The Gospel Of Judas (5 page)

‘How on earth did you survive?’ Madeleine exclaimed when Leo described it to her, but the question was meaningless. The person he might otherwise have been did not survive. What did survive was the person he became. What did survive was the man who found himself prostrated on the ground before the altar of a Roman basilica along with three dozen other postulants laid out like so many corpses before the bishop. And his mother watching from a front pew, dressed in funereal black, with a black veil over her
head (already out of ecclesiastical fashion) and funereal tears in her eyes.

Elation? Ecstasy? Enthusiasm? A fine, abstruse theological word: French
enthousiasme
or Late Latin
enthusiasmus
from Greek
enthousiasmos
, from
entheos
‘possessed by a god, inspired’. The power of it all, the sense of possession quite as vivid as mere carnal love, a sensation of climax more potent than paltry orgasm. They had warned him in advance, of course: beware of the emotions, his spiritual adviser had said – emotions bring only pain and deception.

‘Why are you crying?’ he asked his mother after the ceremony. ‘Isn’t this meant to be a happy moment?’

‘I’m weeping for Leo that was,’ she said. A biblical turn of phrase that ranked with the very best of her utterances.

The Church of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, a church of impressive purity and plainness in a city where the baroque abounds, a church attached to a community that seemed battened against the modern world, against the forces of Mammon and the forces of darkness. During the night the sisters ran a soup kitchen and shelter for illegal immigrants – Albanians, Moroccans, Kurds – and during the day they watched and prayed; and on Saturday evenings they poured out their confessions of peccadillo and scruple in the stuffy confines of the confessional where Leo Newman sat listening. It was a relic pastoral duty that he kept up as though to remind himself of something half forgotten amongst the texts and the scripts: the point of it all, the love for one’s fellow man that was meant to underpin one’s vocation. During the week he dissected the words from the past, words from beyond the great divide which was the Jewish War and the destruction of the Holy City of Jerusalem; while on Saturday evenings
he put all that behind him and went round to the sisters’ convent and put on his stole and sat in a bare room beside a grille and heard their trifling confessions. The next day, shriven and absolved, they doffed their functional overalls and dressed in their traditional habits and sat like a flock of gulls within the confines of the thirteenth-century choir enclosure, while he celebrated mass.

There would always be a few members of the public in the congregation: passing tourists drawn in by the perfect, birdlike purity of the nuns’ voices singing in choir; a few pious women who lived nearby; a vagrant or two; a gypsy begging. And one day there was Madeleine Brewer.

She sat far at the back of the church in the shadows of the organ loft, her green jacket like a sharp spot of paint in the gloom, her face without visible expression. She sat motionless for the homily – a discussion of Saint Paul’s letter to the Galatians, a record of the first internecine quarrel of the Church – and at the climactic moment of the mass, at the invocation of the Lamb of God who came to take away the sins of the world, at the moment when the sisters’ voices floated up from the choir in the communion hymn, she slid out of the pew to join the line of communicants.

The faithful shuffled forward.

‘
Il corpo di Cristo
.’

Father Newman raised the host before their eyes.

‘
Il corpo di Cristo
.’

Host,
ostia
, one of those vestiges which emerge out of the modern language like half-hidden words in a palimpsest –
hostia
: a sacrificial victim. Once a garlanded bull being led to the altar for ritual slaughter, now a little fragment of wafer that may or may not embody the sacrificed Christ.

‘
Il corpo di Cristo
.’

Some communicants held out supplicant hands to receive the wafer; others waited, lips open, for the host to be posted into their mouths. It was a muddle that liturgical reform had created and never resolved.

‘
Il corpo di Cristo
.’

The sisters sang of the Lord who has made his wonderful works to be remembered; who is gracious and full of compassion; who has given meat unto them that fear him; who is ever mindful of his covenant.

‘
Il corpo di Cristo
.’

And Madeleine Brewer stepped up to the altar rail and stood before him, with her hands folded demurely before her and her chin up as though to face an awful truth with defiance. Her mouth opened to let the tiny, glistening tip of her tongue touch her lower lip.

