The Last Western (55 page)

Grayson wept. “Sometimes, after the first day, they club the birds… .”

“You have been there?”

“Once, as a young man, I was in the party,”Grayson sobbed. “I butchered, killed with the others.”

Willie put his arm around Mr. Grayson’s shoulder.

“Now you are a man of peace and love.”

Mr. Grayson could not stop crying, and when he looked at a cypress nearby he saw Michael the archangel.

“Te liri tegurithi,” he said.

“It’s just a tree,” said Willie softly. “See?” He took Grayson’s hand and touched it to a branch. “The tree only wants to be a tree.”

“I have lost touch with so many things,” Grayson wept. “I try to be a person, but the spirits keep coming.”

“Laugh them away, old friend.”

“I cannot laugh anymore.”

Then Willie jumped away from Thatcher Grayson and did a cartwheel. He stood on his head like a circus clown and tried to imitate the talk of the spirit folk.

But Mr. Grayson only thought Willie had turned into a spirit and immediately began to talk in tongues.

They walked back to the Vatican apartments in the darkness.

“Everywhere the Spirit is calling and crying,” said Thatcher Grayson.

“That is only the wind blowing the leaves about.”

“But it
sounds
like the Spirit,” said Thatcher Grayson.

“I have never heard the Spirit,” said Willie. “What does it sound like?”

“The wind blowing the leaves about.”

When the sun
came up over the old blue hills and the deathbound birds chattered in the cypress trees and the first tourists came to the English cemetery to see where the young poet’s name was writ in water, they came to him once more—the watchmen, the custodians, the keepers, the cage builders—they came to him with jeweled rings and rustling silk and met him in a vast arena of rose marble and gilt-framed masterpieces, and Willie smiled and they did not.

And with them came the fear and the doubt and the terror of the unfathomable future, and history made them walk slowly as if history were so many weights of lead that were strapped to their legs.

They were gray men, separate from the race, and they had been in the world before the New had broken through. Their faces were ash, their hands gray-blue and ash-veined, their eyes quick-darting but dull as dead birds’ eyes.

Their faces were like the faces that one saw in many museums of that city, in pictures for which these men might have posed, in pictures of emperors and kings and generals and popes—the look of power and what power does to the human face being one of the permanent things—and those pictures were 500 years old, 1,000 years old, and these men were that age and older.

The everlasting surprise of the sun was at their feet, dazzling the marble, but they took no notice. Their senses had been slain long ago, killed and closed off so thoroughly that they were senseless and considered the state of senselessness to be good.

They were men of reason, they were men of principle, they were men of order. They believed in logic, in fine arrangements that were 1,000 years old—devotion to the corporate structure, devotion to the pattern, devotion to the system.

So when they looked at him that morning, sitting on a plain bench wearing the tunic of a ragpicker or clown, they saw not a man, a person with a name, but a frightening idea, a mad cell, the elusive point of that hideous force that they knew to exist in the world that bore the name Chaos.

“You are a scandal to the church, a disgrace to the nations,” said Profacci, whose face was the grayest of all. “Only look at the confusion and doubt and strange beliefs and the unspeakable practices that have risen among people all over the world since you launched this insane plan.”

Willie, looking at the cardinal framed in the window where the sun flirted in the sky and seeing that the cardinal had not observed the sun or a tree or a bird or a hillside in forty years, felt the old, the fatal pity coming on.

There he stood, the most powerful man in Rome as they called him, splashed in scarlet and not even that burst of color touched him. He was unaware of it as he was unaware of all things that could be seen, smelled, touched, listened to—condemned as he was to safeguarding shadowy standards that he had once memorized in a dead language while his heart withered.

He was like a warrior—they were all warriors, Willie thought, warriors of a once great army and they wore the dress of battle, not knowing the war had ended and that the main forces had scattered and the old nation they were defending had ceased to be—and worse than that, they did not understand that a new war had begun, a war of which they had no knowledge even when they were hired by one side or the other, a war that was harder to define, that was going on all over the world; they did not know of this other war but only the old war and the past battles and the old marching songs and the old enemies, who were dead.

