The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (29 page)

He had not been in Rome 24 hours, and it was no more than ten minutes since he had undergone what should have been the grand spiritual experience of first setting eyes on St Peter’s. His reaction to the sight had appalled him. It seemed tinged not only with heresy but with unpatrioticness. (At the memory, he blessed himself.) His instant thought had been that St Peter’s was not a patch on St Paul’s. Even an a second and, mentally at least, cooller look, he found the building before him at once squat and grandiosely gigantic, while his memory played applaudingly on the superb, almost marine-architectural design of the Protestant cathedral built by an Englishman.

His response was the more culpable in that he had fallen instantly in love, to the point almost of sensual excitement, with Bernini’s colonnade, a monument which, though commissioned by a pope,
4
had no spiritual significance.

O’Flummery was taken, first, by the physical presence of the columns. When you looked at the ones on the opposite side of the piazza, they were all smooth, slim elegance. But those you
were actually in among presented not only a roughness of
surface
but great swelling thicknesses of shape. To stand next to one was like standing next to the stout wrinkled leg of an elephant, and it tempted you in the same way to measure your affection and wonder by rounding the palm of your hand against it.

O’Flummery’s eye for a building had been tacitly trained by his being brought up in Limerick and having served as a curate in Dublin. No one had offered him instruction; so puritanism (at least until he shocked himself by his dislike of St Peter’s) had not intervened between him and his perceptions.

When his vision shifted from the columns to the colonnade as a whole, he fell in love again – and, in addition, automatically perceived the design in groundplan. That made it clear to him
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  that the oval plus the oblong approach to the church made up the shape of a keyhole. Bernini had baroquely punned on the keys of St Peter.

(Though he had not yet entered the church and was not now sure he would ever dare to, O’Flummery knew that the keys themselves were incorporated, putto-borne, in the monument inside the church which Bernini had designed to enshrine the throne of St Peter.)

In his delight in the papal pun his appreciation had
discovered
, Father O’Flummery feared that he (having already been unpatriotic and incipiently Protestant) was being flippant.

It was the New Zealanders (Dinah Lightbight and Lorette Lukey) who first looked up towards the sky.

They had not known each other in New Zealand but had first met at the pensione in Rome where, by a chance they remarked on with amazement, they were both staying. (The chance was less extreme than they supposed, as the pensione was the only cheapish accommodation in Rome included on a list used by several New Zealand travel agents, but they had both contrived to forget how they came by its address.)

In Rome they were both impressed by the shrinking into the small, hazy distance of matters which, in New Zealand, had seemed to them of prime and unquestionable importance. They felt exhilarated by freedom and novelty, yet dizzy, disorientated, and almost as though they were spinning in space. It was
probably
in order to induce in themselves a bodily dizziness to match their intellectual state that, as they stood, two tall,
large-boned
,
rather plain women, one in a red cotton dress and the other in blue linen shorts, near the front steps of St Peter’s, they expressed their appreciation of the hot, clear weather by throwing back their heads and tilting their long bony faces into parallel with the sky.

What they saw descending from it they took to be snowflakes.

Delighted and excited, they remarked to one another on the freakishness of so cold an intrusion into such a burning day. Suddenly the anomaly became for them a metaphor of the unnatural (as they thought of it, their education having
concealed
from them how often something of the sort happens) passion for each other. It was a passion not yet expressed, let alone acted on. But as they shifted their attention from the incipient snow to one another, the visible (to each other) thought visited them both that, early in the day as it yet was, the maid, early-rising and hard-working in the Italian fashion, would probably by now have finished ‘doing’ one or other of their bedrooms at the pensione, where they could consequently be secure from interruption.

Without waiting for the expected snowflakes to land and cool them, they marched briskly back down the length of the hot piazza, towards the river and their pensione.

As they passed the fountain, the Japanese management trainees were zipping their cameras back into their carrying cases and moving, in a disciplined group, away. Only one lagged. He had received such an exceptionally high reading from his light meter that he paused to peer up into the dazzling sky for confirmation.

