There was a card game in progress in one corner and, at the bar, a discussion of the attempt, some years ago, on the Emperor’s life. The mistake, it was concluded, had been in using bombs. It took more guts to use a knife. True, you had to get close to get it into the guts – but then you couldn’t miss!
‘Like this!’ A man held a knife to the barman’s apron, but the barman flicked it away and went on drying glasses.
Maximin had a drink, then, finding nobody he knew well enough to confide in, went back to the Signora’s apartment. Walking in, he paused on the covered walk outside the drawing-room window. The Signora was inside, talking to Monsignor Santi. They were saying that some woman would go to confession to Cardinal Amandi’s titular church tomorrow about four. Monsignor Santi would take His Eminence’s place hearing confessions. That way, if her protector came to hear of it, he would think the confessor was Amandi who, being in his seventies, could hardly rouse his jealousy.
‘All right?’ asked Donna Costanza and the bishop said yes.
Maximin waited until Monsignor Santi came out, then followed him downstairs. He had changed his mind about the paper he had signed. Could he have it back, he asked.
‘Why Maximin, it’s for your own protection,’ said the bishop. ‘Besides, I haven’t got it any more. I’m sorry.’
Maximin felt like hitting him and, bishop or no bishop, might have done it too if Monsignor Santi’s carriage had not been standing there with two liveried footmen, one of whom had opened the door and lowered the step. After that, there was nothing for Maximin to do but go and get stinking drunk, which is what he did.
He awoke with a headache and an idea. He would go to the lodgings of Monsieur Veuillot whose card he had kept ever since the journalist had given him lunch. Surely, he could smooth things out?
*
Cardinal Amandi had been disheartened by the Abate Lambruschini’s tactful silence when asked for advice. Tact carried a judgment. This, it said, is all you can accept: not truth, only this. It came close to pity and the cardinal was crushed.
Arriving in Rome, he had gone at once to the Council in whose anterooms were the usual loiterers, quidnuncs, pious sightseers, and touts. Seen afresh after an absence, they distressed him. Money, as all but the invincibly innocent now knew, was paid by surprisingly respectable people to equally respectable ones for tidbits of information. Agents were active, stenographers under siege and foreign bishops regularly invited to their embassies to be pumped – hence the frustration of the Italians who lacked such a resource – while the more illustrious were regarded as being ‘booked’ by such families as the Borghese, Doria, Aldobrandini and Caetani, in whose drawing rooms they could be approached with circumspection. Naturally, they did not – one hoped – break their oath of silence, but small indiscretions showed how the wind blew.
Seeing it all with Lambruschini’s borrowed eye, Amandi blamed himself. Years ago, when Amandi first tempted him, Mastai had been an unworldly man. Intrigue and pride had been alien – or, if not alien, behind him. He might have devoted his life to orphans or lived quietly as a provincial bishop if Mephistophelian friends had not tempted him with a belief in the Church’s need of his gifts.
So worldly had he then become, that he had sloughed off these friends, turning his coat, abandoning Liberalism, seeking increased power, creating this hive of bitterness, anger and intrigue … But whose fault was it? Who was to blame if the Pope had so destroyed his conscience that he mistook his own wilfulness for rectitude?
Amandi feared that a like fate could overtake Nicola, whom he had known as a shy, reticent boy and formed and educated so that his political sins, if he was committing any, must be all Amandi’s fault. He too could turn into monster – especially under the tutelage of the slippery Martelli whom Amandi did not trust at all. Martelli had assured the cardinal that his aim was of the purest and that so were his methods. Amandi doubted this – which was why he wanted to see Archbishop Darboy who, Martelli had assured him, approved of his strategy. Amandi would ask the archbishop straight out if this was so. He was looking for him now and, hearing that he was expected, hung on, listening, willynilly, to the gossip all around. In under half an hour, he was made privy to more intrigues than would have animated several circles of Dante’s hell, mainly those of the fraudulent, the faint-hearted and the choleric.
