by Mark Helprin
“Have you been to Rome before, Father?”
“Yes, I have, in 1925 when Mussolini was in power. You know what I think of him, don’t you, don’t you, Helen.”
“I most certainly do.”
It was hot where they stood, but his clothes were clean and white and his thick hair was white, so he had no discomfort. There was a black spot of oil on the drive. A shimmering desert stretched beyond—his parish. He could smell the hot sand and see waves of heat rising from it, distorting the mountains.
The driver put the bags in the car, and after bidding good-bye to Helen and shaking her hand Father Trelew got in the back and clicked the door shut. The car was air-conditioned. It was taking him to Phoenix for the plane. He was going to Vatican II.
It was years since he had left his parish. In New York before his parents died, they had called him sometimes “The Indian Priest,” but he never heard them, they thought. They were ashamed of him. They wanted him to be an archbishop. Instead he spoke to deep-brown faces in a dark church with no lighting, while the sand blew outside. He could see it through the window sometimes—perfectly white against the blue sky and billowing like foam on the ocean, and yet it was cool and dry. His mother and father thought he would come back from Arizona as if from some foreign campaign, distinguished and likely to advance. The bishops would appreciate his sacrifice. He knew he was not coming back, but he never told his parents. They died in the Depression, sure that at the end of the Depression he would be called back from Arizona.
If he thought about being an archbishop, he clenched his fist and banged it on the table. When he had too much to drink, he thought wild thoughts about seeing God, about golden staircases and whitened plumes rising from the wide floor of Heaven, about places where it was so bright you couldn’t see anything at all. He had such prideful dreams only after wine or whiskey, so he drank rarely.
He arrived in Rome early in the morning. He felt young, for he had slept on the plane and Rome seemed to him not to have changed since 1925, when he was thirty and had been there for two months as a student. Now there were few carriages, but the streets were the same. In Piazza Navona, the old colors still stood; the fountains had been going for almost forty years since he first saw them. He wondered if they ever stopped, for even a moment. Perhaps each time the city died—after the March, or when the Germans were there—the fountains stopped. He thought to ask an old man, but realized that no one man would have watched constantly, and besides, he thought, I am an old man and could tell no one if ever in Arizona the mountains turned pure white or the sky the color of gold, because I have not watched them the whole time. At least, the fountains appear never to stop; at least, I have seen them while they were going.
His budget for this trip was delightfully large. The Vatican paid much of it, his diocese another great part, and his savings the rest. He thought he would live for this short time in a fashion unlike that of his small frame house on the reservation. There the wind came in a steady stream through an unputtied crack of the window. In the morning gold light glinted off his porcelain shaving basin. At these times there was only silence and cold. After he shaved, he opened the window, and after he opened the window he dressed and prayed—but not in Rome. He would pray, yes, but in Rome he would pray in his own good time. There would be no kneeling on hard wooden floors, no fasting, and no cold.
He checked in at the Grand Hotel, which was full of priests and extremely elegant—marble, rich Oriental rugs, chandeliers, and in his room French doors with a view of a piazza and its enormous fountain shooting a hundred feet upward. As the weeks passed, he habitually ate his breakfast on the balcony. With high winds, he felt slight droplets of spray from the fountain. His bed was large, with a satin quilt. As always when he stayed in hotels—even in Phoenix—he wondered what people had made love in the bed, and then laughed good-naturedly at himself. He had learned to live with that a long time ago.
