Assorted Prose (27 page)

 
MEA CULPA

A Travel Note

St. Peter’s (San Pietro in Vaticano), the most majestic and the most vast of all the basilicas of Christendom, is a masterpiece of Italian art of the Renaissance and of the early Baroque period.… [It] covers about 18,100 sq. yd.; its length is 212 yd.; the breadth of the transept is 150 yd.; the dome is 435 ft. in height and 138 ft. in diameter.… The
INTERIOR
,
in spite of its harmonious proportions, often disappoints visitors at first sight; it is only by studying the details that we begin to realise its grandeur and its calm and majestic beauty
.

—Hachette guide to Italy, page 479
.

D
ISAPPOINTS
? Better, “appalls.” The vastness struck me as so uniform, so remorseless, as to be self-annihilating, like the vastness of stellar statistics, whose zeros our tiny minds accept so lightly, like necklaces of nothings. What is marvellous about a sky-high ceiling when the walls are remote as horizons? The inflation was insufficiently selective. Gigantic marble popes like vertical gray clouds jutted from niches as high overhead as housetops; church-size side chapels, one after another, slowly rotated into view around the colossal piers; living men walked and talked together as if on the open street. Reverence was not in the air. The ghostly presences of so many commemorated ecclesiastical princes melted together into a faceless, sumptuous ambience that seemed to invite, urbanely, by way of devotion—if any was desired—a kind of secondary pantheism. The most majestic and most vast basilica in Christendom so successfully aped the scale of Creation that it seemed to me to deliver, like certain dreadful natural landscapes, a crushing comment on human insignificance.
Vanity, vanity
, each overweening vault declared, in polished syllables of porphyry and gilt. If I found space for any holy
emotion in this maelstrom of artificial immensity, it was pity for the dizzy workmen who had risked their lives in its construction.

In recent times a Stigler-Otis elevator, manufactured in Milan, has been installed, whereby, for a hundred and fifty lire, one may ascend to the roof. Here, on an uneven terrain of tarred pebbles, rusty octagonal huts house those bits of sunlight and blue mosaic which, seen from within the nave, seem glimpses of the Empyrean. A little low shack with a Coca-Cola sign sells souvenir trinkets and sweetens the air with popular recordings of “Mamma Mia” and “Ave Maria.” By walking forward, one can overlook Rome and perceive that the statues crowning the façade have blank backs. By walking the other way one can enter the great central dome which, Hachette explains,
with its simple and majestic lines, forms a canopy above the tomb of St. Peter
. Seen from above, from the balcony rimming the base of the cupola, the interior of the basilica restates its message with a singing urgency. Height sings; it sings to us of annihilation. My legs began to tremble in the wrestle against the angelic urge to push myself over the railing. The very bas-reliefs seemed in danger of letting go. Dots that were tourists like me moved slowly on the symmetrically patterned acres of floor; their footsteps caused the leaning walls of the dome to murmur invitingly. Yes, this was death: to fall through such a space to such a floor, to diminish downward into such a placid flatness. I pulled back from the railing, my palms moist. Yet a perverse aspiration drove me higher still.

It is possible, by means of narrow stairways artfully threaded between the inner and outer shells, to ascend to the very apex of the dome. At first, a seemingly endless spiral of stone steps, which in turning constantly obliterates itself, so that in climbing one seems always to be treading in the same subterranean place, conducts the tourist straight upward. Other souls caught in this ancient corkscrew exist as disembodied voices laughing and panting, but one does not see them. I met only two persons coming down: a fat Swiss or German with binoculars around his neck, and a young nun whose face, bare of makeup, seemed nude. To let the first pass, I hugged the curving wall: for the second, I pressed myself against the core of the spiral. In both cases I had a sensation of their passing through me.

The vertical spiral suddenly ended, the curve of the dome entering the diagonal. I walked up a sharply sloping corridor whose outer wall gradually pressed inward. The trough worn in the floor by footsteps moved
to one side, and a claustrophobic crouch was forced upon me. Then this second episode of ascent also ended, and I found myself at the foot of a flight of stairs statelier than those of any palace. Only a Titan or a monkey could have climbed them comfortably. A zigzag of wooden steps had been imposed upon them for the use of human beings. I climbed, saw sky, felt a breeze, and emerged into the loggia that tops St. Peter’s dome.

This island in the sky already supported a tame little population—several phlegmatic guards, one ancient nun, two pairs of lovers, a family whose father carried a baby in his arms, and a nudging, snickering quartet of Roman youths. All seemed at home on this height. Only I, leaning desperately back from the precipitous parabola of metal that fell away on all sides, seemed to feel the impossibility of our position. Some birds wheeled far below my feet. The view was like a map and postcard mixed, and in the Vatican gardens designs had been executed in shrubbery apparently for our benefit; my retinas received these sights mechanically. My mind was too obsessed by fear to see.

