The Judas Cloth (65 page)

It was clear that Amandi, who had for so long been twinned with d’Andrea in people’s minds, was shaken.

There was a last glimpse of the ruined cardinal. A friend, who went to see him in a country house to which he had withdrawn, found him holding a lighted taper to his face at noon, and begging to be told if he did not look healthier than before. ‘The victim’s victim,’ said Amandi, ‘has to pay for everyone’s sins!’

Enclosed were cuttings from Belgian newspapers. One from
l’Echo
du
Parlement
belge
said: ‘The Langrand companies are in their judiciary phase. Thanks to the courts, those accounts books so carefully kept from shareholders will now see the light of day and the scales drop from the eyes of small investors bamboozled by agents in soutanes!’ Another clipping trumpeted: ‘Now that the collapse of Monsieur Langrand’s
Crédit
foncier
et
industriel
has brought ruin to so many Catholic families, the clerical press …’

Nicola went cold. So the Pope had been right!

‘I,’ wrote Cesarini, ‘never did know what went on in L-D’s inner sanctum. Ignorance, though, may be no protection.’

He
saved us, thought Nicola of Pius and skipped squeamishly on.

‘… the Pope has come in for some harsh criticism, since the papal title was an endorsement of …’ He did not want to read that. Turning the page, he found: ‘The Princes von Thurn and Taxis and Duke Cesarini as well as a host of other leading noble houses stand to lose …’

Contrary to the old compensatory law of fortune-telling – lucky in love, unlucky at the gaming table – Flavio had lost on all fronts!

‘Miss Ella …’

It appeared that she and the former chaplain were living sedately somewhere in Louisiana. They had opened a riding school. The letter informing Flavio had come through a lawyer. He was not to disturb their peace. A
post
scriptum
informed him that they had adopted a child.

Cardinal Amandi, having left the Pope’s territory for Tuscany, could now write freely and his latest note gave details of an audience with Pius on the eve of his departure. He had requested it weeks ago so as to plead for d’Andrea. Pius, however, had divined and foiled this plan and Amandi had had to wait until after d’Andrea’s awful reception for his own. The memory of that hung ominously. However, Pius gave him his hand – d’Andrea had been proffered a foot – and, asked:

‘Is it true that you have a white cat called Cacanono?’ Plucking coquettishly at his own cassock. ‘As white as this? Does it mean “don’t shit” or what? Is it a devil’s name, Eminenza? Have you a predominant passion represented by this cat which has such an interesting name? It’s a pun, isn’t it? You must explain it to me. I like puns.’

Amandi, in a steady voice, said that the cat was an ordinary cat, Holiness, and not called Cacanono.

The Pope looked pained. ‘I am often misinformed. I am an Argus with a hundred squints! What
is
your cat called?’

‘Mangialuce, Holiness!’ The cardinal, red as his robes, eyed Mastai who said, ‘Another odd name!’ and eyed him back.

‘We both,’ wrote Amandi, ‘belong to that impoverished but
resourceful
squirearchy of the Marches. He knew I was rattling responses around my head and wondering which to risk. He was enjoying that but – I could see – the enjoyment was not malign. I was to be given a good fright, a tap of the crosier, then hauled back to the fold. The implications of Mangialuce’s name were not construed. “Beware of scandal!” said he. “My ears have been burning, Eminenza. Be wary! So many people spy! Our poor friend d’Andrea wasn’t wary at all! The poor man was never
papabile
material, wouldn’t you agree?”

‘If there is any message in all this,’ concluded Amandi, ‘it is that those who say he is senile have been hoodwinked. Here it is not Hamlet, the pretender, but the old king who feigns madness.’

Nicola’s dreams had been invaded by Sister Paola’s. Towards the end, these had fractured into tantalising slivers which flew together under the magnet of his curiosity.

