We were to meet in his private apartments in the Vatican at 3 p.m. and I admit that I was somewhat nervous as I made my way through the stately, historical palace, guided at every step by a nervous, priestly secretary who informed me on at least seven occasions that I was to address the Pope as ‘Your Holiness’ at all times, and never interrupt him when he was speaking, as it gave him a migraine and he would become irritable. I was also not to contradict anything that the Holy Father said, nor was I to offer any alternatives which were particularly contrary to the requirements which he would make of me. It seemed that conversation was frowned upon by the Holy See.
I had made it my business to find out a little about this Pope in the twenty-four hours at my disposal between interviews. At a mere fifty-six years of age – a child in comparison to my 104 – he had been in office only for a couple of years at the time. His personality confused me as I read through various newspaper articles about him, for they were all quite contradictory in what they believed to be his true persona. Some considered him a dangerous liberal whose opinions on freeing political prisoners and allowing laymen into his council of ministers could spell a dangerous end to the authority of the Papacy in Italy. Others viewed him as potentially the most powerful force for change within the country, able to unite the old left and right factions into a union of accord, opening up the press for discussion and setting about writing constitutions for the Papal States. For a man so close to the start of his reign, he appeared to have mastered the art of the true politician in that no one, neither friend nor enemy, seemed able to define his true beliefs or plans for either himself or the country.
The room into which I was ushered was smaller than I expected and the walls were furnished with books, long religious tracts, enormous histories, some biographies, poetry, even a little of the new fiction. It was Pius’s private study, I was told, the room to which he went when he wanted to relax a little, unburden himself from his duties for a time. I was privileged, the nervous priest told me, that I was being invited to meet with him there for it meant that our meeting would be somewhat informal, even enjoyable, and that I would perhaps see a less official side to the Pope than others did.
He entered from a side door with, surprisingly, a bottle of red wine in one hand. Had he not been walking in a perfectly straight line, I would have suspected drunkenness.
‘Your Holiness,’ I said, bowing slightly, unsure for all that I had been told whether that was in fact the correct etiquette. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’
‘Sit down, please, Signor Zéla,’ he sighed as if I had already exhausted his patience, indicating one of the seats by the window. ‘You will take a glass of wine with me of course.’ I was unsure whether this was a statement of fact or a request so I merely smiled and inclined my head a little to one side. He barely noticed anyway and poured the wine slowly into two glasses, turning the rim as he finished pouring like a waiter might. The notion crossed my mind that he might have been a waiter in his youth before he had settled on his vocation. He was a little shorter than me, about five foot eleven, with a large round head and the thinnest eyebrows and lips I had ever seen on a grown man. From beneath his skull-cap, a peak of dark hair pointed forward in an ironic display of diabolism and I couldn’t help but observe from his upper neck that he must have cut himself shaving that morning, a human inaccuracy that one might never have expected of the Supreme Pontiff; his infallibility obviously did not extend to a steady hand.
We made some idle chatter regarding my trip to Rome, my lodgings, and I told a few lies about my early life, getting the basic facts right but loosing up the chronology a little. The last thing I wanted was for him to summon forth a conclave of cardinals to declare me a modern day miracle. We talked of the arts – he cited The Beggar’s Opera in music, Reflections on the Revolution in France in literature, The Hay Wain in painting and The Count of Monte Cristo in fiction, claiming to have read the latter five times since its publication a few years earlier.
‘Have you read it, Signor Zéla?’ he asked me and I shook my head.
‘Not as yet, I’m afraid. I haven’t a great deal of time for fiction these days. I liked the days of the pure imagination, rather than the social commentary. So many of these novelists seem to want to preach rather than to entertain. I don’t care for that so much. I like a good story.’
’the Count of Monte Cristo is an adventure story,’ he said, laughing. ‘The kind of book one wanted to read as a child but which had not been written as yet. I will give you a copy before you leave and perhaps you will let me know what you think of it.’