“Scandal,” said Willie, feeling sorry for the combatants of the unreal struggle. “What is scandal, dear Cardinal?”

And the pity deepened in him. He did not know, he could not guess, how, if they thought he pitied them, they would have moved against him that very morning. He saw them in their cell of fear but did not see how strong their fear had made them.

“Teaching false doctrine,” Profacci said. “That is scandal enough for a pope.”

“What false doctrine have I taught?”

“You have taught that the world is coming to its end and the Lord is returning,” came a huskier voice—Cardinal Orsini, Profacci’s assistant, a moralist who had been considered papable at the time of Willie’s election, a swarthy, blunted figure of a man renowned for his skill as a chess player.

Willie looked up at them from his little bench. This then was the fundamental accusation, the single weapon they had selected from an arsenal of his casual infractions.

His eyes drifted from Orsini to Profacci to Liderant, with his white mane and sad eyes, Nervi, Taroni, Guilfoy, Tisch, Sanzer, Reider, Komil, the warriors of the old struggles.

From his boyhood, with the slow, uncomplicated workings of his mind, he knew that when people made accusations they did not do so to have the charge discussed or argued but to declare a course of action:
This is what we mean to do
.

They are going to try to stop L-Day, he thought first, and then, How far will they go?

Looking at Orsini once more, he did not know—indeed Cardinal Orsini did not know—that thirty-seven generations back he was the son of a papal assassin nor, for that matter, twenty-seven generations back, the son of a pope who had tortured heretics in Spain, but he sensed the odor of violence in that formal room, that sudden bitter smell of sweat and blood that clung to certain rooms of the Vatican and to certain sections of Rome and had been there since the days of the Caesars, that not even ten million honeysuckles could quite get out of the air.

Would they try to kill me?

Pity, not fear, possessed him still, even as he asked this question, because he did not see the power of their fear, and of these men he still believed that a basic love of truth and an essential charity prevailed in spite of everything, and in his uncomplicated way, he supposed they shared the Gospel.

He knew he had to declare his action too.

“The Lord comes every day, dear brothers. He comes to us in Eucharist and he comes to us in people. As for the end of the world, is not every new sunrise a new creation?”

“Can we forgo the poetry if that is what it is?” said Profacci. “You know very well that is not the way you have talked of your so-called L-Day Plan.”

“I have spoken clearly of the plan,” said Willie. “I cannot make things plainer. At the same time I know that many have given a false interpretation to the meaning of L-Day.”

Cardinal Liderant, looking very tired, said, “You have put the faith of millions in jeopardy. What was firm and solid has become weak and uncertain. There is a panic among people everywhere. What has happened is quite obvious: you have imposed what amounts to a private opinion upon the universal church, and because you are pope, people believe that what you say, what you think, is the truth, infallibly spoken and to be held as faith.”

“Ah, Brother Hen’fi,” said Willie, “so it is infallibility that worries you.”

“It worries us,” Profacci broke in, “that the vicar of Christ is insane.”

Willie searched their faces—did they really think that? That would make a difference, he thought. It would mean that they would act in one way rather than another. He said softly, “A pope asks that men forgive their enemies and be reconciled with one another. That is insanity for a pope?”

Cardinal Orsini, looking like a bulky rook, said in his basso profundo voice: “The pope says the world is ending and Christ comes again—
that
is insanity for a pope.”

“Yet, it is of faith that the world ends and Christ comes again,” Willie replied.

“You have given a certain date, man!” Profacci shouted. “You have made it possible for multitudes to believe that the world will end on the twenty-fourth day of November!”

“You are referring, Cardinal Profacci, to the false interpretations—”

“Which millions believe!”

The room was silent with the silence of the engine room when the engineer has thrown the switch from one generator to another. Willie spoke distinctly, slowly.