Several men welcomed him back, the Liberals with surprise. Their ranks were sadly thinned. Worn out by wrangling, by the heat and by the stacks of pamphlets which followed them to their lodgings – the more determined of those who had been prevented from having their say in the aula had had these printed in Naples – many had simply left. About six a week were now petitioning to be let go and, every day, the benches were emptier.
Then came the whispers. Had he heard about the Armenian bishops? They had acquiesced in Rome’s encroachments on their freedoms, but then, unnerved by news of angry disturbances at home, reneged. Mastai promptly ordered them to a monastery to perform punitive spiritual exercises and sent his police to enforce the order. One man resisted and was supported by bystanders who started a small riot. After that the Patriarch of Antioch fled to Turkey with a fellow bishop and sent back a letter to the Council, explaining that in the face of imprisonment and his own ill health, he had feared for his life. A scandal. And there were others. Cardinal di Pietro was blackmailed. Told that if he voted with us that old story of the Spanish dancer and the threatened duel with the Russian General would be dug up. It went back twenty-five years to his time as nuncio in Portugal. But the Curia never forgets. Anyway, there’s a vote we won’t get. And poor Cardinal Guidi …
‘Yes?’
A sad story! He was now under semi-house arrest at the Minerva and under pressure to recant. Yet on 18 June he had made a speech which had looked like reconciling all parties. Indeed, so hopeful were the bishops that when he came down from the ambo several rushed to kiss his hands and wept.
The Pope, he had argued, though not infallible in his person, could, with divine assistance, make infallible pronouncements when these reflected the views of the bishops and the tradition of the Church. Surely, here was the yearned-for peace formula? Joy. Tears. Embraces. No bishop wanted to oppose the aged, beleaguered Pope.
But, that evening, Pius, hearing of the speech, summoned the cardinal, threw a tantrum, and to Guidi’s protest that he had spoken only as a witness to tradition replied, ‘I am tradition!’
‘Folie de grandeur! Megalomania! He’s unstoppable now! Like one of the old absolute kings!’
‘Shsh!’
Yet was it not playing into his hands to intrigue? Should one not try for purity?
‘You’re swimming against the current,’ Amandi was told. ‘People are leaving, not coming back!’
What, he asked, about the idea of a mass walk-out by the Minority? Given up, said a bishop. How did he know? From his coachman. Someone jeered. Ex cathedra, then? From the box!
‘Don’t jeer! The coachmen have their own Council where the carriages wait at evening parties. They exchange information.’
‘So what else are they saying now?’
‘That Montpellier who left the city in disgust after throwing his conciliar papers into the Tiber …’
‘That’s stale news. He threw them in in May!’
‘Well, they’ve been fished out and brought to the Vicariato. His name is on them. What do you bet that he’ll lose his diocese?’
The jokes were a cover for fear, anguish and wounded loyalty.
When Darboy finally arrived, there was just time to ask him – discreetly and circuitously – what he knew about Martelli’s activity. He knew nothing at all.
*
Amandi went straight to his palace where he told Nicola that trust was rotting, all trust. Trust between them and perhaps every chance of trust in the Council and the Church itself. Lies, he said, had worked like termites. They had burrowed through the structures. They had hollowed them out. He didn’t blame anyone except himself. How c
ould he? He too had played at the game of diplomacy and politics, had drawn fine lines and justified means by ends. Now he was unable to believe anything he was told. Pius too should disbelieve. When he asked the Bishop of Mainz did he love him, he was misusing the word and the answer he exacted was a debased formula. All words had been devalued and deformed. Therefore, he, Amandi, found it difficult to speak. He would have liked to tell his Coadjutor that he loved him, which he did. But how show the difference between his use of the word and that of Mastai? Shame gagged him.
He would have liked to tell Nicola that he did not want him to intrigue on his behalf, as he believed he had been doing and that he, Amandi, did not wish to be regarded as papabile. This was difficult to say because, under certain circumstances, he would be prepared to be so if only to undo some of the evil he felt he had done. But this sounded two-faced, self-serving, and was perhaps better not said.
