The Judas Cloth (23 page)

That evening the cardinal had no stomach for food and ate rice without condiments and drank watered wine. Even the archiepiscopal kitchens were feeling the effects of the war. Nicola tied a napkin around Oppizzoni’s neck and placed another on his lap.

‘Sit down. Sit down. Eat your own dinner. A good digestion is a blessing. What are you having?’ Oppizzoni sniffed. ‘Do they cook your food properly? Complain if they don’t. Tell me what they’re saying in the offices. That we’ll all be burned in our beds?’

Nicola said they were wondering whether His Holiness had protested at the Austrian invasion.

‘Too soon to know,’ said Oppizzoni. ‘Anyway, protests never stopped soldiers. I’m glad not to be in charge of things temporal this time. I was Legate
a
latere
in 1831 when the Austrians came to restore order and stayed on. Commerce came to a halt. We were clean out of funds and Rome kept asking me for money. That’s what it always wants of Bologna.
Bologna
la
Grassa
,
Fat City, that’s our reputation, but it’s a long time since it was true. In the end I sent back the request, saying I assumed it had been sent to me by mistake. You can’t get blood from a stone. The Austrians will have a try, though. Welden has sent on his list of requirements. I have it here. In any commune where his troops stay they are to receive four ounces of rice, eight of beef, one and three quarter pounds of bread and to be provided with coal, wine and three Ferrara ounces of acquavite per man per day. Officers either to have two good meals each per day or forty-eight
baiocchi.
You’d be astonished at how much of a churchman’s life goes into dealing with figures. Hay, straw and oats for their horses. Money is the root of most of our troubles. Always was. Luther would
never
have started his schism-shop if Rome hadn’t been squeezing the Germans for tithes. People don’t like paying out temporal coin for the spiritual and now that the Germans want ours we don’t like paying up either.

‘However,’ here the cardinal looked Nicola hard in the eye, ‘I must paternally advise you, young man, to have nothing whatever to do with the hotheads who will presently turn up on the piazza, brandishing rusty
fowling pieces, and hoping to stop the imperial forces by luck and a miracle. I want your promise.’

Nicola gave it.

‘If you were to be caught with arms in your hand,’ said the cardinal, ‘I would try to save you, and Marshal Welden would refuse my request for my own good, just as his troops are laying waste His Holiness’s dominions for his. You would be shot. I would look weak. The Marshal would be seen to lack respect for ecclesiastical authority, and who but the enemies of order would be the gainers?’

Nicola’s mind was less on fowling pieces than on his plan to make love to Maria. His imagination was hot with it. It was as though time had begun running out. It had certainly speeded up. Perhaps the city’s excitement was stoking his? By next day – 4th August – people were becoming exalted. Strangers talked in cafés, speculating and raging at the treachery of the troops for whom we had, after all, put our hands deep into our pockets.

‘The Germans,’ a customer was declaring in the Gaffe degli Studenti, where Nicola paused for a lemon juice and water, ‘are heading this way in hot pursuit of the volunteers.
They
drew them on us and now, it. seems, won’t defend us. So for what was all the money collected?’

‘Maybe our government doesn’t want us defended?’ The author of this cynical suggestion looked nervous, but found backers. Incaution was the order of the day.

Another proclamation had now gone up. It was signed by the
pro-Legate
and stated that, since the best military experts believed the city could not be defended, the Army was leaving and everyone should keep calm.

That afternoon Nicola waited in vain for Maria. Perhaps her family would not let her out? When he went down to the street, he felt feverish. So, it seemed, did everyone else. Wild notions were being tossed about. Could ordinary people hold out now that the Army refused to do so? If they did, might Bologna, like the village of Sermide, be burnt to the ground? Surrounded by hills, it was an easy target for howitzers and cannon. But café strategists had grown reckless. Hope had gone to their heads.

After dining once more with the cardinal, Nicola came out to merge his restlessness in the general seething.

The latest proclamation, pasted on a pillar in piazza San Petronio,
was an appeal from Bianchetti the pro-Legate. Someone held up a lantern and the words shifted in its flicker:

‘People of Bologna, this comes to you from a man whose hair has grown white in public service … from an Italian who has faced danger and exile for Italy … Suicide is fanaticism … Unwinnable struggles are for savage peoples … To risk a town whose site makes it impossible to defend is not heroism but folly …’ Shadows from the lantern fell on raised faces, making them scowl like anxious gargoyles.

