Earthly Powers (57 page)
"I was reading the other day," Monsignor Campanati said, "your pamphlet entitled God Does Not Exist, is that still your view?"
"Irrelevant," the Duce scowled. "I've had enough of you, I say. I want you packed off to America or somewhere. Your Eminence," he said to Cardinal Gasparri, "your assistant here is well aware of my church marriage and the baptism of my children. He knows that I've repaired your churches damaged in the war, I've had crucifixes put up by law in schools and public offices. I've been bullied enough by this underling, with all respect to his holy cloth. I would remind you to remind him that I am the secular head of the Italian State."
"You must," Cardinal Gasparri told Monsignor Campanati mildly, "not bully the secular head of the Italian State."
"I apologise," Monsignor Campanati said humbly. "It was and is no more than the affectionate bullying of a father. I am delighted that the Duce, as he calls himself, has at least represented himself as having seen the light, though I have the duty in God of continuing to question his sincerity. I have heard that he still talks of a priest-ridden people and alludes to a marriage of convenience between Church and State. Look now where he has put his left hand; it is Godless superstition. We will not through magic drain away his potency."
The Duce hurriedly withdrew his left hand from his crotch and thrust it into the bosom of his morning coat. He had instinctively been making the apotropaic gesture against the sacerdotal evil eye. "Let us get this business over," he grumbled. "Where do I sign?"
"Here," Cardinal Gasparri said, pointing with a heavily laden ring finger. "And here. And here." So the Duce attacked the documents as though they were an enemy and trampled his signature across them. He then stood upright and said: "Is there more?"
"No more. Praise be to God, the Lateran Treaty is concluded."
"Initiated, one might more properly say," Monsignor Campanati said. "Will not the Duce also say praise be to God?"
"I will say thank God it is done," the Duce said. "Listen to me, Monsignore. I wish now to be left alone. I will go my own way. I do not want the catechism wagged at me and spies reporting on whether or not I have been to mass. A man's soul is his own."
"God's," Monsignor Campanati said. "God's. Still, at least you talk of a soul, and that is something."
"Shall champagne be served?" Cardinal Gasparri asked. "Very well, no champagne. No no, that pen is yours. It is all chaste gold. A gift from His Holiness." The Duce, still scowling, handed the pen to an aide. The aide wiped the ink off on a corner of a blotter and then stowed the pen in his top pocket.
"Do not forget ever," the Duce said, "and bid His Holiness not to forget, that this idea was mine. Tell your flocks that it was mine. We want no falsification of history."
"I," Monsignor Campanati said, "first put the idea to Moscon, and Moscon 3 put it to Dragone, and then it climbed the long ladder to you. As you say, let us have no falsification."
"Well, then," the Duce said.
"Well, then," Cardinal Gasparri said, and he proffered his hand. The Duce took it. He did not take the hand of Monsignor Campanati, since that was not proffered. The Duce about turned and marched out, his aides following. Monsignor Campanati and Cardinal Gasparri looked at each other.
Monsignor Campanati said, "He is too stupid to realise yet what this will mean to him. He is established solid. They will make a little god out of him. They will cherish his very snotty handkerchiefs as holy relics. Women will offer themselves like sacrificial virgins. His picture will be everywhere. The Church, God help us all, has sanctified his castor oil and rubber truncheons."
"It's you who are always saying that good can use evil. I believe that too. The point is that he won't last. We will. Let's go to lunch."
I have put together the above out of what Carlo later told me. The significance of this event in Rome on a wet February day perhaps requires elucidation. During the Risorgimento the Papal States, which were rich secular territories covering some seventeen thousand square miles, including all of the city of Rome, much land north of the Tiber, much south of the Po, champaign, river and township extending from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Adriatic, the papally ruled population more than three million strong, were rudely wrenched away by the forces of reform. Mussolini's new order, needing if not the vocal support of the Church at least a silence that could be interpreted as complicity, offered a settlement to compensate for the loss of its temporal power. The Lateran Treaty provided for the setting up of Vatican City as an independent sovereign state. Three basilicas—San Giovanni Laterano, Santa Maria Maggiore and San Paolo—and all their subsidiary messuageswere declared extraterritorial and rendered immune from state property taxes. The same applied to the Pope's summer residence at Castel Gandolfo as well as a number of other odd edifices within the city of Rome. In return, the Vatican recognised the existence of the Italian State and the permanent secular occupation of what was still, ineptly, termed the Holy City. But it insisted that, if the state left the Church alone, the canon law of the Church should nevertheless suffuse the laws of the secular commonalty. Thus, the state could not grant divorces and, if you were married in a church, that was deemed to satisfy the requirements of the civil authorities.
