The Judas Cloth (42 page)

‘No.’ He explained that he was not here as a priest. The eyes of two acrobats, an animal-trainer and the dwarf were on his violet stockings. Death-and-mourning colour, they registered. What but bad luck could his visit bode? They made gestures to ward it off and cursed the jackass with the pistol. Their season was ruined. An acrobat hissed that the public was stupid! Without his spangles, he looked like a coal-heaver! He spat. Then swore. Nicola fled.

Two days later, looking feverish, Flavio called on him with news that the doctor feared the dancer might have irremediably injured her back. ‘Her’ he said with a faint emphasis. They were thinking of taking her to a local thaumaturgist, a nun who was alleged to work miracles. What could they lose? Doctor, dancer and lover had been in confabulation for twenty-four hours in the small room, which smelled of pomade and urine, while outside the theatre the single word ‘Closed’ spelled ruin for the Circus.

Flavio said it was intolerable that someone like that could be crippled.

‘I won’t apologise for the deceit. You’d hardly want me to give scandal? My mother did enough of that. “Scion of great family practises vice of Sodom” is a scandal-sheet title before which I rather quail. They haven’t burned anyone for the offence lately, but why gamble?’ Miss Ella’s real name, he added, was Olmaz Kingsley and she had been born in Louisiana twenty-two years ago. Convenience aside, female horseback riders were more popular with the public.

‘Did you seduce Miss Ella?’

‘She seduced me. Look, Don Nicola, I’m not pure. Is that so bad? I’m doubtless seeing the mote in others’ eyes, but, as I see it, prideful purity is the plague of our times. It leads to bloodshed.
I
don’t kill anyone. And don’t talk of souls because they can be shriven, for instance by you. Do you know why I don’t flounce out of this glittery, tottery, hypocritical old Church? It’s because I like being in it. I was brought up as Nobody’s Child and now enjoy being one of this state’s ducal ornaments and am
even ready to work for the privilege, which few are. I want it to go on, not to collapse. The Church is supposed to have many mansions – so why not a niche for me? At the moment you’re all busy cordoning off half the rooms and I do see why. You’re under fire, etcetera. But you shouldn’t reject friends. I’ll make a bargain with you if you like. I’ll promise not to hurt anyone too much and in a year or so I’ll be back to do you some practical good.’

‘Simony! You want to buy a licence to sin.’

‘Not at all, I’m showing
esprit
de
corps
by not leading a mutiny within St Peter’s barque. If it weren’t for loyalty I might. There’s no reason for the Church to condemn my love for Miss Ella. Don’t talk to me of “nature” because you don’t hold with it. It’s fallen. That’s your doctrine.’

‘We must redeem it!’

‘Bollocks! Keeping up appearances is the vital tribute and I’m making it. Don’t let’s quarrel. I have to go back to her. She can’t be left alone and the doctor isn’t as gentle as I am. We have to help her to relieve herself. She can’t move, you see. I’m her slop-emptier. Does that surprise you? I’m attached to her as I am to this doddery old state. Both she and it are rare phenomena and if it can’t perform its vital functions we’ll have to help it. Empty its slops. I must go.’

Nicola didn’t see him for a while after that. Six months later, though, he saw a poster for the Circo Cinisello featuring ‘the miraculous Miss Ella’, and guessed that either the doctor or the thaumaturge had cured her back.

About then he chanced to meet the lady who had done her best to bastardise Flavio.

The link was Miss Foljambe, who hailed him on one of her sorties with what must be yet another resigned young footman trundling a cartful of offal. The two were sheltering from a nipping wind between the columns of the tiny Temple of Vesta. Reminding Nicola of how, some years before, he had sent her Don Mauro’s address, she confessed that, from time to time, she sent the exile news that the Pope’s regime was on its last legs. It seemed, said she impishly, the kind thing to do. Now it was
her
turn to put Father Nicola in the way of doing a good deed. Would he call on her? There was a poor soul staying with her who needed consolation. ‘I think you know her son, Flavio. Wake up!’ shouted Miss Foljambe, but was only chiding her footman for failing to defend the offal from brigand cats. A near-earless torn, looking more simian than feline, had started a fight. ‘Come this afternoon,’ she cried while turning to deal with this.

