Authors: Julia O'Faolain
As an afterthought, he produced a French newspaper. ‘Here’s a blow struck for freedom and struck, my reverend friends, in your own diocese! I’ll leave it with you. Sorry if it disturbs your digestion.’ He left.
Amandi shook his head. ‘Brace yourself,
fili
mi
,
the French love to disturb. It’s their national vice.’ He unfolded the paper in which an article had been ringed in red ink. Entitled A VISIT TO THE POPE’S OLD STATES, it was an interview by a French journalist with Sister Paola:
The nun had to speak to us across a barricade, for the plain people of her village have locked her up so as to lose her neither to the new authorities nor the old. They think of her as one of themselves, and indeed when we saw her she was wearing clogs. She refused to talk about politics. ‘For most people,’ she told us, ‘politics are like cholera. You pray they won’t touch you and make the sign against the evil eye if they do.’
She wouldn’t talk either about the miracles with which she is credited nor of the crimes laid at her door. We asked if she knew of the whispered charges: performing abortions and making women barren. Using philters as old as paganism to remedy the sins of young girls. Could she guess where people got such ideas? No answer, so we tried another tack. Had she heard, we asked, of the coming Council in Rome? It was to be held in a few years’ time. Another blank look.
We, we explained, were wondering whether religion too sometimes seems like cholera to people through whose villages armies have marched so often in its name. Several visionaries, we told her, have prophesied that the coming Council will declare the Pope infallible so as to finish with strife and bring peace to parishes like hers. Does she, a holy woman, have anything to say about this?
But Sister Paola remained irredeemably taciturn.
Did she believe the Pope to be infallible? We knew he had been her confessor for several years. All she would say to this was that it was beyond her competence and, when pressed, added that the Pope was a good man but that the opinion of her uncle, who had also been a good man, was that if any mortal man were to be infallible, human endeavour would come to a halt. Trial and error were the way to improvement, this uncle used to say, and why change anything if we know we’re right now?
This brought us to the topic of ballooning and the story of how, three years ago, she saved one which was being blown out to sea. Eyewitnesses swore that as soon as she had prayed for the balloonists’ safety the wind shifted and blew them back to shore. Sister Paola laughed at this. The wind, she told us, was blowing in two different directions and when the navigator wanted to rise and catch a contrary wind he threw out ballast.
‘Do you think the state should do the same? Throw out ballast and change direction?’
No answer.
‘Should the Church?’
At this, Sister Paola must have given a signal to her protectors for they
hustled us away. Far be it from us to claim that this unassuming woman is a pythoness. Still, it is heartening that the Church and the Kingdom of Italy which have so long been at odds have been able to agree on one small matter: the sparing of her small hospital which is to be let stay open as a symbol and, it is hoped, harbinger of their eventual entente. As we go to press, an agreement has been signed by the Italian Minister for Finance and Count André Langrand-Dumonceau who is thought to represent the Court of Rome.
Amandi folded the paper. ‘There will be trouble over this.’
‘By Bacchus!’ Prospero, avoiding blasphemy, swore by pagan gods.
Dio
Bacco
,
Nicola was aggravating their afflictions.
The two were in the episcopal palace. From its walls gazed popes painted to look uniformly benevolent and stern.
‘I‚’ Nicola reminded, ‘have been looking into sanctity and the lack of it for years! Remember the children of La Salette? As the Cardinal’s assistant – and assistants, let us be frank, do the work – I put together files on them.’
‘So there are files?’ Prospero was interested. ‘And you are saying that this nun is a saint?’
‘Not at all. My approach is negative. Just as medical men concern themselves with boils, tumours and the like, I …’ And Nicola explained that, being inured to spiritual afflictions, it lightened his heart, for once, to find none.
‘Can you be sure this lightness is not a more … human feeling?’
‘She’s over fifty, Monsignore!’
‘Quite, but has His Eminence never …?’
‘Talked of her? Of course he has. When the Italians ruled that only “useful” convents might stay open, it was he who let hers start a small hospital. Very modest. The stories about abortions don’t ring true. Surely, a scandal can be avoided?’
Too late, said Prospero. Indeed, that was why he was here. The Holy Father was heartsick. Did Nicola think it had pleased him to read in the French gutter press of an agreement purportedly signed in his name by this Belgian trickster? ‘He has disowned it.’
Nicola couldn’t credit this. ‘It saved the bulk of our assets!’
‘It condoned the seizure of the rest.
And
he wants the convent closed down. He’ll accept no favours from Florence!’
‘But …’ This was baffling. ‘The people love Sister Paola!’
‘Oh … love!’ Irritably, tapping a windowpane, Prospero disclosed that the Italians were already dealing with, among others, Baron James Rothschild of Paris. Jackals would not be lacking to pick our bones. Perhaps we should rejoice? This way, even if the new agreements took
all
our property, we would not be party to them. ‘How can we join the Roman soldiers dicing for Christ’s robe?’ His tapping fingernails did, though, sound like dice.