I indicated that I would be glad to but inside felt a little aggrieved that I would be obliged to plough through five hundred pages of Dumas when I would prefer to be acquainting myself with the city. He asked me whether I was alone and I spoke briefly of Thomas, suggesting that I hoped to find suitable employment for the time that we remained in Rome, however long that may be.
‘And how long would you like to stay?’ he asked me, a thin smile spreading across his face.
‘As long as is necessary, I expect,’ I said. ‘I’m not entirely sure of the commission which you have for me. Perhaps you -’
‘There are many things which I would like to do as Pope,’ he announced, addressing me suddenly as if I were a college of cardinals. ‘You have probably read of some of the reforms I am being accused of undertaking. I will doubtless be drawn into this war with Austria at some point and I do not relish the political reverberations of that. But I also want to create something to be proud of. Here in Rome. Something which the everyday Roman can come to and enjoy and celebrate. Something that will make the city feel alive again and vibrant. People become happier in a city which has some sort of central focus. Have you ever been to Milan or Naples, Signor Zéla?’
‘Neither,’ I admitted.
‘In Milan there is the great opera house La Scala. In Naples there is San Carlo. Even little Venice has La Fenice. I want to build an opera house in the city of Rome which will rival these fine buildings and bring a little culture back to the city. And that, Signor Zéla, is why I have brought you here.’
I nodded slowly and took a long sip from my wine glass. ‘I’m no architect,’ I said eventually.
‘You are an administrator,’ he said, pointing at me. ‘I have heard of the work you undertook in Paris. I have heard people speak very highly of you. I have friends in all the cities of Europe and beyond and they tell me many things. Here in Rome I have a certain amount of funding at my disposal and, as I have neither the time nor the talent to find the best artists and architects in Italy, I thought of you. You will undertake this commission for me and you will, of course, be handsomely rewarded for it.’
‘How handsomely?’ I inquired with a smile. He may have been the Pope but I was still young then and had a living to earn. He mentioned a sum which was more than generous and indicated that I would receive half at the start of the project and the rest in increments throughout a proposed three year building plan.
‘So,’ he said eventually with a smile, ‘does this meet with your approval? Will you agree to undertake the construction of an opera house in Rome for me? What do you say, Signor Zéla? The choice is yours.’
What could I say? I had already been told that I could never turn this man down. I shrugged my shoulders and smiled at him.Accepto,’ I said. Throughout that summer my romance with Sabella blossomed. We attended parties together, the theatre, salon functions. We were written up in a court reporter and all interest was continually directed towards Sabella, who had appeared in Roman society out of nowhere with a beauty and a talent that was envied by all and a past known by no one. We became lovers as the city sweltered to summer and the young men began discreetly to leave the city for the Italian war with Austria, from which Pius was holding himself aloof. There was talk of insurrection, of the Pope himself being turned out of his city, and the commentators were divided on whether he should become involved – and by default involve the Pap
al See – or not.
I myself cared not. I had no taste for war during those decades and wanted nothing more at that point than to enjoy Rome, Sabella and the commission I had been granted. I had grown instantly wealthy when I agreed to build the opera house and, although I made sure to live well within my means, I found that those means could from time to time turn to the lavish.
Sabella delighted in my company and lost few opportunities to tell me how much she was in love with me. Within a short time of our first encounter she was telling me that I was the love of her life, the only true love she had known since her girlhood, and that she had fallen in love with me that first afternoon at the home of the Comte de Jorve and his tone-deaf daughter.
‘When I was seventeen,’ she told me, ‘I began a liaison with a young farmer in Naples. He was no more than a boy, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old. We were in love for a brief time but he soon became engaged to another and broke my heart. I left our village shortly afterwards but have never forgotten him. Our affair was brief – maybe four weeks out of my entire lifetime – but the impression that it left lingers. I thought I would never recover from it.’
‘I have known such a romance,’ I said but declined to discuss it.
‘It was after this that I found that I could sing and began to use my voice to make a little money along the coast. Every song led to another and I was soon becoming employed because of it and found that I had the ability to make a living with this instrument. Somehow I ended up in Rome. With you.’