‘The body of Christ,’ he announced to her. He spoke in English and, lest there be any doubt, he held up the small disk, a mere flake as light as a butterfly’s wing, for her to see.

‘Amen,’ she murmured.

He reached forward and touched the flake to glistening, pink flesh. She drew her tongue back. Her lips closed and the host was gone. For a moment she shut her eyes. Then she gave a small, impersonal smile, turned away and walked away down the empty aisle back to her place.

Initium sapientiae timor Domini
, sang the sisters: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have they that follow His commandments.

At the end of the service he hurried into the sacristy to divest. He hoped – it was a hope so secret that he almost managed to keep it from himself – that she would be waiting outside; but, except for a pair of indifferent tourists, he found the nave of the church empty when he emerged.

*     *     *

Families and the power of families. Families weighed on Leo Newman’s mind, the peculiar intensity of families, what they mean and have meant. Families as the natural selfishness of man writ large, man straining beyond the feeble confines of his body in order to possess things beyond his reach – including the future. Families as life, and families as death; families as creation and families as destruction; families nurturing love and suckling hate; families as the beginning and the end.

Families are paramount in the New Testament. There is, for instance, Herod’s family against Jesus’. Leo worried at the problem during those days. He worried at the matter of blood and inheritance. Consider this string of facts, this woven circlet of thorns, picked carefully out of the brambles of the New Testament and laid before the students of the Pontifical Biblical Institute: Jesus came from a priestly, royal family; as a newborn infant he apparently risked death at the hands of Herod because he, by way of this family, had some kind of claim to the throne of Israel. When he was in his thirties this claim burst into life through his cousin John, son of a temple priest Zechariah and a woman of the House of David. John started a popular movement in Judaea and Galilee. Religious or secular, the distinction didn’t exist in those days – John started a movement and it disturbed the edifice of power. He attacked Herod’s son Antipas on grounds that were both moral and dynastic, and for his pains he was flung into prison on the far side of the Dead Sea.

‘You may ask yourself why, if John was nothing more than a half-crazed preacher, he should have mattered so much?’ Father Newman asked his students. They shifted uneasily in their seats, sensing the sharp smell of heterodoxy. ‘Salome danced her sinuous dance (we know the
name from Josephus, the dance from Mark and Matthew) and called for John’s head and when her wish was granted, it was his cousin Jesus who took up the baton on behalf of the family. “Are you the one, or do we look for another?” they asked of Him.’

He eyed the audience with a certain curiosity, as though they not he were on show. ‘Never doubt the claim,’ Leo Newman warned them. ‘It has come down to us through the centuries, through the telling and the texts, through the copying and the glossing and the interpolations and the excisions: there it is in three languages on the titulus above His head when He hung on the cross: T
HE
K
ING OF THE
J
EWS.
’

Some members of the audience crossed themselves.

‘That was the claim for which He died. If the whole thing was mere history and the gospels merely historical texts, Our Lord’s ministry would be put down as nothing more or less than an attempt to take the throne of Judaea back from the colonial rulers and the satraps, an appeal to the God of Israel, a return to the spirit of the Maccabees.’

And he paused at that point, for here the merely heterodox trespassed over into heresy. For the signal fact is that after Jesus’ death his brother James inherited the leadership, and the Church admits no siblings in the family of Nazareth, no other children of the perpetually virgin Mary. And yet there it is, in the Acts of the Apostles and in Josephus: John to Jesus; Jesus to James. Inheritance and succession: the Janus feature of families. Inheritance and succession: the grindstones that crush the child to dust.