Nicola, too stunned to listen, caught a reference to bishops who lacked loyalty. Cardinal d’Andrea was mentioned: a controversial case. Prospero said, ‘I want the dossier on the children of La Salette.’
His skin looked papery and his nose pinched, as though chary of breathing in too much air. Nicola, with a rush of sympathy, mourned the Prospero of years ago. As the dossier, though, was Amandi’s and contained God knew what, he said he couldn’t lay hand on it. He was angry with Rome for sending a friend to work on his feelings. So, asked Prospero, who
had
the file?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘You must know! His Holiness will want it. Who has it, Monsignore?’
‘Cardinal d’Andrea.’ It was an inspired lie. ‘He was Prefect of the
Congregatio
Indicis
when some books came out on the case. As you know, there were controversies …’
‘And he
kept
the file?’
Nicola nodded. D’Andrea, now a refugee in Naples, was the one prelate from whom Rome could not easily recover it.
‘Would you get it for us? Go to Naples?
‘Why should I?’
Prospero’s dry-pod face cracked a smile. ‘This,’ he coaxed, ‘is in the strictest confidence. The secret of La Salette was that the Pope should be declared infallible. Individually, by himself and apart from the episcopacy.’
‘That wasn’t in the dossier!’
‘No. It’s the secret which the Virgin gave to the boy, Maximin, and which he later revealed to the Holy Father in a confidential letter. We need to see the dossier in case there are contradictory elements there. As the secret was communicated to the child in 1846, the year of Mastai’s elevation, its publication cannot fail to touch hearts. The Council, you see, will aim to dogmatise the doctrine so that there may be no more strife and the Church strengthened.’ Prospero’s eyes shone. ‘Think,’ he urged, ‘of the comfort it will bring to millions.’
Nicola thought of Amandi and Darboy. ‘Sudden and secret moves,’ he warned, ‘harden opposition. However, I’ll strike a bargain with you: if you get a pardon for d’Andrea, I’ll ask him for the dossier. I’ll want a promise from the Pope himself.’
*
Cardinal Amandi wrote advising d’Andrea to make his submission, but feared, privately, that the humiliation could kill him. D’Andrea was an aristocrat, a man of another age. To have to grovel – and, bargan or no bargain, Mastai would make him do that – could destroy him. Amandi sighed. The Church, once a collegial corporation, was now an autocracy. The new instruments of communication – rail and telegraph – long seen as threats to the central power, would instead reinforce it and the
chemin
d’enfer
be a
chemin
de
Rome.
The Council would put its stamp on that!
‘This time,’ he prophesied, ‘you may depend upon it, the secular powers won’t intervene as they tried to do at Trent. Instead, they’ll sit back and watch us give the world a spectacle of archaic folly. Infidels and Protestants will split their sides and atheists wish they had a god to thank.’
*
Nicola, taking the train for Naples, joined the ‘crows and ravens’, which was how the Italians decribed the clerics dispersing, after their gathering in Rome. D’Andrea, once the drollest of prelates, received him dully. Disappointment had shrivelled him. His movements were wooden, his shoulders pale with dandruff, and he had the friable look of a pillar of salt. He was out of the running for the succession, and even here must be feeling the cold since the Italians, who had made him so welcome three years ago, knew that a cardinal likely to be ‘decardinalised’ was of no political use. Minor maladies seemed to beset him and there was a raw, albino look to the skin around his eyes.
‘Mastai’s ruthlessness,’ he exclaimed dispiritedly, ‘makes up for his lack of brains. Did you know I’d been suspended
in
spiritualibus
et
temporalibus
?’
Yes, said Nicola, and warned that, although the Pope had promised to restore d’Andrea’s functions once he had publicly repented, the cardinal had better not delay. Now, when Garibaldi might strike Rome at any time, lingering in the company of Italian prefects and generals could be seen as treachery.
‘The generals
I
meet,’ the cardinal pointed out, ‘are the men who will restrain Garibaldi!’
But both knew that such distinctions were beyond Mastai.
*
Journeying back to Imola, Nicola pondered the lie he had told about d’Andrea’s having the dossier, while knowing it to be among his own papers. Justified lies were now common in Rome, and his own scruples were due to a personal habit of truthfulness which he attributed to the scarcity of facts in his early life.
A foundling without a true family name, he had hated knowing that he was a false word made flesh and yearned for facts to be unshakeable. No doubt many of the Pope’s subjects had since come to feel the same way.
Disoriented, as familiar reality absconded, they longed for
reassurance
. And now this was to be given them with the new – or, according to its promoters, old – dogma which would freeze truth so that it could never again mutate or alter or develop into something capable of flinging men at each other’s throats or into an anguish of doubt.
Was this water in the desert or a mirage?
As the train chugged, and smoke shivered like ostrich plumes, he concluded with some sorrow that what men like him might once have received gratefully now brought no balm, since the grid which Pius proposed putting over their perceptions could only prevent them keeping up with the shifts of an unstoppable world. Lies, if only because the liars knew them for what they were, were less deceptive than the truths of men like Mastai.