Images recurred: a mountain presbytery and a convent school. One was bathed in bright air and the other crammed with the dull impedimenta of women who expected little from the here and now. Fierce practical jokes leavened the drabness. A cripple’s crutch was hung out of reach; a wigged bolster placed in someone’s bed; a sheet sewn across so that the occupant couldn’t get in; a spaniel bitch on heat was locked in a confessional so that canine hordes assailed the church. On that occasion, the chaplain demanded that the perpetrator, having committed a reserved sin, go to the bishop for absolution. Nobody did. Sister Paola recalled with a shocked giggle that the secret sinner had been more in awe of Monsignore than of hell and never owned up.

‘You were a terror, Monsignore!’

Her voice, at such moments, grew young, and old, innocent mischief animated her wrinkles. Her eyes were as bright as coins. He guessed her to be about fifty.

He came back and back again to see her, as she failed to recover or die, lingering perhaps until she had passed on her memories. He felt her intense interest in himself, her last listener, who was administering secular rites as well as the ones which the Church had taught him to give: a bonus to which she had every right since she herself had extended it to many. ‘Useful’ work was what nuns were expected to do by the Siccardi laws – called after the deputy who presented them to the Italian parliament – and that was what Sister Paola had agreed to do and did.

‘Tell me,’ he held her hand, ‘what you look like.’ He asked because her eyes were intermittently naïve with hope. ‘You came back,’ she had just said and he guessed that the ‘you’ she was addressing was not him. She bridled. ‘Oh, I have long hair. Black.’ Her fingers moved feebly towards the greying stubble on her cropped head. ‘A river of it! I wear it in a coil. I would
like
a silk dress. I’m not sure if I’m pretty. Napoleon
Louis said I was. You never did!’ She laughed. ‘But I know you thought so, Monsignore!’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Of course it does! Pretty women are grateful to God and charitable to others! They’re nicer people, hadn’t you noticed? Even pretty nuns are! And statues of the Virgin are always pretty. That shows that pious people value prettiness even though they pretend not to. Have you ever seen an ugly statue of the Virgin?’

‘Never.’

‘See!’

‘But we mustn’t tell the ugly that. They would be too unhappy.’ Absurdly, he flirted with this dying woman in her dotage. It was as if, beyond their roles as confessor and penitent, a connection had been established. They liked each other. There was something responsive in each to the other’s temperament. Like magnets, they leapt into
conjunction
again and again. And then, one day, he decided to reverse their roles.

‘Tell me,’ he decided to ask. ‘I know someone who perhaps had a son whom someone else now wants to find and adopt …’ But this sounded confusing even to himself.

Her face closed like a frightened sea anemone. ‘Why,’ she asked, ‘do you raise that – that bit of the past?’

‘There may never have been one …’

‘There was!’

‘No, no, quite possibly, even probably, there wasn’t. But this person – the one who wants to adopt – will, I suspect, find a boy anyway whom he can pass off as the lost one!’ Nicola foundered, then decided to go on since, after all, he, like the barber in the old story of King Midas’s ears, was really talking to himself.

‘He says he wants to help the child – who, if it exists, is no longer of course a child – but his purpose may be …’

‘What?’

‘Sodomy.’ He doubted that she knew the word yet used it anyway. It was like addressing the Delphic sybil, a pythoness in a cave, someone whose answer must be dictated by some force beyond her own
understanding
. ‘Sin.’

She asked: ‘Who are you talking about?’

‘Cesarini. Flavio. Do you remember him?’

‘Of course. Does he want to adopt the child?’

‘Yes, if he can find it, but …’

‘But how wonderful! Aren’t you pleased? We will be able to know it – her, him, without scandal. And it will be now be grown up, anyway, so what harm can come of it?’

Nicola marvelled at her sudden lucidity. Sibylline intuition? Had she a gift? Perhaps this was why Mastai – from what she had been saying – had asked her about his infallibility! The boy, he told her, would be eighteen now.

‘No, no!’ She argued. ‘Thirty-six.’

In the garden walked His Eminence and his cat, a creature which carried itself like an emblem.

