Warburg in Rome (30 page)

This litany of catastrophe was as familiar to Warburg as to her. Relief workers were accustomed to pronouncing such lists, not to inform one another but as a way to keep from going mad. Warburg said, “At the WRB, we were reduced to pleading with the Allied authorities for separate concentration camps for Jews so they wouldn’t have to go to the latrine ditch side by side with Nazis, who are now prisoners in the same camps. Our pleas were ignored. What is Jewish suffering amid so much? Our pleas became demands. The result? Instead of separating Nazis from Jews in Germany, we have the abolition of the War Refugee Board.”

“I am told your work has been good, very good.”

“You know better than I how far short we fell of doing what was needed.” He took a drag, exhaled.

She said, “Hungary. Budapest. Who did as much? And much of it from here in Rome.”

Warburg’s demons put an outrageous question to him, and he asked it. “Are you talking about me?”

“Not you,” she said. “I mean the War Refugee Board.”

“Now defunct.”

“So America declares the war refugee question—what? Answered? Finished?”

“Not the refugee question. The Jewish question. Done with. The WRB is dispersed, whatever is left of it folded into the UN ‘Relief and Rehabilitation,’ such pretty words. Like repatriation and resettlement.” Warburg put out his cigarette on a tin plate. “Alas, there can be no rehabilitation without habitat, no repatriating without a
patria
. Are you aware of that particular problem?”

“You mean Palestine.”

The word hung between them, a stopper.

Finally she said, “I am surprised the Croce Rossa would allow you offices in this building. In Geneva they keep their distance from Zionism.”

“But not from Jewish philanthropy. The JDC contributes to the Red Cross, too. As for the office here, in the past year Signor Nucci and I have worked closely together. He trusts me. I understand what the Red Cross requires and will respect it.”

“Neutrality.”

“Yes. But neutrality is not indifference. Postwar definitions have room to expand, including Signor Nucci’s. If I can trust you with a secret—” he risked a small smile—“that is why I sought out offices here. Not the grand vision of Zionism, about which I could care less, just the picayune details of immigration policy. When it comes to formally stateless persons, I aim to loosen up Red Cross visa restrictions, which, whether they like it or not, loosens up British restrictions.”

“The British?” Marguerite said, surprising him with her deadly tone of voice. “The British are hopeless.”

“Hopeless?” Warburg asked. He waited for her to look at him again. When she did, he said quietly, aware of making the shift to the personal, “That’s how I came to feel about you. I worried that you were hurt. It troubled me that I would not see you again. More than it should have.”

“And now you see me. I am not hurt. After Fossoli, I was rebuked by Geneva for unduly acting on my own authority, risking the organization’s neutrality.”

“You were bringing medicine and food to Fossoli.”

“I allowed Partisans inside a truck bearing the Geneva cross. Therefore it became a combat vehicle. Obviously forbidden. As punishment, I was made probationary. You say that?”

“On probation.”

“Not to be reinstated until the end of the war. Since then . . . May I?” She reached for his cigarette pack. He held a match for her. She said, “I will be in Rome only for as long as it requires to regulate procedures at this office here. I am a clerk. A traveling clerk.”

“But a clerk has to eat, no? Even a traveling clerk.” For a year, passing a certain restaurant, Warburg would think, Is this a place she would like? “Would you have dinner with me?”

She abruptly put out her cigarette in the tin plate and stood. “I am late for a meeting.” In one deliberate move through the crowded canteen, she was gone.

Antonio Dubois no longer referred to himself as Père or Padre. He dressed in the loose clothing of a laborer, including the undyed linen wagoner’s smock that fell to his thighs. None of his charges would be intimidated by his dress. For shoes he wore wooden clogs, a primitive version of the sabots of his Brittany youth, but common footwear now, when leather enough even for sandals was still in short supply for everyone but soldiers and priests. The thudding of his clogs nicely served to let the girls know when he was approaching. There were always about two dozen women living in the house, most in the late stages of pregnancy, which was when, typically, they admitted to needing help.