On leaving her, Nicola’s thoughts turned to poor Don Mauro. Shortly after his ordination, he had heard that the ex-priest was in Paris, and, on looking him up, found him suffering from phthisis and living with a woman of whom he was ashamed. Though known locally as Monsieur Maur, and, presumably, resigned to lay status, he had been upset when Nicola walked in, dressed as the priest he now was. The Maur/Mauro ménage lived higgledy-piggledy in one room; privacy was impossible and Maur had insisted on getting out of bed.

‘Wait in the café,’ he told Nicola and began to shout at his companion, who had objected that he was too sick to move. Nicola, retreating from their conflict, reflected that if Don Mauro had had a beautiful mistress, the game might have seemed worth the candle; conversely, austerity
would have had claims to respect. Failures of both flesh and spirit were hard to redeem. Almost at once, though, while entering the acrid fug of the smoky café, he remembered that Maur/Mauro was a victim of failures not his own.

It was March and cold and when the exile arrived swaddled in a dingy scarf, discomfort grew. Nicola had hoped to be invited to witness peace restored in a tidy room. Instead, there was a prolonged palaver about credit with the café owner who, in the end, grudgingly, supplied two glasses of absinthe. No, no, said Mauro, Nicola must not pay. Very well. Pride was pride. He did not insist.

Looming between sunken cheeks, the sick man’s nose quivered tetchily. He was avid for news of home but turned out to know more than Nicola did. Had Nicola heard of the by-law forbidding cafés in Bologna to close their curtains? He tittered over that bit of petty repression, wondering what official snitchers hoped to see, then, as though challenged by candour, began to talk of his companion. A good woman, he stated a touch belligerently, but, well … Discomfited, he changed the subject.

Did Nicola know who was to be buried tomorrow here in Paris? The ex-Abbé de Lammenais! A brilliant spirit! ‘Remember what he said about Liberalism? “Do you fear it? Then baptise it!”’ Don Mauro repeated this several times, slapping the table and looking pugnaciously around. Nicola wondered whether he was running a fever. ‘He believed in the people,’ wheezed Don Mauro. ‘“Freedom and love,” he said, “will save the world.”’ Whispering, Don Mauro’s voice carried further than if he had spoken aloud, and its laboured suspiration gave it a ghostly authority. ‘He was the prophet of our time,’ breathed the sick, imperious voice. ‘He said the popes would lose their temporal power. Democracy will triumph, so the Church
must
come to terms with it Just remember that, Father Nicola! Remember those words!’

Nicola caught the eye of a girl who kept wiping the counter and watching him with curiosity. What, she must be wondering, was a young priest doing with Monsieur Maur? Looking with her eye at his
companion’s
stubbly face and room-dried linen, he guessed that he must be seen in the neighbourhood as a card.

‘He was a friend of Mazzini’s!’ said Monsieur Maur. ‘His funeral is tomorrow. Elise wouldn’t let me go alone. Now I can tell her I’m going with you.’ He could not, he explained, upset her too much. She worried lest he be taken ill. There was a rigmarole about why she couldn’t come herself. ‘Fate sent you!’ he concluded.

‘I’m not sure I can.’ Nicola, fresh from the seminary, did not want a scandal preceding him to Rome, where his career had already been mapped out. How say this, though, to the ruined priest who was now excited about tomorrow? The girl at the counter was listening to every word. Curiosity? If this had been Rome, Nicola would have guessed her to be a spy – then he saw that she was making eyes at him. He blushed. In the seminary he had forgotten about girls.

‘Wear secular clothes,’ commanded his friend. ‘He was condemned by two popes, don’t forget. And though he had a fashionable following in his day, you won’t see any duchesses tomorrow. But the people will come and won’t tolerate priests. It’s to be a pauper’s funeral. That’s what he wanted.’

Nicola’s efforts to beg off failed. They caused Don Mauro to choke in a coughing fit, then when he suggested bringing some wine upstairs to the woman, Elise – she might be an ally – Don Mauro said no. She was a lace-maker and gone to deliver her work.

