The American (23 page)

She opened the rear door and removed her sports bag.

‘Thank you for a lovely day, Mr Butterfly.’

She leaned in and kissed me lightly on the cheek, her lips dry and quick upon my stubble. ‘And you must take your mistress up there.’

She closed the car door, vanishing through the station entrance. Quite confused, I drove into the town.

In the Piazza del Duomo, the market bustles. There has been such a gathering here ever since the town was founded: it was probably given its charter because there was a market here before there were buildings, a coming together of traders, of shepherds down from the mountains, of itinerant monks and healers, of charlatans and fakers, of soldiers of fortune and mercenaries, of bandits and horse-thieves, of the dice-throwers and the bone-casters, of moneylenders and sellers of dreams. The whole cosmos of humanity gathered here on the hill above the bridge where the road down the valley crossed the river and the trackways from the mountains converged. Why on the hill, you ask? To catch the breeze.

Little has changed. The horses are now Fiat vans, the stalls set on trestles not on barrow wheels, the awnings are garish plastic not hessian brushed with pitch, but the traders are the same. Squawking like aged crows, old women dressed in black squat behind the riotous hues of their vegetables, scarlet chillies, loden peppers, cherry tomatoes. Young men in tight jeans, charlatans, modern pardoners and summoners, sell not promises and releases from sin but cheap shoes, T-shirts, solar-powered digital watches and ballpoint pens which leak. Older men in vests and trousers hawk kitchen utensils, copper bowls, seconds of crockery, Taiwanese steel knives and cheap Duraflex tumblers. There are stalls purveying cheese and hams, salamis and fresh fish brought from the ocean that morning, under the mountains by way of the autostrada tunnels.

Through this mercantile mayhem pass the travellers of life, the housewives and the browsers, the middlemen and the fixers of deals, the hungry and the well fed, the wealthy and the poor, the old and the young, the cyclists and the Mercedes-Benz drivers, the have-nots and the owners of grandeur.

This is a crazy circus, a microcosm of the world of humans, of ants, of bees, of every gregarious species which has to exist in droves, crossing and crisscrossing their paths like those complex human dance patterns devised by the sports organizations of Socialist republics, never colliding and never touching, never in touch. Everyone knows their place, knows what to do, knows how to be safe in the ring and avoid the tigers and lions in the cage. A few venture inside the iron bars, crack their whips and come out unscathed. A few go in and are mauled, caught in the jaws, tossed aside like rotten meat for the scavengers to tussle over. The remainder prefer to be safe, to clown about, balance on unicycles, juggle cups, eat fire, train seals to play guitars or chimpanzees to drink tea. Some test themselves on the high wire, swing precariously on the trapeze, but there is always the net, the brake on catastrophe. Those too fearful to clown or ride a gilt-edged pony backwards sit in stalls and applaud the inanities of the show.

Nothing has changed at all, not since the early market, the early fairs and circus. There is even a soldier of fortune mingling in the crowds of the Piazza del Duomo. He is not en route for the Holy Land, not one of an order of military monks. He buys only the few items he might need for his voyage towards tomorrow, for tomorrow is his goal. Or the next day. For him, the future is immediate, can be counted on a station clock or one of the cheap watches. He does not know where his road leads nor what it passes by on its way to his ultimate destination: he knows what that is; it is death. The hydraulic buffers at the end of every line. He simply follows the way, watching the shadows ahead for bandits, cautious of the charlatans, wary of the sin-eaters and forgivers of men, suspicious of the way the dice roll.

Watch him. He buys a thin salami, accepting a slice to taste before choosing. He smiles politely to the crone in the orange headscarf with her sharp knife and greasy hands, bobbing under the salamis hanging from the roof of her stall like obscene fruit. He does not haggle. A man with no determined future has no need of bargaining. He saves his skills in that arena for the last great bargain of them all. To die quickly or slowly, with or without pain, humiliation, suffering or sufferance. He purchases a length of small-bore lead-water piping from one of the hardware merchants. He tests the ripeness of the artichokes, the apricots and peaches, the peppers and the cucumbers. He sniffs the clean leaves of the lettuce as if they were the petals of an exotic jungle flower. Whatever he purchases, he pays for it with cash, low-denomination notes, and waives his right to loose change. He has no use for coins or brass telephone tokens. They are an encumbrance, a weight to slow him down.

