The Clowns of God

by Morris West

  It was one idiocy too many. It put Jean Marie in a cold, Gallic rage.

  “Alain, you are a fool! You are also a snob and a tasteless, greedy little money-changer! I will not come to your house. I do not wish to have the apartment at the Lancaster. You will provide me immediately with the money I need. You will call a meeting of the trustees for ten in the morning and we will discuss in detail their past administration and their future activities. I have little time and much travel to do. I will not be inhibited by the bureaucratic nonsense of your bank. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Jean, you misunderstand me. I did not intend to…”

  “Be quiet, Alain! The less said the better. What documents do I have to sign for the immediate funds I need?”

  Fifteen minutes later it was done. A very subdued Alain made the last call to summon the last trustee to the next morning’s meeting. He mopped his hands with a silk handkerchief and delivered himself of a carefully modified apology.

  “Please! We are brothers. We should not quarrel. You have to understand: we are all under a strain now. The money markets are going mad. We have to defend ourselves as if it were against bandits. We know there will be a war. So how do we protect the banks’ assets and our own? How do we arrange our personal lives? You have been away so long, protected so long…”

  In spite of his anger Jean Marie laughed—a gusty chuckle of genuine amusement.

  “Eh-eh-eh, little brother! I bleed for you! For my part, I should not know what to do with all those trunks and strong rooms full of paper and coinage and bullion.… But you’re right. It’s too late in the day to quarrel—and it’s also too late for all that silly snobbery! Why don’t you see if you can get Vauvenargues on the phone for me…”

  “Vauvenargues? The Foreign Minister?”

  “The same.”

  “As you wish.” Alain shrugged resignedly and consulted his leather-bound desk directory. He switched to a private line and tapped out a number. Jean Marie listened with cool amusement to the one-sided dialogue.

  “Hullo! This is Alain Hubert Barette, Director of Halévy Frères et Barette, Banquiers. Please connect me with the Minister.… A propos of the fact that an old friend of his has arrived in Paris and would like to speak with him.… The friend is Monseigneur Jean Marie Barette, formerly His Holiness Pope Gregory the Seventeenth.… Oh, I see! Then perhaps you will be kind enough to pass the message and have the Minister call back to this number.… Thank you.”

  He put down the receiver and made a grimace of distaste.

  “The Minister is in conference. The message will be passed.… You’ve been there, Jean! You know the routines. Once you have to explain yourself and your current identity, you’re diplomatically dead. Oh, I’m sure the Minister will return the call; but what do you want with a limp handshake and some words about the weather?”

  “I’ll make the next call myself.” Jean Marie consulted his pocketbook and spelled out the private number of the most senior presidential counsellor, a man with whom, during his pontificate, he had maintained a constant and friendly relationship. The response came immediately:

  “This is Duhamel.”

  “Pierre, this is Jean Marie Barette. I am in Paris for a few days on private business. I’d like to see you—and your master!”

  “And I you. But it has to be in private. As to the master—my regrets, but no! The official word is out. You are untouchable.”

  “Where does the word come from?”

  “From your principal to our principal. And the Friends of Silence have been busy at all the lower levels. Where are you staying?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Outside the city is better. Take a taxi and drive out to L’Hostellerie des Chevaliers. It’s about three kilometers this side of Versailles. I’ll telephone ahead and book the accommodation for you.… Sign yourself as Monsieur Grégoire. They won’t ask for documents. I’ll call there on my way home—about eight. I must go now. A bientôt.”

  Jean Marie put down the receiver. It was his turn to apologize.

  “You’re right, little brother. Diplomatically I am dead and buried. Well, I should be going. Give my love to Odette and the girls. We’ll try to arrange a meal together before I leave.”

  “You don’t want to change your mind about the Lancaster?”

  “Thank you, no. If I’m a plague-carrier I’d rather not spread the infection to my family. Tomorrow at ten, eh?…”

  The Hostellerie des Chevaliers was a pleasant surprise, a cluster of ancient farm buildings converted into an agreeable and discreet hotel. There were manicured lawns and quiet rose arbours, and a millstream that meandered under a drapery of willows.

