Painting Death

by Tim Parks

  ‘His father’s hard-earned money,’ Morris remarked.

  ‘You have to remember, caro,’ Antonella chipped in, ‘that Don Lorenzo is not actually from Verona, are you?’

  ‘Oh I’m a complete alien,’ the priest coughed apologetically.

  ‘Bussolengo,’ he explained.

  ‘Fantastic, ten kilometres away!’ Mauro was sneering. ‘The boys I’m on trial with were all from Bussolengo. It’s one of the proudest Hellas fan clubs.’

  Again Morris noted how the whole unhappy episode had stoked up the boy’s self-esteem rather than the contrary. If some severe punishment wasn’t forthcoming when the judges made up their minds, his son seemed well set for a life of thuggery.

  ‘I suppose it’s like supporting God against the Devil,’ Massimina observed.

  Amid the general perplexity that this bizarre remark aroused it was Morris who now asked, ‘I beg your pardon, my girl?’

  Massimina drained her wine, shook her long dark hair and giggled. ‘I mean, supporting Juve, you’re sure to win, aren’t you? I bet all the priests support them. Like they support God against the Devil, since He’s also bound to win.’ Her voice had a tinkle of silver to her brother’s booming brass.

  ‘They’re the devils, not us,’ Mauro protested. ‘We just fight our corner.’ He began to hum the triumphal march from Aida: ‘Forza giallo blù, giallo blù, giallo blù, giallo blùùùùùùù.’

  Morris was surprised that Don Lorenzo wasn’t more concerned about the blasphemy he had just heard. ‘Massimina,’ he told his daughter, ‘a Christian doesn’t choose God because He’s a winner but because He’s good. It’s not like Juve and Hellas. You couldn’t say, I’ll choose the Devil because he’s closer to home.’

  ‘Byron did.’

  ‘Byron was hardly a Christian,’ Morris pointed out. He had written his Part One Tripos dissertation on Childe Harold and loathed the poem. Making heroism out of defying one’s Maker.

  ‘Dante, then.’

  The tall girl was swaying from side to side on her seat, raising her right hand, knife and all, to push away the long hair that immediately fell back across her laughing eyes and pouty upturned mouth.

  ‘Dante did not support the Devil,’ Antonella said with surprising severity. ‘You really shouldn’t talk such nonsense, Mimi.’

  Morris saw his wife’s strategy at once; to defuse the tension between beloved son and beloved Don she would lay into her daughter’s patent stupidity.

  But cheered by the abundant meat and wine, Massimina pressed on. At college, she told them, they had a project to create some modern illustrations for the Inferno. With computer graphics. Well it was obvious that when it came to Paolo and Francesca, Dante was on the sinners’ side, which implied he was in favour of the Devil who’d made them sin and against God who was punishing them forever when it really wasn’t necessary. ‘I mean,’ she finished, ‘it’s the only part of the poem with any real emotion. It’s so sad that they have to be in hell because they loved each other.’

  ‘They were in hell because they were adulterers,’ Antonella said frostily.

  ‘He couldn’t help it if he fell in love with a married woman, could he? Or she with him.’

  Morris was surprised at her obvious feeling. Could it be that his daughter, who with her slender shoulders and tall nervy neck suddenly seemed very attractive, was having an adulterous affair? With whom? A teacher?

  ‘I can’t help it if I was born Veronese,’ Mauro chimed facetiously, ‘and fell in love with Hellas.’

  ‘Mauro, for heaven’s sake, don’t be so infantile!’ Morris snapped.

  ‘Giallo blù, giallo blù, giallo blùùùùù’ the boy smirked. Even his eyelashes were red. Those are definitely not my genes, Morris decided.

  Don Lorenzo was smiling indulgently. ‘Forza, Mousie! I like your spirit!’

  ‘The spirit that attacks unsuspecting policemen,’ Morris reminded him.

  Antonella was making urgent signs that they should change the subject.

  ‘The authorities deliberately provoke us so that then they can demonise our town,’ Mauro said. ‘It’s all set up. Papà, even you’ve seen how they’re always trying to present Verona as a shithole.’

  ‘A what?’ Antonella was horrified, mostly for the benefit of Don Lorenzo, Morris thought.

