A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

  “Yes, carissima,” the prince called bravely, “bring us a tiger.”

  Anna’s spirits were high.

  3

  CONSTANZA managed her affairs more discreetly.

  If ever there was a cradle Catholic, it was she. She had been taken to her first act of worship in her bambinaia’s arms. She had been told that she would meet Gesù, the good Virgin, the Saints and everything that was holy, potent and miraculous. The bambinaia’s own Saint had a shrine in that small, dark and rather mysterious church that stands behind the Trevi Fountain. It was there they went. It was evening and the waters were playing. Constanza saw gods, plunging horses, a glorious profusion of light and roar and spray and flung out her arms in ecstasy. She very nearly managed to tumble herself into the seething pool. The good woman carried her down the steps and held her while she put her hands and mouth to a spout and drank. If afterwards she was presented at another altar it held no separate memory for her.

  •

  When Constanza was old enough to have her lessons with the parish priest, what sank in first of all was the contrast between his teaching—authoritarian, uninspired—and that of her other masters; after a while it was the subject matter which gave her to think. Anna, keeping aloof from her daughter’s religious education, made the mistake so natural to fundamentally not very religious people of believing religion to be capable of isolation. On the more practical and immediate level, it had not occurred to her that while Constanza was being taught—by a kindly and sincere old man to whom what he was putting before this child was no less than the most patent and most necessary of all truths and did not stand in need of explanations or expository refinements—about the Flood, Divine Omnipotence, Eternal Damnation, the Sacraments, the Virgin Birth, she was also taught and by men of very different abilities about everything else from geology to the Inquisition.

  As Constanza grew up, her mind (at various stages) buzzed with questions. She did not put them to the priest, she suspected that it might be of little use and that it might give him pain. Constanza had tact, she was also very good-natured and did not like to cause offence where offence might be avoided.

  She asked her mother. “Do many people go to Hell? People we know?”

  Anna gave her full attention to this, but tried not to show it. She said lightly, “Oh, I don’t think so, darling. Some say that hell exists, but it is empty.”

  Constanza looked at it. “With the Hell Fires going all the time? Through Eternity? Don’t you think God would get to want to try the Fires out one day? I should, if they were all there and waiting. Of course I should order the Hell Fires to be put out at once.”

  “There is no hell fire,” said her mother, “not really. It is only a kind of symbol.”

  “Hmm,” said Constanza. “I don’t think the parroco believes that.”

  “He may feel that you are too young; I suppose children are usually given the literal interpretation.” Anna wondered if she ought not after all to rope in one of her friends among the Monsignori, but dismissed the thought. “God is all merciful,” she said firmly, “there can be no hell—it is unthinkable.”

  “In pictures, there are always flames, and people. Is that symbols too?”

  “In a sense.”

  “There is some proof,” said her daughter, “there’ve been the ghosts, poor Souls in Purgatory, but nobody from Hell as far as one knows.”

  “Darling, who told you that?”

  “Everybody,” said Constanza. She thought. “It is common knowledge.”

  “I must get Dr. Slater to tell you a little about Psychical Research,” said her mother.

  “I should like that,” said Constanza.

  “But really, my pet, people do not return.” Anna quoted the appropriate passage from Hamlet. “At least not as individuals; we must take that as established now.”

  “What about the Resurrection of the Flesh, mama?”

  “You must not take the Scriptures too literally, my dear.”

  “I don’t do scriptures with the parroco; it’s in the Creed.” Constanza looked hard at her mother: “You are quite sure about Hell? Because if it is true, we have to be very careful.”

  “Of what, darling?”

  “Not to die in a state of Mortal Sin.”

  “That’s nothing you will have to worry about, my darling,” said her mother. “What we must all hope for is to lead good lives according to our conscience.”

  •

  “Constanza, tell me, do you . . . do R.C.’s ever have difficulties with their beliefs?”

  “Difficulties, William?” They were doing geometry. Constanza (a few years older now) was quite good at it, but lazy.

  “Do they find it difficult to believe what they are told to?” “Oh, doubts? One does have doubts. That is accepted. You are supposed to pray to get rid of them.”

  “Do you?”

  “It’s bad luck to omit prayers on certain occasions,” his pupil said lightly.

  “How do you feel about Infallibility, for instance?” William was a very young man, just down from Oxford and an Anglo-Catholic.

  “That’s easy,” said Constanza, “like the Immaculate Conception and all that. God is omnipotent, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “If he is omnipotent, he can do anything. If he can do anything, he can make the Pope infallible. Right?”

  “Yes. . . . Wait a minute: the Pope is a man, and man is presumed to be left free to make his own choice between good and evil—God could not make a man his own mouth-piece?”

  “Why not?” said Constanza. “If God chooses to, just one man. He may need someone to speak for him, although I do think that a direct voice from Heaven would be so much more effective. I often wish for one. Anyway, the Pope is only infallible as pope—like you in mathematics—he could be a sinner himself. And perhaps the Pope is not a man after all—who knows?—perhaps God makes us only think he is, perhaps the Pope is a Miracle.”

  “But why should God want to make the Pope infallible?”