  The patronne was a handsome woman in her mid-fifties who waived all the formalities of registration and led him immediately to a pleasant suite with a view onto a private enclave with its own greensward and a lily pond. She pointed out that he might make his telephone calls with full security, that the refrigerator was stocked with liquor and that, as a friend of M. Duhamel, he had only to raise a finger to command the total service of the Hostellerie.

  As he unpacked his one suitcase he was amused and a whit surprised to see how lightly he was travelling: one suit, a raincoat, a sports jacket and trousers, a pullover, two pairs of pajamas and half a dozen changes of shirts, underwear and socks constituted his whole wardrobe. His toiletries, his Mass kit, a breviary, a missal and a pocketbook made up the rest of his impedimenta. For sustenance he had a day’s supply of cash, a folder of travellers’ checks and a circular letter of credit from Halévy Frères et Barette. For these he was a debtor to the bank until the trustees released some of the funds from his patrimony. At least he was free to move quickly once the call came, as it had come centuries before to John, the son of Zachary, in the desert.

  What troubled him now was a growing sense of isolation and of his precarious dependence on the goodwill of friends. No matter that at the center of himself was a great pool of calm, a place, an estate, where all opposites were reconciled; he was still a man, subject to all the chemistries of the flesh, all the unstable physics of the mind.

  The weapon of estrangement had been used against him in the dark and bitter days before his abdication. Now it was being used again, to render him impotent in the political arena. Pierre Duhamel, longtime counsellor to the President of the Republic, was not prone to exaggeration. If he said you were dying, it was indeed time to call the priest; if he said you were dead, the stonemasons were already carving your epitaph.

  That Pierre Duhamel had been so prompt to suggest a rendezvous was itself an indication of crisis. In all the years of their acquaintance, Duhamel had observed a singular and spartan code: “I have one wife: the woman I married. I have one mistress: the Republic. Never tell me anything you do not want reported. Never try to frighten me. Never offer me a bribe. I give patronage to none and my advice only to those whom I am paid to counsel. I respect all faiths. I demand to be private about my own. If you trust me I shall never lie to you. If you lie to me, I shall understand, but never trust you again.”

  In the days of his pontificate, Jean Marie Barette had had many exchanges with this strangely attractive man, who looked like a prize fighter, reasoned as eloquently as Montaigne and went home to cherish a wife who had once been the toast of Paris and was now a ravaged victim of multiple sclerosis.

  They had a son at Saint Cyr and a daughter somewhat older, who had earned a good reputation as a producer of programs for television. For the rest, Jean Marie made no enquiry. Pierre Duhamel was what his President claimed him to be—a good man for the long road.

  Jean Marie picked up his breviary and stepped out into the garden to read the vespers of the day. It was a habit he cherished: the prayer of a man walking, at day’s end, hand in hand with God in a garden. The day’s psalmody began with the canticle he had always loved: Quam dilecta. “How lovely are thy tabernacles, O Lord of Hosts. My soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord. My heart an
d my flesh have rejoiced in the living God. For the sparrow hath found herself a house and the dove a nest for herself where she may lay her young ones.…”

  It was the perfect prayer for a late-summer evening, with the shadows long, the air still and languorous with the perfume of roses. As he turned down a gravelled pathway towards another stretch of lawn, he heard children’s voices, and a moment later saw a group of little girls, all dressed alike in gingham dresses and pinafores, playing a simple catching game with a pair of young teachers. On a bench nearby an older woman divided her attention between the group and a piece of embroidery.

  As Jean Marie passed along the gravelled walk, one of the children broke away from the group and ran towards him. She slipped on the verge and fell almost at his feet. She burst into tears. He picked her up and carried her to the woman on the bench, who dabbed at her grazed knee and offered her a lollipop to soothe her. It was only then that Jean Marie noticed that the child was a mongol—as indeed were all the others in the group. As if sensing his shock, the woman held the child towards him and said with a smile:

  “We are all from the Institute across the road… This one has just come to us. She’s homesick; so she thinks every man is her papa.”

