Authors: Julia O'Faolain
Patiently, she went on with her
gros
point,
knotting threads and waiting for light to break. He spoke of the discredit which could be brought on the cause if its supporters were not seen to be above reproach. Liberal priests must not give scandal … Did he, she asked timidly, mean himself. No? Ah!
‘Yet in a way I do. You see I could prevent a scandal – take it, that is, upon myself. The institution must be protected, even if it becomes a Moloch.’
‘Moloch? You mean the idol to which children were sacrificed?’
That startled him. ‘Children?’ He looked flustered and was perhaps going to pieces – as happened with Papa who, after years of tyranny, ended up shamelessly dependent. He whined. Whined! Yet when Mama, as a young bride, had run home to her family, he hauled her back and locked her up. A court case taken by
her
father failed on the grounds, said the judge, that hard cases made poor laws and he would not condone the flouting of a husband’s authority. After that, Miss Foljambe was born and trapped Mama for good.
‘If you mean the institution of the family,’ said she, ‘I would sacrifice nothing to it. Not a thing.’
At the end, her delightful riding companion became a dribbling wreck whose disease, said the doctor, was best not named. Once, unmistakably, he attempted to get his hand under her skirt.
Her lodger, she surmised, had a mistress. Possibly bastards whom, of course, he
must
give up. Archdeacon Manning, who had been subjecting the Romish Church to scrutiny, believed that the present pope was strongly opposed to laxity. Don Mauro’s cause would founder if he had such complications. Perhaps, as he had been living in exile, the complications were conveniently abroad?
*
Don Mauro welcomed Nicola and introduced him to a lady whose name appeared to have no vowels: Flljmb. She stared at him in a way which set his mind whirring, then gave him a glass of port. Could she be his mother – no,
she
was supposed to be a nun.
He hoped Don Mauro recalled that he was to discuss her.
‘1831 …’ Don Mauro spiralled away from the topic – though maybe not? It was the year of Nicola’s conception. ‘France …’
Tremulously, Nicola emptied his glass and wondered if his mother could be French. His throat was painfully dry.
‘General Lafayette …’
Nicola asked nervously if he might pour himself more port. Ms Flljmb had left the room. Don Mauro shuffled foxed papers. A cat lay nose to tail on an overstuffed chair. Its stomach throbbed and it struck Nicola that the apartment was made in its image: furry with pink ruchings and padded curves.
For something to do, he picked up the beast which leaped away with plump agility then began to play with a bell connected with a bell-pull several floors below. Someone was clearly pulling it, for the bell, though stuffed with tow, began to vibrate and, as the cat extracted the stuffing, to ring. The sound seemed to Nicola to be coming from his own head.
Don Mauro, ignoring it, continued to reminisce. History poured from his mouth which sported a black tooth among yellow ones, like a paternoster among aves. Because of this, his mouth seemed to wink, but his eyes were sad.
‘Hope,’ he said, ‘is the climate of our story. You must try and imagine it. Hope and panic. Listen to the oath taken by the Grand Elect of the Carbonari Sect. Mmmm,’ he mumbled, ‘“… and if
I should have the misfortune to break this oath I consent to be crucified in a cave … stripped and crowned with thorns as was done to Christ our model and redeemer. I agree too that while I am still alive my belly shall be ripped open and my guts and heart torn out …” Do you think this was playacting, young man? It was terror. People were trying to ensure that their friends would stick by them in spite of their fear of the regime …’
‘And my mother …?’
‘Wait.’
Outside the window were roofs. Terracotta tiles overlapped like the scales of a fish. A pigeon preened. Don Mauro talked of villas where gentlemen conspired. He had travelled from one to another, carrying correspondence or guiding refugees.
‘People despise such activities now. They say we achieved nothing. I say we were preparing what’s happened since. If you want the butterfly you must first have the worm.’
Even the Duke of Modena had conspired. A world of stealth, nocturnal sessions, rumour and disguise was described by Don Mauro and half imagined by Nicola, whose head was affected by the port.
Somewhere along this narrative, revolution broke out. The Duke panicked, denounced his confederates and sent for the hangman.
‘There was no telegraph then,’ reminded Don Mauro, ‘and rumours ran riot.’ A cardinal was kidnapped. Legates fled. And in the diocese of Spoleto a motley lot of refugees converged on a Capuchin convent in the mountains. There were far too many for the convent to house, but the monks lent them their barns and outhouses and hayricks and they stayed there for some days to hide from the marauding troops. ‘Among them were some nuns and a girl who was put in their care. She was a cousin of your patron, Monsignor Amandi. In the confusion someone – nobody knows who or even how many people – forced her. Nine months later you were born.’