FATHER TRELEW’S role at the Council was not very exciting; indeed, the Council itself was not very exciting. He was just a priest. From where he sat near the entrance of St. Peter’s the Pope was only a white spot and the Dove of the Holy Ghost a needlepoint of light—a ray. When he removed his glasses, the sea of cardinals before the Pope was a mass of red, and when they stood their motion made them look like red waves. They were seated on both sides of the aisle. It was as if Moses had spread them back into the galleries. But whom would Father Trelew tell? Helen? Helen thought only of her child, who broke windows and stayed alone in the hills at night even when it was cold. Perhaps Father Wohlen from Los Angeles, who was Father Trelew’s friend simply because they were both at the Grand Hotel; Father Wohlen had an idea that anyone from west of the Mississippi was somehow a loving brother. But Father Trelew did not like Father Wohlen, for he ate too much and had an unconvincing laugh. There was no one to tell. “There is no one to tell,” he said. “Maybe I will sketch it.” He had not sketched since he had last been in Rome. He was in a drawing class then. He was mainly interested in architectural form; Rome offered him that, while the desert did not. He had tried to paint the Indians and the things they did, but there was not much left of them by that time, and he suspected not much left of him—or, rather, of his talent to draw.
Did he dare begin again? “I must,” he said, the blood coursing to his face. The hair at his temples was silver. When his face lit up, he looked like giltwork. I am the only priest in the world, he thought, who looks like a church. He would have to buy a pad and charcoal.
One day, he left the Council early and began to walk back to his hotel. He passed through Piazza Navona, and somewhere off it on a side street he found an art store. “Could I have,” he began but found that he was not able to speak the words. “Could I have...” and then, like a madman, he rushed from the shop.
He was disturbed by this, knowing precisely what it was. He tried not to think, flooding his mind with words that formed in silence on his lips, like the cries of men in dreams of sinking ships. “Flood it with good cheer. Fill it up, fill it up, for life is short.” If he could somehow get supplies, he could sit by the fountain and sketch.
What is the power of a priest’s life? It is that he need not fear. “Father Wohlen,” he said next day, too nervously, “do you think that on the way back from the Cathedral tomorrow you could stop in an art shop and get me a large pad and some charcoal?” He gasped for breath. “Because I must stay late for chapel vespers. I don’t mean to trouble you...”
“No trouble, no trouble,” said Father Wohlen. “I’ll do it. You just give me the money, tell me where to go, and I’ll do it.”
Father Trelew did not go to vespers; he did not even go to the Council that day. It was an important day, too. He stayed in his room, and it seemed to him that God was working wonders with his body. If he had been a proud man, he might have presumed that he was undergoing Divine revelation, that he was receiving saintly visions. Only once in his life, only once, had the rest of his body responded to his mind and made him tremble. No, it was the body responding to the heart which caused trembling.
He sat on the edge of his bed, with his glasses off, and the blur of outside sunlight made him feel the enlivened world. “Oh my God, my dear God,” he prayed, “I am not having visions, am I?” He said this to a shaft of sunlight in his room at his feet, and the golden dust danced in center beam.
When Father Wohlen gave him his materials, Father Wohlen thought Trelew was sick. Something was wrong with the man.
Father Trelew ran his hands over the pad, took the charcoal out of its box, and felt the smooth rectangular blocks. The cool of the blocks reminded him of the desert at evening, their blackness of the night, but the night was full of white stars. That was an advantage he would not have had as an archbishop—seeing the Milky Way stretched as a shimmering band over the great dome of his little life. The power of a priest’s life is that he is unafraid. All is concelebration. “I am beginning to realize this,” said Father Trelew. “That all is concelebrati
on—all of the city, all of the stars. The Church is for me. A man need not fear his loneliness. He need not fear his loneliness, for God is strong and all is concelebration. The power of a priest’s life is that he need not fear.”
The next day he was up very early. He read most of La Stampa. A bus took him to the Vatican.
It would not be right for him to sketch in the Cathedral. His idea was to study a particular scene and commit it to memory for drawing. Back in Arizona, he would paint it. Somehow he got very dose to the Pope. Though it was thrilling to see him, it was not the Pope he chose to study but the under-secretaries close to the Papal Throne, seated at a table next to the balustrade of the Confessio.
Another priest from America was determined to guide him. “That is Bishop Wilhelm Kempf of Limburg,” he said, “and Archbishop Villot of Lyons, Archbishop Krol of Philadelphia, and the archbishop of Madrid—I do not know his name.”
