The Gospel Of Judas (2 page)

It is not uncommon for Catholic women to befriend priests. It is a kind of patronage. Priests are to be supported materially, while they in turn support the faithful spiritually. If you come from the Protestant tradition maybe you do not see it in quite the same way, but looking after a priest is a kind of good work. If you don’t come from any tradition at all, you probably cannot see why there might be a celibate priest in the first place and why, for God’s sake, a woman might ever concern herself with such a man.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t quite get your name … Manderley?’

She glanced up from her handbag where she was rooting around for a diary or something. ‘Madeleine. Madeleine Brewer.’

There. Madeleine Brewer. The very first encounter. Thus the chaotic hand of coincidence had its way, like the petulant hand of a child rearranging the pieces on a chess-board.

‘Tell me,’ she said, pen poised over her address book.

The flat where I live now is in an old Roman
palazzo
, the Palazzo Casadei. The building stands on the edge of the ghetto: one face confronts the open, Gentile world; the other overlooks an alleyway that winds back amongst the cramped houses of the Jewish quarter. The flat crouches beneath the roof of the building: the ceilings slope, the windows are at floor level, the floors are uneven; there is a sense of refuge up there under the tiles, a sense of sanctuary. During the war, it is said, the Principessa Casadei hid Jews in the warren of rooms beneath the rafters.

I work, of course. I can’t exist on nothing. Part-time, ill-paid, off the record, I work. The organisation for which I work is the grandly named Anglo-American Language School and it occupies the third floor of a block near the main railway station, sharing the building with a
trattoria
, some offices belonging to dubious import/export firms and even more dubious lawyers, and a
pensione
. For a logo the school boasts the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes in
a clumsy juxtaposition, like battle honours won in some obscure colonial war.
Listed by the British Council
, it claims on a scroll beneath the flags.

I am paid weekly, in used 10,000-lire notes. From the very beginning the director viewed me with suspicion, wondering at the motives of a man of my age taking up casual teaching work; but he guessed, quite rightly, that I have no more interest in denouncing him to the tax authorities than he has in making my employment legal. No references asked for and none given: it’s that kind of place. But at least I have a job and can keep body and mind together, if not soul. I have long ago abandoned any attempt at keeping my soul.

And for company I have Magda.

I found Magda. I found her in one of the first classes that I taught at the language school. She was like a piece of flotsam cast up on the shore of the city, one of those bits of debris that drift in from Europe, from the Middle East, from anywhere in the world really – Latin America, the Philippines, India, anywhere.

Novotná Magda. At first it wasn’t clear which was her first name. Novotná Magda, she repeated doggedly when I asked, so
Novotná
I called her and she seemed to accept it. She was tall and silent and dressed in black, as though in perpetual mourning for something, lost innocence perhaps. Her hair, which to conform to the Slav stereotype ought to have been fair, was in fact or in fiction almost black. It was cut short and ragged and made her appear younger than she was, her complexion giving the game away: heavy makeup doesn’t hide a coarse skin. Red lipstick made a scar of her mouth. She was what in France might be described as
gamine
.

‘First you tell us all where you live,’ I announced to the
class in that first encounter. In response I received a litany of the dispossessed and the itinerant: in a hostel; with friends; I share apartment; I move around.

Novotná’s legs wrapped themselves round one another like a lucid black snake coiling round a sinuous sapling, the sapling of the knowledge of good and evil, perhaps. ‘With my sisters,’ she said. She did not mean siblings, but religious, some obscure order of Polish nuns.

‘And where do you come from?’

‘Maroc.’

‘Burundi.’

‘Morava,’ said Novotná. The name evoked a small stir of anguish within me, a little
frisson
of something like horror.

‘And where do you want to go?’

‘America.’

‘America.’

‘America.’

A shrug from Novotná, a gesture entirely in keeping with her manner which was one of indifference to much of what went on around her. ‘America,’ she agreed, in the manner of one who might say ‘the moon’.

We plunged into the lesson. ‘At the customs’ was the theme. It seemed appropriate. The students composed themselves to play the roles they dreaded, the surly faces of officialdom, the hopeful, hopeless faces of the dispossessed.

‘May I see your passport?’

‘Here is my passport.’

‘Where is the visa?’

‘The visa is at the back.’ Hollow laughter at this.