Family, and the power of family. Madeleine’s family had its own curious argot, its own exclusive customs. Like a stranger in a foreign land, Leo Newman, priest of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, began to learn. ‘Beano,’ they said,
‘pass the beano,’ when they meant wine. ‘
Issma
’ signified ‘come here’ because they had spent some time in Cairo where Jack was First Secretary; Madeleine was ‘buffled’ when she was confused, and things were ‘famulus’ when they were good, and Jack was ‘jabber’ when he was telling the rest of them off. Jack was brisk and jovial, a man with both brain and brawn, a man who had the word
ambassador
engraved on his heart. The elder of their two daughters, seasonal orphans at a boarding school in England, had been christened Catherine because that was the name of Jack’s Oxford college, which was where, he assured Leo, he had come to loathe Anglo-Saxon and love Madeleine. He treated Madeleine with mild amusement – Maddy, he called her, with its faint suggestion of amiable madness – while to his children he granted an impersonal affection, as though there was little difference between the two of them, as though they were both some kind of household pet. The younger daughter, for reasons that were never clear, was called ‘Boot’; but
acushla
was either of the girls, for it comes from
a chuisle mo chroidhe
and is Irish for ‘pulse of my heart’.

The metamorphosis of a relationship is a mysterious thing, much too mysterious for a simple naming. One may interpret it in retrospect, as a historian will look over the trace of past events and descry a thread, a logical development; but at the time, in time, there is no thread, is there? There is nothing more than the contingent facts of existence, the small moment as significant as the large, the detail dictating to the whole. Leo was an acquaintance, he became a friend. Family outings; the occasional party; a concert or two, that kind of thing. And whereas acquaintance may be shared with others, friendship is an exclusive thing, with its own cryptic dimensions, its own assonance. He
would start a sentence and find his own words trampling on Madeleine’s identical ones. He would glance at her, and find her watching him with bewilderment there in her expression, as though she was trying to puzzle out words from a language she didn’t fully understand. They smiled and watched each other smiling. Casual contact – the merest touch of a wrist, arm brushing shoulder – became something that each was aware of.

‘It’s a bit like having our own personal chaplain,’ Jack remarked of his presence one day when they were out walking in the Alban Hills.

‘Good gracious, I hope not,’ Leo protested, and Madeleine echoed his words exactly – ‘Good gracious, I hope not’ – so that the twin supplications stumbled across one another and it was unclear who had spoken first. There was something embarrassing about the coincidence, as though they had been caught embracing and needed to provide some kind of excuse.

‘You always laugh at the same things,’ her older daughter said; and her words, with their tone of accusation, brought a strange silence to the group, as though something had been said that should have been covered up, kept secret, been consigned to the limbo wherein are laid matters of family disgrace.

The thread of contingency is inscrutable. Somewhere above the Dead Sea a ragtag group of students and archaeologists was at work picking over the bones of the past, kneeling in the dust and sifting fragments from the rubbish, and finding there the first hints of disaster. While somewhere in Rome a married woman and a dry and sterile priest shared something fragmentary and ill-defined: a sympathy, a sense of irony, a feeling of doubt, a sensation of discovery.

‘May I ask you a dangerous question, Leo?’ Madeleine was smiling her small, Irish smile and watching him in that way she had, with her head tilted slightly on one side. Questions in the confessional are dangerous, but this was not the confessional – this was somewhere mundane: the kitchen of the Brewers’ flat, amidst a litter of bottles and unwashed glasses. Beyond the kitchen door was the noise of a party. Jack was holding forth about dealings with an Italian ministry, about the absurdities of the bureaucracy, the arcane hierarchies, the subtle obligations and inducements. ‘It’s not so much
who
you know,’ Leo heard him saying, ‘it’s who they
think
you know.’

‘May I?’

‘Go on.’

She paused, as though perhaps building up her courage. ‘Did you join the priesthood because you don’t like women?’

He felt a faint reddening, perhaps a glimmer of anger. ‘No, of course that’s not the reason.’

A maid came in with a tray and there was a brief exchange in pidgin Italian. When she had gone he found Madeleine looking at him curiously, as if she was standing before an abstract painting and trying to make sense of it. She seemed to have steeled herself to pursue the matter. ‘But is it so? That you don’t, I mean.’

‘I’m not homosexual, if that’s what you’re asking.’

She looked away, busied herself with a plate of canapés. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry if I’ve made you cross.’