The Gospel Of Judas (11 page)

‘Precisely.’

‘Precisely, what? What do you mean,
precisely
?’

‘There you are: you’re reduced to semantic arguments. That’s all there is. If you’re not careful, you’ll slide on into old age and semantics is all you’ll have. You’ll sit there just like the cat and words will go round in your head and there’ll be nothing else.’

‘Your analogy is breaking down. The cat’s mind is empty, you just said so yourself.’

‘I bet you even rationalise your faith, don’t you? I bet you don’t
feel
it any longer, not with your emotions, not with your body. I bet it’s just words. Liturgy, dogma, creed, words. Sterile. Tell me what you think.’

‘What I think about what?’

‘You, your life, your vocation. What’s it for?’

Conversations like this gave him a sharp and curious sense of delight – something that was almost physical, like a guilty pleasure. On occasion he provoked them, willed her to produce these outbursts. ‘Why on earth do you
live
in these dreadful rooms, Leo?’ she asked when she and Jack visited him in the Institute. ‘What’s to stop you moving out, getting a place of your own? If you’re not careful you’ll end up evolving into a dreadful old fossil just like all these other priests.’

‘I don’t think you
evolve
into a fossil,’ he answered her. ‘I think you’ve mixed your metaphors. Again.’

‘There!’ she cried triumphantly. ‘That’s just what I mean.’ She became, of course, the negation of her own argument, his escape from the very evils she accused him of. Her tone, her presence, her manner conspired against him, jostled him out of complacency and compliance. Consciously, unconsciously, he began to change. A metamorphosis. Celibacy is the enemy of change but Leo Newman, Father Leo Newman, began to ease himself reptile-like out of the dry skin of his old life.

‘How do you know a
princess
, for goodness’ sake?’ Madeleine asked when he told her his plans. She bubbled with laughter at the idea. ‘How on
earth
do you know a princess?’

‘She was a friend of my mother’s.’

‘Your
mother’s
? I thought your mother was a piano teacher.’

‘Can’t a piano teacher know a princess?’

‘A cat may look at a queen,’ Madeleine said. It was what Leo had come to label one of her ‘Irish’ replies.

She went with him to visit the princess in her castle, the eponymous Palazzo Casadei, a mouldering Roman palace that had belonged to the family since the sixteenth century. The family had survived popes and kings, dictators and presidents. It had lived there when Benvenuto Cellini was a prisoner in Castel Sant’Angelo, and when Keats was a young hopeful dying of consumption in a boarding house not far away. It had watched the Garibaldini celebrating in the streets and the French troops marching in to restore the papacy. It had weathered theocracy and monarchy, oligarchy and tyranny but now looked as though it might well not survive democracy. The
principessa
lived on the
piano nobile
amidst the fantastic wreckage left behind by
bands of marauding visitors: the portrait of the family pope, the paintings of long-dead ancestors, the gilt and guilt of those five hundred years’ survival. She resembled her surroundings as a pet resembles its master: she was ancient and decaying, the edges frayed and the prominences shiny and threadbare.

‘
Conoscevo tua madre
,’ she said to her visitors from the outside world. I knew your mother. She used the familiar form of the pronoun,
tua
, as though Leo were a child. ‘
Una bellissima donna
.’ The old woman nodded as though confirming the fact to herself and the fog of memory seemed to disperse for a moment to show distant scenes, forgotten people. ‘I remember hearing her play, do you know that? She played like an angel. Schubert, Liszt, Beethoven, those great Germans. Ah,
die gute alte Zeit
. And I remember you, oh yes, I remember you. Young Leo, isn’t that it?’

Leo and Madeleine sat awkwardly on a threadbare sofa from the last century, an uncomfortable thing with tortured legs and twisted arms. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘that’s it.’

‘And she is dead now?’

‘She died eight years ago.’

The
principessa
shrugged. What else could one expect? They were all dead, her friends just as much as her enemies. All dead, just as she herself appeared almost to be dead, or at least to occupy some state between the living and the dead, a kind of limbo. She pointed her clawed finger at Madeleine. ‘And who is this?’

‘She is a friend.’

‘She is not your wife?’

‘I have no wife. I have never been married.’