‘Didn’t she name anyone?’
‘No.’
‘Was she a moron?’
‘No. Ashamed. Stunned? Hysterical perhaps? Anyway, she seemed to forget the experience later and the nuns let it drop. It was a mad time. You could say you were born of the revolution. Father Gavazzi, who travelled around preaching, did Monsignor Amandi a favour by bringing you to the capital. Your mother became a nun. She is not accessible.’ Don Mauro looked sad. ‘Especially not to you. Ill-disposed people could dig up old gossip. Father Gavazzi is in the public eye and so is Monsignor Amandi. It would discredit them if it were thought that either of them was …’
‘My father?’
‘There is nothing but malice behind such talk. But the abate did not want to be seen speaking to you at too much length.’
‘
Is
my mother sane?’ He had to know.
‘She is more than sane. She may be saintly. These things are – elusive.’ Ruddiness glowed patchily on Don Mauro’s face.
‘A saint?’
‘Some say so.’
‘How horrible!’ This too broke out despite himself.
‘Yes.’
Nicola, who had expected to be contradicted, said primly, ‘I don’t think I meant that.’
But Don Mauro had the bit between his teeth. His voice shook as he cried that the story conformed to a hateful pattern. First came the fall, the breaking of a spirit, then the forgiveness which ensured submission. Sanctity as abasement. The image of the Magdalene wiping Christ’s
feet with her hair said it all. Woman’s glory, he ranted, became a
foot-rag
.
Bubbles of saliva hung on his lip.
Nicola asked whether Monsignor Amandi would approve of Don Mauro’s talking like this.
‘Why not? I can be disowned, you see. We are between orthodoxies and it is better I speak rather than someone who could embarrass others.’ A smile tripped on the assymetry of Don Mauro’s teeth. Nicola guessed his nervousness to be stoked with pride.
‘Was my mother some sort of … revolutionary?’
‘No.’
‘But
you
were?’
‘I was a priest trying to love my neighbour. Can one be responsible for a man’s soul and let his body be destroyed?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Bravo. We lived under an unjust papal government. If the salt lose its savour wherewith shall it be salted? God forgive me if I’m wrong. I hope this present pope will let me be reconciled. The last one wouldn’t and my bishop made an example of me.’
This load of adult grief frightened Nicola. He looked at the priest’s pained mouth and felt ashamed to be young and intact.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘You’re a good lad, Nicola.’
‘No.’
‘No?’ Don Mauro laughed. ‘Ah, you’ve been thinking ill of me, is that it?’ Shrewd-eyed and at bay.
Nicola must have blushed.
‘Don’t worry.’ Don Mauro kissed and absolved him with a blast of appalling breath. ‘I had thought,’ his smile revived a lost, convivial,
hard-riding
, outdoor man, ‘of pretending
I
was your father. It would stop mouths and prevent trouble – but I couldn’t do it to you, lad. You’d have been too unhappy, eh?’
Taking in Nicola’s discomfiture, he closed one piercing, bloodshot eye. ‘We have to have some thought for the individual, don’t you think? After all, the institution’s not a Moloch!’
Gently, he squeezed his shoulder.
*
After Easter, which fell on 23rd April, Don Eugenio arranged for Nicola to travel north and meet Monsignor Amandi at his brother-in-law’s villa
near Bologna, which turned out to be an old haunt of Don Mauro’s. The Villa Chiara? Home of the Conti Stanga? The old smuggler remembered it well.
Nicola, coming to say goodbye, found him suffering from eczema and hope deferred. The tic in his cheek kept burrowing deeper.
‘You’ll be travelling some of the same route as the troops!’
He spoke enviously. There was no question of his leaving Rome. The Pope had not agreed to see him and he must keep up the siege. He had been watching the political weather intently for, as he told Nicola, even fleas suffer in a conflagration and his hopes were tied to those of the Liberals.
The Pope too was said to be in great agony of mind. A manifesto, issued by one of his generals, containing the words ‘God wills it!’, had turned the deployment of Roman troops along the Austrian border into a crusade and committed God and His Vicar to making war on Catholic Austria. An unheard-of thing! To send in the troops could provoke a schism and to disown the general a mutiny. Yet how keep our men idle while fellow Italians fought? What could Pius do now? Don Mauro hung around tobacco shops and clubs, picking up rumours then brought them home to Miss Foljambe, who took a sporting interest in all this.