  ‘You should come with us and see. We’re forced to be violent.’

  ‘What rubbish!’

  ‘Come on. I dare you. Come to a game.’

  ‘I thought you’d been banned from going to games,’ Morris objected sharply.

  The boy grinned under his red hair. ‘There may be ways round that.’

  ‘What Dante was trying to say,’ Massimina insisted, ‘is that the world is more complicated than black and white. He definitely thought God got it wrong about Paolo and Francesca.’

  ‘In a Christian view of things, God can’t get it wrong,’ Morris told her, exasperated. ‘Because God is good. Isn’t that right, Father?’

  Having tucked away his meat, Don Lorenzo was sitting back from the battlefield, digging between molars with a toothpick.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘there’s a gap on the bottom right. It’s the crown they put in.’

  ‘I get the same thing,’ Mauro agreed. ‘I hate teeth.’

  ‘Who says I have to have a Christian view of things?’ Massimina asked dangerously.

  ‘Don Lorenzo,’ Morris turned to the family’s spiritual guide, ‘could it ever be right for us to feel sympathy for someone God has sent to hell? Surely after God has judged we no longer have any right to hold an opinion.’

  As he spoke the words he was aware of a sudden change of tone in his voice, a sudden personal interest that went beyond rebutting his daughter and restoring domestic order. Hadn’t he himself been feeling sympathetic to Cain just an hour or two before? A forebear who was surely in hell. There was silence while they waited for the elderly man to pull out three or four animal fibres from between his teeth and swallow them properly with another full glass of Trevisan’s Classico Superiore.

  ‘Well,’ Don Lorenzo began wiping his mouth, ‘Dante was of course excommunicated and posthumously accused of heresy; I believe Cardinal Rusconi has written a learned—’

  ‘I told you!’ Massimina squealed with delight.

  But Mauro interrupted: ‘How did you hurt your foot then?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Your foot. How did you get your bad foot if it wasn’t playing football?’

  Morris sometimes wondered if it was drug-taking that prompted his children’s disturbing non sequiturs.

  ‘My foot?’ The priest paused, then smiled vaguely. ‘But have I never told you?’ He looked at Antonella. ‘Did I never tell you about my foot? After all these years?’

  ‘No, Padre.’

  Don Lorenzo shook his head and dabbed at his dry lips.

  ‘How extraordinary.’

  ‘So how did you get it?’ Mauro asked.

  ‘Remarkable.’

  They waited, Dante, heresy and Hellas all on hold; Don Lorenzo smiled wanly and wriggled off the purple stole he had so far kept round his cassock against the cold.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Massimina said impatiently. Plate clean, she was eager to be gone. Was it this adulterous lover that she was always texting, Morris wondered? Yet he felt certain she was still a virgin. Playing with love, he thought.

  ‘I’ll tell, if you promise you won’t laugh,’ Don Lorenzo eventually said.

  ‘Why would we?’ Antonella enquired.

  ‘You’ll see,’ the Don smiled coyly. Then added: ‘But why don’t you try to guess first?’

  Doesn’t the old corpse love drawing attention to himself, Morris thought. Do admire my embalming, everybody.

  ‘I’m sure we never would,’ Antonella declared. ‘Laugh, that is.’

  ‘A horse trod on it.’ Massimina tried.

  ‘Acqua! ’ the old priest cried, as if they were playing hunt the thimble.

  ‘Car
ran over it.’

  ‘Acqua! ’

  ‘You kicked a policeman.’

  ‘Oh Mauro, really!’

  ‘Acqua freddissima,’ the old priest laughed. ‘Or rather,’ he added mischievously, ‘it wasn’t that that did the damage.’

  ‘Savaged by a pit-bull?’ Morris enquired innocently.

  ‘Acqua.’

  ‘Shot by a jealous husband!’ Massimina was giggling again.

  ‘Children, please!’

  This Classico Superiore was definitely a couple of per cent stronger than it said on the bottle, Morris thought. They were undercharging.

  ‘I’ll give you a clue,’ Don Lorenzo teased. ‘Something fell on it.’

  ‘A brick,’ Mauro said at once.

  ‘Acqua.’

  Morris shook his head. ‘Why would a brick be funny?’