He crosses the Corso Federico II and disappears down the shadowed gully of a side street.

Who is this enigmatic person, this invisibility, this cryptically quiet smiler, this secretive man?

It is me. Yet it might just as readily be you.

The sun is high. Father Benedetto has placed an umbrella over the table in his garden. It is blue and white and has the logo of a national bank printed on alternate panels. A long shoot from the grapevine on the north wall of the garden has reached out to it and is trying to twist tendrils round the rim.

He has been to Rome, to the Vatican. He has attended Mass in St Peter’s with the Holy Father, returned with his soul purified and two bottles of La Vie, Grand Armagnac.

The peaches being finished and the tree bare save for the scatter of late fruit which will not ripen now, we have before us half a kilogram of prosciutto sliced as thin as tissue paper. It comes from the stock of two dozen hams he has cured himself, suspended like the corpses of gross dead bats in the cellar. He smokes them, too: there is a smoke oven down there. It is against the law to cure one’s own hams with smoke within the town boundaries. He does the work at night, dousing the embers and glowing woodchips at dawn, or when there is a high wind. The law has nothing to do with pollution control: it has existed for centuries, to protect the monopoly of the burgesses and guild of prosciutto smokers.

‘Americans are uncivilized,’ he says, out of the blue.

We have not spoken for a quarter of an hour. This does not matter. We are not so unfamiliar with each other that we have to chatter all the time like popinjays.

‘Why do you say so?’

‘In a cantina off the Piazza Navona, I saw two Americans drinking cognac –
and ginger ale
! Such a blasphemy against Bacchus.’

‘And you a Catholic Father!’

‘Yes . . . Well,’ he defends himself, ‘one has to keep standards. Regardless of faith.’

He glances momentarily upward at the sky for forgiveness, but the bank umbrella gets in the way. Not that it matters: I am sure, had I mentioned it, he would have reminded me that Our Lord can see through an umbrella.

‘When I was in Rome, I dined at the
Venerabile Collegio Inglese
. Do you know it?’

I shake my head. I have always avoided the narrow Via di Monserrato off the Piazza Farnese. The brothers in my public school were forever speaking its praises, telling us boys of its beauty, of its tranquillity in the chaotic heart of Rome. Every anecdote they told seemed to begin, ‘When I was at the English College . . .’ Some of the boys eventually trod their way there, became seminarians and fathers to perpetuate the stories. I determined at a young age never to set foot near it. It was as much an anathema to me as the gates of Hell. I envisioned it populated with brothers in soutanes, devils in disguise who, like the music master, patted boys on their buttocks as they filed out of the choir stalls.

‘I know of it,’ I reply evasively.

‘A curious place: you know, my friend, I think the English were never meant to be adherents of our Roman church. Wherever they go – even here, in Rome, where the college has the direct patronage of our Holy Father – they keep their own particular style of . . .’ He pauses, his half-open hand circling in the air as if to catch from the breeze the words he requires, ‘. . . being Roman Catholic.’

‘What do you mean?’

Father Benedetto’s hand circles for a few moments more, then settles upon the table.

‘In the college chapel, by the high altar, there hangs a painting. All Catholic churches have these, except the modern monstrosities.’

He stops talking. His dislike of twentieth-century architecture is so strong it silences him. If he had his way, the medieval would be the norm.

‘The painting?’ I prompt him.

‘Yes. The painting. In most churches, this would be Calvary, the Crucifixion of Our Lord.’

He speaks the capital letters. Certain words act like charms upon all priests, and when they utter them one knows they are reading block text in their minds, seeing their speech as if it was a decoration on a twelfth-century manuscript.

‘This painting is of the Trinity. God is standing with the body of Christ in his hands. The Holy Blood of Our Saviour is dripping not to the ground but to a map of England. And there, on the map, kneel St Thomas and St Edmund. It was painted by Durante Alberti. When the faith was proscribed in England, the seminarians would sing a
Te Deum
before the picture whenever a new martyr was elevated to the side of Our Lord.’

I make no comment.