For my part, I was fond of her but not so in love as she. And yet, shortly afterwards, almost by chance, we married. She claimed to have become Catholic after she had joined me for a meeting with the Pope, and said thereafter that she did not want to sleep with me any more without the tenets of marriage. I was unsure at first – marriage had not been working well for me those past fifty years or so – and I considered breaking off the attachment, but any such suggestion drove her into a hysteria which I could not control. These sudden and inexplicable bursts of anger contrasted with the deep affection she displayed towards me in our quieter moments, and in the end I agreed that we should wed. Unlike some of my other marriages, we opted for a simple ceremony in a small chapel, with only Thomas and his new lover, a dark haired girl called Marita, as witnesses.
We did not honeymoon but returned instead to our apartment, where she surrendered herself to me as if we had never before known intimacy. Thomas had moved out and become engaged to Marita, although he claimed it would be a long engagement as he was not yet ready for marriage, and we were alone together at last. For a brief period anyway. Once again, through no fault of my own, I was a married man.
After an initial competition phase, I hired a man named Girno to design the opera house and he brought me some plans in the summer of 1848. They were rough sketches of what appeared to be an enormous amphitheatre with a huge stage set at the front. The ground held eighty-two rows of seating, fronted by the orchestra, and on either side there were four levels of boxes – seventy-two in all – each of which could hold up to eight people in comfort, or a dozen without. Where the curtains were to meet was the seal of Pope Pius IX, which I took to be a little sycophantic and requested that he think up a different idea, suggesting a representation of the twin founders of the city, Romulus and Remus, on either curtain, separated during the performance and joined before and after. Girno was an intelligent man and excited to be involved in such a lavish production, even if it was at an early stage and even if it was destined to come to nothing.
The revolutions had been growing in ardour throughout the year, from shortly before our arrival in the city, and I studied the newspapers carefully every morning for news of any political unrest. It was on one such morning, while enjoying a coffee in a small cafe near St Peter’s Square, that I read how the four main Italian leaders – Ferdinand II, Leopold of Tuscany, Charles Albert and Pius IX – had each issued constitutions in an act of appeasement and in order to prevent further rioting after the Palermo revolution in January had caused such trouble. These disturbances continued around the country with the mainly conservative governments being attacked by the more radical elements of each separate society. The Italian reporters were typically verbose as they described how Charles Albert declared war on Austria from Lombardy. Immediately the country was devastated by the Pope’s decision not to side with his countryman, a move which might have ‘unified’ Italy against a common enemy. Rather, he denounced the war, a move which strengthened the Austrian position and led to Lom-bardy’s eventual defeat, for which he would then receive the blame.
‘It is not that I am opposed to Lombardy’s views,’ the Pope told me at one of our regular meetings at the time. We had become confidants of a type and it was not unusual for him to discuss such matters with me. ‘On the contrary I am privately concerned about Austria’s imperial threats, although I consider them of less danger to Rome than to anywhere else. But what is most important is that I, as Pope, do not side with a nationalist leader in a matter which could potentially lead to the destruction of the Italian nation states as we know them.’
‘You are opposed to unification then?’ I asked, somewhat surprised.
‘I am opposed to the idea of central government. Italy is a large country, once all our states are joined together. And if that was to happen we would become nothing more than elements in a greater whole and who knows who would be in charge of Italy then or what it might become.’
‘A powerful country, perhaps,’ I suggested, at which he roared with laughter.
‘How little you know of Italy,’ he said. ‘What you see before you is a country whose very organs are ruled by men who see themselves as the natural offspring of Romulus and Remus. Each one of these so-called nationalist leaders looks towards a unified country of which they themselves are king. Some even suggest that I should be king,’ he added thoughtfully.
‘Which you don’t want,’ I stated flatly, watching his reaction closely -a shrug, a wave of the hand, a dismissive gesture, a change of tack.
