Tosca also discovered that the prince and princess had been sincere when they had said that she would be treated as a member of the family. Not just with the Belgioiosos but throughout Italy, even throughout Europe, the talent of an artist was equal to any pedigree. And so just as Voltaire became the honoured guest of King Frederick the Great or the Tsarina Catherine, so Tosca, with her giggling peasant charm and harsh Veneto accent, was treated by the prince and princess and their servants with the respect they would have accorded the daughter of a duke or the niece of a pope. When they stopped for the night on their journey north, she shared a bed with Princess Carlotta; and when they finally reached the Palazzo Belgioioso in Milan, she was given a room like that of the prince’s older children. She was also assigned a maid and, guided by Princess Carlotta, a wardrobe of fine dresses matched with equally fine shoes. Instructions had been given, presumably by the prince, that she was not to be denaturée – which the dressmakers and hairdressers perfectly understood to mean that the freshness of the campagna should not be lost. Tosca was Tosca and must remain Tosca, though perhaps not entirely Tosca: with a little laughter, and a little teasing, and a friendly solicitude, Tosca was taught the meaning in Florentine Italian of some of her Venetian idioms.
With the utmost tact, some of Tosca’s rough peasant manner was smoothed: she learned how to eat with silver cutlery and sip from a glass of wine. She was given romantic novels by Carlotta, and taught by the tutors of the prince’s musical children how to play the harpsichord and read music. The best teachers in Milan were employed to further train her voice and she practised singing for several hours each day. She joined with the prince’s children in an amateur performance of an opera written by the prince himself; and then, in October, Tosca made her first professional appearance at La Scala in Cimarosa’s La ballerina amante. It was a small role, but she enchanted the audience. The prince was delighted. His children fussed happily over Tosca after this, her first appearance on a public stage.
And later, when the children had retired, the prince – the illustrious Prince Alberigo Belgioioso d’Este – went to Tosca’s room to praise her in person. She awaited him in a loose silk gown. She was now sixteen years old. He was more than sixty, but healthy and handsome and so immense in his grandeur that a peasant girl from the Veneto could no more refuse him than she could refuse Zeus. And ever since she had seen his eye linger on her bosom that day in Gallo, Tosca had known that in due course she should expect to repay the man who had given her so much in the only currency she possessed. And in the mind of the illustrious prince? An assumption of a droit de seigneur, perhaps, or a feeling that, having been taught music and manners, it was time for Tosca to learn about love.
Five
1
The equerry who had accompanied Treasurer Ruffo to the recital by Floria Tosca at the Quirinale Palace was Vitellio Scarpia. After fifteen months serving in obscure garrisons on the routes across the Apennines, and on the borders of the Papal States, Scarpia had been recalled to Rome. He had amply justified all Ruffo’s expectations; wherever he had served, banditry had declined. The brigands captured by Scarpia, among them the infamous Ponzio Adena, had been tried, convicted and given the prescribed sentence of ten years in the galleys. Since there were no galleys, they were held in the comfortable Carceri Nuove and, after three years, benefited from one of the amnesties that the popes periodically extended to all convicted criminals to demonstrate the merciful nature of Christ’s vicar on earth. Scarpia had been rewarded with promotion to the rank of captain, an increase of his pay to eighteen scudi a month, and a posting to the garrison of the Castel Sant’Angelo. On Ruffo’s recommendation, his protégé had received from Pope Pius VI the Order of the Golden Spur.
Scarpia had returned to Rome with few acquaintances and no friends, and having spent so long in the company of men, he now hankered for the company of women. The painful memory of what had transpired in Algiers had faded and Scarpia found himself glancing at pretty girls at Mass on a Sunday or walking up and down the Corso. Many met his glances with a smile: the months of active service had given depth and maturity to his handsome face. However, these young women were all strictly chaperoned and Scarpia had no introductions to the homes where they lived.
Spoletta, noticing his master’s renewed interest, offered to introduce him to willing women – not just whores but young wives in Trastevere whose husbands turned a blind eye to their earning some pin money through discreet liaisons with richer men. Scarpia declined Spoletta’s offer. He retained a high-minded vision of love, which Spoletta considered an aristocratic affectation, like a powdered wig.