‘I’m ill!’ He gripped Nicola by the elbows. ‘You can’t refuse me!’ There were red, fever spots in his cheeks. ‘Yes or no?’

So, Nicola had to say ‘yes’.

Next morning, his carriage made slow progress, due to the number of streets being dug up to facilitate the improvements ordained by M. Haussman, the new Prefect of the Seine.

‘You’re late,’ accused Maur. ‘And you can’t wear that cassock.’

The patron of the café was somehow browbeaten into lending lay clothes and at last a disguised Nicola, smelling faintly of old beer, was on his way to the funeral of one renegade priest in the company of another. He had paid off the carriage. They were to wait here for the hearse to pass, then fall in behind it. He prayed ardently that there would not be trouble.

Then it arrived, a poor-looking contraption. A police officer called: ‘Constable, remove that man.’ And a priest was hustled off.

The procession walked down the middle of the street. Men wearing aprons and smocks came out of shops and manufactories along the route and stood with bare heads as it passed.

Don Mauro said: ‘He didn’t believe in hell.’

Outside the graveyard, another crowd was waiting and when the two mingled, disorder broke out. The police seemed to be clubbing people
at random and word was passed down the line that very few mourners would be let into the graveyard.

‘There’s the poet Béranger!’ someone shouted.

Nicola craned his neck and glimpsed an old man leaning on the arm of a companion. ‘Do you want to take my arm?’ he asked Don Mauro who was galvanised with excitement.

‘Can you imagine a better funeral for a revolutionary,’ he said, then reddened. Had he been thinking of his own?

A quick-eyed fellow in a cloth cap caught his wrist. ‘Come on,’ he said in Italian, ‘we’ll squeeze in with the bigwigs.’

Quickly, he drew them past a police barrier in the wake of Béranger. Just behind them two or three gentlemen who had had the same idea were driven back and one shouted that he would sue the police. He had received a blow of a baton across his wrists as he tried to push back the barrier.

‘Bolognese, aren’t you?’ said the spry Italian and shook hands. ‘My name’s Viterbo.’

Nicola gave his name and, when Viterbo called him ‘Signor Santi’, felt ashamed of his disguise.

There were two squadrons of police armed with sabres on the left and right of the hemicycle. The coffin was lowered on ropes into a trench already filled with a row of coffins, and there were no speeches. As the grave-diggers shovelled in the earth an official told them, ‘Leave space for a child in case we get one.’ The filling in and levelling off was finished in silence.

‘Are we to put a cross?’

‘No.’

A grave-digger tied a bit of paper with the name Lammenais on a stick and planted it in the fresh earth.

Viterbo caught up with the other two outside the graveyard. He had been nosing about and learned that the coffin had cost eight francs and the hearse-driver been surprised to see a silver plate of false teeth in the corpse’s mouth – a queer thing for a pauper.

Turning into a small
tabac,
he and Don Mauro made the speeches which the dead man had forbidden at his graveside. They were garrulous and expectant as though the denuded funeral had left them dangling. Don Mauro was soon flushed with drink and kept saying that they must rid their minds of that ‘last orthodoxy, the notion of a good death’. When Nicola said he had to leave, Viterbo asked, ‘Does your old woman keep you on leading strings? We can’t,’ he urged, ‘let the poor corpse rot
without drinking to his safe passage to the next world. He went without the help of the black beetles!’

‘What have you against priests?’

‘Joker!’ Viterbo elbowed Nicola in his borrowed waistcoat.

He promised to take care of Maur and a last glimpse showed the invalid to be in congenial company. By now other mourners were around the pair and an aviary of hands making signals so graphic that, even from afar, Nicola could read a convivial cynicism in the shaking of steepled fingers and in the irreverent sign of the fig.

When Nicola gave her a small gift of money, Maur’s woman revealed that her companion was ill in ways hard to understand. It was mental. ‘Monsieur,’ she called Nicola, although he had resumed his cassock, which showed she had no grounding in the religion lying at the root of her friend’s trouble. He, she disclosed, was in a sick panic lest, despite Monsieur Lammenais, there be a hell and Pius IX have the key to it. ‘Why,’ she sighed, ‘is the Pope so cruel?’ Maur, who would not bow the knee to the papal turncoat, was torn between this world and the next. He had nightmares. ‘He wouldn’t want you to know.’

