The Last Western (46 page)

The night before the conclave Willie had prayed and meditated upon a single idea in the Guidebook, a few lines contributed by Sister Stella, who had spent fifty-one years in a Belgian insane asylum in the eighteenth century:
What is called sanity is just a stubborn clinging to a loop of the spiral. Dive down deeper and deeper so that the outer loops quiver and sway and are no longer safe. Then will not all descend to the lower places for survival?

Not
necessarily
, a Servant had written in 1918.

This woman believed in private revelation and other nonsense
, said another writer in 1951.

“She speaks of the DIVER,” a recent glossist noted.

The words came to him now as he sat in the illustrated testaments of the chapel. Sane men, he thought, are still sane during the starving of the innocents, going about the routines and the arrangements in perfect sanity.

And all of us here, he thought, looking at his fellow bishops seated like unhappy children under the watchful anxious God, we too are sane, indeed the sanest of men.

Who shall accuse us of strange deeds, diving to the lower places in behalf of others, crashing through the made-up patterns, driving the spiral down so that the outer loops shake and become unsafe to cling to?

And are you any different? he asked himself. If you are, then why are you here instead of there? And who is that other, that man who looks like you, cradling the dying woman as she dies? And now over there—do you see?—the man standing before the court of insane justice?

Even as the question formed in his head, that unfathomable silence entered the art shrine and came over the conclavists like a cloud, except that it was a cloud that could not be seen or measured or felt by any of the senses. It was the silence the old men of the East had once understood, the silence that communicates more than the speech of humans, and it had no outward sign other than a portentous stillness that made the men gathered under the apprehensive God of Michelangelo look like men who*- had been frozen in a stop-action movie.

Profacci had come to the end of his instructions when this silence began, and even he sensed it, though in his case it was less a sensing of the silence than a sensing of its effect, which made the men before him almost indistinguishable from the art works around them.

Absorbed in the phenomenon, he lifted his eyes to the overwhelming figure of the Lord God. Perhaps he prayed, or perhaps he sought to find the source of the emotion that had taken possession of the assembly.

His black-olive eyes peered into all the outer space Michelangelo could see, but his gaze soon exhausted itself in those finite hues, and with an agitated sigh he turned to his comrade and fellow realist, Cardinal Liderant, as if to say “Well then, why do we not get on with it?”

But Liderant, he saw at a glance, was under the spell himself. He sat before him like a child bewitched by a ghost story—his white crown listing to one side, as if to hear better.

Profacci then saw for the first time that concentrated gaze of the crowd, grasped it in an instant, and turned with the others to its focus and object, the figure in the shabby suit, that lean orange Buddha who seemed to be sleeping.

Behind him someone moved—Nervi, all blue veins, a man of smoke.

He handed Profacci another document, and the movement broke the spell for some—Liderant, Orsini, Tisch. Profacci saw their plain faces again, and they exchanged curious glances with one another as if they shared an embarrassing secret. Profacci cleared his throat and looked wildly at the papers before him. He was like a man standing on the seashore who has sensed the coming of a storm. The sea is placid, scarcely moving, but the man knows the sea is restless, and when its restlessness disappears, it is because an unknown force has intervened and suspended its activity and set up a law of its own, beholden to nothing but itself.

“Fathers,” he began, as calmly as he could, and a few heads stirred. “Fathers—”

At that moment the oldest member of the conclave, Cardinal Yamoto, Archbishop of Tokyo, rose unsteadily in the very last row of the chapel. His spectacles were thick and enormous and gave his eyes the appearance of being the eyes of a bear.

“I have a nomination to make,” the old man said, speaking carefully and distinctly in excellent French.

Profacci raised his hand and started to say something. He saw the wave now on the horizon.

The cardinal archbishop of Tokyo held out his arm almost theatrically.

“To the office of Bishop of Rome, I nominate the auxiliary bishop of Houston, in Texas, in the United States,” the old man said, his voice sounding firm and strong.