Spoletta did not suffer from solitude: in all their postings he had quickly found the tavernas where he could satisfy his simple needs for food, drink, talk and a woman. Spoletta saw himself as a straightforward, uncomplicated son of the soil, but he was not as simple as he seemed. His father had been a brute and his mother a bully, who punished her son for the sins of his father – a violent, irascible man who exacted sexual favours from the wives and daughters of the peasants of Castelfranco in lieu of unpaid rent. There had been no joy in the home, and, such was the isolated position of the factor between those who owned the land and those who worked it, little chance of finding joy elsewhere. Spoletta had only been happy in those summer months when the Spolettas’ feudal lord, the cavaliere Luigi Scarpia, took up residence in the villa and he rode out into the olive groves with his son.
Spoletta had been taught to read and write, but there had been no books other than rent books in his home; and though Vitellio Scarpia had lent him the odd history or romance, Spoletta found reading laborious and did not see the point. With long hours of brooding during the winters in the Apennines, he had developed his own philosophy which lay between that of the Church, which taught that human nature was fallen but might be redeemed, and that of the French philosophes to whom man was perfectible if only he could break the shackles of oppression and superstition. To Spoletta, man was an animal, and it was vanity to think he was something better. Like the friends he made in the tavernas, he wanted to be neither perfected by the philosophes nor redeemed by the Church. He was careful not to mock the Church; he did not want to be called before the Inquisition; but at times, to a suitable audience, he would suggest that the clerical calling was a clever way for cowards to avoid fighting, get a good income, yet still retain the moral high ground.
*
Around six months after his return to Rome, Scarpia received an embossed invitation to a ball at the Palazzo Colonna. He had walked past this magnificent building at the foot of the Quirinale Hill on a number of occasions; he had even wandered in to look at the collection of paintings and sculpture that rivalled that of the Vatican, but never had he imagined that he would ever enter the palazzo as a guest. Who was behind the invitation? Was it Father Simone to whom he had returned to make his Easter confession, and had confided his isolation and lack of friends? Or was it Treasurer Ruffo? Both were cousins of the princess.
The invitation produced in Scarpia elation, excitement, confusion and finally panic: it demanded more strategy, planning and courage than any encounter with brigands. He would have to buy a new suit of clothes, a new powdered wig, new shoes with new buckles – all in tune with what was worn at the court in Versailles. Had Scarpia been a Knight of Malta he might have worn his uniform, but better, he thought, the coat of a civilian than that of a mere captain in the despised pontifical army. A tailor was found and money was borrowed from a Jew in the ghetto to buy an elegant tunic, a white silk shirt with exquisite ruffles, soft grey breeches with silk stockings to mould his fine calves, and large oval silver buckles on his brightly polished leather shoes.
*
The night came. Scarpia was delivered to the palazzo in a sedan chair, a tricorn hat loosely placed on his head, and a silk cloak covering his tunic on which was pinned the Order of the Golden Spur. A hundred torches lit the entrance, where Scarpia’s hat and cloak were taken from him; and two l
ines of footmen in sumptuous attire held silver candelabra to illuminate the wide stairs. Scarpia followed his fellow guests to the top, gave his name to the major-domo and then heard it bellowed over the chatter to a decrepit old man and a shrivelled old woman who were receiving the guests – presumably the Prince and Princess Colonna. His name meant nothing to them: both shook his hand briefly with the dead smile and empty expression of those who wish to show a minimum of politeness, but no more. Then Scarpia was carried by the flow of guests into a huge and magnificent galleria, offered a goblet of punch from a gilded tray, and finally, as the flow ceased, he found himself alone and ignored in a crowd of people he did not know.
But then, in the distance, he caught sight of a familiar face – that of the Treasurer, Fabrizio Ruffo, dressed resplendently in a black soutane and purple cotta, with gold-braided cuffs appearing below his purple mozzetta and three bejewelled orders pinned to his chest. He was standing at the centre of a group of four others – one a cleric, one a layman and two of them women. Should Scarpia approach him or would such an august figure consider it an impertinence? He moved closer, and stood pretending to admire a painting. He turned. The treasurer caught his eye and beckoned for him to approach. Scarpia stepped forward and gave an elegant bow.
‘This is the young man I was telling you about,’ said Ruffo to the older of the two women.
