The Faces of Angels (50 page)

‘But she went to Mass, right? Before she came here?' I try another tack.

‘Uh-huh. She'd had a fight with André, her fiancé, that night. That's when Bene was most likely to go to Mass.'

‘At night?'

Isabella smiles. ‘No, when she felt guilty. But she went at night, because of her work schedules. You fit God in when you can. I don't believe he minds,' she says. ‘There are others who disagree.'

‘Where did she go? That night, before she came here.'

‘To Mass?' Isabella shrugs. ‘San Miniato.'

I stare at her, my stomach feeling as if it's going down on a fast elevator. ‘San Miniato?'

Isabella nods. ‘Sure. Our family went there, when we were children. It was our family church.'

‘Just like Ginevra Montelleone.' I say it as much to myself as to her. ‘Tell me,' I ask quickly, ‘do you know a priest there? A Father Rinaldo? He's very right-wing. I think he's even Opus Dei.'

‘Opus Dei?' Now Isabella stares at me.

I nod, feeling my pulse begin to race. ‘This group,' I say, ‘they're—'

She waves her hand in the air, brushing my explanation away. ‘I know who they are.' Isabella closes her eyes. ‘“Let us drink to the last drop the chalice of pain in this poor present life…Deny yourself. It's so beautiful to be a victim,”' she recites. Then she opens her eyes and looks at me. ‘You know who wrote that?' she asks, and I shake my head. This time when she smiles, the smile is bitter.

‘Josemaria Escrivá, Opus Dei's founding saint—literally—in his book,
The Way
. It's their bible. Their manual for dayto-day living. Bene's fiancé, André, has spent most of his adult life fighting them,' she adds. ‘In fact, that's how they met.'

Pictures shoot through my head. Rinaldo's beautiful prayer group whispering and fluttering around me as I stand in the sacristy at San Miniato, Rinaldo himself, towering over me as I proffer tulips, the scrubbed boys and blank-faced girl standing in the empty street behind him; Beatrice Modesto shaking her head.
We haven't actually had any trouble with them, but others have, though, especially if they touch abortion.
Pieces of the puzzle click and shuffle.

‘Benedetta was involved with Opus Dei,' I mutter. But Isabella shakes her head.

‘No,' she says. ‘I was.'

This takes me totally by surprise, and I open my mouth to protest, to actually argue with her, then close it again, quickly. Isabella is looking down into the garden, studying the whirring flight of her bees. ‘I can't wear bathing suits,' she says.

I feel faintly sick. Too much sun. Or the idea of barbed wire digging into flesh.

‘The cilice?'

She nods. ‘I have holes.' Her eyes are still on the bees. ‘Like stigmata. They said it was a special privilege, and I was so happy when I received permission to wear it.'

When she looks at me there are tears on her cheeks. ‘It's like a chain of barbed wire. You wear it around the top of your thigh for two hours a day. More, if you're very privileged. And you use the “discipline” too. I suppose you know what that is?'

I nod. It's a rope whip, something like a cat-o'-nine-tails. In the Middle Ages the penitents used to beat their back and buttocks with it until they drew blood, flaying their flesh to grow closer to Christ on the Cross. The church took a dim view of it, even then, and eventually mainstream Catholicism banned it. But not Opus.

‘That's not the worst thing about them,' Isabella is saying. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hands. ‘The sleeping on boards and kissing the floor, all that nonsense. That's what the papers like, but it's not the worst. The real damage isn't what they do to your flesh, it's what they do to your heart. To your love of God. They take it.' Her voice turns hard.

‘They kidnap Christ,' she says. ‘Treat him as if he's their own personal property, and instead of him, you get them. You're supposed to surrender everything to them, and in return they tell you how to love God. And how not to love God. Then they tell you how he loves you. But, mostly, how he doesn't love you. And in return for that, they want everything. Everything. You give up your life.' She pauses. ‘“To live we must die,”' Isabella says. ‘“We must deny ourselves everything; the sacrifice must be the Holocaust.”'

She smiles, her teeth showing, as if she might bite. ‘That's what they teach about the Love of Christ.' She picks up her empty cup and puts it down, and when she starts speaking again I can hear the rage in her voice.

‘They don't want just your faith and your mind, they want your money too,' she says. ‘If you live in one of their houses they make you hand your salary over to them and give you an allowance in return. It's all part of the “Childhood Before God” idea. But that's not all. What they really want is for you to make your will over to them. They wanted this house.'

Isabella looks up, at the closed windows of the upper room where her family has been born, and probably died, at the butter-coloured stucco, at the pediment above the door engraved with a fading coat of arms, and shakes her head. ‘I would have given it to them,' she says. ‘That's the sick thing. God, I would have. I gave up my marriage for them. They told me I was giving it to Jesus, and I would have given them this house, too. That's what happened to André,' she adds.

‘You were married?' I thought he was Benedetta's fiancé, and now I'm confused.

‘Not to André.' Isabella smiles. ‘No, to someone else, who I left for Opus. André's mother got involved with them, though. After his father died. They lived here, in Florence, and she signed everything over to them. But worse than that, they took her from him, and his sister too. When you live in one of their houses they discourage contact with family. They tell you who you can and can't write letters to, the whole thing. What you can read, what you can watch on TV. That's how Bene met André,' she adds. ‘She went to him about me. He runs a group that helps families of Opus members. Or he did. After she was killed, he decided to stay in Morocco. Even when they got Indrizzio, he didn't want to come back here. There was nothing for him after Bene died.'

I'm feeling cold. The chill spreads from somewhere deep down in my insides. ‘Do you think her death had anything to do with Opus?'

Isabella either doesn't hear me, or ignores the question.

