The Judas Cloth (6 page)

Mastai
to
Amandi
:

Mastai
to
Amandi,
1845
:

The
same
to
the
same
:

Interesting to reread those letters and note the tart, easy irony of the man on the sidelines! His Holiness, Pope Gregory XVI, was not ailing but dying. Shortly after this, His Eminence and his fellow cardinals met in conclave to elect a successor. After some haggling, Mastai-Ferretti was himself picked as a compromise candidate to the surprise of everyone except Monsignor Amandi, who claimed to have had a premonition of his friend’s rise.

It was not, of course, a premonition at all. Amandi was a pope-maker.
For years he had been haunting antechambers and dropping hints in influential ears. Then, when his efforts succeeded, he began to wonder whether, after all, his friend had the stomach for the job. Mastai was a good administrator but there is more to politics than that – especially in times like ours.

I have a letter which Amandi wrote at the time, justifying himself. ‘Stomach maybe not,’ he wrote, ‘but head yes.’ Mastai had a head for figures and
that,
as Amandi must have assured half the conclave at one time or another, was what was needed with the Treasury in the state it was. I can just imagine him: ‘Your Eminence didn’t
know
!
About our near-insolvency! The lack of balance sheets! The public debt!’ He must have seriously unsettled his hearers. ‘Remember,’ he would add, ‘how he handled the disturbances in Spoleto! He’s a man to build bridges between factions and what else should a pontiff do?’

His hope was that Mastai could reconcile the ideals of 1789 – the ideals only: liberty and fraternity, not the guillotine! – with the gospel’s message, and the Church with a world it had shunned for fifty years.

‘If he succeeds,’ wrote Amandi, ‘it will be by blind instinct which is the only safe way.’ Pius, as we both knew, had no grasp of the abstract and this, argued Amandi, was all to the good. Theory frightened more people than practice and had sunk the chances of Cardinal Gizzi, who went into conclave with the reputation of being ‘the reformers’
candidate
’, just as my uncle, Cardinal Lambruschini, was known as the champion of the
status
quo.
In the end, as so often happens, it was the third man, the dark horse, whose discretion won the votes of the timid old
porporati
who were fearful of extremes but eager for a change.

Returning from Paris after the conclave – as he was not yet a cardinal, he had not returned for it – Monsignor Amandi picked up garbled news. Along the route, the new pope’s name was being mauled beyond recognition. In the north nobody had heard of him. Mastai-Ferretti? They tried it on their tongues. Bishop of
where
?

Closer to Imola legends had begun. A white dove had been seen to land on Mastai’s carriage as he left for Rome and had refused to leave the carriage roof. A link boy, while lighting Amandi to his lodgings with a torch of pitch and tow, swore that he, personally, had seen the dove hover. Dazzled by the boy’s exclamatory torch-waving, Amandi was soon seeing hovering doves himself. Also tongues of fire. A hot drop burned his hand.

In Rome the great topic was the new pope’s first political move. Pius IX – this was now Mastai’s title – had granted an unusually generous amnesty to political exiles and prisoners, and Liberals were collecting money to pay for their return. Some, already back, were said to be advising the Pope about prison reform.

Grey-faced men with skittish eyes were received in the Quirinal, and prelates were scandalised that fellows fresh from studying subversion in Swiss cafés or the prisons of the realm should have the new pope’s ear. The city was filling up with dangerous elements.

The Caffè Nuovo, the spice shops and the Sapienza University were hives of Liberal agitation and who could doubt but that counter-intrigues were being hatched in the gloom of certain great palaces?

Monsignor Amandi was alert to the danger posed by quondam power-brokers and by the underlings who, having worked for them as bravos, would now be frightened for their lives. Rome was a town inured to intrigue and he guessed that the Gregoriani – this was the name being given to those who hankered back to the late pope’s reign – would not
easily throw in the sponge. Dispatches from Vienna warned that Metternich was aghast.

Absorbed by these dangers, Amandi nearly missed a subtler one to which his first meeting with the new pope should have alerted him. Mastai did not smile at his friend’s teasing reference to the white dove. All in white himself, he seemed as awed by his regalia as a bride on her wedding day.

Amandi asked about another anecdote he had heard. Was it true that the cardinals had been about to blackball the amnesty when Mastai, taking off his white skull cap, placed it over the voting counters and said: ‘Brothers, Pio Nono has turned them all white’?

‘Ah!’ Mastai softened. ‘The people like that story, don’t they? I play to the gallery a little – under inspiration.’ Fluttering a wing-like hand, he mimed a hovering paraclete. ‘I
have
to believe that. You, better than anyone, know the meagreness of my human powers.’

‘But you were elected because of them.’

Pius gave a shrewd laugh. ‘I was a compromise candidate. But now the stone the builders rejected is on the top of the arch and I must have confidence in God’s choice, must I not?’

As Amandi described them afterwards, the pride and humility were absolute. ‘But now you are Peter. Peter and Pater.’