‘What is your purpose?’

‘I want to work.’

‘We have jobs for enthusiastic workers.’ More laughter. The hopelessness of the whole thing began to strike them: it transcended barriers of language and culture and became a universal all-comprehensible joke.

‘I work as a secretary,’ said Novotná. ‘I type good.’

‘
Well
. You type well.’

‘I type well. I am wilful.’

‘Probably. But you mean willing.’

‘I work as executive,’ said one of the other students. The laughter was general.

Was it after the sixth or the seventh lesson that I invited her to lunch? What would Madeleine have said about that? Probably she would have told me to let the girl alone. What does she want with a dry stick like you? she would have asked. But Novotná treated my invitation as she treated everything in life: with that indifferent shrug and a thoughtful chewing of gum. ‘OK.’ She seemed to pause for careful reflection and to gather together bits of fragmented English. ‘I think if we go to lunch, you call me Magda,’ she decided.

Magda, Madeleine: the congruity of the names amuses me. In whatever terms you measure the human personality, never have there been two women further apart. Magda is tall and silent and dressed in black, as though in mourning for something; Madeleine was small and ebullient, the kind of person who made her husband raise his eyes heavenward in mock despair. Madeleine was soft and comforting; Magda is anonymous and indifferent. Madeleine was open, Magda is shut. But both named for the same woman, the woman out of whom Jesus cast seven devils, the woman who stood beside the mother of Jesus at the foot of the cross, the woman who saw the stone rolled away from the tomb, the woman who made the first announcement
of the resurrection to the disciples as they cowered in the upper room.

‘They have taken away the Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.’

So we had lunch at Zia Anna, Aunt Anna’s, a tawdry
trattoria
nearby that I have taken to using when I can’t be bothered to return to the flat. We ordered
spaghetti alla puttanesca
, spaghetti with tart’s sauce, a concoction of red tomatoes and black olives that brings to mind sin and hellfire and menstruation, and Magda sat across the exiguous table from me, deposited her gum (a momentary glimpse of grey amalgam within the scarlet depths of her mouth) in the ashtray, and ate the dish with the methodical determination of someone who is not quite certain where her next decent meal is coming from.

She used to work in a shoe factory, she told me between mouthfuls, in the design department. Life there was dull and the pay was bad, and she decided that she wanted something better so she came to Italy with a friend, just to see. A girlfriend. She shrugged the girlfriend off. ‘She goes back.’

‘And what job do you do now? In Rome there can’t be much work.’

Magda sniffed. With a sudden delicacy, almost as though she was touching up her makeup, she used her napkin to wipe red sauce from the corner of her mouth. ‘I draw.’ Then she reached down to her copious bag and produced a folder to show me, passing sheets across the table. They were charcoal sketches, skilled enough, the kind of facile things you see in Piazza Navona to attract tourists to have their own portraits done: there was Barbra Streisand, there was Madonna, there was the Pope. She shrugged. ‘And I do model.’

‘Artist’s model?’ I asked.

For the first time she smiled. It was a hurried, perfunctory thing, her smile – a mere widening of her mouth, a momentary expelling of air from her nostrils. ‘Pictures.’

‘Pictures?’

She shrugged, as though it were obvious. ‘Photographs. No clothes.’

The noise of the
trattoria
intruded on our conversation, the clash of cutlery, the scrape of plates, the noise of unheard conversations from the other tables. And I sensed the clash of two emotions, the scrape of two sensations, one that in my previous life was always allowed full rein, the other that was always suppressed: shock and lust.

‘Do you want to look at that also?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps not.’

She shrugged indifferently and returned to her food, mopping up the remnants of sauce with a piece of bread, and then ordering
pollo alla diavola
with the eagerness of someone who had just devoured spaghetti with tart’s sauce and found that no problem. ‘And the nuns?’ I asked. ‘What do they think of the work you do?’

‘The nuns?’ She laughed. ‘The nuns know nothing.’

Three days later Magda was thrown out of her hostel. She was given ten minutes’ notice to clear her things. The nuns knew more than she had thought. She spent the night at the main railway station and probably earned 50,000 lire letting someone fuck her in the back of a car. I don’t know. I’m not a fool, but I don’t know for sure. The next day she came to her English lesson as usual.

‘I look for somewhere to stay,’ Magda announced to the class.

