Thomas M. Disch (19 page)

Had even the bishops of the Middle Ages been so unsanitary as this? But no, he was dreaming—with an uncanny verisimilitude, truly, but all this was a product of his own unconscious mind. His filth-encrusted skin was his mind’s metaphor for the tattooing, and all too apt.

The fat priest returned, accompanied by a boy who appeared to be eleven or twelve years old. The boy knelt beside Father Bryce and offered him a large goblet of crudely wrought silver, filled almost to the brim with red wine. He received it with a nod, and the boy stood up and took some steps back.

He tasted the wine, which seemed at once raw and exquisite, like a fine St-Emilion decanted too soon. Yet even in its rawness there was a grace, a flavor of grapes still warm from the vineyard. Did all his dreams have such sensory authority as this, which the waking mind at once forgot? It was not just the tang of this wine. Every detail of the scene about him had the texture of reality intently observed. Everything in the garden seemed to exist with a fullness and vibrancy that brought back those first delicious minutes when he’d taken the LSD with Lance. The petals on the trees were whiter and lighter, the wine server more exquisitely youthful, the wine more savory, while all that was unpleasant was, similarly, more acutely unpleasant: the coarseness of the wool, his scaly skin, an incipient toothache triggered by the wine, and, underneath it all, its ground bass, a panicky feeling that he was trapped within the stone walls of the garden. He could feel the same undertow of paranoia that had taken over during his acid trip. Perhaps the tattooing had reactivated the drug. Perhaps there was a room within his mind where the drug continued to exert its force, like a lamp left switched on in a basement closet, its light invisible until the door has been opened.

“Silvanus.”

Unthinkingly, as a dog might look upon hearing someone speak its name, he turned his head, and there beside the calvary was a man in the white habit of the Dominican order. He had a tonsure of the sort one saw in old paintings of saints, but his face was anything but saintlike. He seemed, as much as any actual human being could, to have been the original for the bug-eyed, bird-beaked Jesus of the calvary. A deathcamp face—cheeks hollow, a bony chin, the lips retracted from the unhealthy teeth not in a smile but from a simple insufficiency of flesh.

“And
your
fear was that
I
should lack fortitude if I accompanied you to the crypt,” the skeletal monk said in a whining, nasal voice and in another language than the fat priest had spoken. In Latin, Father Bryce realized as the man went on—a Latin not much different from the scholastic Latin in which his theology classes had been conducted when he was studying in Rome; a desiccated, flavorless language from which anything specifically human had been effaced.

“I did have some trepidation beforehand, I will admit. In Rome, God be praised, we do not have a large population of heretics. Of sinners, a sufficiency; that is to be expected. The sinners of Rome sin after the flesh, like the offspring of the bondwoman Hagar, but the sinners of
these

lands—of Toulouse and Carcassonne, of Montpellier and Rodez—sin not after the flesh, but in their very souls, which is more terrible. Aware of this, how should we feel compassion for their fleshly sufferings? They will enjoy worse torments hereafter than any that the civil arm may exact. I think I would feel more pity for a bull being baited for the amusement of a mob, which I understand is a custom of these parts, than for the woman whose interrogation we took part in so briefly.”

“Indeed,” Father Bryce murmured. “I cannot account for my weakness, but it has passed. I am better now.” To testify to this he tilted the silver goblet to his lips and drank a deep draught of the wine.

“Yet there is a lesson to be learned from your very weakness, just because it was a fleshly weakness. You surely did not wish to faint away the moment the knife was put to the woman’s breast, and yet your animal nature rebelled. As mine did, I must admit. Though I did not faint, salt tears came to my eyes, just as might have been the case if I’d walked into a bitter winter wind. Were they tears of pity for her suffering? No, I cannot pity a heretic. They were tears after the flesh. And were we to let the rabble witness the work of interrogation, they would feel the same
animal
pity, and they would say these Albigensians were martyrs to their faith, and for every heretic that we exterminated, seven more would spring up in his place. The Church, in her infancy, grew by just such means. The martyrs who were thrown to the lions in the Colosseum were the Church’s most effective missionaries.