‘By God’s grace.’

And mine, thought his friend, and wondered if it might have been safer for Pius to rely more on human advice. ‘Let me,’ he offered, ‘be your ears and eyes for a while.’

‘Oh, I have the eyes of Argus working for me now.’

It was hard to tell whether the snub was deliberate.

‘And the people’s hearts are good.’ Pius had a sweet, exalted smile which Amandi didn’t remember from before. It was a held a little too long, as though for distant viewing.

‘Holy Father …’ Amandi’s mind divided. Part of it monitored the delivery of a warning about the enemies of reform who would find it all too easy to create trouble. Already this year there had been bread-riots in the provinces. One third of the inhabitants of Bologna were indigent and poor cereal harvests all over Europe had exacerbated their misery – but there were also those who
used
the mob. ‘Holy Father …’

The other half of his mind was marvelling at how this title had reversed relations between himself and his old protégé. ‘Holiness,’ he practised, while a bounce of memory recalled the sorry figure the young Giovanni Maria had cut after being rejected by the Pope’s Noble Guard.
He had used his epilepsy to avoid being drafted into Napoleon’s Grand Army to fight the Russian campaign, and later the excuse, staying on his record, closed off all hope of a military career. For a younger son, there was nothing for it then but to don a cassock. Had Mastai forgotten the mundane source of his vocation?

‘Let me at least take a look at the police archives,’ Amandi pleaded, ‘now before they start hiding things.’ He was thinking: they may have files on us both.

The man in white was twice the size of the rather wispy youth who had been Amandi’s fellow guest at the Colonna palace a score or so years before. Damascened vistas flickered in memory as Amandi recalled draughty hangings, smoky oil lamps and the charcoal foot-warmers supplied on evenings judged unbearably cold. On others, the only resource was to persuade one of the princess’s pug dogs to sit warming one’s lap. The malicious claimed that, when her other guests had gone, Donna Clara sometimes performed the same service for Giovanni Maria.

Turning from old scandal to new, Amandi asked whether gaslight was at last to be installed in the city?

‘Yes,’ said Mastai. ‘A Jesuit adviser,’ he confided, ‘warns me that this makes me the second Lucifer or Light-bearer since it will encourage adultery and conspiracy and people’s staying up when they should be asleep. I asked if sleep was the Christian ideal. He doesn’t want us to build railways either.’

‘People should stick to their station in life.’

‘Chemin
de fer,
chemin
d’enfer.’

The old jokes drew them together.

Mastai did not, however, want to leave his friend with the impression that the Jesuits were hostile. Quite the contrary. Why, after his election, pupils from the Collegio Romano had untackled his horses, harnessed themselves to his carriage shafts and pulled him in triumph up the Quirinal Hill.

‘Showing you their stamina perhaps?’ Amandi feared that the Jesuits must be smarting under their loss of power for, during the last reign, they had been consulted at every turn. It was said – and he saw no reason to disbelieve it – that all the cardinals resident in Rome had gone every evening to the Gesù to receive instructions. Yes, they must be smarting, for Liberals were making much of the fact that Mastai had not taken a Jesuit confessor. He should beware of them, Amandi warned. But Pius was euphoric with optimism. He was not a Liberal, he assured. He loathed Liberalism – but neither did he care for conservative fanatics.
The people, he insisted, understood him. The people were his and he could rely on their support. He began to talk about a fritter-seller whose stall had been moved by the police and who had appealed to him for help. Seeing the look on Amandi’s face, he laughed and acknowledged with his old, shrewd charm that, to be sure, statecraft was not a matter of pleasing fritter-sellers. No! But, since half our troubles came from insensitivity to trifling abuses, he planned to overhaul the police, improve the penal system, dissolve the
Centurioni
and …

Amandi was appalled. ‘Holy Father!’ The title rang like an oath. ‘You’ll stir up a hornets’ nest! You’ll unite your enemies against you!’

‘But,’ Mastai skirmished, ‘I’m not thinking of
reforms
!
Only
improvements
.’ Then, taking Amandi by the elbows, ‘You’ll help me tame the hornets, won’t you? Gently, as St Francis tamed Brother Wolf?’ Rocking slightly on the balls of his feet, he added: ‘Tell me who they are.’

‘They’re everyone!’ And Amandi tried to explain the dangers of tinkering with a crumbling edifice. ‘First the bureaucrats …’

‘Well, tame them for me then.’ Mastai kissed him on both cheeks.

So Amandi went forth to take the bureaucratic pulse.

He was not sure whether Pius had thought up the task so as to rid himself of an intrusive old friend’s concern. Mastai was changing in office and proving, if proof were needed, that power made men volatile to the point of femininity. Exalted and excitable in his new white gown, he was in manifest need of protection from competing suitors – mob, Jesuits, reformers – and perhaps most of all from the pride he took in seeing his election as a miracle from God.