But one day, because the grass in the garden muffled his footsteps as he approached the far bench, where he aimed to take his silence, he surprised a girl, coming upon her in a heap in the corner behind the hedge. She had been weeping, and when she looked up startled, she pulled at her dress, trying to get up. But, like the others, her belly was huge and she could not get her balance. Instead of automatically reaching to take her arm, as he once would have, he asked, “May I help you, Signorina?”

Only when she nodded did he reach down to offer a hand. She took it and pulled herself up. Tears continued to course down her cheeks, and, taking a place on the bench, she wiped at them as if they were the cause of her shame. She sat as if she’d been offered just a few inches on a ledge high above the street.

When she lifted her eyes to Antonio, he saw the telltale flood beyond tears that, in combination with her evident sweats and the flush of her skin, made clear she was in the savage grip of withdrawal. He would have to get her to the brain doctor, who came twice a week to treat the heroin addicts by injecting them with cocaine.

The girl grasped his hand as if to keep from falling off that ledge. Antonio sat with her. Soon, in her weariness, she leaned against him, letting her head fall against his large shoulder. When he put his arm around her, she snuggled in. She fell asleep. They remained like that for the better part of an hour, slow-passing moments for him during which, again, he could lie back in the feeling that at last he had found his daughter. The living Christ had nothing to do with it.

He remembered sitting in the public garden in Arles, watching a worker bent over her plants. As it happened, she had been surreptitiously watching him. She wore the green canvas apron of the town’s crew that maintained the lanes and pools, not to mention the camellias, lilacs, and bearded irises that Van Gogh had immortalized. That it was a garden made their coming together seem both foreordained and good. Very good, as God observed of the garden primeval.

Her name was Marie. She showed him how the silvery blue-gray of dwarf junipers emphasized the apricot tones of the peonies. She showed him the satin lime undersides of water lilies. His eyes were opened. That first time—who was leading whom?—they went from the garden to a seamen’s hotel. After all the nudes he had seen in paintings and in marble, he had begun by wanting only to see her in that way. Once she showed herself to him, though, the cosmic creation itself was reduced to her breasts, the well between her thighs, the invitation her legs made—and the purity of his own responsive ardor. To call this lust, he understood at once,
there
was the sacrilege. Adam was right.

Yet Marie had made him feel torn in two, as if, against Genesis, another
man
were being ripped out of his ribs. He became a second person, even while the first stood by, a witness. Ecstasy: from the Greek, to stand outside oneself.

And according to her own report, something like that happened to Marie. Sin had nothing to do with it, nor did vows, nor even Christ. Their double life began in a double moment. When she became pregnant, it seemed less wrong to marry, with all the lies that made necessary, than to part. Later, he was accused of having deceived her, but it was not true. She knew from the start that he was a priest, and she agreed to share him with his parish in Marseille, a two-hour drive away in his old Citroën. Back and forth he went, celibate priest here, family man there. The secret was safe from everyone but her. Marie lived it, too.

That acids from this arrangement were all along devouring the very core of her came as a complete surprise to him. Sin. Sacrilege. Remorse. Regret. Self-condemnation. Marie hanged herself from a beam in the shed behind the house in Arles. Their daughter, Sophie, found her corpse. Sophie was fourteen. Antoine had then found it impossible to keep from her the truth of his other life, which, when she learned of it, seemed to Sophie another death. She disappeared. His sin, he saw for certain, was unforgivable.

Did Marguerite d’Erasmo know of his disgrace before she’d had the solicitor dispatch the letter? He could not be sure. Mother Abbess had come to him after Matins that winter morning months before, informing him both that the Cistercian foundation would be removed from Casa dello Spirito Santo to the sister convent attached to Santa Maria della Vittoria, and that his services as chaplain would no longer be required. So the German priest had succeeded in his Vatican manipulations, in acquiring the extraterritorial monastery on Via Sicilia and in punishing Antonio for refusing to help him do so. That Mother had learned of her chaplain’s canonical status as an excardinated priest of restricted faculties seemed clear from the brusqueness of her dismissal. He didn’t blame the woman for resenting the fact that, without her knowledge, her community had been a wayward priest’s place of penance—the Casa his own personal penitentiary. Their years on opposite sides of the one communion rail apparently counted for nothing. Mother informed him that she had been in contact about his status with the Vicarius Urbis, the office of the cardinal vicar, to whom, she announced, he was solemnly obligated to report at once.

