The Gospel Of Judas (20 page)

Gretchen is not praying, not even kneeling; she is merely sitting in the back of the church in the incense-scented atmosphere, looking. She is wearing modest grey. Her hair, that splendid, golden hair, is demurely covered by a veil (black lace with gold edge, Neapolitan, a bit of a treasure). She looks at the distant altar, at the sanctuary light glimmering like a ruby in the dull velvet of the shadows, at the tortured Christ. She looks, and her eyes are glistening in the subdued light, brimming with tears, clouding with tears. It is all most satisfactory.

‘Where have you been?’ Her voice on the phone, quiet and anxious.

‘You know where I was. In Jerusalem.’

‘What was it all about? Why the mystery?’

‘A scroll. They’ve found a scroll.’

‘It’s always a scroll. Scrolls, papyrus, God in heaven can’t you get your mind away from it?’

‘It’s devastating.’ The word seemed both inadequate and absurdly overstated. The scroll was no more than a piece of rag, a scrap of plant pith, a mere scrawl of letters.

‘Devastating? You don’t know what devastating is. Leo, can we meet?’

He saw an abyss before him, and the ground beneath his feet sliding down into the gulf like the scree on the crater of a volcano. The volcano shook faintly and grumbled far away in the depth.

‘Meet?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake! Look, I won’t give you any trouble,
please believe me. But I must see you.’

And in some vaguely defined way, he had to see her. When you stand on the edge of the abyss you need someone there beside you. So they arranged to meet on neutral ground, outside a bar tucked in a mediaeval alley in the centre of the city, just opposite the Palazzo Taverna, 14° secolo. Leo got there first and settled down at an outside table with a glass of beer and a copy of a magazine. Behind a small barricade of potted laurel bushes, the aromatic laurel that the English call bay, the pagan laurel that crowned the heads of heroes, he sat and watched and waited.

The occasional tourist passed by. So did the minutes. The owner of the café – a languid, middle-aged man with a carefully cultivated bohemian look – began a discussion about holidays with the girl who was serving behind the bar. Would she go away with her boyfriend or with him? It started as a joke and metamorphosed into a bitter little argument.

And then Madeleine appeared: a bright, sharp figure at the far end of the alley, walking down the gunmetal grey paving stones towards him. Leo waited to be disappointed in her: in her purposeful stride, upset momentarily as her heel caught between the setts and she almost tripped; in her manner, which was of nervous laughter, the kind that speaks of anxiety and insecurity; in her look, which was pale and tense, as though smiling were a strenuous exercise; in the way she pushed a strand of hair from her eyes and smiled at him with desperation. He wanted to be disappointed, but he wasn’t. He was frightened of her, but he wasn’t disappointed.

‘I’m late,’ she said, sitting at the table. ‘I took a bus and the bloody thing broke down, and we all had to get out and
catch the next one, which of course was already full, and then there was this gypsy that someone said had picked his pocket, and God knows what …’

‘What would you like?’

‘Coffee. I want a coffee. Or a stiff gin. I think I want a coffee, but I
need
a gin.’ She laughed, shaking her head and running her fingers through her hair in a gesture that was purely, startlingly female. ‘I’ll take a coffee. Just a coffee.’

The conversation between bar-girl and café owner broke off for long enough to provide the coffee, and was then resumed in slightly louder tones now that there was competition. Madeleine drank the thimbleful of dark liquid and replaced the cup on its saucer with care. ‘I thought you’d run out on me,’ she admitted quietly. ‘I thought I’d frightened you away and you’d run out on me. I wouldn’t have blamed you, you know that? I’m sorry, Leo. I’m sorry about everything. I mean, I could have just kept quiet, couldn’t I? I should have. I should have shut up and continued to see you as a friend of the family, a guide round the holy places, all that kind of rubbish, and instead I had to do the full confession thing. That’s the Irish in me. Can’t resist offloading her troubles on to a priest …’ Her mood lurched dangerously from misery to laughter, so that the bar owner and his girl paused in their argument and looked across. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. A caricature of confession, a travesty of an act of contrition: ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Christ, I told myself I wouldn’t do this sort of thing. I told myself I would be contained and collected and all those other anal-retentive things that a well-bred diplomat’s wife should be, and now look at me. I’m crying.’ And to his surprise Leo saw that she
was
crying, that her eyes were blistered with tears, so that she turned away towards the laurels in a pathetic attempt to keep the
fact from him. ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ she whispered to the laurels. ‘Damn, damn, damn.’

