"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."

"Kingdom, you say. Who will be king?"

"Whoever the kingmaker decides on. And do not ask me to name the kingmaker because he may be now a snotty boy peeing his breeches. I apologise, your eminence."

"You have this Roman coarseness in you, my son. So that is your picture of the Roman future, eh?"

"Not a future I greatly relish. I'm temperamentally incapable of thinking in terms of – big national unities. Italy to me is the name of a land leg and a land belly above belted with spiky mountains. I'm a Roman and it's enough to be a Roman. What's good enough for a Caesar is good enough for a Belli. Soon they'll be talking of a language called Italian which any good Italian patriot must speak and write, forgetting his Roman, and his Venetian or Milanese for that matter, disregarded dialects with literatures ignored by the big dottori. Bad as things are here and now, I prefer them to what's to come."

"Bad?"

"Oh, what I said – the stink of uncollected garbage, robbers in alleys, no street lamps, too many jacks-in-office."

"Of whom you are one."

"A very small jack, your eminence. Just big enough to stop me living off my wife."

"You could," Cardinal Fabiani said, "be a very big one." Belli said nothing. He looked into the golden firecave, waiting. "I reject your prophecy," his eminence said. Belli shrugged Romanly. "Things will not be as you say, at least not in our lifetime."

"You must, as ever speak for yourself, eminence."

The prelate ignored that. "Expect hotheads, a renewal of jacobinism, republican claptrap, inept pasquinades, inflammatory pamphlets, street-corner evocations of a Bonaparte who ceased to exist even before the turn of the century. Rome, however, will not yield one whit of its ancient and blessedly recovered divine authority. What do you say, my son, to a central bureau of censorship of which you shall be the head?"

"Censorship? More than already exists?"

"The theatres as well as the newspapers. The opera house. Poems and novels and cheapjack modernist metaphysics. The printed and spoken and enacted word. What do you say?"

Belli got up to kick back into confirmation of its place a log that had been proposing dislodgement for half an hour past. He remained standing, looking down on the meagre prelate who by our lifetime could mean no more than a meagre decade. He said: "There will be more police too, paid for with a heavier tax on salt and tobacco. With respect, your eminence, always with respect, I wonder how far you, a man of the Campagna, understand the Roman mind. Wait, with respect, and let me say my word, since it was for my word you asked me here to eat your fish and pullets. You can do anything to a Roman – indeed, you must do anything to a Roman, touching the very limit of oppression. A Roman expects nothing from his rulers except tyranny of one sort or another. Treat a Roman well and he will begin to think there is a catch somewhere and start brooding revolution. Probably they deserve to be so treated, the rats of this foul and beautiful sewer. They are probably all damned, and hell is a city much like Rome. They have no notion of morality, none of theology, none at all of history. Ignorant and damned. To many Romans, Rome is a tract only in space and not at all in time, so that the tyrannous Popes and Caesars share a kind of mythic contemporaneity. For that matter, Cain murdered Abel in an alley off the Piazza Navona, and Noah modelled his ark on the Porto de Ripetta ferry. That a bird impregnated our Blessed Mother none find it difficult to believe, since after all bird is another name for prick -"

"You are getting off your point, whatever your point is or was."

"The Roman tongue has more words for prick and balls and cunt than any language in the world. They believe in nothing but hardship and getting drunk and fucking. Oh, they accept Christian doctrine as they accept Romulus and Remus and the mother-wolf, and they think that Pontius Pilate delivered his judgment in St Peter's. It seems very reasonable to them that God should play a dirty trick with an apple and then say: Posterity, you're fucked. They are all fucked and in turn they fuck. What I suppose I am saying is this, your eminence – for God's sake, with respect, don't dream of a holy city which can be made even holier by cutting off the outside world from its denizens. They don't believe the outside world exists, most of them -"

"You speak," said Cardinal Fabiani, at last sitting down on a chair whose arms writhed with cherubim, "of the common people, and you, my son, have used very common language in speaking of them."

"Mea maxima culpa. Holiness in others brings out the worst in myself. I am a positive saint in the company of atheistical sneerers. Common people? A holy city surely talks of souls all equal in God's eyes. Anyway, even poets and intellectuals Roman-born have enough of the common Roman inside them. I myself have. I try to keep it down, not always with success, then I yield and beat my breast after. The language which is my language, and which Dante's Tuscan disdains, is made out of melons and flyblown meat and piss and shit and -"