Nicola could only pray, blasphemously, that his friend would continue to find solace in making the defiant sign of the fig.

Before leaving Paris, he took his remorse to a teacher at the seminary, a French Legitimist with a linenfold face, who warned that the World, the Flesh and the Devil had new disguises, namely Freedom and Love. Always remember, warned this Gothic figure, that indocile priests could cause a schism! Some were actually advocating the surrender of the Temporal Power and wanted His Holiness to be a purely spiritual leader! The priest spoke with pity for these soft-heads who wanted Pope Pius to divest himself. Was he to be a mere Italian bishop? Without land or independence! How then could he deal with Catholics living in other states? How pretend to be impartial? See where the false light leads! The Frenchman’s mouth compressed itself into a crack so taut that the top of his head looked in danger of falling off.

In Rome, Nicola found the same row raging, for Republicans had informed the people that the Gift of Constantine – which their priests
had always told them was the basis for the existence of the Pope’s state – was a fable. This knowledge, though not new, was dangerous to disseminate at a time when Garibaldini were once more plotting to seize the Pope’s territory.

Besides, said Prospero, the
habit
of scepticism was bad for the simple. Legends were cohesive. ‘Tailors say you should think nine times before cutting your cloth and I say the same about throwing out a good legend. The one about the Emperor Constantine is very good. He,’ reminded Prospero, ‘was converted from paganism when he saw the cross shine in the sky with the words “In this sign shalt thou conquer!” He then did conquer his enemies and in gratitude gave the Church its own lands. We need a new vision like that.’

Prospero smiled. They were in his apartment – not the one in the Collegio dei Nobili Ecclesiastici; he now had his own. ‘May I offer you something?’ He stepped towards the bell pull. ‘No?’ His cassock suited him for he had a waist like a girl’s. He was making headway in the Church. Already, he had taken his degree
in
utroque
iure,
had practised at the bar for two years and was launched on the ceremony of entering the prelacy, a leisurely affair which he described lightly, while admitting that it had been an ordeal, since he had had to submit himself to the separate scrutiny of the seven voting prelates of the Signatura Iustitiae, at each of whose lodgings he had been required to call. He had worn black. Only when His Holiness granted him a position would he put on a purple mantelet which – he could not resist showing it – he had already purchased.

‘
In
hoc signo
vinces
!’
quipped Nicola, fingering the cloth.

Prospero’s opinions were consistent. ‘We need less scepticism,’ he had told Nicola recently, ‘and more visions.’

This was an allusion to the visionary Caterina da Sezze, whose fortunes had prospered since Cardinal Amandi first investigated her case. Now famous and fashionable, she travelled regularly between her village and the papal court where she enjoyed the hospitality of the Pope’s steward, to whose children she was godmother and where her readiness to tell fortunes earned her a flow of cash which was managed by an entourage of three priests and a friar. Cardinal Amandi believed her to be an impostor, and had given Nicola the task of finding proof.

‘Don’t talk about it,’ His Eminence had advised and Nicola hadn’t. Yet his friend had said ‘We need more visions!’ Chance?

‘Everything about this case is delicate!’ Caterina, said the cardinal, had a great sway over His Holiness whom she kept exhorting to defend
the Temporal Power. This message, supposedly relayed from heaven, was suspiciously timely.

If hers was an imposture, her attendant priests must be collaborating in it. Others too perhaps? The scale of the potential scandal was daunting. Souls could be troubled. ‘We must pray,’ said Amandi and, having done so, decided that Nicola should seek the truth in Caterina’s village.

It had taken him a while. Local reticence had had to be circumvented. Her village, a huddle of mucky lanes, owed it to her if it was on distinguished persons’ maps. For a foreigner – and anyone from over ten miles away was that – to ask probing questions could raise hackles. So, instead, he let it be known that he was writing a pious booklet about her and hoped to gather the sort of detail which, if one waited for her sanctity to be declared, would be surely lost. Her first tooth? Her early charity? Anything, he assured, was welcome.