There were really three separate agreements unified in the Lateran Treaty. There was the Lateran Pact, which created the new state of Vatican City. There was the Financial Convention, under the terms of which Italy gave the Vatican the equivalent of some ninety million dollars—part in cash, part in government bonds—and agreed to pay the stipends of parish priests. And there was the Concordat, which exempted the clergy from paying taxes and gave the Vatican 3 financial control of a number of so-called ecclesiastical corporations all over Italy. The Concordat also banned the Protestant Bible and the holding of evangelical meetings, even in private homes. Catholicism was the official religion of the Italian State. Religion had to be taught in schools, and educational establishments under a Catholic aegis gained preference over lay or state institutions. February 11, the day of the signing, became a national holiday. On June 7, 1929, the day of the ratification of the Treaty, the Pope created a Special Administration of the Holy See and put Bernardino Nogara, who was related to the Archbishop of Udine, in charge of it. Carlo was never too happy about this; he believed he could have managed all those millions far better himself. Nogara, he said, was not a holy man. He was a liar and a hypocrite. Lay as he was, he lacked ecclesiastic scruple. He fell into the trap of allowing Vatican money to serve dubious secular enterprises.
"Money is money," I told Carlo, "whoever manages it. It's neither dirty nor clean. Even Judas's money was blessedly above or beneath the taint of treachery. Like an animal. And, like an animal, it must be permitted to breed. That is the law of Nature."
Nogara bred money out of Italgas, which he bought from Rinaldo Panzarasa when his group of companies was foundering. Soon Italgas, with the Vatican as the controlling stockholder, was hissing and flaring in the buildings of thirty-six Italian cities. Including brothels. The Vatican swallowed La Società Italiana della Viscosa, La Supertessile, La Società Meridionale Industrie Tessili and La Cisaraion, and put them all, as CISA-Viscosa, under the control of another unholy man, Baron Francesco Maria Odesso. But Nogara was the brain, skilled at persuading the Duce, who knew nothing about economics nor, indeed, much about anything except gaseous oratory and the administration of murder (though he had written a novel at least as good as any of mine, The Cardinal's Mistress), that a Vatican-owned bank was really a kind of church, its transactions blessed by the Paraclete, and that it was one of the ecclesiastical corporations to which, under the provisions of Clauses 29, 30, and 31 of the Concordat, tax concessions must be granted. Nogara even, after the economic crash of late 1929, made Mussolini accept the transference of the much depreciated securities held by three banks in which the Vatican had invested lavishly—the Banco di Roma, the Banco dello Spirito Santo and the Sardinian Land Credit—into the government's holding company for dud enterprises, the Istituto di Ricostruzione Industriale, not at the current market rate but at the original worth of the holdings. The Vatican got $632,000,000 out of that, and the Italian treasury wrote off the loss.
But, in a way, Carlo was right. In 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia and a munitions plant controlled by Nogara supplied arms to the invaders. Money could, after all, become dirty. Still, all in all, generally considered, not to put too fine a point on it, Carlo's initial concern about an impoverished Vatican 3 that could not subsidise the propagation of The Word had been the match that had, after slow smouldering, ignited the great blaze of wealth. The speed with which the Vatican grew rich was positively obscene, as unnatural as a swiftmotion nature film showing a mustard seed turn into a tree, with birds dwelling in the branches thereof. He had wanted money to bring light to the heathen and, by God, he had got it. Not that he himself was now in charge of the mechanics or maintenance of the spread of the faith. Mussolini's words about wanting to see him packed off to America, though of no import within the Vatican, bore fruit perhaps merely because they were uttered. The Holy See had to dispatch ambassadors abroad, like any other independent state, and, though Carlo was not yet ready to head a legation, he would be, it was recognised, very useful as an aide in a country whose language he spoke, literally, as a mother tongue. So, in the early thirties, he was sent to Washington under an archbishop who spoke American like a street organ-grinder. (Carlo was, unkindly, sometimes to be called his monkey.)
