Authors: Julia O'Faolain
I suppose pride rules me, acknowledged Sister Paola. I know it made the angels fall – but may it not have been what saved the good angels too? I try to imagine how You think. Mastai believes You speak to me and that I, perversely, fail to pass on messages. He wants proof that You and I have forgiven him. He is nervous.
I have since tried to help women like the housekeeper – stunted creatures, as hemmed in by their lives as their own farm animals. Living among them, I tried to help them and their daughters. Unaided by You – who leave me to my own resources – I try to invent a celestial arithmetic and give back here what I owed there. The women treat me with deference. They know that I won’t denounce them when they come in panic, haemorrhaging between their legs and losing black blood clots the size of my fist. Shame makes them delay. I only see them when they are already rigid with cramps and fearful of having perforated the uterus by trying to stick knitting needles into its eye, with the help of a bit of mirror held between their thighs. Death and infertility are distant fears. The law and their menfolk are closer. Some are unmarried. Others have too many children already, or else their husbands are in the Army and the pregnancy came at the wrong time. When they meet me later, they look away.
I don’t often think about the child. I gave it to You without learning its sex. Boy? Girl? Amandi knows. Would he tell if it had died? I think he would ask me to pray for its soul so, as he hasn’t, it hasn’t. ‘Make a crib in your heart for the Baby Jesus,’ wrote Mastai. That meant: forget your own baby. It will be better off without you. Boy? Girl? I would have understood a girl better. When girls came to me for help, I used to think: she would be their age now. Now she would be thirty-six and a
mother if they found her a dowry, which they would have done. That would be part of
their
celestial arithmetic. Mastai took my uncle’s place.
‘Am I going to die?’ She must have spoken aloud for the Coadjutor answered that an act of contrition never came amiss.
‘Tell me a sin from your past life,’ he asked, when she finished the prayer.
‘I hounded my uncle’s housekeeper. I disgraced her in the parish and made her life such a misery that she had to go into a convent and die in solitude. Now,’ said Sister Paola with a small laugh, ‘I have lost
our
convent and our group of sisters will be dispersed so that I too shall die in solitude. Am I served right?’
Nicola prayed murmurously, but could not imagine this sweet-faced woman hounding anyone. The occasion was odd, for it was neither night nor day and the solstice was vibrant with pagan memories. Our own rites were an exorcism of these, just as the Italian fireworks were of ours. But, over time, the exorcism had become contaminated and one sensed a truce between formerly hostile ghosts. Sister Paola’s fancies had company. Holding her hand to show her she was not dying in solitude, he added his prayers to the forces firing through the blazing air. ‘Absolve, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the soul of this Thy servant …’
Waltz music whirled and a pyrotechnic finale filled the sky with a great cross of Savoy. At one time, Sister Paola had felt that something was due to her for the waltzes she had not waltzed and for the conjugal comforts she might have known with some good-natured dowry-hunter. Her uncle’s legacy would have sufficed for that, but Mastai had not agreed.
‘
Subvenite
,
Angeli
Domini
…’
She no longer blamed him. A knowledge of his mind and an ability to tune into it, even at a distance, had seeped through the
confessional-grating
in the years when he had her conscience in his care. He had supposed the only transaction between them to be the exchange of his wisdom for her submission. But submission had taught her the contours of his thought and made her so receptive to it that, although she did not hear the Madonna’s voice as he had hoped, messages did come to her from him. She knew and was pestered by his fears and fevers, which were lately reaching a pitch.
Turning to the Madonna, and finding that his old success with feminine sensibilities would not help, he had looked for intercessors with the intercessor and had had hopes of Sister Paola. She knew, because in unguarded moments she felt him willing her to assist him. His appeals tired her and she wanted him to desist. She guessed that his
mounting terror was unacknowledged. Leaking into her dreams, she felt him channel towards her a dark, fearful part of himself which he dared not recognise and which his plan to have himself declared infallible aimed to assuage.
*
Cardinal Amandi, who was still in Rome, wrote his Coadjutor affable notes. He was a master of meandering prose in whose coils a signal could escape the censor’s eye. Unfortunately, it also escaped Nicola’s, who was blessed if he saw anything sly in His Eminence’s bland account of afternoons spent in the company of Her Britannic Majesty’s
unaccredited
agent, Odo Russell, a gentleman, whose tall white hat, gold spectacles and genial smile were regular features at Roman receptions.