The Roman Church must not repeat, here, the mistake made by the Roman emperors. Some few heretics, to be sure, must be burned before the public, as an example and a warning, but it must be done in such a way that the mob will see their execution as a kind of sport. They must be made to be figures of fun, fitted out with peculiar hats and donkey ears. Or they may be offered to the crowd, like the bulls butchered in the arena, as objects of a communal blood lust. I have noticed that older women, such as the one we were visiting just now, produce the most consistently gratifying response.”

As he spoke, the Legate would twine his bony fingers nervously, flexing and loosing them, playing brief arpeggios on an imaginary keyboard, and then, of a sudden, clasping his hands tightly together, as though they’d been caught in some guilty act and had to be restrained.

“Could I offer you some wine?” Father Bryce asked, not at all certain of what decorums he must maintain with the Legate. He felt like an actor called on to perform in a play whose script he’s never seen, having to improvise from moment to moment on the basis of the hints thrown out by the other performers.

It was only a guess that this garrulous cadaver was the Legate the fat priest had mentioned.

As for the time and place in which he found himself, he supposed the earlier Middle Ages and (from the towns cited as heretical) southern France, where the Church had, indeed, proclaimed a crusade against Albigensian heretics. Exactly when that crusade had taken place Father Bryce had no very clear idea. Though he’d often had to study Church history, those courses had not examined such episodes in detail. There’d been a sense that to do so was tantamount to assisting the Church’s secular enemies in their work of mockery and muckraking. What need to examine such embarrassments as the Inquisition, or the Church’s opposition to the Copernican universe, or the wars against the Protestant states of Europe? If errors or excesses had been committed at such times, they had long since been regretted, corrected, and expunged.

It seemed strange, therefore, that his dreaming mind should have transported him to an era and a place concerning which he was so illinformed; even stranger how vivid an illusion had been conjured up. For it did not seem like a dream. It had not the accelerated pace that a dream has; it seemed to be happening in real time, at the pace of a Casio watch, with each second numbered and accounted for. This Legate (as he supposed him to be), though somewhat grotesque physically, spoke plausibly and persuasively and with a logic not the logic of dreams. Even in his grotesqueness he was plausible enough, for Father Bryce had had parishioners quite as ugly as he. For instance, that latter-day crusader Gerhardt Ober bore a pronounced resemblance (now that he thought about it) to the Legate. Were the Legate some thirty years older, and naturally bald instead of tonsured, and if he’d had a bit more meat on his bones, he’d have been Gerhardt’s brother, if not quite his twin.

The Legate/Gerhardt accepted the offer of wine, and after Father Bryce had managed to get to his feet with the help of the cupbearer (now the problem wasn’t his back but his knees), the two men entered the building. At once, the fat priest came up to him and suggested, “If Your Grace does not intend to return at once to the crypt, he will want to divest himself of these rags?”

Grateful for this chance to explore other parts of his dreamworld, Father Bryce excused himself to the Legate and followed the fat priest up a narrow, steep stone staircase that taxed his bum knees and back with equal cruelty. He was taken to a large room furnished, it seemed, only with coffins embossed with brass studs in geometric patterns. The fat priest opened one of the coffins, and it proved to be a kind of wardrobe.

“I should like to bathe,” Father Bryce declared, “before I dress. Could you have…” The word did not come to his tongue. Perhaps the concept of a bathtub did not yet exist. He reformulated his desire. “Could you have water heated for that purpose?”

The fat priest regarded him with astonishment. “You wish to bathe? This soon before Easter?”

“As soon as possible.”

The priest bowed his head. “As Your Grace commands.”

“And I should like to be assisted by the young man who brought the wine to me in the garden.”