  “And where is Papa?” There was a touch of censure in the question.

  The woman shook her head. “Oh, no, it isn’t what you think. He’s been recently widowed. He feels, quite rightly, that she is safer here with us.… We have about a hundred children in the Institute. The patronne lets us bring the little ones here to play. Her only child was mongoloid but it died early.”

  Jean Marie held out his arms. The child came to him willingly and kissed him, then sat in his lap and began playing happily with the buttons of his shirt.

  He said, “She’s very affectionate.”

  “Most are,” the woman told him. “People who are able to keep them in the family group find that it is like having a new baby in the house all the time.… But, of course, it is when the parents age and the child comes to adolescence and maturity that the tragedies begin. The boys may become very rough and violent. The girls are easy victims to sexual invasion. The future is dark for both parents and children.… It’s sad. I am so very fond of them.”

  “How do you maintain the Institute?”

  “We have a grant from the government We ask fees from parents who can pay. We solicit private charity. Fortunately we have some wealthy sponsors like Monsieur Duhamel, who lives close by. He calls the children les petites bouffonnes du bon Dieu… ‘God’s little clowns.…’”

  “It’s a gentle thought.”

  “You know Monsieur Duhamel perhaps? He’s a very important man, the President’s right hand, they say.”

  “By repute,” said Jean Marie carefully.

  The child slipped from his knee and began tugging his hand to make him walk with her. He asked, “May I take her down to the pond to see the fish?”

  “Of course. I’ll come with you.”

  As he moved away his breviary fell from his pocket onto the bench. The woman picked it up, glanced at the title page, then laid aside her embroidery and followed him, book in hand.

  “You left your breviary, Father.”

  “Oh! Thank you.”

  He shoved it back in his pocket. The woman took the child’s other hand and fell into step with Jean Marie. She said, “I have the strange feeling I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

  “I’m sure we haven’t met. I’ve been away from France a long time.”

  “A missionary perhaps?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “Where did you serve?”

  “Oh, several countries, but mostly in Rome. I’m retired now. I came home for a vacation.”

  “I thought priests never retired.”

  “Let’s say I’m on retreat for a while.… Come on, little one! Let’s go see the goldfish.”

  He swung the child up on his shoulder and began singing a song from his own childhood as he marched her down to the pond. The woman dropped back and stood watching them from a distance. He seemed a most pleasant man, obviously a lover of children—but when a priest, still vigorous, was retired so early, there had to be a reason.…

  Punctually at eight, Pierre Duhamel was knocking on the door of the suite. He must be gone by eight forty-five, since he never failed to have dinner at home with his wife. Meantime he would drink a Campari and soda with Jean Marie, whom he seemed to regard with bleak amusement as a highly memorable survivor, rather like the hairy mammoth.

  “… My God! They really pegged you out and ran the steamroller over you! Frankly, I’m astonished to see you looking so healthy.… What have you done now that makes them lean so hard on you? Of course, that big splash in the press didn’t make you any more popular with the French hierarchy. The Friends of Silence are very strong here.… Then I heard that your friend Mendelius had been the victim of a terrorist bomb attack…”

  “A bomb attack, yes. A terrorist action, no. The thing was planned and executed by an agent of the C.I.A., Alvin Dolman.”

  “Why the C.I.A.?”

  “Why not? Dolman was their agent-in-place. I think it was a neat piece of work by the Americans for the Bundesrepublik. It was designed to rid them of an influential academic who was bound to cause trouble once the call-up for military service was implemented.”

  “Any proof?”

  “Enough for me. Not enough to raise a public outcry.”

  “Very soon”—Pierre Duhamel stirred the liquor with his finger—“very soon you’ll be able to boil your mother in oil on the Pont Royal—and nobody will blink an eye. What is being done to you is only a pale shadow of what is being planned for the repression of persons and the suppression of debate. The new propaganda chiefs will make Goebbels look like a schoolboy amateur.… You haven’t been back in the world long enough to feel the impact of their methods—but my God, they’re effective.”

