Authors: Julia O'Faolain
‘I am,’ he confessed, ‘well known.’ Money was introduced into Maximin’s hand. ‘I need a simple confession priest,’ said the
gentleman
who had a Belgian accent. ‘Confession priests’ were those who attended to pastoral duties. ‘Yet,’ said the Belgian, ‘perhaps not too simple!’
He’s afraid, thought the Zouave happily. Fear produced tips.
Garrulous now, the Belgian said he had been staying near Albano where the priest, a mulish martinet, was incapable of confessing a man like him. ‘I wouldn’t hire a cook in such a place. Why did I think I could use its confessor?’ He had, he admitted, insulted the man and was now sorry. He needed God.
Maximin, wondering if the gentleman was in danger from an angry husband, said he didn’t know any confession priests. Only the military chaplain who – but the stranger waved the idea aside.
‘Take a message for me then,’ he said.
‘I can’t, sir. Not until sundown. Then I go off duty.’
The Belgian cursed his own stupidity in sending away his coachman. He had been afraid someone might recognise his livery. As if anyone would have noticed or cared! People cared only for their blood kin. Only your kin stood by you, so why leave them destitute on the say-so of a priest from Albano?
The baffled Maximin shuffled his feet in a suspect substance – it stank – and agreed. Plainly the gentleman needed a listener.
A learned Jesuit, said the Belgian, who seemed not to notice the stench, had sent him a message to the effect that a bankrupt could sinlessly conceal his assets. To be precise, he had said ‘those assets
necessary for his survival’. But who was to compute necessity? What the priest in Albano considered necessary would not buy oats for the Belgian’s horses, all of which, he confided, had white stars on their foreheads. For luck.
Maximin felt like a stray dog who meets an ideal master only to find that he too is a stray. Was this promising patron too far down on his luck?
There was a time, said the stranger, when the kings and Emperors of Europe had been ready to do favours for him. ‘Yet I started out probably poorer than you.’
Maximin could not resist doubting this.
‘Do you want to bet?’
Maximin, prudently, said he had no money.
‘Ten to one,’ cajoled the Belgian. ‘Thirty to one! Done? Well, my grandfather was a
filius
exposititius
brought up by the
Assistance
Publique
!
He
became a weaver. My father kept a tavern for a while but died when I was ten, so I had to go to work. I peddled pencils through the villages of Brabant, then worked in a bakery and a brick kiln and later joined the Foreign Legion. I had to run away from that.’
Maximin mentally kissed goodbye to hope of employment. Any minute now, he thought, this chap will admit a crime and after that he’ll not want to see me again! Morosely, he told him, ‘I was poorer than that. I was a herder and slept with the cows. I slept on dry dung and was so lonely I used to moo back at them.’
‘Ah,’ said the gentleman. ‘Muck for luck!’ And coughed up the promised sum. ‘Your cow dung is a poor omen for me.’ Then he asked Maximin to go to the residence of Monsignor Nicola Santi and tell him that André the Baptist needed him. ‘He’ll know who it is.’
*
If the Pope was God’s Vicar, Cardinal Cullen was His man in the Irish College. Lunch was an occasion for him to air his views, and having a Jesuit from the
Civiltà
at his table stiffened them. ‘This Council,’ he opined, ‘will leave the nineteenth century’s prime legacy! It’s not for science that it will be remembered!’
Around the table, assent had the purr of a
placet.
Gilmore was told to stay when the rest withdrew. Cullen tried to tell a joke, but it fell flat.
‘
Traduttore
traditore
!’ said Father Grassi. ‘Jokes travel no better than
books on usury.’ His laugh startled Gilmore for whom the subject was a sore one.
Some years before, just when Catholics were being urged to invest in bonds to save the Papal Treasury, Gilmore had, in all innocence, published a pamphlet spelling out the position of usury in Canon Law. His aim was to protect Irish tenant farmers, and both he and his bishop had been amazed by the wrath of Rome.
‘It seems that your book was untimely! Money has been baptized.’
The bishop, an unworldly old man, had gazed in bewilderment at Gilmore. Shortly after that he was forced to retire and Gilmore was packed off to a parish in a bog so wet you could rarely tell whether its white stipplings were cloud-reflections or sheep.
Father Grassi asked, ‘May I take Father Gilmore for a drive?’