Whether it was only her tone of voice, or the accumulation of insult from across the Tiber, or a final verdict on his own unworthiness, he went over an edge, silencing for good his own ferocious argument with himself. He had already resolved to have nothing further to do with the cardinal vicar when the solicitor’s letter arrived.

Marguerite had, in absentia, signed over the leasehold of her father’s house in Parioli to him, on the condition that he put it at the service of Roman women and children. Funds for the provision of services would be supplied. There was no need for those services to be defined, nor any reason for Antonio—what redeeming joy he felt just to know that his princess was alive somewhere!—to do anything but agree. Working with a matron retired from the Bambino Gesù Hospital, Antonio needed only a matter of weeks to outfit the house with obstetrical instruments, birthing beds, cradles, scales and weights, linens, stainless steel vats, and kitchen equipment. Midwives who had been working for devalued lire in ill-equipped clinics were happy to accept his offer of room and board, and payment in cartons of American cigarettes. Any pregnant woman who presented herself was welcome. Word spread among Rome’s prostitutes that the d’Erasmo house was safe. To the once elegant neighborhood came the humblest women in Rome.

By now, seventy-four children had been born there, and from the looks of the girl on the bench next to him, it would soon be seventy-five. If she could hold on, perhaps this wraith’s misery would be transformed—as was his own when, only days ago, Marguerite herself had at last appeared. She had come to the door and pulled the bell as if she were one from the streets. But in her blue uniform, the high color of her face, the poise with which she held herself, and the soft smile with which she greeted him, her ownership of all that she beheld was implicit. The one room in the house that had not been given over to the women and babies, besides his own cell in the attic, was her father’s study, which, according to the lawyer’s instructions, had been kept as it was. No surprise, then, when Marguerite claimed it for herself, pronouncing the divan suitable to sleep on. In the study they sat together that first night, surrounded by books and family photographs.

It was soon apparent that, for reasons of her own, Marguerite could not explain where she had been or what she had been doing. He understood that, rather than lie to him, she would tell him nothing. So it was that their lifetime habit was reversed, and it was she who did the sympathetic listening, he the confessing.

Her only pointed questions, when she finally put them, were about Roberto Lehmann.

Eight

Reds

T
HE EXPLOSION CAME
in the middle of the night, and though General Peter Mates was hard asleep almost three blocks away, it woke him up. Reds, he thought, fucking Reds.

He knew a bomb when he heard one, and his first assumption was—headquarters. His cognac-induced bleariness was instantly replaced by a concentration of senses. He threw the satin sheets aside and, stark naked, went to the half-open floor-to-ceiling window, where filigreed curtains wafted in the warm night air. Behind him, his pretend contessa snatched at the sheets as if they offered cover from whatever was about to fall.

The sky to the south, above the Quirinal Hill, was red, and Mates thought at once, Not headquarters, but the palace of the king. He threw the window wide and leaned out over the railing without a thought for his nudity. He could make out the dark forms of structures and landscape high above. The Quirinal was the tallest of Rome’s hills, the site of the greatest patrician palazzos, including Victor Emmanuel’s. Before the kings, popes had lived there for three hundred years. Yes, the royal residence, Mates thought, that’s what the Reds would hit.

Then a second, equally violent detonation clapped—a boom to rival the first, followed by a low fading roar. The red in the sky brightened, pure color projected onto the screen of the clouds. Seconds later, Mates felt a blast of air against his face, chest, balls. Only then did he realize that he was unclothed. He backed away from the window. When had he felt this knot in his chest before?

Slovenia. The bomb-bay plunge into the night abyss; the heart of existence caring nothing for him or for anything he valued—not even his own fleeting pleasure inside the faceless woman behind him. Here it was: the coarse fact not just of his coming extinction but of the Eternal City’s, too; all of life coming and going—like
that!