What he saw pleased him. He was an amateur of Aubrey Beardsley and a theorist who believed that, since the enormous influence of japonaiserie on western graphic styles in the Nineties, the visual cultures of East and West had
interpenetrated
to the point of fusion. Before he hurried after the rest of the group (which was due, in 15 minutes’ time, to attend, in the conference room of their hotel, a lecture by a representative of Pirelli), he took out his notebook and, in characters themselves more like drawing than writing, and in syllables which he thought he might be able to re-cast into a poem incarnating a little of the sadness of mortality, made a note to the effect that even in Rome the cherry blossom falls.

Hector Erasmus, from the moment he saw the objects
descending
,
knew that they were pieces of paper bearing a message for him. He waited; and one seemed to be directing itself
precisely
towards him. But at the last moment some unseen eddy in the air lifted it and bore it aside, where it spiked itself on the obelisk.

He considered climbing up to get it. He had been adept, in Africa, at shinning up tree trunks. But in Africa he had not been wound about by African dress, and he was not sure but that the sharpened sides of the obelisk might make it harder than a tree to negotiate. It would not be consonant with princedom to get half way and stick. So he continued to wait, content to count on his luck.

From one side of the oval, a woman trained as a botanist, who practised these days as an environmentalist, began to make the circuit of the colonnade. Glancing out between columns at the piazza, she noticed a fall (blown, she presumed, from some nearby garden) of oleander petals.

From the opposite side, in the opposite direction, the circuit of the colonnade was slowly begun by a collection of Indian novice nuns, newly flown in, on economy fares, to people a depleted convent. They were under the command of an elderly nun who, magpie in her habit, seemed to hop around them and peck at them with long stabs of Italian, which they scarcely understood. They moved, lightly chattering among themselves, with the soft driftingness of the saris they had had to discard in favour of wimples, from beneath which gleamed cow-brown eyes and an occasional jewelled caste mark. They were neither happy nor unhappy, neither willing nor unwilling to be in Rome. They believed, though without passion, that Jesus was as loving as Krishna, albeit in a different way, and that they would, with practice, learn Italian.

One of them acutely missed the presence of sacred cows in the streets: both because she was fond, though without passion, of cows and because the rule that no one must disturb them served to slow down the more headlong drivens, a service she thought Rome could do with.

Seeing the white objects descend, Father O’Flummery was put in mind of manna and, for an instant, conceived that God was manifesting himself in token of forgiveness.

Then he mentally chastised himself for his want of humility in supposing that God would single him out.

As though the devil were after him, he fled through the baking piazza, up the steps and into the church. There he flung himself to his knees before the throne of St Peter and bewailed his pride, his heretical inclinations, his sensuality and his flippancy. Purged, he then settled down to a long, serious prayer for the unity (under the control of the true faith) of his native island.

The environmentalist (who was wearing, flapping open, an old and dirty green mackintosh which she dared not throw away because it was not biodegradable) noticed, as she trudged through drifts that accumulated on the ground inside the
colonnade
, that what she had taken for oleander petals were in fact advertising handouts. She kicked at them in disgust. She was not interested in what they said – which in any case looked to her as though it was in shorthand, which she could not decipher.

As she trudged she wondered whether oriental civilisation had accidentally hit on the solution to this modern problem before the problem arose. She pondered the chances of getting the U.N. to enact a ruling that all handwritten and printed matter must be on rice paper and that the reader, having read, must eat it.

When a copy at last drifted into his hand, Hector Erasmus looked at the side which first presented itself and found it blank. He turned the paper over. The reverse side was blank too.

For a gulped second he feared his luck had left him.
Intelligence
again rescued him. He recognised that the message meant ‘Use your imagination.’

Smiling, he marched out of the piazza, determined to call himself the Black Prince from now on.

Gathering her charges into a group about her, and
conducting
them from the centre as though they had been a choir, the little elderly nun put them through their practice.
Misdistributing
the accent, and slurring what should have been an
explosive
double consonant, ‘Iddio’, they declaimed in unison, ‘Iddio’.

The environmentalist pushed past them, but they paid no attention, happy in their sense of learning Italian at last, though they had no idea what the word meant.

‘Iddio’, they said louder.

The sound ran round the colonnade and swelled out into the piazza.

‘Iddio. Iddio. Iddio.’

Unobserved, though dipping quite low over the obelisk, a goose flew across the piazza.