Authors: Julia O'Faolain
‘Does he imagine he’s the only one tempted to devote himself to his own salvation? asked Odescalchi. ‘You may tell him from me that I wrestle with the urge on an average of once a fortnight. Tell him too that we’re praying for him.’ Then he advised Amandi to stress spiritual fellowship when talking to the archbishop. In time of need your fellows could provide support, and he and Amandi now held Mastai up, or anyway back.
They presumed him to be a prey to scruples more precise than those mentioned in his letters. A temptation of the mind or, less importantly, of the flesh? Patriotism? Heresy? The excessive charity which leads to heresy? The cardinal knew that only a deep disarray could have made Mastai grind out the letter to His Eminent self and the one to Pope Gregory which ended: ‘Permission to withdraw would, Oh Most Holy Father, be the greatest expression of your love and I would be grateful to you always …’ Permission was not forthcoming, but Mastai was to receive more tangible grounds for gratitude when the following year – Donna Clara again! said the monotonous gossips – he was promoted to the Diocese of Imola. This was a major see, though not an archbishopric, so it was with a purely apparent loss of rank that he became for a while plain Bishop Mastai. He was forty now, and though he would not recover from the emotional disorders left by the epilepsy of his
adolescence
, had for years been judged sufficiently free of it to say mass unaided. Was he still beset by scruples? Perhaps, for he was unusually susceptible to signs and wonders and sent assiduously to solicit the prayers of the visionaries who, being numerous at this time, were thought to have been sent by God to comfort His people after the ravages of revolution. They must have comforted Monsignor Mastai, for the following year he received letters from Odescalchi and Amandi congratulating him on his new serenity. Amandi, who had been on missions to Paris and Brussels where he sharpened an already keen political sense, was particularly pleased at his friend’s elevation to a key diocese.
August
1833
Now that you are back I warn that you may get more letters than you might like. While you’ve been away, I have been struggling to come to terms with my translation to this great see with its stipend of nine instead of three thousand scudi, and do not doubt that, after my protests, I must look in some quarters like a shrewd contriver.
The same divisions prevail here as in Spoleto. Did I tell you that my first invitation was from a gentleman whose wife is a connection of yours, Count Stanga? This happy discovery was a trifle marred by a subsequent one that the count is held to be unsound. But then I am sometimes considered so myself by, among others, His Holiness who likes to quip that in my family’s household even the cat is a Liberal! I take this to mean that I am on the Church’s reserve, to be used only if it should one day need to show a Liberal face. Having, thus, little to lose, I dine fearlessly with the unsound Stangas. At first we were always
en
famille.
Then I met their friends. I fancy the aim had been to sound me out because no sooner was the ice well broken than a young guest began to praise my mildness during the Spoleto troubles. I told him that this had been due rather to charity than to partisan feeling, whereupon he remarked that charity was precisely what was bringing some priests to make their peace with Liberalism. He was unabashed by my saying that, being unacquainted with the ideas current in fashionable drawing rooms, I could not discuss them. His name is Gambara. He is greatly exercised by His Holiness’s condemnation of freedoms of thought and the press and by the new encyclical which, he fears, must drive Liberals from the Church. Did I know, he asked, that there is a secret movement for reform within the Church itself? I said I did not and marvelled at his knowledge. He claims he has it from his spiritual director, whose name he will not divulge, since the secret of the confessional should cut both ways. I took this to mean that I too might speak my mind without fear.
This was impertinent but I own to some curiosity about his clerical
friends – Tuscans, would you not guess? – who espouse unorthodoxies, some of which go back at least fifty years to the Synod of Pisa which, as we know, was declared a non-event. This shadow-Church is, I suppose, the equivalent of the
Carbonari,
who equally secretly elaborate plans for an alternative form of civil government. The count is thought to be one of
them
and his young friend, a layman with a curiously clerical cast of mind, must, I suppose, aim to recruit me. To be prudent, I should delate him but am reluctant to do so – except now to you. In our conversations I am the soul of discretion and beg you to be the same by destroying this, which I shall not send by the public post.
April
1835
Gambara continues to tease me. I ask the count about him and am imperfectly reassured by his replies. I fear that he too is rash and that his wife worries about this. She is a quiet, pretty woman and devoted to their small son who is about four. I suspect her health prevented her having another.
Gambara’s spiritual directors talk, it seems, of abolishing mass stipends, confessions, benefices and, to be sure, ecclesiastical courts. Priests and laymen should be equal before the law! Parish priests should be elected by the laity and the clergy be of and with the people. It is a farrago of generous contradictions, not the least being Gambara’s status as a layman. On my saying so, I was surprised to see him redden like a girl.