The English were cheering for the Liberals and Miss F hoped the dear pope would grasp the nettle and send in the troops. However, the signs pointed the other way. Mastai was thought to be suffering from a paralysis of the will due to Austrian protests.
Don Mauro’s bad luck dazed him.
‘I was advised,’ he confided, ‘yesterday to take a rest cure at a spa.’ He hissed the word: an insult which could – Nicola saw – have been kindly meant.
Don Mauro’s eyes called out for cover: bandages or eye patches. They had the inturned burn of a man whom life has over-tested. He said he must pen a note to Father Gavazzi which Nicola should deliver. ‘He’ll make Bologna his headquarters for a while. It’s a good place to raise funds for the troops, so you’ll find him there.’ He withdrew to write his letter.
Later, he walked half way down the Corso with Nicola whose last glimpse of him was outside Merle’s bookshop where he would spend the next few hours sifting rumours and peering between the uncut pages of books. He was wearing his round layman’s hat.
*
Nicola left the city in a roomy posting coach which swayed nautically through damp streets. A watery sun emerged, and housefronts in yellows, cinnamons and maroon steamed like cooked crabs and gave off a reek of brine. An unstable image of St Peter’s swung in, then out of, view, as they crossed the Ponte Molle, the bridge beyond which, it is said, the world stops for true Romans. Passengers loosened their coats and belts.
A lawyer took charge of the conversation. The Campagna, in his opinion, should be ploughed. Dug. That would release the poisonous vapours which caused malaria and agriculture could become intensive and profitable. ‘Open it up!’ he cried of the lands which stretched on two sides of the coach like a monotonous, russet sea. Local labour, he noted, was unobtainable and only desperate migrants from the Abruzzi were prepared to work this pestilential earth. Nicola was reminded that his wet nurse’s husband had done so and died.
Looking out he saw nothing but goats, grey oxen and a crumbling aqueduct. He fell asleep, rocked by the motion of the coach, and when he awoke the distant mountains had turned blue. Men in long cloaks passed in the distance. Shepherds? Some time later he saw a line of mules tied together by their tails.
‘We’re a country of carnivals and footmen,’ spat the lawyer, furious because someone had used the word ‘picturesque’. Why, he raged, were only the ruined and rotten worthy of being put in a picture? Industry was what we needed. Factories.
When the coach pulled in at Civita Castellana, Nicola whose rump felt as if he had been sitting on walnuts was glad to stretch his legs. He found hospitality that night in a convent, and next day had the excitement of seeing the troops from the Kingdom of Naples trudge north. There had been no rain here and their boots raised white dust so that they looked like an army of pizza-makers. The coach passengers dined at Terni and spent the night at Spoleto, where Nicola again stayed in a convent but could not sleep for thinking of the refugees who had fled from here in 1831.
Waking, he tried to remember Monsignor Amandi’s face and whether it was like his own. Absorbed by this, he did not become drawn into the wave of patriotism which gripped everyone else.
Next evening there was no convent to lodge him. The troops had slowed progress on the roads and the only inn was crowded. A party of foreigners – ‘English milords’ said the innkeeper – had taken the best rooms and the coach passengers had to do with what was left. Nicola’s
was hardly more than a cupboard with walls so thin that the foreigners’ conversations seemed as close as his ear.
At first they were incomprehensible, then broke into meaning. A man’s voice said, ‘I don’t want the others to understand! Tell me in Italian. Who is he?’
‘Just a boy I used to know.’
The second speaker sounded familiar.
‘Before you rose in the world?’
‘It’s still before. I intend to rise higher than your employ, Milord.’
‘Invite him in for a glass of something. No? Supposing I do?’
Invite whom in? What boy? Could they mean Nicola?
‘If you do, you won’t see me again.’
The listener put his ear to the partition. It was the orphan! Flavio! Nicola hadn’t seen him since the day the Russian Jesuit said he might know his family. After that, he had heard some talk of a fortune which the orphan might be able to claim. It hadn’t sounded credible – yet here he was with rich foreigners! Could he – Nicola was envious – have
found
his father? The other voice did not sound fatherly. But then, Nicola was no judge.