Being unable to speak, neither could he credit what he was told. He did not want his Coadjutor, for instance, to hear confessions on his behalf this afternoon. The reason was that he believed him to be using the confessional as a hideout for purposes of conspiracy. Amandi didn’t blame him for reasons already stated. But neither could he believe his denials. Sorry. No, Nicola! You are not to go there this afternoon. My name is on the box, so I shall be the one sitting there to hear confessions. Simplicity is the only route out of the mad maze in which we are strangling.
*
Maximin Giraud arrived at Monsieur Louis Veuillot’s lodgings just as the journalist was setting off for lunch with a party of guests. Maximin must join them, he urged. Yes, yes, don’t be bashful! We’re not worldly folk! We won’t ask for better company than the one chosen by the Virgin. So Maximin got into their carriage and drove with them to a restaurant where they proved to be in a merry mood and drank a lot of toasts. They had all heard of him and a balding Jesuit kept eyeing him as though keeping him under surveillance. Meanwhile, the rest of the company toasted his great moment and spoke of him as ‘chosen’, but though Maximin kept trying to get in a word, they were eating the pudding before he had a chance to mention the paper he had signed. The faces went tight. Ah, he thought, so it had been a mistake! He had hoped it might not matter and that Bishop Santi had, after all, been, truly, looking out for his good. Even now he hoped this.
For whom did he say he had signed it? asked the bald priest in an abnormally quiet voice. For Monsignor Santi? And could he not get it back? Maximin explained that he had tried and failed.
‘But Padre Grassi,’ said Veuillot to the priest, ‘isn’t Monsignor Santi a friend of yours?’
The faces were as smooth as marble. ‘Only,’ said the priest, ‘when our loyalties do not clash. Cardinal Amandi is back in Rome. This is unlikely to be a coincidence.’
‘Ah!’ said Veuillot. ‘The Pretender!’
There was some excited talk then and Maximin kept losing the thread. What he did grasp was that this cardinal would undo the Pope’s work after his death if it wasn’t made safe by the dogma which was our great rampart and bulwark. Maximin, said Veuillot, had let the Pope down and made it harder to get his dogma. Veuillot was all for fighting on even now but Grassi said better give up the idea. It had, he said, always struck him as too flamboyant and anyway, if the company would allow the expression, there was more than one way to skin a cat!
Give up what idea? Which? Maximin couldn’t take this in. Did the priest mean the occasion in the aula? The announcement of the secret? The crowning moment of his life? The bright, multilayered pudding on his plate flared and dissolved into a coiled rainbow. For several seconds the visionary was blind.
‘Tell me,’ Monsieur Veuillot was asking when he came to himself, ‘what exactly did the paper say?’
Maximin told him.
Padre Grassi said, ‘I see die hidden hand. La mano di Amandi! Well,’ he told Giraud, ‘if you said that there was no vision and no secret, you must see that you can be of no further use to us. What could you tell the Council? You have denied your own news.’
Maximin was thunderstruck. ‘But all I said was “maybe” …’
‘“Maybe” is too much and you may depend on it that the paper will be cleverly written.’
By now they were out in the hot afternoon street where the light hurt the eyes. There were more headshakes, then Maximin’s priestly hosts – even Veuillot seemed priestly – got into their carriage and left him standing, a discard for whom they had no father use. His head swam, for he had drunk everything he had been offered, but still he ran after the carriage, shouting, ‘What about my lump sum? Aren’t you going to pay me?’ At last, lacerated by a stitch in his side, he had to drop back. The footmen clinging to the rear of the carriage were laughing, so he picked up some dried horse dung and threw it at them hard.
He had been made a fool of! Even now he couldn’t quite work out how. Distrusting his own eyes, he was startled by the blood smeared on his palms. He had clenched his fists so hard that his fingernails had punctured the skin. Too agitated to pause, he walked randomly through empty streets in tangling circles, raging against the city’s mockery. Steely reflections dazzled him and once he nearly fell into a mondezzaro. God, he hated Rome. Hated siestas when everyone drew back into their own cosy lives and closed you out. He hated his own diminished life and bloody God. Merde!
