The Judas Cloth (30 page)

Reports from Bologna said that Amandi’s main connection there was a youth as green as duckweed who was in the employ of that old fox, Oppizzoni. The usual speculations had been made mat the boy could be a catamite, a spy, or the son of the Pope’s reputedly wanton sister, Isabella. Of Isabella and – whom? Rumours could make your head spin.

Bedini instructed his informant, Don Carlo, to offer the boy a suit of clothes, but neither to reveal Bedini’s expectations of being the next Legate nor premature sympathy for Austria. When Don Carlo found that his penitent wanted to go to Rome, Bedini was cock-a-hoop. Encourage him, he advised. He’ll lead us to his master. Encourage Oppizzoni to let him go. There was, wrote Don Carlo, some story about a girl. A pretext?
Optime
! Clearly, the boy was going there to make contact with Amandi. What else?

The tailor measured Nicola for the promised suit but said it could not be made ready in time if the young gentleman was leaving. Nicola, who had been puzzled by the gift, said never mind. He must leave now if he was to catch up with Maria before she was confined.

‘He must think he’s clever,’ said Don Carlo irritably.

‘We’ll start building the suit anyway,’ promised the tailor. ‘You can come for your next fitting when you return.’

On 30 April, a French attack on Rome was repulsed. In the aftermath the city grew eloquent. Even the slow, swag-necked oxen began looking like emblems. Even the mimosa blossom which hardened like gun shot. Romans knew about gesture. Putting defiance into their nonchalant habits, they prolonged siestas until late breezes had turned laundry into pennants and curtains into parodies of gun smoke. Ordinary living became a thumbing of the Roman nose at the French camp. Spies would make known the city’s self-possession – and its contempt for
fellow-republicans
fighting on the wrong side. So thought the citizens who had learned showmanship from the Church, and were stimulated by their new role. Danger spiced what was already a near-sexual glee.

‘Italians don’t fight,’ was what the French commander had said. Then his men had been driven back!

The Roman Republic had life in it yet and, in the pollen-laden waft – of lime, acacia, horses, hay – customers at open-air cafés lingered to argue the toss. The intentions of the sister-republic were unclear. Protective or punitive? Rome was on the qui vive. The horses, so sweetly redolent of spring grass, had been commandeered and gravel strewn on the cobbles lest the cavalry skid.

Nicola had come straight to the Foundling Home where girls sat squinting over a froth of needlework. There were maybe a hundred, all with deferent eyes, and, though one might have looked for gloom, expectancy rippled when the door opened. Any break was welcome in their numb routine. These, said Don Mauro, were the ‘spinsters’. Left as infants on the Foundlings’ wheel, they would work here until they died, unless picked out at one of the processions when they were
paraded for inspection by men who needed wives. Country lads were glad to get them – and glad of their small dowries.

Don Mauro, looking blithe and rosy, had the run of Rome’s charitable institutions. Since the Pope’s
Monitorio
, there had been a shortage of priests, so he had been filling in for absentees and saying mass all over town.

Mass? Had he been restored to the priesthood then? How could he have been? Nicola guessed that, in a flight of wishful thinking, he had re-ordained himself, then compounded his fault by collaborating with the Republic. If so, penalties would be implacable, but the little cleric seemed oblivious of this. He was rigged out in stole and cassock, having just heard the spinsters’ confessions, when he stepped into the hall to find Nicola badgering the doorkeeper about recently abandoned infants.

‘They have tags around their necks,’ the doorkeeper had been saying. ‘With a mark. You must describe the mark.’

But Nicola didn’t know whether Maria had even had a child, much less whether she had put a tag on it or left it here.

‘Over eight hundred a year are left,’ scolded the doorkeeper.

Don Mauro took Nicola to see the wheel on which a woman out in the street could leave her bundled infant, then ring a bell and run off without being seen. A nurse, inside the building, would then turn it so that the baby passed inside the wall. The space was designed for newborn infants but, in bad times, two-and even three-year-olds had been known to squeeze through. Times now, Don Mauro admitted, were bad. He too, it struck Nicola, was trying to smuggle himself inside an institution: the Church.