‘Gardens,’ Prospero looked out the window, ‘remind me of Jacobins and their Utopias.’ He must, thought Nicola, be the last man left to call Liberals ‘Jacobins’. Nose to tail, the cat seemed to be chasing an errant piece of itself. ‘My father …’

He had died the year before and now Sister Paola too had slipped away in a dream which had, in the end, grown real to Nicola who could have mapped her uncle’s presbytery. Copper gleamed there; ceilings were sooty, faience plates crazed, and a hand ran, with tenderness, over the soft bindings of books. The uncle had been a scholar, rusticated for reasons she never knew.

‘Leniency,’ Prospero tried to persuade himself, ‘sells the pass.’ He was remembering a guillotining seen in Rome last November in the piazza dei Cerchi. He had not planned to witness it. ‘But, somehow, on the day itself, I felt I had to. D’Arbuez – our inquisitor saint – must have witnessed the deaths of the heretics he condemned. It was a test.’

‘I would fail it,’ said Nicola. ‘I would feel that our beliefs aren’t worth so much.’

Prospero’s face thawed into passion. ‘If they were worth Christ’s death, how could they not be worth those of Giuseppe Monti and Gaetano Tognetti?’ These were the dead men’s names. They had been convicted of trying to blow up a papal barracks.

The guillotine had been on a small platform and in the end the headsman or an assistant had held up the heads. First one. Then the other. By the hair. ‘One man’s was short. He had trouble grasping it. The blood …’

‘All right! All right!’ It was Prospero’s nausea which Nicola hoped to staunch.

‘There was sawdust to soak it …’

‘Prospero, it could have been your father!’

‘That’s why! Don’t you see?’ His voice was hoarse and his jaw clenched. ‘One must confront things!’

‘Let’s have lunch. I’ll send the footman to call His Eminence.’ Nicola pulled a thick, prettily twisted woollen bell-rope, yellow and pink.

He had known, of course, about Sister Paola, having guessed from the first, but hadn’t wanted, any more than she – surely? – could have done, to live through the recognition scene so familiar from opera
libretti
: ‘
My
mother
!’ cries the repelled and horrified Figaro, on being confronted with an ageing woman who has mistaken her maternal instinct for amorousness … Horror and farce! What other response, implies the librettist, could there be to such an untimely revelation? The
timelessness
of Sister Paola’s memories were what Nicola had relished. The girl from 1831 was the one about whom he had wanted to know: unchanging, luminous and perfectly preserved. The remembering nun, lying there like a shell resonant with sea sounds, was best, for dignity’s sake, treated as the medium she was. Neutral and unrecognised. Separate and, if possible, distanced from the story which both had come to enjoy remembering. He rejoiced in imagining her at fifteen, a radiant creature at its peak, aquiver like a cresting wave – soon to be ruined by his birth.

His father’s identity was as elusive as a face on a spun coin. Libretto prince or incestuous uncle? Tenor or baritone? A ruthless man might have forced her to say – only to find, perhaps, that both masked the unbearable memory of an anonymous and multiple rape. Shrinking from that, he cherished uncertainty. As for her, the spirited old relic, he was as glad to have known her as that she had not known him. He genuinely mourned her now.

Amandi, reluctantly, agreed that they must hand over the La Salette file. ‘How resist
his
overweening if we become Petrine in our own opinions?’ His watchword, these days, was ‘flexibility’, and his hope that, even now, a way could be found ‘to conciliate Revelation and Revolution’. Why not? Why
not
?
‘After all,’ he said, ‘what is the Revolution but Charity grown impatient and turning to arms? It’s not hard to
understand. D’Arbuez, in his day, stood for armed Faith. And
he’s
been canonised!’

At lunch none of this came up.

Nicola, seated between his seething friends, talked of the weather – a topic on which, said Amandi impishly, we must all learn to discourse! Not only was it the only one safe to discuss with H.H., it was also a challenge! How far could one spin out discussions of, say, wind? The sirocco and its properties. The
tramontana.
The winds of change! Gaiety seized His Eminence. ‘Do you know
why
it’s unsafe to talk to
him
of other things? It’s because
he
blows the gaff on his informants! He can’t help it! He gets carried away. That spiteful tale-bearer, Monseigneur de Ségur, got into hot water with his superior, Darboy, whom he had maligned secretly to Pius. When he got home Darboy knew every word he’d said!’ The cardinal laughed.