He wanted to touch her, that was the unexpected thing, that this need could be so plainly and simply physical. He just wanted to touch her, even shifted his chair round so that their knees could meet, so that they sat almost side by side and his hand on the arm of the chair could reach out to hers. She smiled and returned the grasp clumsily and tightly, patching her composure together as though out of component parts. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Better. Much better. A big grown-up now.’ Her eyes – mere organs, mere globes of gristle with a reflective costume jewel in the very centre – considered him. ‘Now tell me.’

‘Tell you?’

‘Your bloody scroll. If that’s what it was all about, tell me what it was. Devastating, you said.’

It seemed ridiculous. In the face of this woman, this table, this narrow Roman street, the matter-of-factness of hundreds of years of material history, the whole thing seemed suddenly absurd. ‘It’s an account of the life of Christ.’

She laughed. ‘I thought that had already been written.’

‘This is different. It claims to be a true eyewitness account.’

‘Claims.’

‘I’ve read it. The prologue anyway. It’s enough.’

‘Enough for what?’

‘Enough to undermine everything. My faith. The whole Faith, perhaps.’ The capital letter sounded in his ears. The Faith. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. There was silence there behind the laurel hedge with tourists going past and the couple behind the bar arguing about their summer. He looked at
Madeleine’s faintly freckled skin, at the delicate, precious flaws in her complexion, at the eyes that wavered between green and brown and watched him with an intensity that he had never known before, as though by looking they were possessing. And offering as well. And exacting something in return.

‘It’s Judas,’ he said finally. The name lay in the air between them like a threat, a name with all the emotional baggage of two thousand years of opprobrium. ‘Judas Iscariot. The scroll claims to be the writings of Judas Iscariot. It gives his name. Partly it is in the first person. It claims to be an eyewitness account of the crucifixion.’

She frowned. ‘Are you serious?’

‘That’s the claim.’

‘It’s genuine?’

‘Difficult to see how it could be a forgery. It hasn’t been opened yet, but––’ He shook his head. But what? It would be opened. He would read it. The whole ornate and arcane edifice of Christianity would come tumbling down. There were tears in his eyes, sharp, acid tears. ‘It claims …’ His voice faltered, for any claim was surely absurd, fantastic. Yet Judas whispered in his ear, his voice quiet and measured as it sounded across the centuries of faith: …
he died and did not rise and I myself witnessed the body in its corruption
… ‘The author claims that he saw the decaying body of Christ, and that he didn’t rise from the dead.’

He felt the touch of her fingers on the back of his hand. ‘Poor Leo,’ she whispered. She picked up his hand and held it against her cheek as though it were the dearest thing that there could be, his dry and sinewy hand that was a mere machine of tendon and ligament and bone. ‘Poor, fragile Leo.’ She kissed him in the palm. He felt the press of her face
and the intensity of her presence, just there within his literal grasp and it seemed to him the most startling of intimacies. ‘Poor poor Leo, learning at last the only lesson that life has to give.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That there is nothing else. That there is only you and me, now, at this moment and this place. All else is no more than empty hope.’

The flat high up under the roofs of the Palazzo Casadei, the Palace of the House of Gods. She took his hand as they went inside, kissed him lightly on the cheek, helped him make tea neither of them really wanted, talked all the while, a light, bantering talk that he couldn’t manage. Could the mundane intrude on the momentous in this way? She complained about the disorder in the kitchen, the lack of decent equipment and that kind of thing. She had gathered up her hair to keep it out of the way as she worked and he stood behind her and watched what he had never really seen before, the hidden, secret intimacy of the nape of her neck, the subtle hollow between two taut tendons, fragile wisps of hair. The saucepan of water came to the boil and she plucked it from the flame.

‘Jack’s away until tomorrow.’

‘What’s that meant to mean?’

‘Whatever you want it to mean. There you are.’ She turned and handed him his tea, as though that were the reality, that and her presence here in his flat, and all matters of papyrus scrolls or belief or faith or husbands were just nonsense. ‘So tell me,’ she said. ‘How do you feel?’

‘About what?’

She eyed him over the rim of her cup. ‘Don’t be idiotic. About
this
, us.’

The volcano shuddered somewhere far beneath his feet. ‘Bewildered, I suppose. As though nothing is quite real.’