But returning into the shelter of the loggia, and heading back down the tortuous path of ascent, I regained my senses, and perceived that the walls enclosing me were covered with names. Pencil, pen, lipstick, and knife had left hardly a square inch uninscribed. There were no irreverent graffiti, merely names and dates solemnly placed wherever hands could reach. Many of the names were Italian, many were English, some were German or Spanish or French, some were impossible to identify nationally, and some—indeed, many—were unmistakably American. A few, soldiers’ names, were accompanied by a serial number or the number of a military unit. Not only were names fitted into every interstice between other names, but older names, below these, had been covered up, so that layer upon layer, decade upon decade, of inscription was indicated. There was no indication that any attempt had ever been made to erase the names. It came to me why: these were souls in Heaven. The nave of St. Peter’s was the world. At the base of the dome, one died, and entered a purgatory of strait and arduous ways. At the summit, one was, like Dante, blinded. Then one signed the firmament and joined the uncountable host of the blessed that the dome of St. Peter’s invisibly poises before the eyes of all Rome. It surprised me that Paradise, which I had pictured, in Sunday school, as being in another dimension, could be a notorious tourist attraction, its construction detailed in guidebooks, its photograph peddled in shops. It shocked my Protestant conscience that
the method of salvation should be, strictly, illegal—a matter of defacement. But then, what does the Bible tell us if not that it takes a little daring to enter Heaven? A little daring, and a writing implement. I had a pen. I fingered it in my pocket, and hesitated. I had reached, during my revelation, the spiral stair. In a few minutes I would be down, gone from the dome forever, my opportunity lost. Voices panted and laughed above and below me. Suppose I were discovered? Arrested? Caught in the middle of the leap of faith, is one eternally embarrassed? I paused amid hordes of those who had gone before. If all these, why not I? Taking out my pen, I did, in blue, on a bare patch between two seraphic swirls of lipstick, dare set my name.

 
ECLIPSE

I
WENT OUT INTO THE BACK YARD
and the usually roundish spots of dappled sunlight underneath the trees were all shaped like feathers, crescent in the same direction, from left to right. Though it was five o’clock on a summer afternoon, the birds were singing goodbye to the day, and their merged song seemed to soak the strange air in an additional strangeness. A kind of silence prevailed. Few cars were moving on the streets of the town. Of my children only the baby dared come into the yard with me. She wore just underpants, and as she stood beneath a tree, bulging her belly toward me in the mood of jolly flirtation she has grown into at the age of two, her bare skin was awash with pale crescents. It crossed my mind that she might be harmed, but I couldn’t think how.
Cancer?

The eclipse was to be over ninety percent in our latitude, and the newspapers and television for days had been warning us not to look at it. I looked up, a split-second Prometheus, and looked away. The bitten silhouette of the sun lingered redly on my retinas. The day was half cloudy, and my impression had been of the sun struggling, amid a furious knotted huddle of black-and-silver clouds, with an enemy too dreadful to be seen, with an eater as ghostly and hungry as time. Every blade of grass cast a long bluish-brown shadow, as at dawn.

My wife shouted from behind the kitchen screen door that as long as I was out there I might as well burn the wastepaper. She darted from the house, eyes downcast, with the wastebasket, and darted back again, leaving the naked baby and me to wander up through the strained sunlight to the wire trash barrel. After my forbidden peek at the sun, the flames dancing transparently from the blackening paper—yesterday’s
Boston Globe
, a milk carton, a Hi Ho cracker box—seemed dimmer than shadows, and in the teeth of all the warnings I looked up again. The clouds
seemed bunched and twirled as if to plug a hole in the sky, and the burning afterimage was the shape of a near-new moon, horns pointed down. It was gigantically unnatural, and I lingered in the yard under the vague apprehension that in some future life I might be called before a cosmic court to testify to this assault. I seemed to be the sole witness. The town around my yard was hushed, all but the singing of the birds, who were invisible. The feathers under the trees had changed direction, and curved from right to left.

Then I saw my neighbor sitting on her porch. My neighbor is a widow, with white hair and brown skin; she has in her yard an aluminum-and-nylon-net chaise longue on which she lies at every opportunity, head back, arms spread, prostrate under the sun. Now she hunched dismally on her porch steps in the shade, which was scarcely darker than the light. I walked toward her and hailed her as a visitor to the moon might salute a survivor of a previous expedition. “How do you like the eclipse?” I called over the fence that distinguished our holdings on this suddenly insubstantial and lunar earth.

“I don’t like it,” she answered, shading her face with a hand. “They say you shouldn’t go out in it.”

“I thought it was just you shouldn’t look at it.”

“There’s something in the rays,” she explained, in a voice far louder than it needed to be, for silence framed us. “I shut all the windows on that side of the house and had to come out for some air.”

“I think it’ll pass,” I told her.

“Don’t let the baby look up,” she warned, and turned away from talking to me, as if the open use of her voice exposed her more fatally to the rays.

Superstition
, I thought, walking back through my yard, clutching my child’s hand as tightly as a good-luck token. There was no question in her touch. Day, night, twilight, noon were all wonders to her, unscheduled, free from all bondage of prediction. The sun was being restored to itself and soon would radiate influence as brazenly as ever—and in this sense my daughter’s blind trust was vindicated. Nevertheless, I was glad that the eclipse had passed, as it were, over her head; for in my own life I felt a certain assurance evaporate forever under the reality of the sun’s disgrace.

 
POETRY FROM DOWNTRODDENDOM