Nicola had arranged to meet Rangone. Normally the streets would have been cleared by now and police patrols on the lookout for nocturnal vagabonds, but tonight the police were closing an eye. Martial music thrummed from a window. Anarchy trickled through warm air.

‘I’m going to make love to Maria,’ Nicola informed his friend. ‘I think she’s perplexed by my lack of ardour. When it’s so hard to be alone with a man, you expect him to seize his chance.’

‘That,’ said Rangone, ‘is because, despite what our pro-Legate thinks, we are a savage people. In France …’ He dreamed of it. Women there, he had been told, being freer, were more complex. What could that mean? It was like trying to imagine a new colour.

‘Would you fight?’ Nicola’s mind shifted.

But Rangone said there were no guns and the only trained men left were police and customsmen.

Next morning came news that the Pope
had
protested at the violation of his territories. A
Motu
Proprio
, published in Rome on 2nd August, declared the Austrian invasion ‘a mere act of
force
majeure
which must in no way be read as affecting the full and sovereign rights of the Holy See over the province’. Surely, argued those who wanted to fight, this was a licence to do so?

A deputation delivered a formal protest to Welden’s headquarters; the city bells were rung and anyone who could get his hands on a gun which worked armed himself.

Next: another proclamation by the pro-Legate called for prudence. The mood in the streets vacillated and some barricades which had gone up were taken down. Nicola was kept busy all day doing paperwork for the cardinal.

On the morning of the 7th, the Austrians were at the city gates demanding to take over five of them. A deputation went out to haggle over terms: three gates only to be turned over and no soldiers to come into the city. By afternoon, however, Galliera Street was swarming with white-coats.

‘Bit of a smell here!’ Rangone drew Nicola out of a café as a group of Austrians walked in.

Again Maria didn’t come.

By next morning there had been trouble. An Austrian officer and several soldiers had been wounded in a scuffle and the Marshal was demanding hostages. The pro-Legate offered himself. Shops closed. Barricades went up again and the volunteer-hostage was unable to get through. Again the bells rang. People gathered on roofs and balconies. A proclamation by the pro-Legate, so fresh that it smelled of paste, apologised for his inability to deliver himself to the Austrians. The city held its breath.

Nicola was near Rangone’s lodging. He did not expect Maria today but had, like a homing creature, headed in his usual direction. Then he saw her. His heart’s thud was echoed by a dull boom: cannon. He caught up with her.

‘Maria! Let’s get off the street.’

Even if Rangone was home he would surely offer them refuge. He wasn’t home. From an undiagnosable direction came sounds of artillery fire and an insistent rattling of shot. More booming. It was like beams beating sullenly on hollow wood. Then silence.

‘They’re firing on the city!’

Nicola drew her from the window. ‘Where were you all week?’

‘I couldn’t get out. I’ve just taken my mother’s laundry round to her customers. She’ll think I’m sheltering in one of their houses.’ She laughed.

They kissed. ‘Why are you laughing?’

‘Excitement. Nervousness. Do you think they’ll burn the city?’

‘No. I don’t know. We can’t do anything about it. Kiss me.’

‘Listen.’

‘Don’t listen. We’re safe here.’

‘Unless they burn us out.’

Their love-making was sudden and simple and Maria did not pretend to be a virgin. This was a relief. All the other times they had met here it had been to eat and now they could have been eating each other, as they exchanged sups of stale water from a jug which Rangone had left by the bed. The air was hot and they moved like creatures on a spit, exploring and sucking reassurance from each other with hard mouths.

Outside, noises boomed, stopped, then took up again. Twice he went to the window but could see nothing except a few neighbours as
uninformed as himself. So back he came to where Maria lay
half-wrapped
in a petticoat which she had declined to remove.

‘Look.’ She showed him bluish love-bites and he was astonished to have marked her after all.

‘Don’t do it on my neck!’

The third time he went to the window two bodies were being carried past.

