it no
t have been what saved the good angels too? I try to imagine how You think. Mastai believes You speak to me and that I, perversely, fail to pass on messages. He wants proof that You and I have forgiven him. He is nervous.
I have since tried to help women like the housekeeper – stunted creatures, as hemmed in by their lives as their own farm animals. Living among them, I tried to help them and their daughters. Unaided by You – who leave me to my own resources – I try to invent a celestial arithmetic and give back here what I owed there. The women treat me with deference. They know that I won’t denounce them when they come in panic, haemorrhaging between their legs and losing black blood clots the size of my fist. Shame makes them delay. I only see them when they are already rigid with cramps and fearful of having perforated the uterus by trying to stick knitting needles into its eye, with the help of a bit of mirror held between their thighs. Death and infertility are distant fears. The law and their menfolk are closer. Some are unmarried. Others have too many children already, or else their husbands are in the Army and the pregnancy came at the wrong time. When they meet me later, they look away.
I don’t often think about the child. I gave it to You without learning its sex. Boy? Girl? Amandi knows. Would he tell if it had died? I think he would ask me to pray for its soul so, as he hasn’t, it hasn’t. ‘Make a crib in your heart for the Baby Jesus,’ wrote Mastai. That meant: forget your own baby. It will be better off without you. Boy? Girl? I would have understood a girl better. When girls came to me for help, I used to think: she would be their age now. Now she would be thirty-six and a mother if they found her a dowry, which they would have done. That would be part of their celestial arithmetic. Mastai took my uncle’s place.
‘Am I going to die?’ She must have spoken aloud for the Coadjutor answered that an act of contrition never came amiss.
‘Tell me a sin from your past life,’ he asked, when she finished the prayer.
‘I hounded my uncle’s housekeeper. I disgraced her in the parish and made her life such a misery that she had to go into a convent and die in solitude. Now,’ said Sister Paola with a small laugh, ‘I have lost our convent and our group of sisters will be dispersed so that I too shall die in solitude. Am I served right?’
Nicola prayed murmurously, but could not imagine this sweet-faced woman hounding anyone. The occasion was odd, for it was neither night nor day and the solstice was vibrant with pagan memories. Our own rites were an exorcism of these, just as the Italian fireworks were of ours. But, over time, the exorcism had become contaminated and one sensed a truce between formerly hostile ghosts. Sister Paola’s fancies had company. Holding her hand to show her she was not dying in solitude, he added his prayers to the forces firing through the blazing air. ‘Absolve, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the soul of this Thy servant …’
Waltz music whirled and a pyrotechnic finale filled the sky with a great cross of Savoy. At one time, Sister Paola had felt that something was due to her for the waltzes she had not waltzed and for the conjugal comforts she might have known with some good-natured dowry-hunter. Her uncle’s legacy would have sufficed for that, but Mastai had not agreed.
‘Subvenite, Angeli Domini …’
She no longer blamed him. A knowledge of his mind and an ability to tune into it, even at a distance, had seeped through the confessional-grating in the years when he had her conscience in his care. He had supposed the only transaction between them to be the exchange of his wisdom for her submission. But submission had taught her the contours of his thought and made her so receptive to it that, although she did not hear the Madonna’s voice as he had hoped, messages did come to her from him. She knew and was pestered by his fears and fevers, which were lately reaching a pitch.
Turning to the Madonna, and finding that his old success with feminine sensibilities would not help, he had looked for intercessors with the intercessor and had had hopes of Sister Paola. She knew, because in unguarded moments she felt him willing her to assist him. His appeals tired her and she wanted him to desist. She guessed that his mounting terror was unacknowledged. Leaking into her dreams, she felt him channel towards her a dark, fearful part of himself which he dared not recognise and which his plan to have himself declared infallible aimed to assuage.
*
Cardinal Amandi, who was still in Rome, wrote his Coadjutor affable notes. He was a master of meandering prose in whose coils a signal could escape the censor’s eye. Unfortunately, it also escaped Nicola’s, who was blessed if he saw anything sly in His Eminence’s bland account of afternoons spent in the company of Her Britannic Majesty’s unaccredited agent, Odo Russell, a gentleman, whose tall white hat, gold spectacles and genial smile were regular features at Roman receptions.