‘Ah, yes, the fearless soldier who has made it safe for us to travel to Ancona. I am told you do not know many people in Rome.’
‘No, signora,’ said Scarpia. ‘I have spent more than a year in the mountains.’
The woman shuddered. ‘You poor boy. I am surprised you survived the cold.’
Ruffo introduced Scarpia to his friends and his friends to Scarpia – the layman, the abate and the two women – Principessa di Marcisano and Contessa di Comastri. At each introduction, Scarpia bowed.
‘You must call on us,’ said the younger of the two women, the Contessa di Comastri. She was aged around thirty, her features even, her skin flawless, her hair piled high, her dress cut low – the bodice richly embroidered and studded with sequins framing the soft rise of her breasts.
The Principessa di Marcisano was a good ten years older and dressed with the same elaboration, but in a way that suggested this was only for form’s sake. She flickered a look of suspicion at the contessa, then turned to Ruffo. ‘Shouldn’t I take him to meet some other young people, Monsignor?’
The treasurer bowed. ‘By all means.’
‘Come with me,’ said the principessa to Scarpia, then set off at a fast pace, her hooped dress parting the flotsam of guests like the blunt prow of a ship – acknowledging the bows and smiles of those she passed with an almost irritated nod of her head, but stopping for none as she pursued her mission.
Scarpia followed in her wake into a smaller side room where there stood a group of young people around Scarpia’s age – languid, saying little, glasses in their hands, two of the girls with thick powder covering their pockmarked faces. From upholstered banquettes set against the wall older women kept watch on the young.
At the approach of the principessa, the young men bowed and the girls curtsied.
‘Ludovico, Paola,’ said the principessa, ‘this is Vitellio Scarpia. I want you to look after him. He knows no one in Rome.’
‘And we know everyone,’ said a girl with a clear complexion, and a shadow of an impertinent smile on her lips.
‘He does not need to meet everyone,’ said the principessa, with a sharp look at her daughter.
‘Don’t worry, Mother,’ said the young man. ‘We shall look after him.’
The principessa turned to Scarpia. ‘You know how to dance, I take it?’
Scarpia bowed. ‘If the steps are the same in Rome as they are in Palermo.’
‘A Sicilian!’ said one of the young women. ‘Well!’
What the ‘well’ was meant to signify was not clear to Scarpia. He felt welling up inside of him a rage at being treated like some strange beast from a zoo.
‘Your card,’ said the principessa to her daughter.
The girl handed her mother the thick parchment programme listing the dances against which were written a number of names.
‘You have some free, I see,’ said the principessa. Then, turning to Scarpia: ‘Would you like to dance the next quadrille with my daughter, Paola?’
Scarpia bowed towards the young woman, and in a tone tinged with sarcasm said: ‘If the signorina would be so kind.’
‘With pleasure,’ said Paola di Marcisano, investing the word ‘pleasure’ with an equal irony, and a sharp look of annoyance directed not at Scarpia but her mother.
*
Paola became kinder when the two were alone. ‘What brought you to Rome?’ she asked, as they came face-to-face during the quadrille. Before Scarpia could answer, they were swept apart; then, as they came together again, before giving him a chance to answer, she said: ‘Not as a pilgrim, surely?’ The same impertinent smile. Back, forward, their hands touched for a turn.
‘I was in Spain,’ said Scarpia, ‘and the boat brought me to Civitavecchia.’
‘Like Aeneas.’
‘More or less.’
‘And clearly, if you found yourself in Civitavecchia, it made sense to come to Rome.’ She was swept away again. Then, when they were momentarily reunited: ‘What did you do in Spain?’
‘I was a soldier.’
She seemed unable to think of a smart rejoinder; then, when the dance ended, she said: ‘I dare say there’s more to being a soldier in Spain than there is in Rome.’
‘I am a soldier here too.’
‘A Knight of St John?’
‘No. Just a soldier.’
‘Well, that’s original. I don’t think I’ve ever met an ordinary soldier before.’ They walked towards the buffet: she seemed in no hurry to return to her friends. ‘But then, though we know everyone, as I said, it is only in a social sense. I was locked away in a convent until last year, and so have in fact met few people outside our circle.’
Scarpia followed her to the table.