‘You love something—God—so you want to be close to it,' she says. ‘You think it will save you. I thought Opus would save me, but instead all they did was take something beautiful and make it ugly. They say your heart is a traitor, that you should lock it away, and that your body and soul are enemies who can't escape each other. I don't know,' she says, suddenly answering my question. ‘I've thought about it. I don't know if they regard a human life that can't be converted as especially sacred. I mean, when I left, they told me I would be without God's grace. Actually,' she adds, ‘they told me I was damned.'

‘Yes. An Opus priest told me that once too.'

‘This Father Rinaldo?'

I nod.

‘Did you believe him?' she asks.

‘No,' I say slowly. ‘In the end, I don't think I did. I guess I didn't believe God would really do that. Or that I'd want to know him anyways, if he did.'

Isabella smiles. ‘I don't know this Rinaldo,' she says. ‘And I doubt Bene did. Maybe. But she wouldn't have gone near him if she knew he was Opus. She wasn't their biggest fan. To put it mildly. I did suggest it,' she says, ‘to the police. Of course I did. It was obvious. But I don't think they found any connection between Indrizzio and Opus. They've threatened André in the past,' she adds. ‘Opus, I mean. But they leave me alone. I think they consider damnation enough. Which doesn't mean, of course, that we don't want them out of here.'

‘Out of Florence?'

Isabella laughs as if this is genuinely funny. ‘That wouldn't be possible, I don't think. People say Florence belonged to the Medici, but the Medici are dead and Savonarola's still going strong, so to speak. No. I mean out of this area. We've started a neighbourhood group, but there's not much we can do about them. It's not illegal to buy property. They own a couple of houses around here, and they're after a big ruined villa down near the Art Institute, you know the one I mean?'

I think of the mascara-streaked stucco, the squat crumbling towers, and the old man with his deaf poodle and his cane. ‘Yes,' I say, ‘actually, I do.'

‘They got the oldest son to leave it to them. But the other brother and his sisters are contesting it. And the neighbours don't want them. They usually don't, when they find out about them. They burn books, you know,' Isabella says. ‘Have little Bonfires of the Vanities in the back garden. ‘“The eyes. Through them many iniquities enter the soul. If you guard your sight, you have assured the guard of your heart.”' That's from
The Way
too. We had to learn them. All Escrivá's little pearls of wisdom. And the sick thing was, we loved it. We thought they were incredibly profound.'

Sadness drifts across Isabella's face. ‘I don't understand now,' she says, ‘how I could have believed it all.'

‘Listen,' I tell her. ‘Father Rinaldo? He tried to snag me for Opus two years ago. And in other circumstances I might have bitten. They weren't that wrong. Their timing with me was just off, that's all. Another time, another place, I could easily have done what you did.'

I want to give her this, partly as thanks for what she's told me, and partly to say that whatever well of loneliness and neediness they spotted in her exists in us all. She nods, but she doesn't say anything.

A few seconds later the dog rustles up out of the bushes and trots up the steps. He throws himself down at Isabella's feet with a sigh and thumps his tail on the gravel.

‘I usually take him out for a walk,' she says. ‘He gets bored here. He likes to go and do the shopping.'

This is my cue to leave, to step out through the gates and let Isabella close herself back into the world of her villa where maybe time, or enchantment, or bees, will heal her. I stand up and thank her, for her coffee and her time and what she's shared with me, but she shakes her head. ‘I'm going to drive you home.'

‘I can't possibly let you.'

She looks at me and laughs. ‘After what you've told me,' she says, ‘you can't possibly not!'

Isabella insists that she has to feed Fonzi first, and I follow her into the kitchen. It's a cavernous room. Dented copper pots and knives hang above a gas range that looks as if it dates from 1900. She vanishes into a pantry and comes back with a slab of meat on a board while the dog paces behind her and then sits, eyes fixed on her hands as she chooses a knife. She runs her thumb down it, and reaches for a whetstone. The sound of the blade running across its edge is like nails on a blackboard, and I have to look away. I could never stand this noise. In school, when I was little, it used make me feel as if I had to pee. Now I distract myself by studying a dresser full of books and pictures.

‘That's Bene,' Isabella says suddenly. She has stopped sharpening the knife, and stands watching me by the sink. The photo I have picked up was once brightly coloured, but now the green of the child's dress has turned dull and a little murky. The red ball she holds is mottled.

‘I think she was seven then.'

From where she stands, Isabella cannot possibly see the picture I'm holding. She must know by the space on the dresser. She must have memorized every one, and I imagine her, sitting at the long empty table in the evenings, the dog at her feet, the lights pooling on the stone floor while she eats, cutlery clicking, in the company of ghosts.

When I look on the back of the snapshot, someone's written, ‘A. Giugno 1975' in spidery handwriting. ‘A?' I ask.

Isabella nods. ‘Agatha. She hated it. Benedetta was her middle name.' She turns back to the board, flips the hunk of meat over and begins to chop, the blade swishing down hard and fast as she hits the wood. A piece of gristle plops onto the floor, and is snuffled up by the dog. I put the photo back, careful to make sure I have it in exactly the right place.

When we leave, Isabella drives fast. After I close the gate and get back in the tiny Fiat, I barely have time to buckle my seat belt before she flies down the road. Fonzi lies across the back seat, apparently unbothered. The gears grind, and she swings into Viale Galileo so abruptly the car almost skids. We shoot down the hill and the big dog sits up, his breath filling the car with a meaty smell. I'd like to open the window, but when I reach for the button I find it's broken.

I've told Isabella where Pierangelo's is, but by the time we accelerate across the river, I kick myself for not asking her just to drop me at Signora Bardino's apartment, not because I want to go there, but because it's an awful lot closer. The tiny car and the dog are making me feel slightly sick. I tell myself not to be stupid, that we'll be there in just a second, but even so, I want to get out.