‘I will hold Rome independent,’ he said, tapping each word out on the side of his armchair with his index finger. ‘That is what is of importance to me here. I will not allow her to be destroyed by the vain and wholly impossible concept of political unity. We have been here too long to see her brought to her knees by the Italians themselves, let alone the Austrian invaders.’ By ‘we’, I assumed he meant the long line of pontiffs to which his own name had recently been added.
‘I don’t follow your reasoning,’ I continued, irritated by his arrogance and forgetting all that I had been instructed on my very first visit to the Vatican. ‘If you consider -’
‘Enough of this!’ he roared, standing up and allowing his face to grow purple with rage as he moved towards the window. ‘You get on with building my opera house and allow me to run my city as I see fit.’
‘I meant no offence,’ I said after a long pause, standing up and walking towards the door. He didn’t turn around to see me or to say goodbye and my last view of him was of a huddled man leaning towards a narrow window over St Peter’s Square, watching as the people – his people – busied themselves for the storm to come.
The events of 11 and 12 November 1848 remain somewhat incredible to me, even now from a distance of some 151 years. Sabella returned home early in the afternoon, clearly agitated and unable to answer even my most simple questions.
‘My dear,’ I said, rising and going over to embrace her. Her body was rigid against my own and as I stood back to look at her I was amazed by how pale she appeared. ‘Sabella, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ she answered quickly, stepping back and pinching her own cheeks to invite a little colour to reappear. ‘I can’t stay here right now. I have to go out again. I’ll be back later.’
‘But where are you going?’ I asked. ‘You can’t go out in this state.’
‘I’m fine, Matthieu, honestly. I just need
to find my -’ There was a sudden rap on the door and she jumped back in fright. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘Don’t answer it!’
‘Don’t answer it? Why ever not? It’s probably only Thomas, come to-’
‘Leave it, Matthieu. It’s trouble, that’s all.’
But it was too late. I had opened the door and standing before me was a middle aged man in the uniform of a Piedmontese officer. He had a broad moustache above his lip, which seemed to curl back in towards his mouth as he looked me up and down.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ I asked politely.
‘You have already helped yourself,’ he replied, stepping inside quickly, one hand hovering dangerously above the sword buried within his side scabbard, ‘to that which is not yours.’
I looked across at Sabella who was rocking back and forth on a seat by the window, moaning audibly. ‘Who are you?’ I asked baffled.
‘Who am I? Who are you, sir?’
‘Matthieu Zéla,’ I replied. ‘And this is my home so I’ll thank you not to make demands in it.’
‘And that woman,’ he said quickly, pointing roughly at Sabella, ‘I’d say lady but that’s not the right word for her. Who is she, then, might I ask?’
‘That’s my wife,’ I answered, growing annoyed now. ‘And I’ll thank you to treat her with respect please!’
‘Ha!’ he laughed. ‘Here’s a riddle for you then. How can she be your wife when she is already married to me, eh? Can you answer that? In your fine clothes,’ he added as a non sequitur.
‘Married to you?’ I asked baffled. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. She -’
I could continue this scene and play it out, phrase by phrase, admission by admission, to its logical conclusion but it is the stuff of farce. Suffice to say that my so-called wife, Sabella Donato, had omitted to inform me that at the time of our nuptials she already had a husband, this dolt whose name was Marco Lanzoni. They had got married some ten years earlier, shortly before her rise to fame, and he had joined the army almost immediately after the wedding in order to make enough money for them to live comfortably in the future. When he returned to his hometown she had vanished, taking with her most of his belongings which she had sold to finance her early adventures throughout Italy. It had taken him this long to track her down to Rome and now he was here to claim her back. The one thing he hadn’t counted on was a second husband. A fiery chap, he demanded satisfaction and immediately challenged me to a duel the following morning, which I was forced to accept or bear the brand of cowardice. After he left, a troubling scene took place between my ‘wife’ and me, leading to many tears and recriminations. Our farcical wedding had taken place because she had placed herself in a state of self-delusion regarding her earlier alliance. And now there was a chance that I would pay the ultimate price for it. Time could not wither me, but Lanzoni’s sword certainly could.