‘Do you like ice cream?’ she asked, taking a small porcelain plate on which sat three coloured boules. ‘We love it here in Rome.’
Scarpia took a plate from a flunkey. ‘Also in Palermo.’
‘Shall we sit down?’ Holding the plate of ice cream, she sauntered towards the side room from which they had come. ‘We had better remain in view of Aunt Adolina. We don’t want to cause scandal. It’s a sin. Did you know that? Causing scandal is a sin, even if what causes the scandal is entirely innocent.’
‘I would not want to compromise your honour,’ said Scarpia.
‘Oh, you couldn’t do that. No one could think –’ She stopped, turned towards Scarpia, looked him up and down, and said: ‘You really shouldn’t wear that order, the Golden Spur. His Holiness hands it out to everyone. Most people pass it on to their valet.’
Scarpia blushed. ‘Alas, I don’t have a drawerful of orders to choose from.’
‘Better none than the Golden Spur, I can assure you. It marks you out as a provincial.’
‘I am a provincial,’ said Scarpia, looking for some way in which he could avoid sitting down next to Paola on a banquette. ‘But I am most grateful to be taught the ways of the world by someone who has spent her life in a convent.’
Paola patted the place on the seat next to her. ‘Come and sit down. I didn’t mean to upset you. And you’re quite right, I really have no idea as to what is or is not comme il faut. It is only that I overheard someone saying that about the Order of the Golden Spur. But, as you say, an Order is an Order and it looks quite pretty. And me, do you think I look pretty?’
Scarpia glanced at her – the small, sharp nose, thin lips, white teeth and large eyes. ‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t take long to come to that conclusion. A first impression. Why not? You don’t think my features are too severe? My ancestors, over the centuries, married into families from Tuscany, Lombardy,
the Veneto – even the Thurn and Taxis who are German – which perhaps accounts for the colour of my hair.’
Scarpia looked at her elaborately dressed hair. ‘What colour is it au naturel?’
‘Au naturel, as you put it, my hair is brown. You would probably prefer it to be black like that of the girls in Sicily or in Spain.’ She glanced at him mischievously – the same look of impudence that she had directed at her mother.
‘I would not judge a woman’s beauty simply by the colour of her hair,’ said Scarpia.
‘And yet,’ said Paola, ‘St Paul himself – he’s my patron saint – said that a woman’s glory is her hair, so it must play some role in one’s overall judgement of a woman’s beauty. Perhaps you judge beauty simply by the quality of the soul?’ – another impudent smile. ‘We were taught in the convent that that is what matters, but then as soon as we were released we are bedecked and adorned as if the soul is the last thing a man has in mind when he is looking for a wife.’
‘Perhaps the way a woman looks says something about her soul?’
‘Less in Rome than in Paris where Frenchwomen put rouge on their faces. We don’t do that here.’ She pointed to her cheek. ‘That’s its natural colour. Au naturel. Perhaps we’ll start painting our faces sooner or later. We always follow the fashions of Versailles, though we’re usually ten or twenty years out of date. That dress my mother is wearing. Did you notice? It’s ancient. It might have been worn by Madame de Pompadour. It’s not that she couldn’t afford a new one. She simply can’t be bothered. She’d much rather fuss about what I’m wearing.’ Paola finished her ice cream. ‘That was most enjoyable, but now I must get back to my friends. I can see a worried look on Aunt Adolina’s face.’ She stood. ‘You must forgive me for prattling on so much. You can’t imagine how dull life was in the convent with no one to talk to but the other girls, the nuns and the occasional abate.’
*
Was she pretty? Lying in his bed that night, and over the next several days, Scarpia tried to raise images from his memory of Paola di Marcisano. She had been pretty, but how? She was tall, and thin – quite the opposite of the buxom Celestina. The skin of her cheeks to which she had pointed, untainted either by smallpox or rouge, was part of a pale complexion but, perhaps because of her adolescent chatter, her prettiness seemed like that of a child. Her dress had been a pale blue, with little scarlet bows beneath the bodice, but, when he thought of her bodice, there came into his mind the gentle swelling of the breasts of the Contessa di Comastri. The more Scarpia mused on the two women – and one or two others he had met at the ball – the more his mind returned to the contessa.