  “Because we are the One True Church,” said Constanza.

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “I’m not at all certain,” said Constanza. “It does seem odd that everybody else should be wrong, the Protestants and the Greeks and the people who think there isn’t any God at all; the Buddhists, too. Mama says there are such wonderful religions in the East. It seems so like the lottery—think if one weren’t born what one is.”

  “It’s terribly important to know which is right,” said William.

  “Oh you know, you don’t have to worry about your Salvation,” she said, “even if you are a Heretic. You see, people aren’t damned just because they haven’t had the chance to be born Catholics—that would be dreadful—it’s only if you have been given the chance to know better and reject it. . . . Oh Dio, this may be the chance! William dear, do be careful, perhaps it isn’t at all wise for you to have come to Rome.”

  The young man blushed. “As a matter of fact . . . as a matter of fact——” Constanza turned her eyes on him. He said: “I may take the chance.”

  •

  A few of Constanza’s masters, particularly those who happened to be staunch Anglicans or Presbyterians, shared her mother’s scruples and refrained from subjects liable to weaken their charge’s allegiance to her own faith. Even they would not suppress the Marian Persecutions when the point was reached. Most of them, however, whether Darwinians, agnostics or believers, showed no concern other than to impart knowledge according to their lights. The origin of man was taken by their pupil in her stride; the interest to her was academic, what enthralled her was the way men behaved and not how they were made. Nomadic tribes and the Crusades were apt to bore her, the periods she had most feeling for were Republican Rome and the Italian Renaissance, while the history of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation filled her with mounting indignation and dismay. Tolerance was bred into her very bones, and she abhorred cruelty.

  “They did thi
s?” she said, blazing, “to each other? Both sides? Burning each other, hacking each other to pieces?”

  “Both sides.”

  “Because each thought they were right and the other wrong?”

  “Yes.”

  “Each side thought that?”

  “Convinced of it.”

  “How foolish!” said Constanza. “And then they had a Thirty Years’ War. I suppose they began by being a little right each? Then everything got more and more wrong and they couldn’t stop it? The way it is when one quarrels.”

  “It is nearly impossible to stop anything, dear child, once it involves a large number of interests and people.”

  “I see that,” said Constanza. “But it couldn’t happen again now? Could it?”

  Her master said: “No.” And he added: “Not in that form.”

  “That is certain? How does one know, I suppose people nowadays mind less being wrong?”

  “More and more people are being right.”

  “How do they know they are?” said Constanza.

  •

  “Mr. James,” said Constanza, “when I want to do something and don’t, is it my conscience or the voice of my guardian angel?”

  “Does it happen, dear girl?”

  “It was a hypothetical question. But it does.”

  “Then I should call it enlightened self-interest,” said Mr. James.

  Constanza laughed. “I have other promptings. Where do you think they come from?”

  “Your kind heart, possibly.”

  “That again might be my guardian angel?”

  “Oh quite,” said Mr. James.

  “Surely,” said Constanza, “the guardian angel would be something outside myself, a separate entity, whereas my conscience is a part of myself.”

  “Which part?” said Mr. James.

  “It must be a part of my mind.”

  “Your mind. What is your mind. Will you describe it?”

  “That does get us into deep waters,” said Constanza, delighted. “I suppose the mind is brain and spirit——”

  “How you do mix up things,” said Mr. James.

  “Well, that’s what they appear to be.”

  “What makes you certain you have a mind?”

  “I’m not at all certain about my conscience, but I can’t help being sure that I have a mind, I feel I know it’s there.”

  “Ergo?” said Mr. James. “Touché.” But she added, “You are not telling me that my mind is no more real than my guardian angel?”

  “More real!” said Mr. James. “You’ll never make a philosopher. And I am not telling you anything.”

  “Dear Mr. James,” said Constanza.

  •

  It was about this time that Constanza—who had nearly reached the age of thirteen—ceased to ask such questions of herself and others. She woke up one fine morning and found that she had (as she knew they called it) lost her religion—it was gone, she had sloughed it off. She realized that she believed in nothing whatsoever and she did not feel a sense of loss at all. In fact she shed interest in the subject altogether; her worries about people being damned appeared to her as childish things now put behind for ever.

  This did not mean that she did not recognize that on a mundane plane it was a serious matter. If her family went about their observances and no questions asked, it was because these things and their acceptance were unquestionable. There had been foreign wives and therefore converts, there had been exiles, eloped daughters, a cousin who went to prison, but atheists (Constanza told herself that she was one now), never. No use inviting trouble, no use hurting loved people: Constanza merely kept quiet. There were few real problems. First communion, and with it regular instruction, lay behind. She went on going to mass when it was required, or gave the impression of having been. Sometimes, standing in an aisle, hearing the priest’s sibilant gabbling through the Latin words (she blamed them for not putting more fervour into what she did not believe), looking at the vacant, the rapt, the sheepish faces, the mumbling lips, she was moved to say to herself: I am the cleverest person here, I am the only one who has seen through it all, and I am younger than any of them. What filled her was not quite pride, but amazement and contempt—how easy everything was if one was clever. And she was glad she was: it was useful, it was fun.

