Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  The winding road through those six miles was mostly moonscape, too salty to be arable, only the low hills that must have once been islands bearing a choke of chaparral and a scatter of date palms. Melek ordered the driver to pull over, stopping us in the middle of nowhere. Stevie and I peered anxiously out, wondering if a terrorist attack was on the program. “See over there in the field,” said Melek, pointing across the arid scrub. “See that column?”

  You had to adjust to the waves of shimmering heat, more blinding than any Ray Bans could shade. But now that she mentioned it, there was a column out there, with a nest of cranes at the top. It was, she told us, the last column of the Temple of Diana—one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world—at least the last column that was still in place. All the rest had been hauled off to Istanbul to ring the inner dome of Hagia Sophia, one religion erasing another. The dark green marble pillar in the field was improbable and forlorn, but from it had flowed, like ripples in a pond, a whole world of pagan temples, crowning every promontory.

  Then Melek told us to shift our gaze about thirty degrees to the right, where the rubble of a Venetian fort sprawled across a rise. A village was clustered beneath its walls, abandoned it looked like to us, unless they were all in there napping, fleeing the heat of the day. A tiny barrel church anchored the houses at one end—Orthodox, Coptic, I couldn’t have said. “Now, do you see the house just below the church?” she asked us. We nodded. More like a sway-roofed stable, really. “In that house Saint John finished writing the Gospel.”

  She spoke without any melodrama, a Muslim herself, though clearly no mullah was going to make her shed her Chanel, real or otherwise. To her this was a purely secular experience, with no more symbolic weight to the pagan landmark than to the Christian. Myself, I couldn’t stop staring, for here we were at a writer’s landmark. Factoids came back from my confirmation classes in the fifties. John’s Gospel—the beautiful one, the record of a poet—written some eighty years after the events it records. And on this hill he had formed the final awestruck sentence—in Greek, on a parchment scroll:

  And there are also many other things which Jesus did. If they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.

  We couldn’t have been there more than two minutes altogether, and the choking bus was already revving up for the twisted climb to Ephesus. This had all been just a sidelight. Yet I yearned to stay longer, to sprint across the salt fields and run my hand down the pocked marble; then to lope up the rise to John’s house, to peer in and try to imagine him working. I pictured him like Saint Jerome in his study in Diirer’s great engraving, only without the lion.

  Was this a religious experience? Well, not the conventional kind. Indeed, it was two religions—the pagan, face to face with the Christian, mute testimony to the schism of two worlds, before and after. Fragments and echoes, more like phantoms than physical places now, no signs or roadside markers to point the way. When Melek is running late, doubtless she skips this two-minute stop entirely. As we pulled away I craned for a last look. What quickened my spirit was the opposition of these two memories, pagan and Christian. You couldn’t say from the evidence here which would prevail in the end. No priest, no exegesis would settle the matter. The deep past is just a pillar in a field and a sagging barn.

  Or go back to the fall of ’87, when my friend Craig and I wandered for ten days in Italy. He wasn’t even as sick as I am now—didn’t die till New Year’s of ’91—but we both believed this Tuscan journey would be his final voyage out. In all the years I’d known him he’d never had a buck to spare, writing as he did for the gay press, which more or less paid him in rice and beans. I had two free tickets from a mileage club and offered him the world for his birthday, wherever he’d like to go. “Florence,” he answered instantly, as if he’d been waiting all his life to be asked.

  Not an easy trip for me, who’d spent a glorious week with Roger there in ’83. Too soon. But off we trekked—and found ourselves in a fusty pensione six floors up and facing the Arno, the Ponte Vecchio just below and a vista across the roofs of the city, that brandy light of mid-November. Perfecto, most especially the two spinster proprietresses who appeared to have sprung full-blown out of A Room with a View. Yet these two estimable ladies would always squabble at the comparison. Oh no, they assured us, Forster was three blocks up the street, at Signore Rotelli’s. Not a first-class establishment, clearly, round the bend and out of sight of the Old Bridge. Now Mrs. Browning’s view was quite superb, just two doors down, a lovely place to die.