“You wish Ansiau to assist you in
bathing?
”

Clearly, there were limits to what even a bishop might ask for in this dreamworld, and Ansiau was outside those limits. Well, he thought, another time. “Let him pour the water into the …” Again, the word would not come.

“Into the lavabo, Your Grace?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“I shall so instruct him, Your Grace. Meanwhile, what are Your Grace’s intentions?”

“I shall wait here, or”— he waved his hand—”in one of the rooms close by.” Then, to be sure the priest got his message: “You may leave.”

As soon as he was alone, Father Bryce went to the room’s single window and only source of light, a squat pillared arch, unglassed and placed so high on the wall that he had to pull over one of the coffinshaped chests and mount it (careful of his back) in order to see the view. Which consisted only of foliage, some close to the window, some at a distance, and a stretch of untrafficked dirt road. It was a prospect that stood outside of time—a summer afternoon (or morning) in the century of one’s choice. He was about to get down from the chest when, as though to mock his curiosity, he heard, off in the distance, someone whistling a familiar tune. At first he couldn’t place it, for the whistler had subtly warped the melody, making something faintly liturgical of it. But then his memory filled in the unsung lyrics: “Oh, I believe in . .

“Yesterday”: the perfect anachronism. Yes, indeed, here was a yesterday as far from his troubles as any yesterday could get. He listened to the song with the same sense of dreamy comfort it had given him when he’d listened to it, late at night, on the illicit transistor radio in his room at Etoile du Nord. The whistler continued for about as long as the song might have played on the radio, and then fell silent. But the song had delivered its message; Father Bryce felt comforted.

Getting back down to the floor was more difficult than getting up on the chest had been. Was it arthritis? That’s what his brother worried was happening to him. Did his own future have these pains in reserve for him? Did one’s body know in advance the ills encoded in its genes? When he got to be sixty, would he stifle a groan each time he had to genuflect, as Father Cogling did?

The adjoining room offered the same uninformative view from its pair of windows, but its appointments were ampler, if still rather spare. One large chair of carved wood, flanked by two benches. The walls hung with tapestries that had been hand-embroidered (rather than woven) with stiff, wide-eyed figures of saints and clerics brandishing croziers and crosses and sundry emblems of their martyrdom. A large fireplace with the charred remains of what must have been a considerable fire. There were also sconces on the walls, some with candles in them, others simply crusted with the drippings of candles that had illuminated some earlier dream he did not remember.

He began to feel uneasy, as though the dream were something other than what it seemed; as though he’d been caught in some kind of trap. He would have wished himself awake, even though that would have meant returning to Knightriders Kustom Ink, but wishing did not accomplish anything. In that respect, at least, his dream was properly dreamlike. What was undreamlike about it was its prosaicness. One didn’t voyage back through the centuries and across oceans in order to savor a young St-Emilion and to tour empty episcopal palaces. But no doubt his dreamworld was so tame precisely because the world he was escaping from was too exciting, too dangerous, too terrible. Here he could be an archetypal priest of the Middle Ages, speaking in Latin, going unbathed for the forty days of Lent, tippling from a silver goblet, taking his ease on an episcopal throne carved with acanthus leaves. Though not taking much ease from it, for the idea of comfort seemed not to have been invented yet.

He had to wait some time for the water to be readied for his bath. And that seemed the oddest thing of all, to
wait
for something in a dream.

Dreams are generally excessively eventful, but not this dream. When he went out into the corridor to explore other parts of the episcopal palace, he found the fat priest hovering in attendance, and he was assured that his water would be ready presently, that he must wait only a few moments more.

“What time is it?” he asked the fat priest, who lifted his hands to pantomime his incomprehension.

“The hour of the day,” he elaborated.

“It is approaching terce.”

Father Bryce knew that terce was one of the canonical hours, and that it came before sext and after prime, but none of that was any help. He still had no idea what o’clock it might be, except that it was not yet evening.