Pausing in the shade of a church door, he saw a list of confessors and the languages in which they would hear confessions: Polish, Spanish … Confessions! Like a stung bull, he took off for the church where Monsignor Santi had told Donna Costanza he would be this afternoon at four. It was a little after that when he reached it and it seemed quite empty and dark as he thumped about, shocking himself by the sound of his own boots. ‘The hidden hand’! Santi and Amandi! Where was that hand hidden now? Then he saw the name Amandi over a confessional, and just then a woman walked up the aisle and knelt in the penitent’s niche. Putting her mouth close to the grating, she began to whisper.
Another conspiracy! thought Maximin and, on impulse, stepped up to the central section of the confessional and put his head through the curtains. He breathed in an odour of snuff.
‘Monsignore!’
‘Che! Che?’ The irritable query from the oven-dark interior touched a sore nerve. ‘Che?’ growled the invisible confessor again, as though Maximin were a passing annoyance. ‘What is it? What do you want? Explain yourself.’
Maximin felt affronted, since an explanation was precisely what was due to him and he couldn’t get his tongue around the buzz of questions raging in his head. What was happening? Why? And in what way had he deserved the mockery in which – it seemed to him now – he had been trapped since childhood. Trapped like a fly in merde! Angrily, he opened his mouth, but his voice would not come. His throat closed as though he had asthma like his father. He was dumb, just as he had often been years ago, when he stood at the church altar in Ablandins to tell about the vision and found he needed a prompt. The old, smothering frustration choked him. It was the priests’ fault, all of it, and now here was this one telling him to go away and stop blocking his light.
Which was he? The Eminenza or the Monsignore?
Almost without his volition, one of Maximin’s hands drew a knife while the other reached into the box, seized the shoulder of the vociferous priest, and raised him so that the knife could reach his gut. Then, bracing himself against the side of the confessional, he thrust it in. For a moment it was arrested by bunched cloth, then he rammed it through.
Stepping away from the box, he looked across the nave to where the only two worshippers in sight seemed to have noticed nothing. And indeed there had been little to alert them, for the confessional was in a dark side chapel and the dying man’s remonstrances had trailed off in a soft diminuendo sigh.
Maximin was about to leave, when the side door of the confessional flew open and out tumbled the woman penitent. Her mouth and eyes were rounded in panic. He had forgotten about her, but now the mouth’s contagion terrified him. It
looked so ready to launch a scream of alarm that for moments he thought he heard it. Whispering ‘Hush!’ he got his hands on her throat. ‘Zitta!’ he urged. ‘Just stay quiet!’ Tightening, then loosening his grip, he pushed her back into the confessional, closed the door on her inert, slumping weight, and ran.
Nobody looked at him as he came out into the square, slowed, crossed it and walked at a funeral mute’s pace down a wriggle of streets to another empty one in whose fountain he soaked his grey jacket to remove the blood. He was thinking that the woman had had a good look at him and must have noticed his uniform. Mechanically, he squeezed out his jacket. The sun would soon dry the damp.
An image of the alarmed woman’s face danced before him and reminded him of an aunt who had defended him when he was small. She had been thin but resolute and he remembered her dodging behind his father’s shoulder to catch the arms raised to deal blows. She could cling to the drunk’s elbows just long enough for Maximin to race to the shelter of a neighbour’s house. Then she had to let go. The Madonna too, it struck him, had said she was exhausted from holding back her son’s arm lest he smite the world. Just like his aunt!
St Peter’s Basilica
A priest stepped forth, then back into the crowd, as though playing some child’s game like Nuts in May. Again! Third time lucky, he came up to Monsignor Santi and introduced himself. His name was Gilmore and they had been at the Romano together.
‘I called a few weeks ago, but you were busy.’
Nicola tried to put the awkward man at his ease but couldn’t follow his rigmarole. He was looking for Monseigneur Darboy and had an eye out for him even while they talked.
‘You robbed me of an English passport in 1849!’ This, though said jovially, made it impossible to walk off. Besides, Nicola now remembered the man.
‘I hope you didn’t get into hot water.’
The Judas Cloth Page 66