She nodded in agreement. Perhaps all this was familiar to her, coming as she did from the foreign world of sexuality. Perhaps bewilderment was one of the symptoms, part of the aetiology of the disease. They sipped at their tea, more to justify the making of it than out of any need, and then without another word, as though things had already been rehearsed, they got up from the table and went through into the other room, his bedroom, a room that until now had been as desolate as any abandoned attic.

The sound of cars came up from the street outside. Twin Madeleines, one real, the other reflected in the wardrobe mirror, crossed the room to crouch down and close the shutters. A sudden twilight descended. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked as she turned back. ‘Leo, is there anything wrong?’

He told her that he was fine. He told her that he loved her and that he wanted to be there, and that he was fine. He told her this as, smiling, she unbuttoned his shirt and held her face against his chest. And he was shocked how his own body – something towards which he had learned to show nothing but indifference – could matter to her; and how she could matter to it.

A motorbike scoured the length of the street below the windows. There was the complaint of trapped cars, the grumble of a bus. In the shadowy room Leo and Madeleine undressed modestly back to back and then turned towards each other at the same moment, almost as though they were taking part in some preordained ritual, the liturgy of love perhaps. The act of looking at her seemed a heresy. There were freckles scattered across her chest. Her breasts were large and blunt and scrawled
with veins like pencil lines; her belly was pleated with the marks of child-bearing. Clothed she had seemed small, small and precise, an artefact beautifully made, a thing to marvel at; naked she filled the space beneath the sloping roof, her flesh luminous in the false twilight. Close to, her flesh gave off a smell, a blend of her own scent and perfume, of memory and dream, of fantasy and nightmare, the smell of his mother lying in his bed when he was ill, the smell of the little pianist as it clung to his fingers, the smell of flesh and fur and faeces, a confection of desire and revulsion, a blend of all those things that he had never dared imagine and those which, imagining, had repelled him. And her breath was in his ear, the rasp of her breath, the muffled voice of her heartbeat; and she was whispering absurd and childish words, as one might to a nervous animal: ‘My lion, my strong lion. I’m not going to eat you. You mustn’t worry. It’ll be all right.’ As though the breath of her body didn’t frighten him, the lucid texture of her skin, the incontinence of her hands, as though all this didn’t terrify him. As though her breasts, soft and warm against his face, didn’t hold between them the warm smell of motherhood. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she whispered as she lay beneath him in the hot, still anonymity of his bedroom with the traffic mumbling in the street below. ‘It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.’ As though mere repetition would make it so.

She found some tissues in her handbag and wiped her belly. The room was hot, hot and airless. Their fragile, fragmentary unity was gone and they lay apart, slick with sweat, limned with guilt. He looked at her lying naked beside him. She was flesh again; for a few, treacherous moments she had been something else, something evanescent that he couldn’t
now recall, but now she was mere flesh once more.

She lay on her back, her breasts slopping sideways under the insistence of gravity. When she spoke she directed her words to the ceiling. ‘It must seem a disappointment. Does it seem a disappointment? Anti-climax perhaps. That’s the right phrase, isn’t it? Apposite.’ She turned and kissed him chastely on the cheek. ‘I’ll go and wash.’

What is done cannot be undone, he thought. You can confess; you can ask forgiveness; you can expiate your sins; but you cannot undo anything. He thought of how her small tough hands had guided him knowingly; how she had whispered imprecations; how her hips had writhed, like the antics of a whore. None of that could be undone. ‘Your fish,’ she had whispered as she clasped him in her fist. ‘Your big, shiny fish.’ Another vocable from the Brewer family lexicon, no doubt. Doubtless Jack had a big, shiny fish. The thought thrilled him and appalled him. Fish,
ichthys
,
pisces
, pisser: an absurd concatenation of words. He had spent his life with words, with the texture of them, the precise intent, the significance. Another one floated up out of the wreckage: fornication – a tortured word.
Fornix
, an arch, a vault, the vaulted arch of a brothel no doubt, the arch of the legs, the crotch, the crux, which is the cross on which we all hang.
Keep away from fornication
, Saint Paul whispered to him.
All other sins are committed outside the body; but to fornicate is to sin against your own body
. The fluid guilt was manifested in him, in the sharp start of tears in his eyes, in the awful incontinent flood from his body.
Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. You are not your own property; you have been bought for a price
.