The cardinal must have said ‘yes’, for in no time a dazed Gilmore was in a carriage bowling down the Quirinal Hill. At some point, while passing a dazzle
of freshly disinterred marble, he was presented with his own diary. It had, said the Jesuit, been found in the street. Someone, seeing a reference in it to the Romano, had brought it there.
‘But it never left my cell.’
Grassi shrugged.
On they drove, keeping pace with other carriages whose wheels could have been faceless clocks until, slowing to visibility, they changed to clock dials afflicted with a plethora of hands. A section of Gilmore’s mind tried to recall what was in his diary but knew only that it was unfit for alien eyes. Mortified, he looked away from the Jesuit. On one side of the road, mauled earth made a ragged mound. A notice announced ‘Temple of …’ The Holy Father had been encouraging excavations in the hope that impressive finds might coincide with the Council.
Grassi fingered a paragraph in which its writer addressed his
remembered
, fifteen-year-old self: Augustine Gilmore, future priest. That was how he had known to whom to return it!
Reading with difficulty – his eye was blurring – Gilmore was dismayed to glimpse an account of how he had felt about Nicola Santi twenty years ago. His avowals were vague, and recognition of what they could be taken to mean would not have burst on him if he had been alone. But now he read with Grassi’s eye, an eye not privy to the fog of unknowing through which Gilmore’s faint self-awareness had dimly seeped – dimly until now. Now it glowed with misleading and lurid clarity. Gilmore felt a disagreeable flush swell the veins in his cheeks.
Santi had failed to even recognise him when, last week in the Council
refreshment rooms, Gilmore passed him a plate of sweet
maritozze
stuffed with pine kernels.
Grassi’s thin finger pointed to Gilmore’s name:
An
Giolle Mór
. ‘I knew you were one of the
Hibernici
,’ said he. ‘I had a friend translate your name. It means “big servant”, does it not? We are hoping you will render us a big service.’
On they drove. Once the horse paused to shed bright, steamy golden turds, then set off again past vineyards, grazing sheep and marble as grey as the sheep. Kitchen gardens, excavations, the Terme di Tito and the Colosseum sparkled in haloes of wet weeds.
Grassi was saying that the thought of sin could be more corrosive than any reality and the Irishman wondered angrily whether he must defend himself and why he should. The doodling words which the Jesuit had read were
private
! A clutch of reveries, they had flashed as briefly in Gilmore’s mind as thrown confetti will flash before ending in the
street-sweeper’s
midden. Even at fifteen, he had lived on memory-scraps: hollow of waist and ribcage. The graceful young Roman had focused the rather shambling Gilmore’s notion of what he himself could be.
Rome, after all, was our pole-star.
But Grassi said, ‘You were in love with him!
Caro
padre
Gilmore, you mustn’t mind my calling a spade a spade. Where’s the harm? It was clearly innocent: a surge of fellowship brimming a tiny bit dangerously as it often will! I hope you feel some now. Rome needs that more than ever and in your case I have a favour to ask which may be more easily performed if you do feel it.’
What he wanted was for Gilmore to see Monsignor Santi, a man who could be of great assistance to the Holy Father if detached from some unwise allegiances. Gilmore, by reviving the glow of their joint past, might be able to effect this. ‘Follow your heart,’ instructed the Jesuit. ‘He’s an emotional man, tender and more easily reached by his own kind. I rub him the wrong way, which is why I am appealing to you. Will you try?’ Grassi asked again, as he dropped Gilmore back at the Irish College.
‘But what shall I say?’
‘Follow your instinct.’ The Jesuit leaned out of the carriage window. ‘Remember that scruple can be a form of shirking. Act!’ he
recommended
and snapped his fingers at his coachman.
*
Gianni, Cardinal Amandi’s major-domo, had been doing nicely out of their stay in Rome and was collecting mementoes to sell to foreign pilgrims. Just about anything could be sold: bits of bone from the catacombs, bits of old vases, bits of captured red shirts, rosaries, shrapnel, papal hair-clippings, dust … As a further bonus, he had become friendly with a widow living in the same
palazzo
:
a source of joy. Everything was going beautifully – and then, out of a clear blue sky,
un
finimondo
!