‘At the base of the picture are the words
Veni mittere ignem in terram
.’

‘
I have come to spread fire over the earth
,’ I translate.

It might be my own epitaph.

I help myself to another sliver of ham. Father Benedetto’s silver forks are thin, long-pronged like elongated tridents. They remind me of the frescoes in the little church by the ruined farmhouse.

‘Do you know a church down the valley full of frescoes?’ I ask.

‘There are a number.’

‘This is a tiny, squalid little place, hardly bigger than a chapel. Next to a farm. Almost a part of the barn.’

He nods and says, quietly, ‘Santa Lucia ad Cryptas. I know it.’

‘You are thinking of another. There is no crypt.’

‘There is, Signor Farfalla. A big crypt. Bigger than the church itself. It is like an oak tree of the faith. There is more below the surface than above.’

‘I saw no entrance.’

‘It is blocked now.’

‘But you,’ I guess, ‘have been in?’

‘Many years ago. Before the war. When I was a boy.’

‘What is there?’

‘You will hear many stories. Perhaps you have already?’

I shake my head and say I stumbled upon the place whilst hunting out new butterflies.

‘The crypt is huge. Maybe the size of two tennis courts. It is vaulted with thick pillars. The floor is made of smooth stones. There is an altar . . .’

He stops speaking, a faraway stare in his eyes. This is unusual. He is not a nostalgic. It disappears.

‘As with the church above,’ he continues, ‘the whole crypt is painted. The colours are more beautiful than in the nave. There is no light down there. No sun fades the colours and the temperature is constant all year. No matter what the sun or the snow.’

‘How did you get in?’

‘My father paid the priest to take us. We were the last to enter. It was sealed a few months later. The war . . . Now no one remembers it. They think the church is what they remember so they do not look for the cavern below.’

‘What are the frescoes?’

He does not answer at first but sips his brandy.

‘It was my visit there decided me to take the priesthood. It was there I saw God.’

I am immediately intrigued. Father Benedetto is not an impractical man, not a dream-monger. He is, within the bounds of his faith, a realist and it is for this I find his company congenial. He may revel in the magic of Mass and the mumbo-jumbo of the rituals of Rome, yet he still has his feet on the ground. His head is not entirely in the clouds of dogma and theology.

‘You saw God? You mean there is a wonderful painting down there? A portrait? The frescoes above are pre-Giotto, I am sure. Is this even earlier?’

‘About the same. But . . .’ He is serious, suddenly very serious. ‘I can tell you only if you swear to secrecy.’

I laugh. How Italian, I think: only in Italy can one be sworn to secrecy over the contents of a church. This is a Byzantine plot in the hatching. I have enough of that sort of thing for real in my life. It is only a day or two to the delivery of the doctored Socimi.

‘How can you trust me? I am not a Catholic.’

‘For that reason, I can trust you. A Catholic would want to open the place up, put a turnstile at the door. Charge the tourists. Encourage pilgrims. They would hold services. The colours would fade. The whole business . . .’ He still holds his glass but does not put it to his lips. ‘So I can trust you? Not to tell a living soul?’

‘Very well.’

‘When you go in – I went with a candle, like a monk of old – there is no Christ. There is no benediction. There is no altar. It is not a holy place as we think of them now . . . What you see is the Love of Christ.’

I am slightly puzzled. Love is an abstract unless translated into action: Clara’s breasts, Dindina’s urgent wriggling. These are love of a sort.

‘More precisely, you see what the Love of Christ can do for you.’

I am none the wiser, for Christ has never shown me any love. Of that I can be sure. And I do not blame him.

‘Tell me, Signor Farfalla,’ Father Benedetto asks, ‘do you ever think of hell?’

‘Yes, all the time.’

This is only a half untruth.

‘And what do you see?’

I shrug.

‘I see nothing. I just sense an ill-ease. Like the first twinges of influenza coming on.’

‘But in the soul!’

I have no soul. Of that, there is no question. Souls are for saints and pious fools. I do not want to argue this one through: we have already stumbled along this rocky theological track together.

‘Perhaps.’

‘What is hell? Eternal damnation? The pit and the flames? Like the pictures you have seen in the church above?’