He showed Nicola around with proprietorial pride. ‘We,’ he said, referring to the Church, but also to the Republic. A reconciliation had taken place in his heart and he forgot that it did not prevail. Yet he saw himself as practical. ‘I went to see Mazzini,’ he disclosed. ‘The Republicans are not priest-haters. That’s a lie.’ And he wagged a monitory finger. ‘People gave me petitions to submit. They had high hopes. But, we have less money than the Pope. This war is an expense and we can’t borrow because international bankers won’t lend. Cardinal Antonelli made the diplomatic corps in Gaeta agree to warn them not to!’

As he and Nicola left the building, pale arms waved from a window. The
zitelle
were enjoying a break. If the Republic survived, something would be done for the poor creatures, assured Don Mauro. ‘By the way,’ he remembered, ‘I met a friend of yours among the wounded. A man
called Martelli. He’s at the Trinità dei Pellegrini. Father Gavazzi’s in charge there. He’s having trouble with his order. The secular authorities obliged them to house him and do his laundry – can you believe that they were refusing? Now he says they piss in his soup. There was bad blood over the setting up of military hospitals. Convents had to be requisitioned. It was during the siege.’

Cassock hitched up, Don Mauro skipped over ruins left by the French bombardment. Clutching Nicola’s elbow, he asked: ‘Have you seen Prospero Stanga? His father complains that he doesn’t write.’

The French encampment outside the walls was close enough to wave at.
Vive
la
fraternit
é
! jeered ironic citizens. The French Republic was just fourteen months old. Surely its soldiers must dislike this assignment? Washing lines outside their tents looked harmlessly domestic. A number of Roman democrats had spent their exile in France.

It was harder to forgive the Neapolitans. Those Austrian puppets – Bomba was allied with Austria – were to blame for the Pope’s harshness to his own city. Even now, Garibaldi’s troops were fighting off their incursions to the south and jeering verses were being bandied about:

Pulcinella, the Neapolitan puppet – a relative of the English braggart, Punch – would not soon set eyes on Rome; nor would any other puppets of Austria unless they chanced to see it on a map!

Meanwhile, there was a ceasefire and the empty days were suddenly intolerable. Young men and those who were not so young felt an urge to be doing something significant.

Nicola and Prospero were self-absorbed, but then this was one of those times when the self absorbs the world. Dressed in tight-waisted jackets and soft hats, they took garrulous walks or went to play bowls, but were apt to pause in mid-play, holding the wooden globes forgotten
in their fingers. Each carried a silver-topped cane which Prospero had bought in a mixed lot from a junkman.

‘Looted property?’ he guessed. ‘I’ll give them back if I discover whose they were.’

He hinted at private misadventures but, when pressed to confide, was apt to turn the talk to public ones. News from Bologna was bad. Austrian troops had it surrounded and Prospero, who got long letters from his father, discounted the old man’s optimism.

‘Count Rossi,’ he told Nicola, ‘had proof that the Bolognese resistance of last August was not the miracle it seemed. The Austrians had orders to retreat before the fight began.’

He hated heroics. It was as though his father’s animating spark risked setting the world on fire. Scepticism had not saved Rossi but was at least adult, and it pleased Prospero that the French, on their march here, had found their route lined with large notices bearing exerpts from their own constitution: ‘France respects foreign nationalities … She does not … take arms against the freedom of other peoples.’ Etc. Lies deserved to be shown up!

His mouth squirmed. ‘They didn’t expect to have to fight at all. Read this.’ He handed Nicola a copy of
La
Solidarité
R
é
publicaine
, printed in Paris some days before.

Nicola read:

INTERVIEW RECORDED OUTSIDE ROME WITH RELEASED FRENCH PRISONER

Prospero took back the paper. ‘They
will
be,’ he said. ‘Whoever killed Count Rossi threw away the last chance of a compromise. The
diplomatists
are wasting their time.’

Nicola found his friend’s cold-eyed disillusion impressive. Might their generation achieve wisdom without the drudgery of ageing? At the same time, he felt rather attracted by the ideals of
La
Solidarit
é
R
é
publicaine
which must be the same ones as animated Father Bassi who was here with the troops winning new praise for his bravery. Nicola, glancing shyly at other young men in the ornate, churchy café, wondered which way they inclined.

Prospero’s eye followed his. ‘They’re spending their paper money,’ he observed. ‘The Republic simply
printed
money!’ After his apprenticeship with Rossi this shocked him.

‘Which side are you on, Prospero?’

Prospero didn’t believe in sides. People deluded themselves – and so had he. Abruptly confidences began to flow. They concerned Madame de Menou with whom all was now over.