“Bishop Willie,” he said. Then again, “I nominate Bishop Willie for pope.” And he gestured toward Willie, lest anyone mistake the man he meant.

At first the stillness deepened upon the conclave; then the men turned to one another, whispering. Low voices murmured and ran together.

“If the archbishop—” Profacci began, but Cardinal Yamoto went right on.

“I call for his election
per inspirationem
,” he said.

There was another instant of silence, but this time it broke quickly. A group of electors in the front of the chapel, near Profacci, began shouting all at once.

“Scandal!” cried Liderant, who had jumped to his feet and turned his flushed face to Yamoto.

“Fake cures!” another voice shouted.

“Deceit!”

“The good of souls!”

The chapel became a scene of tumult.

“Order,” Profacci said in that same controlled tone. “Fathers, let us have order.”

Liderant was still standing; a few others had gathered around him. The protesting group numbered twelve, but the rasp of their dissent made it seem a hundred.

Willie neither saw nor heard any of it. He had turned the sky of Michelangelo upside down and had dived through it and had descended to a dark street where lepers cried for mercy.

The form of Yamoto seemed almost a skeleton—a configuration of sticks held together by some force that seemed to emanate from his spectacles. The sticks shook as Liderant and his followers shouted their disapproval, but one month later, on his deathbed, Yamoto would describe the shaking as a perturbation of supernatural grace. He had once done a paper on conclave law, and with enormous concentration he managed to phrase a sequence of words that demanded that the prefect acknowledge his resolution.

Profacci listened. His face wore a look of desperate patience.

“Fathers,” he said once more to Liderant and the objectors; and then he turned to consult Nervi.

But Nervi shook his head. There was no possible point of order that could be raised against the voicing of the nomination.

“Trickery does not become a pope!” said Cardinal Orsini. “You know this, Profacci. You see all too well the consequence of a vote in this atmosphere.”

“In the name of God, do your duty,” said Liderant.

Profacci’s lips made a thin line. “You are the canonist, Henri. What is my duty here but to follow the law of the conclave?”

The protestors fell into silence and once more the stillness fell—that quiet that was like the wave that could not be controlled.

Profacci felt the strangeness of it again and though he knew many things and had mastered many difficult brain processes that were too complicated for the generality of men, he knew too when that other world veered into his own. It was the world that had made a John the Baptist and the Penitentes, the world of humanity on the edge of things. He had known that world existed and he feared it, and he did not know it except through fear.

But the fear did not show. He had a horror of any feeling that reached to the outside and had permitted feeling to show only once in twenty years, when his mother had died in agony with the cry of Jesus on her lips, and on that occasion it was not that he permitted the emotion but rather that he could not stop it.

But he could stop this. The panic might trip his heart, might fill his stomach with acid. Still he would be the servant of duty and place his faith in reason. Had he not stood in that temple all his days and years?

Quite calmly, too calmly, he said, “It is clear, Fathers? Cardinal Yamoto has proposed the election of Bishop William—Willie—of the diocese of Houston, in the United States of America. The cardinal has asked for the mode of inspiration. According to the form,” here he paused; if the calm were to break it would break now.

He steadied himself, took a little breath. “According to the form, the electors must signify their choice by acclamation of at least two thirds.”

The electors leaned into their headsets, listening to the translation.

Profacci looked at Liderant and Liderant looked at Profacci—two men standing on a bridge that they both knew was rigged with explosives. Any minute now… .

Liderant stood up again. The possibilities of what could happen now stretched before him in a grotesque daydream. More imaginative than Profacci, he believed even more strongly in the strength and majesty of law. The law provided a fence that kept things in place. It was a harbor and a refuge, and he had known the fence and loved it and indeed had fashioned a section of it himself. But much as he loved it, he knew it could be hurdled. He had met men in his lifetime who had hurdled it, and he could see frightful things that Profacci did not prefer to see, and he had known sleepless nights in his lifetime and had often gone to Switzerland to look at the mountains so that huge, changeless things would fill his vision and he could fight that part of himself that sometimes made him see the world as raw flux, spontaneous and irrational, that did not point to any end that he knew absolutely for himself.