  The sacraments she shunned. She would have felt great dread kneeling at an altar rail—she might not be struck down there and then but it might follow her through life; the gods were powerful even if the Church was naught. This was confused, Constanza told herself, irrational (a favourite word), but there it was, stronger than her little chains of argument; she shrugged at it and lived accordingly.

  She did not like deceit, but did not hesitate to practice it as the lesser evil. She was successful, her family assumed that she had adopted her mother’s custom of choosing churches at the four corners of Rome. At confession she judged it politic to show herself occasionally, and so at Easter-time she went to their own man with a well-chosen catalogue of minor sins and nothing worse than an acute social malaise.

  She also decided not to tell her mother. Constanza was perhaps the only one who had divined what a queer Catholic her mother made, and she wished to spare her unguessed complications. Besides, far better always to fend alone than with an uncertain ally.

  •

  At that time Anna herself was moving towards a crisis in her life. The years that lay behind her might be said to have been halcyon years. When she had returned to Italy from across the seas at the appointed time, her trunks multiplied, animated, serene, dispensing treasure, the then recent past was as if it had never been. Even the prince, himself past-master at leaving well alone, found himself outdone in gliding over what she did not seem to remember having been thin ice at all. Perhaps, he hoped, she really had forgotten. Anna had come back with the inevitable Oriental bric-à-brac, but to her husband she brought a clear ruby, a stone unset, though cut. It had been given to her by an Indian. Anna had intimated that she was unable to accept jewellery from a gentleman. The Indian had replied in a most pretty speech that he was no mortal gentleman but a ruler by divine right, that an unset jewel was not jewellery and he was sending this stone to the prince who had the honour to be her husband. They were all charmed. The prince was deeply pleased: rubies in the family, he said, meant luck. If he could not wear the stone, he would do better, he would carry it loose in his pocket and it should always be with him.

  Anna’s life resumed, the circle of admirers, art, the eminent visitors, dining-out, organizing fêtes, and travel. Constant travel, to Scotland in the summer, to London, to Swiss spas, a visit to St-Petersburg (where she would have loved to meet Count Tolstoi but did not), a visit to Madrid to see the Velasquez, travel in Italy, to Assisi, to Siena, to Milan, above all to Venice which she adored and Rico could not abide, he called it that damp hole. He seldom travelled with her; and Anna had not once gone back to her native country.

  It could wait, she said. One day when Constanza was older she would take them all on a visit home. She told the prince he would be made to stay at Boston, and he allowed himself to be teased and flung up his hands in horror.

  “Papa doesn’t like crossing water,” said Constanza; “I shall have nothing against it.”

  “I crossed the Channel, Anna,” the prince said: “Once! To marry you. The ordeal. England! The other end of the world—America can’t be much worse.”

  “Your sisters loved England.”

  “Oh women.”

  “In America,” said Constanza, “everybody is equal, even women.”

  “More equal!” said her father.

  “I can’t see it,” said Constanza. “People are not the same—it is unnatural to pretend they are.”

  “Darling, equality does not mean being the same,” said Anna, “it means being treated the same.”

  “And that is just?” said Constanza.

  Her mother gave her a quick look. “It is a long time since I heard that word. Yes, we do think
it is just. It is our way of redressing, as far as we can, natural injustice. As you say, people are not the same, they are not born with the same advantages of mind and person, so we have a form of life where——”

  “Yes, cara,” said the prince, “but you do have rich and poor in your country.”

  “Oh we haven’t come near to what we are going to be, this is not the end! And we have not your kind of poor.”

  “Nor we your kind of rich,” said the prince.

  “In the United States there is hope for everybody.”

  “For everybody?” said Constanza. “I see how one can hope to get rich. What if you are a fool, or ugly and nobody looks at you and your husband runs away, or you never find one?”

  “You find one if you’ve got money,” said her father.

  “Già,” said his daughter. “Still. . . . It wouldn’t be so pleasant to be ugly—una brutta—even in America. Worse: if everybody is rich, nobody would have to marry her and she wouldn’t get a husband. Of course one knows they haven’t all got the same money, America hasn’t adopted socialism.”

  “Socialism means all poor,” said the prince.

  “Socialism means all moderately well-off,” said Constanza. “I’ve read the Fabians about it—you haven’t heard of them—they have opened my eyes.”

  “Are you a socialist, figlia?”

  “Well, I’m for it,” said Constanza. “It needs working out; everybody would have to agree. But it’s a generous thing to be.”

  “Little you know,” said the prince.

  “My darling,” said Anna. “But you see in America, with our form of Government, we never do anything unless everybody agrees.”

  “Except the minority,” said Constanza. “Mama, are many Americans like you? The ones in Rome are not.”

  “Your mother is unique,” said the prince.

  “But is she a real American?”

  “I am no longer a citizen,” said the principessa.

  “And what am I?”

  “You are half American by blood,” said her mother.

  “American blood,” said the prince, “what is that? Yours is Scotch and English, cara, the rest seems to be Sicilian or . . . German.”