‘What’s happening?’ he called down to the men bearing them and learned that the Austrians had two cannon and a howitzer, inside the walls, on the high ground of the Montagnola and that, despite the hail of projectiles – fire balls and bullets – a group of young fellows had managed to press in and were actually on the point of capturing the cannon. The men being carried past were badly hurt. There had been deaths and some houses had caught fire.

‘Shall we go down?’ he asked her.

‘Why?’

It was true they had no weapons – but he wondered how many of those fighting could be armed at all.

‘Stay with me. Anyway, what good could you do? You wouldn’t even get through the barricades.’ She held him. ‘See, you’re ready again! You won’t always be able to do this, you know.’ Smiling in a sisterly,
matter-of
-fact way.

She’s used to this, he thought. And she’s used to men past their prime. His mind vacillated, flickering out, as his energies focused on the rhythms of rutting. After all, what right had he to be jealous? But he was.

‘Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred more!’ she encouraged.

Who had recited that to her? Some prelate?

‘Might you,’ he asked with late caution, ‘have a baby?’

She said she didn’t think so and he didn’t ask how she knew. Making love to her again, he thought of the next line of the poem, ‘When once our brief light fails …’ There was the cannon again. ‘
Nox
est
perpetua
una
dormienda.
’
Nox,
nox,
nox
!
Then the cannon stopped. Maybe the Bolognese had captured it! This was the first time she had not been afraid to be out so long. Could that be because her father and brother had joined the Austrians, as all the old
Centurioni
and their hangers-on were said to be doing? Gone off to their camp, leaving her free and unsupervised?

Their joint stickiness was beginning to disgust Nicola.

‘Won’t your mother be worrying? Things seem to have calmed down.’

They got dressed, which was just as well, for Rangone’s key turned in the lock as they were smoothing down his mangled sheets.

‘So you’re here?’ he greeted them. ‘Heard the news?’

The Austrians were retreating. Impossible! No, true! He had heard it from an eye-witness. They’d only just got their cannon away from the Montagnola and the last of the fighting was going on now down by the Galliera Gate – rearguard action. ‘They’ve definitely taken a licking!’ The Carabineers had fought side by side with the people. It was wonderful. Heroic! Worthy, enthused Rangone, of the city in its prime.

Maria didn’t believe the Austrian Army could have been been beaten by a mob. Her mouth made a moue at the word and Nicola felt angry with her stupidity in not recognising that who had licked the Imperial Army was the
Populus
Boniensis
and no mob.

‘It started,’ Rangone said, ‘when the soldiers shot into the crowd which was taunting them and killed a fruit-seller near the San Felice Gate. The people went berserk. They’d got arms earlier from the Civic Guard, then found a deposit of Swiss munitions. Now they’re building more barricades in case the Croats come back.’

‘As they will,’ said Maria. ‘The Austrians are our saviours.’

Who was she parroting now? Poor thing, she had not grasped yet that it was time to turn coat and be a patriot! Rangone, amused, began to tease her while he and Nicola walked her home. Two escorts were less compromising than one and offered better protection. From Rangone’s banter, Nicola saw what he thought of her.

The air was thick with smoke and charred particles. A few captured Austrians were herded past in dirty coats. Nicola wondered whether the Imperial Army would make a return attack. Rangone thought not. A quick incursion was one thing. A war in the Pope’s territory would be harder for Vienna to disown.

‘They may just withdraw.’

Maria couldn’t believe this and the two young men’s conviction made her redden with annoyance. Nicola, remembering that she was being loyal to her family, relented and took her hand.

Rangone wondered whether people had captured many weapons.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘there are arms in secret storehouses.’

The young men went quiet, Rangone asked, ‘Where?’

She looked sly. Did she know? No, only that people hid them. Oh? Gaining courage, she said: ‘It was in the Austrian warning that people mustn’t have arms. So, they’ll hide them, won’t they?’

Nicola saw that she did know something. Wasn’t her father a … ‘If
you know,’ he said severely, ‘you should say. If only for your father’s sake!’ He was provoked by her air of quailing deceit. Were the arms, he asked, on the Stanga estate? She shook her head. ‘In a convent, then? A Jesuit house? A church?’ He tried to remember where she had said her brother had worked before being put to dig at the public works. Hadn’t he been a sawyer? ‘The saw mills?’ It was like playing hunt-the-slipper. He watched her face and saw that he was warm, hot, possibly burning.