  For a few minutes then the Trevisan Duckworths, or Duckworth Trevisans, left aside questions of good and evil and tried to guess what object might have fallen on the priest’s foot so many years ago, half crippling him for life.

  ‘A wall,’ Massimina said.

  ‘Acqua.’

  ‘A breviary,’ Antonella said.

  ‘Acqua.’

  ‘Hard to see how a breviary could have done the damage,’ Morris objected.

  ‘The size of the one in church!’

  ‘An aspergillum!’

  Don Lorenzo grinned as he had another stab at his yellow teeth, all the time shaking a hoary head.

  ‘A box,’ Mauro tried.

  ‘Fuoco! Or rather fuocherellino. What kind of box?’

  Ah. They were getting close.

  ‘A box of books. Of Bibles!’

  The Don shook his head, smiling. But the moment of revelation was at hand, they could all feel it. What went in a box that could be heavy enough to have crushed poor Don Lorenzo’s foot?

  ‘A case of wine?’ Antonella suggested. ‘Not Trevisan’s I hope.’

  ‘Acqua. If that’s not rather a contradiction,’ Don Lorenzo quipped.

  ‘Of whisky?’

  ‘I don’t think,’ the priest observed sadly, ‘that I’ve ever handled a case of whisky. Or brandy for that matter. Alas.’

  Antonella folded her arms. ‘We give up.’

  ‘No, no,’ both children cried.

  They all studied Don Lorenzo who seemed remarkably pleased with himself; like a dead man, Morris found himself thinking, asking you to guess how he’s died. The door opened with its customary creak and Maddalena came into the room to collect the plates. She too dragged her feet these days; she too had one foot in the grave. Or rather, now one, now the other.

  ‘Shall I bring in the sweet, Signora?’ she asked.

  In one of those flashes that made Morris the genius he most undoubtedly was he shouted: ‘Coffin!’

  Don Lorenzo looked at him in amazement.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘A coffin?’ Mauro burst into pretended laughter.

  Morris felt a sudden cold prickle of pins and needles running down the inside of his leg. What on earth was funny about a coffin?

  ‘Ma povero Don Lorenzo!’ Antonella exclaimed. She was trying hard not to laugh, which Morris found rather endearing.

  ‘I was just waving incense over it before they lifted it into the loculo,’ the Don remembered, ‘when one of the bearers fainted, the one beside tried to grab him and the thing came crashing down right on my ankle.’

  There was a short silence while they all tried to imagine the scene. Something like 150 kilos of polished casket skewering the priest’s foot.

  ‘Whose?’ Morris asked.

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘Who was inside the coffin? Whose was it?’

  ‘Oh,’ Don Lorenzo hesitated. ‘I can’t recall now. A parishioner, I think.’

  Lying! Morris thought. For the first time in the thirty years he had known the man Don Lorenzo was lying! Morris was sure. He knew perfectly well who was in that box. Even Antonella had a rather perplexed expression on those puckered little lips.

  How interesting!

  But the moment was soon forgotten. Half an hour hence, as on every Wednesday evening, they were reading a passage from the Bible. The children had gone at this point of course. The hosts and their spiritual guide had retired to black leather sofa and armchairs in the salotto. His brandy on the low mahogany table by his knobbly knee, Don Lorenzo accepted from Morris’s hands the Trevisan family Bible, always carefully dusted and always lying open at some page or other on the same shelf that housed the family photographs. It was Antonella’s belief, picked up apparently from her grandmother, that a Bible should never be shut. Open, its pious wisdom was released into the domestic atmosphere like the fragrance of an open rose, or a bowl of potpourri.

  ‘So,’ Don Lorenzo asked. ‘What shall it be this evening? I don’t have the strength to read much, I’m afraid.’

  All that meat and wine was hard work, Morris reflected.

  They had been reading the Bible together for almost thirty years. At the beginning, as a young couple overcoming bereavement, Morris and Antonella had followed specific Bible-reading courses, to deepen their religious instruction and prepare them for parenthood. But thirty years is a long time and when Don Lorenzo had no more courses to offer, they had begun to read the Holy Scriptures at random. That is, Don Lorenzo shut his eyes, the book was placed on his knees, open, without his knowing which way up or at what point, and he turned over a wodge of pages to the left or to the right with a quick deft movement. Then, eyes still closed, but swiftly and decisively, as if convinced that whatever the Holy Book turned up it would be exactly the spiritual nourishment they required, the old priest would stab a bony finger on the flimsy India paper.