  A lovely place to die became our mantra for the rest of that trip—standing on the terrace at San Miniato, or the piazza of the Virgin’s Cloak in Siena, or the top of a cracked tower in San Gimignano. And yet it turned out that Craig had been seriously misinformed about where you had to go to see the masterworks of Tuscany. After ten minutes’ shivering impatience in the Duomo, he categorically refused to go into another church, so bitter was he about the Vatican’s edicts of hate against our tribe. Wouldn’t go back in to see the Giottos, or the Fra Angelico Annunciation in the stairhall at San Marco. He was only interested in the secular, the David most especially, and had to restrain himself from spitting when flocks of nuns went skittering by with their guidebooks.

  Trumped therefore by an anti-Popery deeper even than mine, I was forced to revisit alone the holy places I had come to love before. In practice this amounted to trailing around from one Brunelleschi building to another, especially the soaring interior of Santo Spirito and the jewel-box perfection of the Pazzi Chapel. And yet they did nothing for me this time, less than nothing really, the unbearable serenity just another goad, to my grief and solitude. I had somehow talked myself out of the one peaceable compromise I’d made with the Church of Rome, the consolation of beauty so sublime that it burned away all dogma. Now it was just cold stone, and beauty an apparition that had deserted me.

  We were much better off on the open road, winding from village to village, picnicking under the drowse of sycamores, the brown fields like a harvest quilt. Lazily Craig unfolded our vast Italian road map, a double accordian, finding the exact spot where we sat finishing our pears and nougat, quickly before the bees gathered. Craig trailed a finger along the Tiber where it cleaved the north country in two. “What’s on the other side of the river?” he asked.

  “Umbria,” I replied with some indifference. We were due to fly out of Rome day after next, and all I wanted now was to get back home to Puck and to Roger’s grave. But I peered at the map and lighted upon Assisi, which looked to be about a hundred kilometers away. “You want to drive over there for the night?” Even I could hear the longing in my voice.

  “Is it all churches?” he wondered cautiously.

  “Oh no,” I replied, a brazen lie, since I hadn’t the first idea what was there. Maybe a cross to mark the spot where Francis preached to the birds, which was about all I knew of the life of the saint.

  We set off at once, into a swirling mist that became a driving downpour as we crossed into Umbria. Craig grew grumpy and curled asleep. The single windshield wiper did no more than smear the rain. What I’d thought we could do in two hours stretched to four, and I was verging on a panic attack, wondering what the fuck I was doing. All I could think was I’d never been there—a totally new place, unspoiled by what Roger had once called “the drag of nostalgia.”

  We snaked our way up the mountain, the road a torrent. Because of the low-hung clouds we couldn’t see two feet ahead as we found our dank hotel. It was ten minutes to five, night already. The desk clerk told us the Basilica of Saint Francis was open till five-fifteen, and only a hundred feet away. “You better go see it,” Craig ordered me dryly, eager himself to get to the room and collapse. So I set off into the flood, umbrella-less, leaping puddles till I came to the doors of the lower church. The Basilica is a double decker, the lower church much more gloomy and claustrophobic, but containing the actual tomb of the saint. Shaking ofF
the rain like a dog, I stopped in the first chapel, where under glass was displayed Francis’s brown hooded tunic, patched in a dozen places. The vow of poverty so physical you could almost touch it.

  Turning to go, I was startled to see a young monk watching me—his own brown robe exactly the same as the saint’s, no fashion changes having been deemed necessary in the intervening seven hundred years. I brushed past him, eyes downcast, not wishing to intrude upon his prayers, then made my way toward the tomb, feeding the two-hundred lire slots along the wall to light up the frescoes. The place was empty, and perhaps that explained how hyperaware I was of the monk padding along in my wake.

  But I hardly gave it a second thought, figuring him to be a species of guard making sure I didn’t purloin a candlestick. I descended into the crypt below the altar, where the sarcophagus lies enclosed by a kind of prison grille to protect it. It was so cold down there that my teeth began to rattle. I headed back to the stairs, suddenly wanting out—but was stopped in my tracks by the sentry posture of the young monk, smiling curiously at me from the bottom step. I nodded politely but had no Italian to small-talk past him. He lifted an eyebrow and pursed a funny grin, swaying a bit inside his robe. If this was a spiritual posture, then I was the Bishop of Rome. He was cruising me.