“Thank you, thank you,” said Father Trelew to the other priest, who wanted to say more, and then to escape he stepped much closer to the scene than he would ordinarily have dared. He was the foremost of observers; between him and the undersecretaries was only a slight and terrible plain of marble. The Pope was not far. I am so near greatness, he thought. Princes! He studied the scene. He had always had a good architectural memory. He was fine on detail, but here he was impressed by grandeur, which was glowing, descript, calling out to any man.
Entrenched in the blackness of distant high walls, the red table of the under-secretaries glowed scarlet; ringed with gold and tasseled, its colors moved in front of the eyes. The undersecretaries, in pure white with upswinging conical hats of flattened design, did not rest upon their red ribbons banded about them in curves and sweeps like water falling. They worked at papers, and they were in different positions, so that the tall conical hats pointed together in a smooth indication, like the crest of a wave, to the Pope. And beyond them was a swirling black column edged with a rotating blade of gold. It was so bright it made Father Trelew shudder. He stood for a good half hour, intent upon the secretaries. His gaze was powerful. He was having the time of his life, for he knew he would soon begin to draw.
One of the Papal secretaries noticed Father Trelew when he first came, and then again after half an hour. He thought perhaps he was wanted and crossed the forbidden marble at a glide. His robes were such that his feet did not seem to move. “Is there anything I can do for you, Father?” he said curiously.
Father Trelew, who had tried and failed to escape when he saw the bishop coming, could not answer. His steadfastness had provoked the great man, but he could not answer. His mouth hung open.
“Are you all right?” the bishop asked. He laughed pleasantly and touched Father Trelew, who felt again like sinking ships, and whose mouth was still open while the bishop returned to his table, silent and smiling.
Father Trelew managed to close his mouth as he walked back into the crowd. Everyone looked at him as if he were in some way connected to the Pope. He might have enjoyed that had he been able to answer the bishop, but he was expressionless and numb. And yet he did not panic. He wanted to get back to the hotel to draw, and then the next day to Piazza Navona, with his pad, to sketch the central fountain. He could use his material freely there. He was marvelously excited. He quickly forgot the incident with the bishop, bent down to tie his shoe, and strode like a master through St. Peter’s to home in the hotel. He did not think, Oh, I am such a little man, until he arrived in his room and could not draw what he had remembered.
FATHER TRELEW had many times told weeping Indian women that sleep helped the troubled. He had many times watched tears travel down a face like wind-cut brown granite—sparkling black eyes in the church’s dimness—and thought how deeply the woman would sleep. Always the next day he saw her going about her business, which is precisely what he did the next day.
Late in the afternoon, he found himself in Piazza Navona. He thought to draw the fountain and the buildings vanishing in perspective, to test his draftsmanship. He planned to have dinner at one of the restaurants there so popular with Roman families (fairly well-to-do, he assumed) and clerics, and perhaps find an acquaintance with whom to chat as it got dark.
He took a seat at one of the smaller fountains and put his legs up on the stone wall. In his freshly pressed white suit he looked as if he might have been a missionary from the Congo or Asia. “Perhaps they think I am a jungle priest,” he said happily. “But I am not a jungle priest, I am a desert priest—and how many of those are there? Very few in the Sahara, none, as far as I know, in the Gobi, and none in the Nafud. That leaves me, and a few others. I should find out who they are, write to them, perhaps start a journal.”
He was a good priest, and did his job well. He thought of photographers he had seen on the reservation, who paid people small sums to be photographed and recorded their humiliation and discomfort only to pass it off to the world as the pathos of humankind. In the operations of caring for his flock, Father Trelew tried to avoid the photographers’ fallacy. Only rarely did tragedy face them. There were complaints and sorrows, but not much passionate loss. He had to accept that. It was a small population, and not a battlefield—he was truly needed once in a great while, but he refused to buy the illusion that when they came to him aching from life in the world he was doing great service. In that way, when he did great service he felt he could vault over mountains. In other words, he was a lean man.