‘Was I being warned?’ Prospero wondered later.

Nicola shrugged. Bickering unnerved him. He had handed over the file.

‘We need men like you,’ Prospero said as he left. ‘By “we” I mean true Catholics. Liberal ones aren’t true ones.’ And with that he waved to his coachman and sped off in his well-sprung carriage.

Some months later, Nicola found this opinion spelled out in
La
Civiltà
Cattolica
and knew it to be policy. ‘Catholics,’ said the Vatican organ, unlike ‘Liberal Catholics’, hoped that the coming Council would dogmatise the Syllabus and define papal infallibility ‘by acclamation’; in other words, that the assembled bishops would passively acclaim what was read out to them.

This roused great anxiety and by summer the European episcopacy was showing strain. Pro-and anti-infallibilists differed with decorum, as befitted men of the cloth. Yet there was harshness and some panic in the copies of pastoral addresses, sermons, newspapers and synodal letters which bishops living outside the reach of the papal censor were free to order. Amandi took them all and soon the stacks, pro and con, had to be moved from his desk to the floor where they rose to his waist.

‘Pro’ was hortative. The
Civiltà
and its following argued for a definition by acclamation on the grounds that ‘the Holy Ghost needs no debate to make up His mind’.

In the other pile were the pained statements of men who knew their
message to be unwelcome: historians who found that the doctrine, having been unknown to the early Church, had been later condemned as a heresy by one pope and discredited when another was branded a heretic by three ecumenical councils.

The Vicar-General was shocked. ‘These things should surely be forgotten,’ he argued, ‘in the interests of …’ ‘… a career?’

Charity had been the first casualty of the pamphlet-war. It was unfair to goad the Vicar-General who found the sheer sight of the climbing piles of pamphlets troubling to his faith. Challenging authority had never been our way. ‘We might as well be Protestants,’ he lamented to Nicola, who promised that nobody would hold it against him if he followed his conscience. But the Vicar-General’s conscience was a pendulum which had been given a push and whose giddiness tormented him. Extracting a paper, despite his better judgment, from the polemical ‘anti-’ pile, he learned that, as recently as 1826, the doctrine had been repudiated by the bishops of England and Ireland when their government questioned them about it on the eve of Catholic Emancipation. Had they lied then? If not, how could Manning now hold the opposite view? Anxiously, the Vicar-General circled the rising stacks and was to be seen sidling towards them with a crablike movement and a hovering hand which annoyed Mangialuce, who liked to sleep on them and had been known to hiss as the troubled cleric pulled out, then poked back in, papers in languages he didn’t know. It distressed him that the Dean of the Theological Faculty of Paris had attacked the doctrine and that the papacy’s old champion, Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans, advised against defining it. An unopened bundle of
the
Augsburger
Allgemeine
Zeitung
, which nobody could read, was said to deliver a crushing historical criticism of the doctrine. This, though pseudonymous, was thought to be by the same Professor Ignaz von Döllinger as had fingered the new Saint Peter d’Arbuez. Peering at the devilish-looking German script, the Vicar General shook his head and, once, Nicola saw him put his nose to it, as if sniffing for sulphur.

But perhaps Mastai would
not
try to bring in the doctrine? His Bull convoking the Council made no mention of it. It was possible that, having tested the waters, he would judiciously desist.

Not every skirmish in the paper-war was represented in Amandi’s files. Some news reached Imola only as hearsay, like the report of the secret letter which fourteen German bishops had sent His Holiness, warning that to dogmatise the doctrine would cause havoc in Germany, where Catholics had to live with Protestants.

Roman reactions to this were waspish – for why give thought to Germany when it was Rome which was in danger, Rome, the
caput
mundi
,
the head without which the limbs could not function?

Letters echoing the debates going on in presbyteries up and down the land went into neither pile. These Amandi burned from concern for his correspondents’ safety and because of admissions which they might one day prefer to forget.