  I drew myself up with unconcealed contempt, offended somehow for Francis’s sake. The monk only leered more openly. It wasn’t a sacrilege against anything I believed. In fact I should have been crowing at such a pure example of the rot at the heart of piety. What did he want us to do, dart behind the sarcophagus so he could give me a blow job? He was waiting for me to make the next move. He lounged against the banister, coquettish and yet oddly passive, a virgin tramp. Giving him nothing back, I left by the opposite staircase, as huffy as a Puritan divine.

  “Well, was he cute?” asked Craig when I got back to the hotel.

  “I don’t know, I guess if you like them hooded. He was creepy.”

  “Some people,” he drawled, “would give their left nut to be done by a monk in a crypt.”

  Thus did we laugh it off and gorge ourselves on Parma ham and pasta. But as I lay there waiting to sleep, long after midnight, restless from the drumming of the rain on the red tile roofs, I berated myself for having been so icily aloof. I could have ignored his clumsy advance and still been kind, acknowledging we were brothers somehow. I even knew what it was that had made me cruel: how much his awkward pose and tentative pass had called back my own ineffectual moves at twenty-five, eyeing men from a hopeless distance. Always terrified that one of them would respond in kind, giving me back what I wanted and dared not have. I had acted out instead the affronted pride of a straight man.

  The morning broke in a blaze of gold. Craig, a very slow riser, banished me to an hour’s shopping while he took a bath. He wanted Assisi souvenirs even if he hadn’t caught a glimpse of the place himself. As soon as I stepped outside it grabbed me: the whole town built of the rosy-ochre local stone, a revelation after the night and the rain. I bought a guidebook and raced to the main square, speed-reading Francis’s story as I went. I found the spot where he renounced his father, stripping himself naked in the plaza and giving up the garments of a young nobleman. I gazed up the pinnacle slopes of Mount Subasio to where he’d lived in the caves with his followers. The day was unearthly bright, the window boxes all through the town still glutted with flowers, no frost yet. The views out over the Umbrian plain were unlike anything in my lifelong travelogue—something new at last. A pagan beauty restored, like a gift of second sight.

  By the time I joined Craig for rolls and cappuccino, I was fairly babbling over the glories of Assisi. I’d stumbled onto the Church of Saint Clare, Sister Moon to Francis’s Brother Sun. Her personal best involved an army of Huns or Visigoths bearing across the flood plain, a thunder of horses and brandished swords. Clare grabbed a monstrance containing the Host and strode down the mountain, holding the Blessed Sacrament before her like another kind of sword. She marched across the plain toward the advancing army, and the light caught the Host, blinding the soldiers and bringing them to a dead halt. Clare did not retreat. The invading army turned and ran.

  Right on, Clare! As I told the tale to Craig, there was no question in my mind that Clare and Francis were queer. She bestrode the wilderness like Diana the Huntress, her pagan forebear, while her eremite brother communed with the birds and flowers, Pan in a patched cloak. “Okay, okay,” Craig replied, but where were his postcards and tee-shirt? If we didn’t leave right now, he fretted, we might not make Rome till after dark, where we had no reservation.

  Just look at something, I pleaded with him, coaxing him at last to a quick duck into the basilica. He looked impassively at the frescoes, as clear to me now as news footage, so well had I drunk up the stories since my visit in the dark. I was giving a mini-lecture about one of the Giottos when Craig bumped my shoulder. “Is that him?”

  Perplexed, I followed his most unsubtle stare. And there was the monk from the night before, startled to see me again and uncertain whether to smile or nod. For all I knew he’d been to confession since the incident, and was even now praying his penance. “He is cute,” Craig observed, making no effort to keep his voice low, the dish reverberating across the vaulting stones. The monk glanced at Craig and then me, his face gone blank but hiding nothing. Either he felt betrayed that I’d told his sin, or he ached to see the two of us together—so casually fraternal, without any secrets. I didn’t know what to do, and then he had turned away, an old man’s stoop in his shoulders as he padded off. I felt that I was the one who’d sinned.