For, while he was still in Italy, Carlo would not let Mussolini alone, and his enmity was not in accord with the amicability of the Vatican. Mussolini was called, by the more naif of the clergy, a man sent from God. His Holiness himself once spoke, when the guard was off his tongue, of the divine provenance of the Duce. Carlo, Monsignor Campanati as he still was and would still be for a long time, never missed an opportunity of abusing the pyknic atheist, as he termed him. The Lateran Treaty had been signed and could not be (nor would the Duce, now a saint, wish it to be) revoked. The Church was safe from the fascists, and Carlo was of the Church. He was untouchable, though he lodged with me a document to be opened in the event of his sudden death, in which, whether death was caused by double pneumonia or by overeating, the blackshirts were unequivocally to be blamed.
I was, on one of my visits to Rome to see my dentist, dining with him one evening at da Piperno, a Jewish restaurant next to the house of the Cenci, well known for its artichokes and a dessert called grandfather's ballocks. There were two middle-ranking fascists near our table, and they recognised Carlo. Da Piperno was much patronised by fascists. They had not yet been taught by Germany that the Jews ought to be persecuted. Indeed, there were fascists among the Jews. The Jews had killed Christ and made money, but they had been in Italy longer than the Christians. They tolerated the Pope as a Roman, but Christ was a kind of foreigner. Up on the Gianicolo the Jewish stallholders sold metal replicas of St. Peter's and Romulus and Remus and jawjutting pictures of the Duce. They were all right, and da Piperno was one of the best restaurants in Rome. One of the middle-ranking fascists snarled at Carlo and said, "You'd be wise to stop it."
"Have we been introduced?" Carlo put down the skeleton of a grilled sole he had been sucking the flesh off and turned to them very amiably.
"No nonsense. You know who we are and we know who you are. We know what you've been saying and we warn you to stop it."
"About the Duce and your stinking regime? Let me, as your father in God, warn you not to meddle in matters you are not well qualified to understand. You may know all about truncheons and castor oil—a very good aperient, incidentally, if taken in moderation—but you know nothing about theology. May I now proceed with my dinner?" And he got back to sucking sole bones. The one who had not spoken grasped Carlo rudely by the shoulder in order to make him turn round to listen to abuse. Carlo sighed, put down the skeleton, wiped his fingers on his napkin, then, with an athleticism surprising in one of his fatness, so twisted himself that he was freed from the fascist grasp. He then gripped the wrist of the grasper and held on to it till he produced a little yelp of pain. Then he let it go. He said to both of them: "I love Benito Mussolini probably more than you do. Indeed, you would cut his throat tomorrow if you could get a thousand lire out of it. I love him because he is a human soul, and I regret that his pure humanity, which issued from the hand of a God in whom he does not believe, has been so foully sullied by the devils of greed and power which have clearly taken possession of him. I would like to purge him of those devils, but, in his perversity, he is happy to be possessed."
"Devils," sneered the one who had spoken, an oily-haired handsome man in early middle age. "Get back to your dusty books, priest, and leave the modern age alone. Devils, indeed. We're done with your superstitions." And the other, who had a wine stain on his black shirt, laughed sillily.
Carlo put on a shocked look. "Indeed? You call strict Catholic teaching superstitious? And you and your leader so anxious to get on the right side of the Church and hang crucifixes even in knockingshops? Perhaps, of course," he said more loudly, "you do not always agree with the Duce's enactments."
A man with a bib on halted the delivery of a forkful to look at the two fascists. The younger of the two, the shouldergrasper, said, "Mussolini ha sempre ragione." It was one of the comforting slogans of the regime. Carlo was delighted to hear it.
He said, "Right, for instance, in paying the wages of the priests of the Church so that they may perform their priestly duties? One of which duties, I may add, is the casting out of devils."