‘Forgive me,’ he begged. ‘I don’t want to insult you – but neither do I want the privilege of being a priest. In this state, you see,’ he explained gravely, ‘the privilege is a worldly one, since only the clergy enjoy high stipends or qualify for high office.’
I have decided not to visit the Stanga villa for a while.
Amandi saved these letters. Later ones were peppered with sideswipes at the chronic absurdity of those around Mastai who was as easily roused to humour as to indignation. Both bristled in the margins of a pamphlet which he sent on with a complaint that someone was circulating it among his diocesan priests.
It praised the
Centurioni,
a militia founded to ‘defend the godly against French doctrines’, and urged priests to keep an eye on free-thinking landlords and forbid labourers to work for them. ‘That,’ triumphed the pamphlet-writer, who signed himself ‘the water-sprinkler of truth’, ‘will
teach these proud gentlemen that they need the people more than the people need them!’
‘Who writes such things?’ marvelled Mastai. ‘They undermine people’s respect for their betters. Our zealots don’t need a guillotine. They’ll cut off their own heads!’
He had failed to hit it off with local conservatives who were alarmed by his hobnobbing with the Stangas. The count, they warned, was a
Carbonaro
and the Devil knew what heathen mumbo-jumbo went on in his villa after dark. Had Monsignore himself seen none of this?
*
Lieutenant Nardoni laughed. ‘Well, no, I suppose Your Lordship wouldn’t!’ A squat man, dense with muscle, Nardoni kept his fists in a half clench and his knees bent as though ready to spring. ‘They have tunnels and secret entrances,’ he explained.
He had come to the sacristy one Sunday. Would it be presuming, he wondered, if he were to invite his lordship to lunch at his humble home? There were devout members of his flock who had not had a chance to meet him. This sounded like a challenge, so the lunch became an armistice. The other guests made it clear that they, though less
well-born
than the Stangas, were loyal and that loyalty was insufficiently prized. The
Centurioni
,
for example, were the true salt of the earth and
were
needed
to defend property. Vagrants had been cutting down fruit trees and the roads were unsafe.
Mastai, lest his presence seem grudging, accepted second helpings of boiled beef and caper sauce.
‘It’s a local speciality,’ said his hostess.
A communion? Eyes winked in the grease.
‘Some,’ said the Signora, ‘think they’re above the law. It’s not the common folk who conspire.’
‘And some,’ said her husband, ‘get puffed up by reading the likes of Babeuf!
Boeuf
,’
he joked as the meat came round again. ‘Ba!’ An
ex-customsman
, who knew the names of forbidden authors, he was silly with pride at having a bishop at his board. ‘Sometimes,’ he reminisced, ‘we would find subversive papers like
The
Morning
Chronicle
wrapped around travellers’ shoes. You had to be alert for such tricks. Or they’d line suitcases with it. Gentlemen were the worst! Expecting to get away with it. Nobody is above suspicion.’
The bishop was reminded unpleasantly of the girl whose baby, it was
now clear, could not have been sired by her uncle, although – he hoped cravenly –
she
might think so for she had called him by her uncle’s name.
‘Were you,’ his confessor had asked delicately, ‘quite yourself?’ Referring to the epileptic symptoms which could still cause mental confusion. Maybe he’d dreamed the episode?
‘Expecting to get away with it,’ repeated Nardoni. ‘But that didn’t work with me. I’m in-corr-up-tible, Monsignore!’
The bishop blushed.
‘No point dwelling on it,’ the confessor had decided. ‘The thing now is to deal with the consequences.’
The girl had been moved to a convent at Fognano in his new diocese. Best for her, the Reverend Mother had agreed, to be where nobody knew her story. The Abbess of Fognano must, of course, be told. But she, an old friend of Monsignore’s, would be discreet.
He had already visited to ask how things were. Had the girl mentioned the child at all? No. Or her past?
‘Not really. We gave out that the reason she left the other convent was because she’d been ill and the air here was healthier.’
‘You think she has managed to forget … everything?’
The abbess looked from under her coif at the bishop who had once held her longer than was strictly necessary, during a game of Blind Man’s Buff, when they were both fifteen and living in the town of Senigallia. ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘We all forget things.’
He saw that she had been hoping to reminisce with him about their youth. They had belonged to big, friendly families, and she loved recalling long-gone carriage drives and cheerful gatherings at New Year. Today, though, his mind was on the girl.
‘Oblivion,’ he told her, ‘is a grace. Better relinquish the past.’ He made a chopping gesture with his hand. Tac! Cut it off.
The abbess insisted that he honour the convent by taking a
refreshment
, though her mood had changed. They had been young together and now here she was, a woman of forty with nothing further to expect, whereas time moved differently for Monsignore. In the end, the same thought struck him and he became affable as people do when made aware of an inequality. He even listened to some of her gossip. Her girlhood friends were now grandmothers and she had crocheted caps for their children’s children. The thought returned them to the girl and her baby. Monsignor Amandi had sent for it. It had seemed wise to give it to a wet nurse straight away.
