"I said no, John, and must say it again. Please let us have no no no. More of this." Severn, to his own surprise, was weeping. John was sardonic-fatherly.
"Aye, aye, weep, dost thou, little one. Like Niobe. Well then, thou shalt be made laugh. Diddle diddle dumpling my son John beshat himself with's breeches on. It shan't happen, don't you see, Severn, it must not happen to this one. Can I not be preserved from that indignity?"
"You make me. I do not know what to. I wish I."
"Go paint the death of Socrates or some other bearded ancient, Severn. Be about your business, what you call your art. Or shall we have a symposium about my bed? Call them all in, Belli and hewing Ewing and Gulielmi, no he is with Shelley and his lordship in in where the tower leans, and our anglophilic Spaniard. But keep Clark in the dark, for he will be full of Calvinistic engines whose creaking jars. The Pope we could have if he would come, to see how a vile atheist dies."
"I will not have this," Severn, on his feet, his fists clenched with thumbs inside, cried, control lost. "I will not have this, do you hear?"
"Marry, because thou art atheistical dost thou think there shall be no more crusts and vinegar? You are right, Severn. I must look after you, I must not let you have hysterica passio."
"I will not have it, do you hear?"
"And I agree, do I not? Well, I will be calm." And then: "Wells, poisoning wicked Wells, the foul swine, you shall not prevail, there are engines to crush you and strong thumbs for the strangling."
Severn sobbed.
SEVEN
"For us," Cardinal Fabiani said, "the future exists."
"Yes, your eminence," said Belli. They had finished dinner – pasta with a rich meat sugo, Bracciano lake fish stuffed with sage and rosemary and roasted, roasted fowls, a winter salad, Sardinian cheese, eggs whipped with sugar and sherry, white and red wine, grappa and coffee – and sat before a log fire as wide as a stage in a chamber theatre. The salone of the villa on the Via Aurelia was full of holy and comfortably Italian art, but there were one or two pictures by the Spaniard who was really a Greek, containing placid whales into which crowds of people placidly proceeded. There were some Etruscan cups and vases filched from the tombs of Cerveteri, and there was some frank neopagan statuary by Canova. Cardinal Fabiani should have been fat but was thin, as if gnawed by an undying worm. He had vigorous ringed hands that flashed in the firelight. He poured more grappa for Belli. "Thank you, your eminence."
"We must not confuse the future with eternity. Eternity is not an endlessly prolonged future, it is a timeless state that wraps itself about time and, in odd places perceived chiefly by the holy, nibbles at it. Do you follow me?"
"Yes, your eminence. Very poetically put."
"However, to return to the future. In a few weeks 1821 commences. It will be a strange year. You know in what way or ways?"
"The death of Bonaparte, to begin with."
"Well, yes, the reports I have received, stemming ultimately from the Corsican physician Antommarchi, point to the completion of the task by early summer."
"The task? The completion?"
"The English are killing him under the guise of giving him the best medical treatment. Slow poisons, one presumes. However, however. He is to die, and he has time to die holily. He has murdered many by one means or another, and his purgatorial sojourn can hardly be brief. He has changed Europe," the Cardinal said sharply, as though making an epigram.
"One cannot doubt that, your eminence."
"And now Europe changes again. The Napoleonic flame flares, as if sugar had been thrown on it, for one last time, and the big grandiloquent odes will be written."
"Not by me, your eminence."
"Not by you, my son. What is this I hear about your losing your taste for grandiloquence? There is a sonnet of yours going about, one written in the Roman dialect. It condemns or scorns or something some holy poem written on the Blessed Virgin."
"I do not condemn the substance but the form. There are some self-styled poets in the Academy of the Tiber who launch words like balloons. I prefer my words to be small but full of gravity. Mass, not size. Napleon's death will launch plenty of balloons, your eminence. They will all come down. Now a word of metal makes no pretension to flying."
"You are not here, my son, to deliver a theory of literature."
"No, your eminence. You started it, with respect, your eminence."
"You are here," kindly smiling, up on his feet, ringed fist banging Belli's shoulder, "to discuss the future of Rome and your future in the Rome of the future."
"How far into the future, your eminence?"
The cardinal prepared to kick back a log dislodging, saw that he had a silk slipper on, desisted. Belli thrust out his booted foot without otherwise stirring from his chair and smartly sent the log back in a grumble of sparks to nest again with its fellows.
"Well, now, we gained our independence from the French Empire six years back. His Holiness resumed rule of a city that had tasted the rank meat of Jacobin republicanism -"
"Rank, I question that rank with respect. Fresh meat rather, very bloody. Rank suggests long-hung and mouldy."
"Like," the quick prelate said, "the city itself. You were about to say that, were you not?"
"No, but since you have put the idea into my head, your eminence, I will now say, with respect and in the humility of a son of Rome, yes. Yes. Our drains are bad, our streets carry no name plaques, we lack light -"
"So the Urbs Lucis lacks light, does it?"
"I am talking of the physical city, your eminence. In London they now have gas lighting, so a London visitor told me."
Cardinal Fabiani shook two gemmed fingers brilliantly at Belli. "I know very well what you are talking about, and my response then was by way of a rebuke. You are slow sometimes, my son. What does the physical city matter? This is the City of God, and all above the dirt and madness of the body."
"The Holy Father is a temporal ruler. There are, with respect, such things as temporal obligations."
"We have no ambition here to be London or St Petersburg -"
"We are already St Petersburg, we were re-founded as St P -"
"Very sillily clever, you are always ready with your word play and your word play may well prove your undoing, my son. You are not here drinking my wine and eating my victuals to indulge in your silly games of the Academy of the Tiber. You are here to consider the future of Rome."
"I'm flattered, your eminence, that I should be considered worthy."
"Giuseppe Gioacchino, you are no fool, otherwise I would not put up as I do with your nonsense. No fool, but no thinker either. It is your flashes I want, what I suppose you would call your imagination."
"The vatic, the poet as vates. Thus flash I forward to the future, eminence. His Holiness will not rule this city for ever. The papacy as military power, which is all civil power has ever meant on this peninsula – the notion was already dying with Julius II. And that one dying on St Helena, he is thought to have lost but has really won. He has taught the new idea of the unified nation, and the idea will not be long in coming here."
"Bonaparte was never an idea, he was a man, my son, mortal but endowed with a devilish big ability. Such men are not ten a penny. He ate the papacy for breakfast, but it will be centuries before such another comes. Peter's seat is safe."
"Yes, eminence, if by Peter you mean merely the keeper of the keys."
"Merely? Merely?" But Cardinal Fabiani poured Belli more grappa.
"I prophesy that the secular rule of the papacy will be over in, oh, say twenty years. His Holiness, whoever it shall be, must keep within his Vatican walls and smirk at the Roman populace from St Peter's at Christmas and Easter. From a balcony, very high up. The secular power will be in hands as yet unknown and the Pope will be reviled and sneered at as a ruler of Christian souls, for the soul itself will be sneered at as a pretentious silly hypothesis. The kingdoms of Italy will be made into one kingdom and Rome has as good a chance as Milan or Turin of being its capital city. Better, perhaps, because of its position."