Disaster! The cardinal said, ‘Pack our bags, Gianni, we’re off to Imola!’ Why Imola when the Council was set fair to go on for months, if not years, and the widow planning a surprise for Gianni’s birthday? Why were they going? Well, it appeared that it had to do with an audience which His Eminence had had with His Holiness where H.E. had told H.H. that the Opposition bishops felt he was sacrificing the rest of the world to Rome. ‘Ah,’ said H.H., ‘the world!’ And H.E. answered, ‘I mean the Catholic world, Holiness!’ Then H.H. had said that the only sacrifice he was making was of himself, and that he knew H.E. might be his successor and undo his work, but he knew how to put a stop to that. H.H. was very upset. ‘Frothing at the mouth!’ said H.E., though whether that was a manner of speaking Gianni couldn’t say, for H.E. was frothing a bit himself and hard to hear through the keyhole. Anyway,
he
’d
said if that’s how you feel I’ll go back to Imola and we’ll think up some excuse to prevent scandal. So H.H. said ‘Do!’ and now it was ‘Gianni, pack our bags’.
He’d only just had time to run and tell the widow that everything was off. Sorry. See you God knows when. Then back to the packing, while Monsignore and H.E. paced about like raging cats. They’d had a tiff which Monsignore had been trying for days to make up. Anyway, since it never rains but it pours, some lunatic Zouave chose that moment to ring the doorbell and ask to see Monsignore who had said he’d see nobody. Nobody, said Gianni to the Zouave. But, says he, an important man needs a priest to hear his confession! What’s ‘important’? asked Gianni, and nearly slammed the door in the fellow’s face. Indeed he would have if another caller hadn’t appeared just then, a foreign priest who also wanted Monsignore. Gianni, seeing that the man was shabby and of no account, told him that Monsignore was in Imola but that he should write down his name which Gianni would be sure to give him on his return. The priest did this and left, but the Zouave, a rougher customer, had his foot in the door. ‘Say it’s for André the Baptist,’ says he. ‘I’m not leaving till I get satisfaction.’ So off went Gianni for less than a minute and when he came back, he gave the Zouave the foreign
priest’s bit of paper and said that Monsignore recommended the man whose name was on it to John the Baptist, or whatever his name was, as a confessor. That was two birds felled with one stone, thought Gianni, as he closed the door. If ever H.E. did become Pope he’d do well to keep Gianni as his
Cameriere
Segreto.
Why not? The last Pope’s barber had been the most influential man in Rome!
Sobered, he began to wonder whether the retreat to Imola was a setback to their joint prospects. He hoped H.E. had made peace with Monsignore. He’d need someone to be looking out for his interests here while he was away.
*
Nicola and the cardinal had, in fact, achieved a truce.
‘Don’t you see,’ Nicola had insisted, ‘that we can’t part like this?’ Then, having soothed Amandi’s doubts and convinced him that he had neither spied nor lied, he asked how he was to explain the cardinal’s departure.
‘Say I’ve gone to Imola to perform some ordinations.
He
doesn’t want me here.’ Amandi was going through his papers, selecting pamphlets for Gianni to pack. ‘He,’ he said of Mastai, ‘is in a euphoric mood. Mad with holy zest! Don John Bosco has been infecting him.’ Bosco, he explained, had a curious brand of piety. ‘He gathers outcast boys into asylums then, in his dreams, sees which are secretly committing abominations and chases them away. Lately, he has been seeing spiritual abominations in the Council and urging Pius to smite the perpetrators. Does my scepticism distress you? I try to resist it. Why, I ask myself, should not a visionary be a spy? Or the Pope mad? God may be testing our faith.’
‘Mad?’
‘Maybe it’s my nerves speaking. Do you know where we keep the laudanum?’
Nicola didn’t and there was no sign of Gianni who had taken to slinking off at odd hours and wore a long face. Perhaps, said Amandi, we should ask why. Servants were often the first to know things. Awkwardly, he confessed to a fear of ending like d’Andrea, whose troubles started when he left Rome without permission. Amandi had now been encouraged to leave – but had no witnesses to this.
‘You need rest,’ Mastai had said. ‘Imola is, as I recall, a restful place.’ An order? A trick?
‘Had you heard that he tried to cure a cripple in the Roman streets
not long since? His head has been turned by lickspittles. Don Bosco calls him “God on earth” and says – I quote verbatim – “Jesus has placed the Pope higher than the angels! He has placed him on the level of God Himself!” Idolatry?
Folie
à
deux
? Anyway, he came on this cripple and said something like “Arise and walk!” Think of the wretched cripple. He knew his role. Tried to play it. Couldn’t. He’ll probably die of shame at letting down the Holy Father. Think of the epigrams!’ Amandi laughed, then stopped.