Noble motives mixed with trivial ones. Coveted privileges, such as the right to deck one’s carriage horses with tassels, would be risible the day there was no court. Rome had seen the agony of too many courts – the Stuarts had ended up there as had several Bonapartes and the Bourbons of Naples – to be deceived on this score.

German abstraction got on Roman nerves. Abstraction, as anyone with pastoral experience knew, meant nothing to the body of the faithful, but the panoply of liturgy spoke to the heart and eye. And that included tassels! Absolutely! Yes! Ritual, a ladder to heaven, manifested the transcendent in ways the multitude could apprehend. A mirror in a dark shaft, it caught the light!

‘But if we’re found to be telling lies,’ worried the Vicar-General, ‘about history and so forth, might that provoke a schism?’

‘You’ve touched the
hic
,’
said Amandi, ‘the
hic
est
quaestio.
’

All summer clerics discussed the odds. Might a strengthened pope even now save the city? Mastai was known to think so. Alternatively, might the Council offer a chance for reform?

‘Think,’ said Amandi, ‘of all those churchmen from across the globe gathering here for the first time ever! Surely something unlooked for may happen? The Holy Spirit is not a caged bird.’

December slid damply in. It had been raining for weeks. The city gleamed like wrinkled silk and, outside Nicola’s window, bright red unpicked persimmons rotted prettily. Reaching Rome late, he and the cardinal found their major-domo eager to let out rooms and arguing that there were fortunes to be made. Foreign bishops had come in unforeseen numbers and the
cerimonieri
were at their wits’ end. Convents and private
palazzi
were brimful. To be sure, one must pick and choose. One foreign archbishop was said to have a ring in his nose and another had disconcerted his host by pissing on the floor! Council Fathers had come from places whose names, even mangled on Roman lips, had the ring of legend. Mexico, for instance, was where Emperor Maximilien had so wretchedly perished, and it was just three years since his demented Empress had trailed her folly through Vatican antechambers, imploring help for what had once been presented as a Crusade. The spectacle had disquieted a population attuned to omens and signs.

When Prospero called, he found the cardinal nursing a chill and his cat, shaken by the outrage of a travelling basket, crouching beneath a chiffonier. From here its offended amber eyes blinked suspicion at the caller.

He and Nicola went for a stroll.

The streets were crowded, vehicles entangled and a docile old horse, on being obliged to back and bump its rump, suddenly reared and rolled the whites of its eyes. Foreign priests leaned from the windows of their conveyances, crying
‘Quid
,
quid
?’ in a Latin so alien that people did not know it for Latin at all.

Prospero remarked that the Council too would be a Tower of Babel and the Fathers – over seven hundred of them – could come under the wrong influence. ‘Democracy could raise its hydra head.’

They walked through fine rain. ‘So the steam engine,’ quipped Nicola, ‘by bringing us so many outsiders has justified Pope Gregory’s fears.
Chemin
de fer,
chemin
d’enfer
! An infallible instinct?
Is
the doctrine to be defined?’

‘Oh, its opponents saw to that! Their vehemence was a tactical mistake. Now, we
must
show the world that the Church is united.’ Prospero laughed.
‘Quod
inopportunum
dixerunt
necessarium
fecerunt.
’

‘But they were provoked!’ Nicola protested. ‘The
Civiltà
said the doctrine should be defined by acclamation! That would turn the Council into a rubber stamp!’

‘And they took the bait. Admit it was a clever move.’ Playfully squeezing Nicola’s elbow. ‘Here’s the man behind it.’

They had reached the piazza Scossacavalli and here, in the doorway of the Palazzo dei Convertendi, headquarters of the
Civiltà
, stood Father Grassi, who was soon speaking with such candour that Nicola guessed his own loyalty must have been vouched for. He felt discomfort but had no chance to say so. Time, it seemed, pressed, for the sheep, said Grassi, must be quickly sorted from the goats. Today there was to be a meeting at Archbishop Manning’s to decide who should be voted onto the commissions which would manage the Council. No votes must on any account go to Liberal bishops – goats. To prevent this, Manning would draw up a single list of candidates for each commission, then get all our friends to vote for it.