He thought, My dreams can be dreamed in forty-five minutes, and then I become either tired or empty and stop dreaming—again, leanness. In the weakening sun he began to sketch Piazza Navona, and his hand moved rapidly, surprising him with what it had remembered. He included cars and carriages, and the horses, drawn well. After several hours, when it was dark, he closed his pad and put a little piece of charcoal into the box, which he then put in his pocket. Putting the box in his pocket was like the sheriff putting his gun back in his holster after a shoot-out. When he swung his legs back to the ground it was as if they had boots and spurs. He had drawn the Piazza, and it was therefore his.
With dinner, he ordered a bottle of white wine. He was not used to it; it was a mistake, he told himself halfway through, but drank it anyway. Then everything began to fall into place as he watched the lights of Rome in the heat of September and wandered about like a young drunk.
He was a good-natured man, had always been a good-natured man. His father, who was ambitious for him to the point of hating him, said once, “Michael, what have you got, what the hell have you got?” Father Trelew had wanted to reply that he was a good man, could draw, and loved God. But he wept instead, and only later, half weeping, did he say to his mother, “Tell him, by my honor, that I am just a man,” and left for the train to the West.
He was good-looking. He had a wonderful face. Even at his age, and he was almost seventy, women were not unmoved by his glance. When he was younger they had frequently fallen in love with him, especially the troubled ones, who always fall for priests of one sort or another. There had been one in Rome in 1925, when he was thirty and had rebuffed already a good many trouble-seekers and those testing their power. A priest is familiar with that. He can handle that. It is the guileless ones, the ones who really love, who make things difficult.
IN 1925, the library of the old Accademia was farmed with sea-green reader’s lamps, which glowed in the day. The walls were so old one might have been sorry for them had they not been painted with angels, gardens, and bursting suns.
Father Trelew was not merely appreciative but ecstatic. He often stayed in the library all day and well into the evening. He was writing a paper on Oderisi da Gubbio, a miniaturist of the thirteenth century. When he left the library he saw only the colors he had seen all day in illuminated manuscripts. It seemed to him that he sailed home without a word, simply gliding and brimming.
One was assigned a seat, and results were not always pleasing. Harvard undergraduates dying for the sunburnt girl in purple who sometimes wore black were place
d across the room from her facing the other way into a bunch of nuns. Father Trelew could hardly breathe for two weeks; he was the only man at a table for Radcliffe girls. One of them fell in love with him, just by looking.
“What is your name ... Father?” she asked, since there was no one else at the table.
“Michael Trelew,” he said, frightenedly.
“And where are you from?”
“From. From. I’m from Ossining, New York. Perhaps you have heard of us—I mean it, as it is the home of Sing Sing Prison. Where are you from?”
“Forty-nine East Eighty-sixth Street,” she said, waiting.
His fear was beginning to bore him, and in anger he wanted to be reckless, if only not to be dull. But he could only stare at her. She was thin, and blond. He could not decide if she looked like the Madonna. She was very brown and her dress was white.
She said, and with her green eyes, “Can we eat together tonight?” It was for her a difficult request, and she blushed. She felt like what she thought of popular music—brash but finally very beautiful. She was embarrassed by her own directness, expectant, and altogether very open and tender.
Father Trelew was taken. Yet he answered as if from a prepared hollowness, “I have no money. I am a priest...” He hesitated, because he was no longer interested in what he was saying. Instead, visions of neutral Switzerland flashed at him and he entertained the profoundly impossible notion of running away with this girl.
The weeks that followed were very sad for both of them. They were both gaining, but they were also losing, and perhaps what united them so strongly at first was that they felt they knew what the other was relinquishing. And then they had that particular camaraderie which exists among schoolboys, soldiers, and outlaws.