Was the absence of a signal itself a signal? Maybe the cardinal meant to show the censor that he was innocently engaged in the social round? Joining in this had become a token of loyalty when the Nationalists boycotted carnival and the Pope’s party riposted by dancing itself dizzy to the detriment of its dowagers’ hip-bones and hopes of longevity. ‘Ha!’ ruminated His Eminence.
Nicola was reminded of his search for significance in poor Sister Paola’s ramblings. ‘Monsignore,’ was how she addressed him, but he could tell that she had taken him for quite another Monsignore. ‘You could have caught chickenpox,’ she chided, and the word throbbed with inscrutable import. ‘Don’t fret over the convent’s closure,’ she urged another time, contradicting her own complaints on this very topic. ‘They were sour places, really. We used to put on a pious charade for your visits! Everyone did. The whole province did it for your last one when citizens were forbidden to breath the word “reform”! The only ones to disobey were old friends of yours whom you took for isolated fanatics! Didn’t you?’ she challenged, and Nicola, to calm her, said ‘Yes.’
‘They knew!’ she told him. ‘They were devastated. One of them told me he wept as your carriage was driving off and all he could see of you was the white flutter of your hand. He compared it to a wounded dove. You were blessing the troops. Austrians! The occupying army which everyone hated. You blessed
them
and never noticed that the real people hadn’t come!’
For a moment Nicola felt as if he had been eavesdropping – but, after all, this was under the seal of confession and he would blot out all he’d heard. Or try to.
*
‘
Il
caro
Russell,’ wrote the cardinal, ‘adores amateur theatricals. He and some English friends are rehearsing scenes from a play about a man feigning madness so as to disarm the suspicions of a king who fears for his succession. Some, closer to us’ – a reference to d’Andrea? – ‘may not have to feign.’
Prospero wrote too, praising Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans who had challenged the Italian Government to ensure that violent hands were not laid on His Holiness. Garibaldi had now been confined to the island of Caprera – a clear response to the bishop. A pity, wrote Prospero meaningfully, that not all churchmen were as loyal!
Nicola turned with relief from these letters to Sister Paola who, suspended between life and death, was in ardent communion with a pastoral dream of her own youth. He found it soothing to visit it with her and now regularly did. Her fancies about an idyll with Louis Napoleon’s dead elder brother back in ’31 were curiously vivid, and it struck him that nuns’ daydreams were like the pits in which mountain villagers stored snow until its price rose in the summer. Like the snow, her stories were compact and ageless, though a new light could transform one, like sunshine fracturing on ice. He rejected such distortions, particularly the delirium relating to her late confessor. The scraps about her girlhood were what appealed to him, and he held in suspense a surmise which it was perhaps wiser not to verify for now.
Meanwhile, Prospero kept him abreast of Roman rumours. Hissed under the coffered ceilings of saloons and sacristies, the latest claimed that the Bishop of Tarbes, when asked why he had not made more of the miracles of Lourdes, put the blame on Cardinal Amandi, whose judicial approach, wrote Prospero, ‘freezes His Holiness’s soul!’
Soul-freezing
too were the cardinal’s reservations about the pious practice of sending H.H.’s toe-and-tonsure-clippings to those who contributed generously to St Peter’s Pence. ‘Contempt for simple faith,’ wrote Prospero, ‘is no longer acceptable.’
A more painful controversy smouldered over a Spanish inquisitor whom Mastai had canonised last June. A German theologian had revealed that the new saint, Peter d’Arbuez of Aragon, had, by the time he died, caused some four to six thousand heretics to be burned alive. Döllinger – the German – thought this incompatible with sanctity. Prospero disagreed. Canonising d’Arbuez was, he conceded, perhaps impolitic. It revived old animosities, especially as the man who finally murdered and so made a martyr of him was a Jew. ‘Yet might it not be that choosing this unlikeable martyr to a cause – the Church’s survival –
which may soon require new ones is a useful reminder of what may now have to be sacrificed? Tolerance? Squeamishness?’ Amandi was suspected of having used Odo Russell’s diplomatic bag to correspond with the mischievous Döllinger and draw his attention to d’Arbuez. Prospero did not believe this, but warned, ‘If people’s suspicions fall on him, who is to blame?’