Amandi wondered whether to tell the pontiff of his own electoral machinations on his behalf, but decided that this would look like the presentation of a bill. Still – Pius’s exaltation was worrying and it was hard not to feel alarm at his talk of overhauling the police and dissolving the
Centurioni.

‘Away with them!’ he had said, flicking his palms. ‘
Via
!’

And to be sure the
Centurioni
would be no loss. On the other hand, once disbanded, might they not
plot
?
Might they not hire themselves out to the reactionary faction whose leaders were now despondently
brooding
in their palaces? Mastai’s ingenuousness was worrying and so was his gusto: that irruption of private feeling which clerical celibacy was designed to minimise.

So off the devoted Monsignore went to Palazzo Madama to disarm
the fears of the Treasury employees whom he found, as he had expected, in a panic at the news that a New Broom was to sweep through their offices. They were men whose most daring concession to novelty had hitherto been the occasional use of an iron pen.

‘Monsignor Amandi, have you forgotten your friends?’ The festive voice came from a carriage inside which sat an old cardinal with whom Amandi’s acquaintance was slight. Two horses, three lacily liveried footmen and a coachman waited and so did anyone else who needed to get past, while His Eminence, bobbing like an affable puppet in its booth, blocked the narrow lane and paid court to the new pope’s friend. Today, he told Amandi, he had learned a new word: ‘Gregoriano! Have you heard it? The Contessa Spaur tells me that that’s what they’re calling the old guard who regret the days of the lamented Pope Gregory. Well, there will always be some who can’t change:
Codini
who’d like to keep on powdering their hair and tying it in a tail! Nostalgia ferments. It can also explode. I don’t have to tell you.’

Laughing inside his red-trimmed window, the cardinal had managed to transform the fetid lane into a drawing room – or was it a confessional? ‘Whisper here to me!’ His own hair could not have been whiter if he had powdered it. ‘Why don’t you come round for a chat? I’m a tomb, you know. Nothing you say will go further. When will you come?’

Amandi was about to excuse himself – he had no time to visit the old man – when the cardinal’s hand drew him close. ‘Those who have something to hope for,’ said His Eminence in a lower, brisker tone, ‘are less dangerous than those who have not. His Holiness must not drive the Gregoriani to despair. Even a tamed beast fights when cornered.’

Amandi was speechless. ‘His Holiness,’ he managed after moments, ‘is a man of peace.’

‘To be sure!’ The other man’s tongue flicked like a lizard’s. ‘But those he has pardoned are not. They want revenge on the men who condemned them – or the Gregoriani think they do, which is just as bad! Fear, Monsignore, can unleash the worst catastrophes!’ Amandi’s hand was released and the face in the window gave him a social smile. ‘Come and see me, Monsignore. We’ll toast your future which I’m sure is rosy! Come tomorrow,’ called the cardinal as his carriage lurched off and the dung, churned up by its wheels, released a sweet, pungent blast.

Lifting his skirts, Amandi walked on and soon came to the
meat-market
, where iridescent flies hovered. Dodging a cart fresh from the
shambles, he passed San Eustachio Church where stags’ heads – carved ones – displayed crucifixes in their antlers.

The incongruity of such an emblem in a butcher’s quarter was a sample of the city’s contradictions. Who had sent the old cardinal to talk to him?

At Police headquarters rumours had preceded him. Clerks, with forearms encased in false sleeves of shiny cotton, popped from
cubbyholes
and desks. Their concern was to know whether laymen were to be brought into the service.

Was it true, Monsignore? What sort of laymen? Did that mean men so blatantly lay that they wouldn’t wear a cassock? For, if it came to that, most of them were lay too and only wore it from respect for usage. Were they now to be penalised? Turned out of their jobs? No? Really, Monsignore? Could they count on that?

Reassured, they told him that he was, of course, welcome to look at any records he liked, although finding them would take time. They, said the archivists, were not to blame for this. Speaking with respect, Monsignore, the worst complexities were the results of efforts at reform. The truth was that to change anything you would have to change everything since the system was a network of exemptions and privileges.

Whose?

Those of certain families, Monsignore. Of religious houses, parishes, chivalric orders, cardinals … Pleased to connive, they flung open doors and cupboards, vying with each other to show this representative of the new authority the ways of the old. Come, come and see. And up and down they led him, through smells of mice and mildew, to a vestibule where boxes of ledgers were being packed for removal.

To where?

Appeasing him – whom they had perhaps led here on purpose – they shrugged and laughed so that the pens stuck behind their ears trembled like antennae. ‘It’s as you say, Monsignore,’ they exclaimed, although Amandi, had said nothing. ‘To change anything one would have to change it all!’ Amused at the enormity, they tapped their papery foreheads. Here was where the indexes were, Monsignore. All in here! Tap, tap! Indexes to indexes! They held St Peter’s keys – or the keys to his keys, which was why they were hard to get at and hard to turn. They laughed and their laughter had the creak of rust.

What were these boxes? asked Amandi. Where were they going?