  As the years passed an element of ritual had crept in. Everyone had come to feel that there was some magic or augury involved. Read once a week, the randomly chosen passages became a message, like a horoscope in one of the more serious weeklies. They were aware of course of the heresy in this. They did not talk about it openly in this way. Don Lorenzo would simply read out whatever verses his finger had found in the voice he reserved exclusively for Bible-readings, a portentously wavering, sanctimonious sing-song that seemed to come from beyond the grave, beyond whole cemeteries, Morris sometimes thought, after which the ancient priest would bow his head in a closing vesper, before winding up the evening with a double shot of Calvados. All the same, the moment Don Lorenzo opened his eyes and announced the book, chapter and verse, that his finger had lighted on, Morris always felt a fine frisson of excitement run up his wrists and forearms, as if he might be about to receive important news regarding the future, or even irrevocable orders from On High. Certainly there had been something uncanny in Don Lorenzo’s reading Jeremiah 40:15, less than forty-eight hours before the moment of reckoning with Forbes: ‘Then Johanan the son of Kareah spoke to Gedaliah in Mizpah secretly, saying, Let me go, I pray you, and I will slay Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, and no man shall know it.’

  Morris fetched the Bible and placed it on Don Lorenzo’s meagre thighs. The old priest turned a wodge of pages, waved his mummified hand in the musty air, then brought it down with ominous decision; he swivelled the big Bible around since Morris had given it to him upside down and declared:

  ‘Judges 3:14.’

  Morris stepped dutifully back to sit on the sofa beside his wife. Only when the couple listened to the Bible together did they regress to holding hands and occasionally actually looking each other in unfathomable eyes.

  ‘So the children of Israel,’ Don Lorenzo began, ‘served Eglon the King of Moab eighteen years.’

  Morris always felt excited when he heard the word Moab. Or better still Moabites. The Bible did have its pleasures. He rather wished now he had made the effort to light some candles.

  ‘But when the children of Israel cried unto the LORD, the LORD raised them up a deliverer, Ehud the son of Gera, a Benjamite, a man left-handed: and by him the children of Israel sent a p
resent unto Eglon the King of Moab.’

  Massimina had been left-handed, Morris remembered. It perhaps explained her poor performance at school. Or at least gave her an excuse.

  ‘But Ehud made him a dagger which had two edges, of a cubit length; and he did gird it under his raiment upon his right thigh.’

  No sooner was the word dagger pronounced, than Morris pricked up his ears. How long was a cubit, he wondered?

  ‘And he brought the present unto Eglon, King of Moab: and Eglon was a very fat man.’

  ‘What was that?’ Morris sat up sharp.

  It was unusual for the reading to be interrupted. Antonella started from the light slumber she was falling into.

  ‘The present? I don’t know. Wheat? Wine? What did these people give each other?’

  ‘No, at the end.’

  ‘Ah . . . he was a very fat man. Eglon, King of Moab.’

  ‘Ah. Curious detail. The Bible doesn’t usually get into people’s physique.’

  Don Lorenzo frowned and went on reading:

  ‘When Ehud had made an end to offer the present, he sent away the people that bear the present. But he himself turned again from the quarries that were by Gilgal, and said, I have a secret errand unto thee, O king: who said, Keep silence. And all that stood by him went out from him. And Ehud came unto him; and he was sitting in a summer parlour, which he had for himself alone. And Ehud said, I have a message from God unto thee. And he arose out of his seat.’

  A message from God was good, Morris thought, for a cubit-long dagger.

  ‘And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly. And the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out.’

  The dirt came out! Morris was electrified. The dirt damn well came out! Indeed it did! In thirty years of Bible-reading he had never heard anything more pertinent.

  Don Lorenzo read on as if cruising through the beatitudes. A faint snore told Morris his wife was in fact asleep, though oddly her hand continued to squeeze her husband’s with apparent affection.