*
The next news to reach Rome had the effect of an artillery enfilade. Garibaldi had ‘escaped’ from his island – the authorities must have closed an eye – had reached Florence and from there, a living ikon in his red shirt, slipped south with the avowed intention of unseating the Pope, whom supporters were already calling the ‘martyr’ and ‘the Word of God made flesh to dwell amongst us’. Passions peaked like winter tides.
Rumours kept alarm upon the boil. Garibaldi was acting on his own, since the king, browbeaten by Louis Napoleon, had disowned him. Thank God for that. Yet might the Emperor, who was known to support the ‘principle of nationalities’, again change sides? He might. At this very moment Italian envoys in Paris were begging him not to send troops to our defence. That whore the Countess Castiglione was adding her blandishments. Grandest of
grandes
horizontales
,
she was said to be the mainspring of Italian strategy, though it was also said that she had been supplanted by some other whore, who was unlikely to be a good Catholic, and, either way, it all went to prove the old adage about how a pubic hair could pull more weight than a team of oxen. Yet the Pope was said to be calm, praying, no doubt, but also remembering that Louis Napoleon still needed that pivotal Catholic vote in the upcoming French plebiscite.
Then came news of a victory! Near Mentana the French, armed with some new marvellous sort of gun, had defeated the Garibaldini! Thank God! Thank the new
chassepots
and the French Catholic voters who had forced Louis Napoleon to send troops!
Soberer voices murmured that France was fickle. After the plebiscite, the Emperor would need us less. If he fell, his successors wouldn’t need us at all. This could be the last time France would defend us. But the Garibaldini would still be here.
*
Amandi learned from Russell that Mr Gladstone and Lord Clarendon, who were visiting Rome, had urged Pius to make peace with the King of
Italy. After all, they said, what other hope had he? His hope, Pius told them, lay not in armies but in Providence.
‘Providence,’ retorted his Protestant lordship, ‘has certainly performed miracles of late, but they have all been in favour of Italy.’
*
It was at this unpromising moment that Cardinal d’Andrea at last brought himself to swallow his pride and make his submission. He left Naples for Rome where a few loyal friends, including Amandi who had stayed in the city for that purpose, went to greet him at the Albergo Cesari and were shocked by what they saw. He was fifty-four and looked seventy-four. There seemed, wrote Amandi with frightened pity, to be no spirit left in him. No self. ‘One thinks of Lucifer after his fall! He, who had been the brightest of the angels, fell into numbing dark. This is scarcely a man, much less a priest or prince. His mind cannot sustain the shame. He will sign anything. Distinctions elude him. His body sways as though his bones had melted, and we would scarcely have marvelled if he had turned to dust before our eyes.’
The recantation, drawn up by d’Andrea’s most implacable opponents in the Sacred College, declared, ‘(1) I beg forgiveness for my
disobedience
in going to Naples in defiance of the Holy Father’s
prohibition
; (2) I deplore the scandal given to the faithful by my attitude towards the Sacred Person of His Holiness and to the Sacred Congregations in my articles in the
Esaminatore
of Florence whose heretical and schismatic doctrines I now reprove; (3) …’ Amandi could not bear to copy the rest. The man had been left with neither dignity nor belief. He was in hell and the restoration of his offices and revenues was a sour mockery. Like decking a corpse in the livery of grandeur, it emphasised not only the death of his spirit but the mortality of his flesh – for he was visibly dying on his feet.
‘He had an audience with H.H.,’ wrote Amandi in a letter which he would not entrust to the postal service, ‘who must have been punishing by proxy all the enemies he could not reach.’
Pius had been flanked by Antonelli and Patrizi when the suppliant stumbled into the room. Corpse-pale, he zigzagged towards the steps of the throne, then fell to his knees and began to sob. The Pope remained stony-faced while the sick man tried to pull himself together, made his request for pardon, crawled forward to kiss the papal slipper then, somehow, got himself out of the room.
‘I have to say,’ wrote Amandi, ‘that d’Andrea’s own version of the
thing is different. He claims that Pius commiserated with him over his appearance and advised him to nurse his health and visit some spa. However, he is in such a state of craven self-delusion that it is hard to believe a word he says.’