‘But,’ Nicola put his question with the care of a man handling a divining rod, ‘you’re still in love with her?’

‘Perhaps.’ Prospero looked gloomy. Love was, apparantly, as
unwelcome
in its recurrences as a case of malaria. It had started, he explained, on the day of Count Rossi’s death when he went to her palace in shame, wondering how to tell her that he had not been with the count when he died. True, he had seen him later but, by then, Rossi’s son had taken charge and Prospero found that he had no claim. Belatedly, it struck him as odd that he should have lived for months in daily intimacy with his employer without meeting a single member of his family.

‘I then realised how distinct he kept the two sides of his life. I belonged to Dominique’s and so became an intruder once the legitimate family appeared. And he can never have expected much of me. He had real secretaries at the ministry and I – was his boudoir lapdog.’ Prospero could have been about to lose control.

Giving him time to recover, Nicola talked about himself. He had come to Rome in search of Maria but found no trace of her.

Prospero, however, was intent on his own troubles. He had been caught between fears: that he was presuming by blaming himself and that he was truly to blame.

‘For his death? How?’

‘I spent a lot of time with him. So did she. We might have contributed to the way he felt.’

‘But it wasn’t a suicide!’

‘Wasn’t it? He didn’t take precautions. Not really. He was on the point of victory in the Chamber. He knew this and knew that it increased his danger. He’d had warnings. It was like Caesar.’

‘So what could you have done?’

Prosperou’s skin burned. ‘He may,’ he burst out, ‘have thought I was sleeping with Dominique.’

‘Were you?’

‘No. But if he thought so, it could have been the last straw.’

After the murder, he had gone to see her, hoping to be reassured. But she was feverish, having heard that the assassin had been smuggled away by a rabble which was now parading around the city shouting, ‘Blessed be the hand that slew the traitor!’ They had chanted this outside the windows of Rossi’s house and the Civic Guard had not chased them away.

‘They didn’t come here!’

‘Forgive me,’ said Prospero. ‘I … need to ask … It’s that he may have thought you and I …’ He couldn’t get it out.

Her finger on his lips surprised him. ‘Hush!’

‘Dominique!’

Again the finger pressed his lips. She drew him into her bedroom. ‘It’s all right,’ she whispered. ‘I think he expected this. He thought of you as our lightning deflector. Instead you attracted it. We stood too close.’

‘Did you believe her?’ Nicola marvelled.

‘I wasn’t sure. He was such a politic man. It was a strange moment. The assassins were being feasted and toasted in the city. We could hear it going on. Rowdiness. Torchlight processions. Threats. I ended up thinking that making love to her was somehow being done in his memory. At least we loved him.’

‘Did you go to the funeral?’

‘Yes. It was quick and furtive. There was a danger lest the assassins create a scandal there too and by then his family had fled to
Civitavecchia
. It was in the Church of San Lorenzo in Damaso. She didn’t come.’

Their love-making, said Prospero, had saved his sanity. Cut off from the city, which was going through its own fever, they stayed inside for ten days. Servants brought food. They had no shame. In between making love, they talked of Rossi. ‘I imagined that I was him. Or that he was in me and we were both making love to her. “This,” she told me, “is the only eternity there is! Take it now, now, now!” She meant it. It’s only looking back that I see that for her it wasn’t just bed talk.’

‘That woman’s a pagan!’ Nicola marvelled.

‘Yes. Another time she said: “He was too wise for jealousy. He knew what mattered most for him. It wasn’t this.”’

She was, said Prospero, an intoxicating creature. Golden-fleshed. Her
limbs moved like shoals of fish. Opalescent light fell through rippling curtains, splashing her as though she were in a forest – or were a forest. They ate Rossi’s grapes, the ones he had brought from Frascati, sliding them from mouth to mouth and letting the juice dribble so that they could lick it off and learn the contours of each other’s flesh. She knew more about the arts of the bedroom than the poor professional who had initiated him. This, despite what people said, was a lady’s game. You needed hot water, leisure and fresh sheets regularly supplied by servants. Apart from his dash to Rossi’s funeral, he stayed locked in with her, sweating out his lust fever. Silly, in his exhilaration, he told her how cannibals had given St Thomas Aquinas food for thought. The Divine Doctor had worried about how, for the body’s resurrection, eater and eaten could be restored to carnal integrity.