Was the absence of a signal itself a signal? Maybe the cardinal meant to show the censor that he was innocently engaged in the social round? Joining in this had become a token of loyalty when the Nationalists boycotted carnival and the Pope’s party riposted by dancing itself dizzy to the detriment of its dowagers’ hip-bones and hopes of longevity. ‘Ha!’ ruminated His Eminence.
Nicola was reminded of his search for significance in poor Sister Paola’s ramblings. ‘Monsignore,’ was how she addressed him, but he could tell that she had taken him for quite another Monsignore. ‘You could have caught chickenpox,’ she chided, and the word throbbed with inscrutable import. ‘Don’t fret over the convent’s closure,’ she urged another time, contradicting her own complaints on this very topic. ‘They were sour places, really. We used to put on a pious charade for your visits! Everyone did. The whole province did it for your last one when citizens were forbidden to breath the word “reform”! The only ones to disobey were old friends of yours whom you took for isolated fanatics! Didn’t you?’ she challenged, and Nicola, to calm her, said ‘Yes.’
‘They knew!’ she told him. ‘They were devastated. One of them told me he wept as your carriage was driving off and all he could see of you was the white flutter of your hand. He compared it to a wounded dove. You were blessing the troops. Austrians! The occupying army which everyone hated. You blessed them and never noticed that the real people hadn’t come!’
For a moment Nicola felt as if he had been eavesdropping – but, after all, this was under the seal of confession and he would blot out all he’d heard. Or try to.
*
‘Il caro Russell,’ wrote the cardinal, ‘adores amateur theatricals. He and some English friends are rehearsing scenes from a play about a man feigning madness so as to disarm the suspicions of a king who fears for his succession. Some, closer to us’ – a reference to d’Andrea? – ‘may not have to feign.’
Prospero wrote too, praising Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans who had challenged the Italian Government to ensure that violent hands were not laid on His Holiness. Garibaldi had now been confined to the island of Caprera – a clear response to the bishop. A pity, wrote Prospero meaningfully, that not all churchmen were as loyal!
Nicola turned with relief from these letters to Sister Paola who, suspended between life and death, was in ardent communion with a pastoral dream of her own youth. He found it soothing to visit it with her and now regularly did. Her fancies about an idyll with Louis Napoleon’s dead elder brother back in ’31 were curiously vivid, and it struck him that nuns’ daydreams were like the pits in which mountain villagers stored snow until its price rose in the summer. Like the snow, her stories were compact and ageless, though a new light could transform one, like sunshine fracturing on ice. He rejected such distortions, particularly the delirium relating to her late confessor. The scraps about her girlhood were what appealed to him, and he held in suspense a surmise which it was perhaps wiser not to verify for now.
Meanwhile, Prospero kept him abreast of Roman rumours. Hissed under the coffered ceilings of saloons and sacristies, the latest claimed that the Bishop of Tarbes, when asked why he had not made more of the miracles of Lourdes, put the blame on Cardinal Amandi, whose judicial approach, wrote Prospero, ‘freezes His Holiness
’s soul!’ Soul-freezing too were the cardinal’s reservations about the pious practice of sending H.H.’s toe-and-tonsure-clippings to those who contributed generously to St Peter’s Pence. ‘Contempt for simple faith,’ wrote Prospero, ‘is no longer acceptable.’
A more painful controversy smouldered over a Spanish inquisitor whom Mastai had canonised last June. A German theologian had revealed that the new saint, Peter d’Arbuez of Aragon, had, by the time he died, caused some four to six thousand heretics to be burned alive. Döllinger – the German – thought this incompatible with sanctity. Prospero disagreed. Canonising d’Arbuez was, he conceded, perhaps impolitic. It revived old animosities, especially as the man who finally murdered and so made a martyr of him was a Jew. ‘Yet might it not be that choosing this unlikeable martyr to a cause – the Church’s survival – which may soon require new ones is a useful reminder of what may now have to be sacrificed? Tolerance? Squeamishness?’ Amandi was suspected of having used Odo Russell’s diplomatic bag to correspond with the mischievous Döllinger and draw his attention to d’Arbuez. Prospero did not believe this, but warned, ‘If people’s suspicions fall on him, who is to blame?’
*
The next news to reach Rome had the effect of an artillery enfilade. Garibaldi had ‘escaped’ from his island – the authorities must have closed an eye – had reached Florence and from there, a living ikon in his red shirt, slipped south with the avowed intention of unseating the Pope, whom supporters were already calling the ‘martyr’ and ‘the Word of God made flesh to dwell amongst us’. Passions peaked like winter tides.
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