The old woman’s laugh had within it a rich bubble of corruption. ‘Why should you? I was never married. I had
many friends but I was never once married. Many friends, many lovers.’ They were there all around her, framed in silver – beautiful young men in wide-lapelled suits and two-tone shoes, beautiful women with wide shoulders and pomaded hair. Edda Mussolini, wearing some kind of turban, smiled out of one frame and greeted
mia cara Eugenia, con affetto
. ‘And you want to come and live here? You have seen the apartment?’

‘The
portiere
gave us the key.’

She shrugged. ‘It’s a poor enough place. This whole
palazzo
is a poor place, old and rotting like me. I am the last of the line, do you know that? Oh, there are cousins of some kind, there are always cousins in an Italian family, but no one that I see. I am the last. My father’s only child, and the line dies out with me. Why shouldn’t you come and live here, eh? Gretchen’s little boy, sterile just like me. Why not?’ The idea seemed to amuse her. She began to laugh once more, a laugh that soon transformed itself into a racking cough, so that a female attendant hurried in from the room next door to help her. ‘Gretchen’s little boy,’ the old woman cried through coughs and laughter, ‘Gretchen’s sterile little boy.’

Madeleine and Leo left awkwardly, in the midst of medical ministrations. They went down wide marble stairs past a group of tourists going into the public rooms where dusty things were roped off and approximately guarded. ‘What a nasty old woman,’ Madeleine said. ‘What did she say? The German, I mean. I could follow the Italian, but she said something in German.’

‘
Die gute alte Zeit
.’ Leo laughed at the idea. ‘It means “the good old days”.’

They emerged from the staircase into the shadows of the entrance archway. In the courtyard (Giacomo da Vignola,
1558) was sunlight and greenery, a circumference of columns, a floor of sloping basalt, a pond with a clump of vegetation around the central fountain. From the midst of this growth a carved figure peered out at whatever tourists were around, a gnarled and leery satyr dribbling water into a stone bowl like a senile man dribbling saliva into a kidney basin. The vegetation included elegant fronds of
Cyperus papyrus
, the papyrus plant.

They climbed other stairs in the building, the back stairs, stairs that led behind the scenes and had once been for the servants.

‘How did the
principessa
know your mother?’ Madeleine asked as they climbed. ‘I didn’t realise she lived in Rome. Or was it in London?’

He evaded the question. ‘It was a long time ago.’

‘And she remembered you as a child?’

Leo laughed. ‘Of course she didn’t. She’s gaga.’

‘But she knew your name.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘she knew my name.’

The apartment was high up beneath the roof of the building. Leo unlocked the door and stepped inside. The place was more like an abandoned attic than a place to live, a loft filled with rejected, broken furniture. The ceilings sloped towards the floor. The floor itself creaked and flexed. There was the smell of dust, the smell of age, the smell of nameless events in a nameless past. ‘A lair,’ she exclaimed, following him inside. ‘Leo’s lair.’ They went through the cold and empty rooms with something like amazement, something like amusement, something of the pent-up, unspoken excitement of children.

‘It’ll be hot in summer.’

‘Unbearable. And cold in winter.’

Ancient pipes snaked around the margins of the rooms
like relics from the industrial revolution. ‘But there’s heating of some kind.’ She peered out of a dormer window on to a stretch of broken tiles. There was a short struggle with the latch before the window yielded. She pushed it open and climbed out, calling him to follow, calling to him to share her astonishment. ‘Good God Almighty,’ she cried. ‘Come and look at this!’

He clambered out after her. He must have been startled by the view. Bewilderment, delight, an amalgam of emotions. It must have shown in his face. He stood there in the middle of the terrace with the city around him, circling round him, wheeling round him as though he was the axis and the whole place was his circumference; and Madeleine laughed at him and his new-found independence.

Together with Jack she helped him move his things from the Institute. There were books but little else, almost nothing physical that bore witness to the existence on earth of Father Leo Newman, priest of the Roman Catholic Church: no accoutrements, no furniture, no
things
. Even when he had installed himself in the apartment, the place remained shabby and bare, a mere dormitory. Madeleine helped him buy things for the kitchen, cutlery, some saucepans, things that he had never needed before – sheets, towels, all the stuff of domestic life. ‘The civilising of Leo,’ she called it. They bought him an armchair, to set against the broken-backed sofa that was part of the sparse furnishings. And Madeleine bought him an alarm clock to rouse him in the mornings. It had the words
CARPE DIEM
across its face.