Magda, Madeleine, Magdalen. Mary Magdalene. She has
long been a problem, has Mary Magdalene. Mary from Magdala, presumably. That’s not the issue. The issue is, who was she? The great sinner of Luke? Mary of Bethany? The woman who anointed Jesus with chrism and thus gave to him the title Christ? But whatever her identification, we cannot doubt the central fact – for she was a woman, and the early Church would have edited the story differently if it possibly could have done so: early on the morning of that first Easter Sunday, Mary of Magdala was the first person at the empty tomb; and, in the Gospel of John, which is likely to be accurate on this point for the very same reason, she was the first person to see the risen Jesus.

Magda standing in the midst of my apartment, a tall black figure: clumsy shoes, black stockings, black skirt (too short), black coat (tossed aside on to the broken sofa), black sweater stretched over small mammary swellings, black hair cut short round her face, red mouth chewing over the situation. An expression of indifference and wariness, a faint suspicion.

I showed her up the steps out of the living room on to the roof terrace. She turned to look. There was a betrayal of emotion here: a short, sharp intake of breath, a faint smile. All around her was the city – the surface of the city that the inhabitants never see as they go about their business down on the ground. The terrace seems like a boat adrift on a stormy terracotta ocean, the tilted, tiled rooftops breaking like waves against towers and gables and domes. Madeleine had cried out when she saw the view, she had projected her pleasure, she had exulted. Magda merely smiled, as thought she already knew.

‘I will draw,’ she announced. She put her bag down
and went inside for a chair. When she came back she stood holding the chair for a while as she considered the prospect. From where she stood she could see, at a rough count, sixteen domes, including the biggest of the lot, the father and mother of all domes, the one that the whole world knows, quite wrongly, as Michelangelo’s; but lesser domes as well, artful, baroque cupolas, with lanterns like nipples. The Gothic tradition of the north has always favoured phallic spires and a lean, ascetic Christ figure; but in the south the female element in Christianity has ruled: subtle, comforting, seductive, redolent with the scent of other, more ancient cults – Demeter, Ceres, Cybele, Isis.
Mariolatry
, if you want a derogatory, Protestant term for it:
Marian devotion
if you want the party line.

Magda made her decision. She hitched her skirt up, sat down with her feet cocked up on the cross-bar of the chair, pulled a sketchpad from her bag and began. Her hand was sharp and assured, the strokes she made like cuts at a thing of flesh, something swift and surgical; and lines appeared that magicked a third dimension out of the mere two of the paper, so that as she worked the dome of Sant’Andrea della Valle (Maderno) was plucked out of the lucid Roman air and methodically transferred to the sheet in front of her.

‘It’s good,’ I told her.

She shrugged. ‘Maybe I sell.’ She worked between the ribs of the dome, giving them a curve, a sullen pewter tone; then she moulded a ball of rubber and bent forward for a moment, working at the grey. When she straightened up, erasure had paradoxically given something positive, a gleam of sunlight to the leads.

Magda is an artist. The whole panorama encircled her as she worked so that somehow she seemed to be the
axis round which all this revolved, this city of domes and bell-towers, of guilt and hypocrisy. Magda is an artist and like an artist she seems to possess whatever she observes.

For three days she slept on the broken-backed sofa in the sitting room. She slept curled up with a blanket thrown over her, as one might sleep on a bench in a park or a station waiting room, and in the morning I would find her in the kitchen making a cup of coffee –
turecka
, she called it although its resemblance to Turkish coffee was minimal – her hair tousled, her face puffed up and creased from where it had been pressed against her arm or the folds in the blanket or the rough, worn velvet of the sofa. She would be wearing a large, shapeless black T-shirt. Her legs were pallid and awkward, as though embarrassed by their nudity. She would acknowledge my presence with little more than a nod, and then she would shut herself in the bathroom and emerge after half an hour wearing her makeup – thick makeup applied to her skin like clotted cream and lipstick like an open wound – and leave the apartment. She would say almost nothing to me beyond the word
ciao
, which perhaps appealed to her because it has been taken up by American youth and smacks of indolence and bubble gum. Each day I thought she might not reappear – her paltry things were hardly hostage against her return – but each evening she was back, the makeup less intense, the manner the same: quiet, introverted concentration. I seemed barely to exist for her.