  So what is a pilgimage anyway? I suppose it has to do with the baggage you carry and the baggage you manage to shed. Almost by definition, the reality is the opposite of your expectations—or why go at all? Faith is the driving force that makes Crusades. In Henry Adams’s brilliant formulation, The Virgin and the Dynamo, he makes clear that no modern engineering could have built Chartres. The sublime of it could only be achieved by the fervor of belief, stone patiently fitted to stone for two hundred years till the steeples were finally topped.

  I went to Assisi without belief and left it much the same, without stigmata, untransformed. But buoyed all the same by its memories, by that medieval fortitude that filled the hearts of its saints. And by the sight of that one frightened monk grappling with his vows, enslaved by a chain of command that went all the way to the Vatican. He is the reason I’ve come to think Jerry Silver had it exactly right, with his hundred-and-ten percent. A whole army of self-loathing men, estranged from women, estranged from the life of the body—did they really mean to go into a system so bankrupt, so inhuman, that it dares to declare as policy that getting AIDS is preferable to wearing a condom?

  In memory it’s all mixed up, the saint among the Giotto frescoes and the disconnected queer. If I wasn’t changed, then maybe the young monk was. Beauty was what I had grown bereft of, and Assisi managed to give it back. Perhaps that’s more of a transformation than I realize, if not exactly the transfiguring kind. In any case my invective against the Church hasn’t moderated perceptibly, but I try to focus the laser of my rage where the power is, on the Roman-collared politicians.

  Yet I understand that on some level all religion is local—just like politics: wards and precincts. Two days after Christmas in ’86, my friend Star and I drove north from Albuquerque, three hours into the desert. We came to a pueblo village miles from anywhere, a few dozen adobe and tarpaper houses grouped about a dusty plaza. We’d come to see the dancing, and as it happened we were the only two non-natives there that day. There were closer villages, after all, with well-worn tourist tracks. The women who hurried out to greet us couldn’t have been more delighted, beckoning us impatiently to follow, as if we were missing the best part.

  It was the men who danced in the plaza, a long sinewy line of them drumming their feet on the ground, clowns darting among them. This was the dance that D. H. Lawrence said transformed the earth itself into a drumskin, noting that
these dancers had been beating the ground for thousands of years before the conquerors came with their crosses. Lawrence had no doubt, witnessing the ceremony, that they would be dancing a thousand years hence, long after the last white men had vanished. In the bone chill of the setting sun, a zero wind blowing in from Chaco Mesa, I thought how close we were to Los Alamos, where whole millennia had collapsed in the quonset labs of the Manhattan Project. A bare few hours north of Alamogordo itself, where a different sort of zero had been reached. And still the Indians danced.

  As dusk fell, the Christmas lights went on in several of the houses—back-lit Santas in the windows, cartoon dioramas of Mary and Joseph winding their way to Bethlehem, the Virgin on a donkey. Which was their religion, I wondered—the spirit power of the Old Ones, or the Christian mishmash? They couldn’t have it both ways—or could they? All that seemed to remain of the missionary padres were the strings of colored lights. No Christian priest marred’ this solstice ceremony, raining them with holy water. The real religion was deeper down, so local it vibrated only here on this quaking ground. And yet, so universal is the particular, that its echoing force on the plaza at Santo Domingo was like Thoreau’s wild-flower. You plucked it, and the whole universe came with it.

  I thought I had severed my own local affiliations long ago, by ceasing to believe. It was sentiment more than anything that brought me back every Christmas to an Episcopal church on Hollywood Boulevard, whose gray stone and polished oak reminded me of New England. Its regular parishioners seemed to number around thirty, widows in hats and white gloves, barely sufficient to pay the gas and electric, I would’ve thought. On Christmas Eve it swelled a bit, but you’d hardly call it a crowd. I would put my ten bucks in the plate for the privilege of singing carols, wanting no ministrations. So perverse was I—so conflicted, I suppose—that when my mother would call on Christmas Day, plaintively asking if I’d managed to make it to church the night before, “for the singing,” I curtly answered “No.” Not wanting her to get the wrong idea that I’d had a sudden change of heart.