‘I know you’ll be kind to her,’ he said as he left.
He was right. The abbess had entered the convent to escape a tyrannical, bedridden father who was still tormenting two sisters left behind. In gratitude for her escape, she made the lot of other refugees who came here as happy as she could.
*
Monsignor Amandi wrote to Gambara that Monsignor Mastai had lunched with a spy who worked for the office of the Cardinal Secretary of State. ‘Be prudent‚’ he recommended. ‘Keep away and let his lordship get his fill of the Zelanti once and for all.’
Amandi, a man whose energies found insufficient outlet in the diplomatic missions at which he showed such tact, relished the sly exercise of influence over a man like Mastai who, being shrewd, pious, ailing and charming, was likely to rise higher than he would himself. People pitied Mastai – and how distrust a man you pity? Besides, he still had the support of Donna Clara.
*
Summer. Imola dozed among its brick arcades. Pigeon’s-foot pink, amber, plum and tawny were blanched to a sparkling pallor –
pigeon-droppings
– until sundown when a cardinal tint blazed then dissolved in a dusk sweet with eddies of tobacco smoke, as old men hauled
straw-bottomed
chairs into the streets and began to gossip.
The rumour was that Monsignor Mastai-Ferretti … Shush! Sounds carry! What about Monsignore? … a row with Monsignor Folicardi of Faenza. Really? Why? He wants the Abbey of Fognano to be under himself and Folicardi says it’s always been in
his
diocese which is true. Maybe Monsignore wants the
abbess
under himself! Shush! They say that she … What’s all this whispering? What? How old is she?
No
! Well, have it your way. Anyway what’s sure and certain is that Monsignor Folicardi sent a protest to Rome but Monsignore has friends there and the convent has changed dioceses. Yes. Oh, he’s a powerful bishop and will soon have a red hat. An attractive man too. No smoke without fire.
*
The lieutenant crossed the cathedral square with the bandy gait of a horseman. Guessing that secret gawkers had him in their sights, he squared his shoulders. Authority needed to impose itself. Every so often, as he’d told His Lordship, you had to fire off your gun. Jacobins were getting too confident. ‘With respect, they’ve been raising their heads
since Your Lordship’s kindness to them. They think now they have licence to meet openly. Oh, nothing to put your finger on, but we can smell their mood. Around here you get a feel for that. Bologna law school is close and turns out pettifoggers who would argue the leg off an iron pot. That young fellow, Gambara, thinks he has Your Lordship’s protection.’
The bishop had given him a look of lordly detachment. ‘Oh?’
Feeling squat – he wore boots with heels – the lieutenant recognised the lordliness as secular and resented it. The Mastai-Ferretti were small nobility and as pugnacious as bantams. Men like that – the lieutenant knew – expected men like us to fret our guts for them and, if it came to it, fight. Nardoni had a wound near his groin – a bit closer and
buona
notte,
he’d be a eunuch! The thought haunted him. He dreamed frequently that he was being gelded and woke sweating – or, worse, only thought he’d woken up, so that when he touched himself to make sure, he found nothing there and heard his voice whimper in a falsetto. Wrenching himself from sleep’s sharp practices, he would bite himself, touch his balls and waken his wife. ‘Open your legs. Yes. Now! I don’t care if you do get pregnant again! Move, can’t you! Oh Jesus! oh God, God, GOD!’ Well, at least he had proven his manhood – if he was awake!
Was
he? He never enjoyed it now. Not any more and all because of a skirmish on the Tuscan border! All to keep fat prelates safe – men who themselves had no use for balls and used their safety to encourage agitators who might one day … The lieutenant’s hand crept
unstoppably
to his groin and he saw the bishop look fastidiously away.
‘He’s a tout, Monsignore. A spy.’
‘Who?’
‘Gambara, Gianmarco.’ Despite himself, it came out like a police report.
‘For whom?’
The lieutenant planned to find out. For now, all he could say was: ‘He gets letters by private courier. And his talk in cafés is too free.’
‘Too free for a
spy
?’
‘He could be a decoy – sent perhaps to provoke others.’
That, Nardoni saw with satisfaction, upset the bishop. Somehow he’d hit home.
‘He,’ said Mastai surprisingly, ‘says you’re one.’
‘Me? A spy?’
‘Or decoy.’ His lordship laughed as though this were a joke. In the lieutenant’s experience, jokes were rarely just jokes. ‘The talkative,’ said
Mastai, ‘in your book are all decoys and the rest are spies. So you too must be one or the other. Provoke
what,
anyway? Talk of what?’