Profacci looked at him with pity, an ironic smile playing on his face.

“Excellency?” Profacci said, acknowledging him formally.

Liderant said, “
Domine, Domine
,” then, “Two thirds,” and he sat down.

Profacci tapped a pencil on the edge of the lectern and acknowledged an obscure bishop from Nepal.

“I wish to have the honor of being the first to vote yes for the pope,” said the young bishop. Profacci said nothing, stood without expression.

A Brazilian bishop, across the chapel, stood up. “
Si
.”

“Aye,” said Cardinal McGregor of Glasgow.

One by one they began to stand up, saying yes.

“You don’t know what you’re doing!” Liderant cried.

Within three minutes, fifty men had stood. But then the sequence seemed to stop. The fiftieth man, Bishop Oxblood of Durban, South Africa, repeated his vote.

“We understand, Monsignor,” said Profacci. That same wan smile appeared on his face, like a moon that flies fast and dimly behind dense clouds. The black eyes glinted, and glinted more as the pause went on.

“It is necessary, as the distinguished Cardinal Liderant has pointed out, that we have a two thirds majority,” said Profacci.

Liderant gazed up at the awesome portrait of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment and prayed to the magistrate who was his Lord.

Even as he prayed, finding the beginning of hope in the break of the vote, behind him twenty rows the well-fed body of Earl Cardinal Goldenblade stirred.

Profacci fixed his eyes upon the travails and triumphs of Moses in the distance, trying not to see Goldenblade.

Goldenblade’s eyes were huge. He stood very still, as if contemplating a movie that was being projected somewhere beyond and above the place where Profacci stood. When he spoke, his voice was husky like the voice of a tired Texas farmer.

“Ye-es.”

The entire American delegation stood up immediately.

Then England.

Canada. Australia. Germany.

Silently now, row upon row of the electors stood up.

Willie, coming out of his reverie, turned to an aged black bishop beside him. “We pray now?” he asked.

The black bishop said, “For you,” and stood up.

Willie, too, stood up, imagining that the prefect had called the assembly to prayer.

When the others saw him rise, they came to their feet at once, until there were no more than five electors still seated in a cluster around Liderant.

Two stood, then two more.

Finally the only elector not standing was Cardinal Liderant.

When he saw the 235 bishops, cardinals and other electors arrayed behind him, Liderant began to weep. He looked up at the canonist Michelangelo had seen as the Lord of history and saw that the Lord was frowning.

He stood then, and the election was ended.

Profacci came down through the crowd to where Willie was standing, looking at the prophet Ezekiel, whom the Lord God had commanded to eat the scroll. The electors parted before the prefect like the Red Sea had once parted for Moses. Willie stepped aside with the others, thinking that the prefect was engaged upon some mysterious bit of ceremony.

But the cardinal prefect, his hands welded together in a sword of flesh, pressed on toward Willie, who kept backing away, stumbling into cardinals and bishops until he came flat against a mosaic of the Fall of Man.

Pressed against the picture of the protoparents going terrified into worldly life, Willie tried to figure out what Profacci wanted.

“Do you accept the result of the election?” Profacci said.

“If the others do,” said Willie, thinking he had failed to register a vote.

The cardinal prefect beckoned him forward. Willie hesitated. Profacci made a more definite motion to come forward. Willie followed him.

He had made some stupid mistake, he reflected with a resigned smile, and now it had to be straightened out. Perhaps, he thought, he had even made a mistake in coming to the conclave. They had turned up papers to show he was not an elector, or else—

The cardinal prefect touched his arm lightly and indicated that he should stop. They were in front of the main altar of the Sistine, and Profacci, speaking in clear English, was asking an insane question.

“By what name do you wish to be called pope of the church?”

Willie’s lips parted and his hand shot up to close over his heart. He felt his throat constrict.

“What do—” he started to say, but his voice failed.