‘Must be like getting a divorce,’ Jack observed. ‘You suddenly find yourself out on your own after years of dependence. Not easy, old fellow, not easy.’

Leo felt a sense of relief when the Brewers had gone, relief and guilt, just as he had as a child when leaving his mother on his return to school. The solitary was ingrained in him, like a scar burned into the skin. Celibacy means more than mere sexual abstinence: it means that you become sufficient unto yourself, contained, self-absorbed. He walked round the flat not like a prisoner examining his cell, but like an explorer on a new and limitless island. Below him the traffic noise of the city; up here beneath the tiles a sense of space, of liberation, of solitude. He prayed for an hour, reading his breviary, reading bits from the Bible, muttering words, keeping long silences. He prayed to a lean and twisted Christ-figure; he prayed to a God who veered between the patriarchal mythic figure of childhood and an abstract concept as vast as a galaxy, as vast as the space between the galaxies, as vast and nebulous and meaningless as the space that contained all the galaxies and all the spaces. That evening he slept in his clothes, foetus-like on the ugly, lumpy bed, and awoke to a morning that was pregnant with possibility. It was a strange delight to move around the place in his own time, to make a cup of coffee with the
caffettiera
that he had bought with Madeleine, to walk out on to the roof terrace and watch the early sun rise over the Capitoline Hill.

Thoughts? More a sensation. A sensation of possibility.

He was to meet Madeleine and some of her friends at a Roman church, to play the expert guide. In the event it was raining, one of those sudden, surprising storms that strikes the city in early spring, turning dry streets into boiling torrents within a few minutes. The traffic ground to a halt. Cars appeared marooned like islands in the stream.
The Janiculum Hill was capped by a grey pall and the dome of Saint Peter’s basilica vanished in the murk. He waited in the exiguous shelter of the narrow Romanesque portico of the church that was to have been the meeting place and wondered how long it would be before he would be allowed to escape beyond the wall of falling water.

Thoughts of a solitary priest caught in a rainstorm: he cannot ignore rain, not rain like that, elemental rain, diluvial, Noachian rain. He cannot merely think about the papyrus fragments he is editing for the World Bible Center, those precious flakes whose existence was stirring the world of textual analysis, or the homily that he must deliver at next Sunday’s mass. He cannot do all of this when confronted with that rain. And thunder beating over the cupolas of the city, like someone moving furniture in the anteroom of heaven. And lightning illuminating the face of the city with a sudden ghastly pallor, the pallor of arc lights. The questioning of the elements. Where, poor priest with doubts, were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Has the rain a father? Is it nothing more than a concatenation of static and water vapour and the clash of bodies of air, warm and cold, dissipating the energy of a hydrogen bomb with all the random carelessness of a child? From which direction does the lightning fork? Who carves a channel for the downpour and hacks a way for the rolling thunder?

What did they think when
He
stilled the storm? Did it make them any happier? You get short, sharp storms on the Sea of Galilee. The wind descends from the Golan Heights, the country of the Gadarenes, and rushes down the slope like a herd of wild pigs and crashes against the water. Shifting masses of air, local heating, sudden confusion, just as suddenly quiet. So what happened on that occasion? Did they think everything was going to be
plain sailing with this man, who, it seemed, might be able to work meteorological miracles?

Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?

And then a figure, some kind of hood held over its head, splashed through the downpour and skidded into the shelter beside him. ‘Christ, how embarrassing,’ it said. ‘Not really appropriate language, is it? Golly, maybe.
Golly
how embarrassing.’ She shook water from her hood (now revealed as a plastic bag with a supermarket logo printed on it) and grinned up at him through plastered hair. There was water on her cheeks and a brightness in her eyes, as though, amongst other things, the rain had washed away some of her years. ‘I’m afraid there’s only me, you see. I tried to phone you to cancel it, but there was something wrong with your line and I couldn’t get through.’