  “Which means you agree with them?”

  “Sad to say, I do. You see, my friend, on the premise that an atomic war is inevitable—and that’s our military projection and your own prophecy, remember!—the only way we can control and offer any sort of protection to large masses of people is by an intense conditioning program. There’s no way we can protect the people of Paris from blast and radiation or nerve gas or a lethal virus. If we announce that nasty fact, tout court, we’ll have instant panic. So we have to keep the cities working as long as we can at all costs. If that means sweeping the streets with tanks twice a day we’ll do it. If it means pre-dawn raids on dissidents or too vocal idealists we’ll have them out in their nightshirts and shoot a few to admonish the rest. Then if we need some diversions—bread and circuses and orgies on the steps of the Sacré Coeur—we’ll turn those on, too!… And there’ll be no debate about any of it! We’ll all be Friends of Silence then; and God help anyone who opens his mouth at the wrong moment.… That’s the scenario, my friend. I don’t like it any more than you do; but I recommended it to my President just the same.”

  “Then for pity’s sake,” Jean Marie pleaded with him, “don’t you think you should look at the scenario I suggested? Surely anything would be better than the primitive brutality and bachanalia you’re prepared to offer.”

  “We’ve done our homework,” Pierre Duhamel told him with wintry humour. “We’re assured on the best psychiatric authority that the oscillation of tactics between violence and bacchic indulgence will have the effect of keeping the public both puzzled and amenable to authority—especially as the facts can only be evidenced by hearsay and not by reliable report in the press or on television.…”

  “That’s monstrous.” Jean Marie Barette was furious.

  “Of course it’s monstrous.” Pierre Duhamel gave an expressive shrug. “But consider your alternative. I have it with me.”

  He took out his wallet, extracted a carefully folded square of newspaper and smoothed it open. He went on, “This is you, as Gregory the Seventeenth, quoted in the Mendelius
article. I have to presume the quote is authentic. This is what it says:

  “… It is clear that in the days of universal calamity the traditional structures of society will not survive. There will be a ferocious struggle for the simplest needs of life—food, water, fuel and shelter. Authority will be usurped by the strong and the cruel. Large urban societies will fragment themselves into tribal groups, each hostile to the other. Rural areas will be subject to pillage. The human person will be as much a prey as the beasts whom we now slaughter for food. Reason will be so clouded that man will resort for solace to the crudest and most violent forms of magic. It will be hard, even for those founded most strongly in the Promise of the Lord, to sustain their faith and continue to give witness, as they must do, even to the end.… How then must Christians comport themselves in these days of trial and terror?

  “… Since they will no longer be able to maintain themselves as large groups, they must divide themselves into small communities, each capable of sustaining itself by the exercise of a common faith and a true mutual charity.…

  “Now, let’s see what we have in that prescription. Large-scale disorder and chaos in social relations, to be balanced by what? Small communities of the elect, making seminal experiments in the exercise of charity and the other Christian virtues. Is that a fair summary?”

  “As far as it goes, yes.”

  “But whatever government or leadership still exists at that time will have to take account of the barbarians first. How is it going to do that, except by the violent measures we envisage? After all, your elect—not to mention the elect of all other cults!—will take care of themselves; or the Almighty will!… Let’s face it, my friend, that’s why your own people cast you out. They couldn’t argue with the principle. It’s a beautiful thought: God’s people planting their garden of graces, as the monks and nuns of old did in the Dark Ages of Europe. But, at bottom, your bishops are cold pragmatists. They know that if you want law and order, you must demonstrate how bad chaos can be. If you want morality back again, you have to have Satan in the streets, large as life, so you can shout him down in full view of the terrified populace.… In every country in the world it’s the same story; because no country can prosecute a war without a willing and conforming public. Your own Church has adopted the siege mentality: no debate, back to the simple kitchen moralities, and let’s have everyone at Mass on Sunday so that we give public witness against the ungodly!… The last thing they want is some wayward prophet howling doom among the gravestones!”