“What would you have me do?”

“Resign,” said Profacci.

“Is that what all of you want?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes,” each man spoke.

Willie went inside himself, considering what he would say.

“It is not only the plan,” said Liderant, “it is the whole method that you have—the total operation of the papacy. And then there are those who associate themselves with you.”

“You speak of the Servants?”

“A canonically irregular order,” said Orsini.

“What have you against them?”

Profacci snorted. “It would require the rest of this day merely to recite the charges.”

“We have dossiers on fifty of the present members,” said Orsini. “Files, records, proofs.” He waved to Nervi, a mist-creature almost invisible in the blazing light. “We have evidence of conspiracy, heresy, plots of violence. We have civil charges to be brought against many, if necessary.”

Willie’s glance fell on Taroni, who looked unhappy and ill and who seemed to be trying to communicate something with his fretful eyes.

“Suppose,” said Willie, “suppose I were to elevate sixty members of the Society to the cardinalate.”

The faces became still portraits and made a true gallery of shock and horror.

“That is—they are—” Profacci sputtered. “Outrage!”

“The pope has the right to make new cardinals,” said Willie.

“They are outlaws!” Profacci cried. “Felder—Herman Felder is—” he stopped in midsentence.

Willie felt his skin prickling and stinging.

“What of Mr. Felder?” he said as calmly as he could.

“A criminal!” said Profacci.

The fields stretched before him once more and he could feel the ice wind coming fast, and the dark shapes moved as in the dream.

“Well,” he said, managing to keep his voice steady. “You can fight, though of course in a fight, there is always the possibility of losing. Fight against your fellow cardinals, I mean, the sixty new ones included.”

“The bishops of the world would be with us,” said Profacci as if speaking to a great multitude. “That I can assure you.”

“The bishops and the cardinals of the church fighting among themselves, to get the pope deposed—that would be healthy, a good sign?” said Willie, smiling hesitantly.

They had not expected him to think or speak like this, and Willie himself had not expected it, and after he spoke, he felt strangely ashamed.

“Let that be put aside,” he said, standing up. “I don’t plan to resign. I am going ahead with L-Day. If you move to depose me, I will still go ahead with L-Day. I will act as pope and be the pope until I am deposed—if I am deposed.”

And with that he walked out of the marble hall, taking them by surprise.

Orsini called after him but he kept walking and then he was gone and they stood there arguing among themselves, each one raising an accusation he had rehearsed a hundred times.

They had been prepared to bring seventy-six charges against him. All the briefs had been prepared—they were stacked carefully in Nervi’s attaché case—and now he had left them before the charges could be made and they had made manifest only their intention.

They lingered there arguing and demonstrating matters that they already took for granted and angry because he had cheated them and angry too that he had taken their declared intention calmly and the more they argued, the more frustrated they became as they sought a way to depose him without causing tumult among the people.

They were old warriors who knew war and understood it, and they had learned to accept wars between nations, in which millions could be slaughtered, and they knew how to lament such wars and decry the inhumanity of such wars, but a war between cardinals and bishops they could not accept because such a war brought harm to souls.

“Dossiers, proofs, files, evidence,” said Orsini, making a fist and pounding it into his hands. “For nothing?”

“One way or other, we shall stop him,” said Profacci.

The gray faces turned grayer in the light; the argument broke out again.

A bird flew in through the window, startling them all. It fluttered above their heads, swooping this way and that in frantic little rushes to get back through the window, and they began to wave their arms to drive it away.

The bird, spying a huge portrait of the nineteenth-century pope, Pius IX, imagined that he could sail into the blue sky that had been painted behind the papal tiara and he sped toward it swiftly, thudding against it and crushing his head.

“We should have the new mechanical birds,” said Orsini. “There were dead birds all over the city this morning.”

With that he picked up the bird, a common sparrow, with blood draining from its beak, and handed it to Monsignor Nervi.

“Get it away from me!” Nervi squealed. “It has germs you have never heard of!”