‘Poor beast!’
he
had said of Cardinal d’Andrea when Nicola obtained an audience before leaving for Naples. ‘For his and my souls’ sake I had to chasten him. Cardinals are a pope’s creatures, so we are answerable for them to God! What choice have I? Authority carries responsibilities and freedom is a danger to most men.’
Then he beamed his celebrated smile on Nicola who, feeling his lips curve in assent, was surprised to sense a small contradictory hardening, a knot of disagreement form deep inside him, which had since spread through his limbs and brain, until he recognised an inner arming against the treacheries of his response to power.
At five one morning, Nicola was awoken and told that a band of policemen had caught the nuns’ guardians by surprise – or perhaps the guardians had grown tired of the farce and connived? Anyway, the nuns had been taken in a police carriage to a fortress some miles away. He left instructions with the Vicar-General to telegraph Rome, asking whether they could not be accommodated in some convent there. Then he drove to the fortress where a polite young officer explained that the convent had been set on fire and the police had been obliged to rescue the inmates. They were asleep now, having been given morphine. Several had burns, but none was serously injured. They would, promised the officer, be safe under his protection and made as comfortable as possible.
As it happened, Nicola had no choice but to accept this offer of hospitality, for Rome’s answer to his telegram was a refusal to have the nuns in a city already overcrowded with refugees. Italian law allowed
exnuns
to finish their days in their former convent and, if their community was too small, to join another one. This option, said the message, must not be accepted in this case. The controversial community must be dispersed. Where to? wondered Nicola. But a request for further guidance received none.
On St John’s Eve there was a firework display visible from the episcopal palace. The Prefect and other Italian officials were presiding on a platform in the piazza, and Nicola and a party of clerics discreetly watching through an open window, when news came that Sister Paola was ill and a priest needed to hear her confession. Nicola said he would go himself.
Taking a young priest with him for company, he drove into a night which was rosily aglow, not only because St John’s is the shortest night of the year but because the sky had been dyed by rockets and Roman candles in the red and green colours of patriotism. As the king’s initials blazed, the younger man recalled that not long ago all sky-writing had been religious.
‘They’re taking over the heavens!’
At the fortress a party was in progress and it was clear that the women invited were of the light and cheerful sort. A tittering group passed the priests on the stairs and a girl paused to ask about Sister Paola. ‘She’s a saint!’ said the girl to Nicola and pressed money into his hand to say a mass for a secret intention.
‘Come on, Gatta,’ called a companion and the woman ran off.
Who knew, murmured the young priest, what
her
secret intention might be? His severe young face deprecated invoking divine aid for such a pig in a poke. This reminded the Coadjutor of the scandal attaching to Sister Paola and he told the young man to wait while he saw her alone.
‘She’s had a shock,’ said the captain who had guided them.
Nuns were praying outside Sister Paola’s door. One waylaid Nicola to explain that, earlier, a rocket had fallen in the sick woman’s window. He went in. Florets of steely light were spraying the ceiling and, through the window, came a cacophony of sounds from different parts of the fortress. Cheers cut across the boot-beat of a military song – the rank-and-file at play – while, intermittently audible behind the stubborn orisons of nuns, spiralled the hankering, decorous strains of a waltz. Sister Paola’s face was hot.
‘War …’ she murmured. ‘It began with one.’ Her delirium was labyrinthine. He explained about St John’s Eve but saw that she had taken off on some spiral of her own. ‘I let him,’ she said, ‘attribute paternity to the dead.’
‘The Fifth Sorrowful Mystery!’ intoned a nun and he went to shoo them away. Returning, he told her to say an act of contrition and that they could dispense with the confession of her sins.
‘My mind,’ said she with sudden lucidity, ‘is as clear as a bell. I want a message sent to His Holiness.’ He had written, she said, asking whether she had received any revelation concerning his personal
infallibility
, and when she said ‘no’, written back saying that what inspiration she did receive might be from the devil.
‘Now, I want him to know this. He became my spiritual father in lieu of what he should have been. He told me to put human affections aside. He made me become a nun and cannot now, in all justice, refuse to let me and my sisters finish our lives as a spiritual family. It is too late for us to return to the world. Tell him we want to go to Rome.’
*
The Coadjutor looks startled, thought Sister Paola. God, she prayed, do You want me to keep my lips sealed until I go to my grave? So the voices which elected to speak for You always said.
I always wanted my uncle to make love to me. Why not? He had done everything else for me, having brought me up from when I was one year old and my parents died of cholera. He surrounded me with himself and, being a priest, led me to You. Living in a mountain
presbytery was as lonely as living on a ship. He learned to knit so as to teach me.
Then, when I was thirteen, I saw him make love to his housekeeper. He meant me to see. He was a man who played three musical instruments and knew four languages and she – well, she was the ground in which he chose to bury his talents. A plump peasant past her prime! She had wens and warts. Sleeping with her must have been like entering the grave.
I came to see that he had done it so as not to sleep with me. Incest would have frightened him. Why? It’s in the Bible! Taboos meant nothing to me. He saw this and reproached himself, since it was he who had made me the way I was. In his fright he turned to her and let her turn me out.