The Clowns of God

by Morris West

  “There will be no rites,” said Jean Marie Barette gently. “I will sit and hold her hand. You can wait if you wish—unless your visitor is impatient.”

  “He’ll be patient,” said Pierre Duhamel harshly. “He needs me. He’s got famine on his hands this winter.”

  Jean Marie said nothing. He drew a chair to the bedside, sat down, picked up the woman’s slack wasted hand and held it between his own. Pierre Duhamel, standing at the foot of the bed, saw a curious transformation. Jean Marie’s body became quite rigid; the muscles of his face tightened, so that, in the half-light of the sickroom, his features looked as though they had been carved from wood. Something else was happening, too, which he could not put into words. It was as if all the life inside the man were draining away from the peripheries of his body into some secret well at the center of himself. All the while Paulette lay there, a sad, shrunken wax doll, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow and full of rales, so that Duhamel wished with all his heart it would stop and she—that special and essential she whom he had loved for a lifetime—might be released like a songbird from its cage.

  The wish was so poignant it seemed to put a stop on time. Whether he stood for seconds or minutes or hours Duhamel did not know. He looked again at Barette. He was changing again—the muscles softening, the taut features relaxing into a momentary smile. Then he opened his eyes and turned to the woman on the bed. He said quite casually:

  “You can open your eyes now, madame.”

  Paulette Duhamel opened her eyes and instantly focused them on her husband at the foot of the bed. She spoke plainly, in a weak but unwavering voice.

  “Hullo, chéri. I seem to have been foolish again.”

  She raised her arms to embrace him and the first thing Duhamel noticed was that the constant tremors which characterized the late stage of the disease had ceased. He bent to kiss her. When he disengaged himself, Jean Marie Barette was standing at the open door, chatting quietly with the doctor. The doctor moved to the bed, took Paulette’s pulse count and auscultated her chest once more. When he straightened up, he was smiling uncertainly.

  “Well, well! I think we may all relax a little, especially you, madame. This nastiness seems to be over for the moment. However, you must stay very quiet. In the morning we can think about clearing up that respiratory problem. But for now—grâce à Dieu!—we are out of crisis.” As he walked down the hall with Pierre Duhamel and Jean Marie he became more expansive and voluble. “With this disease one never knows. Sudden collapses are not too common, but they can happen, as you saw tonight. Then, with equal suddenness, there is remission. The patient returns to a euphoric state and the degeneration slows down.… I have noticed often that a religious intervention, like yours tonight, Father, or the administration of the last rites, may produce in the patient a great calm, which is in itself a therapy.… You will remember that on the ancient island of Cos…”

  Duhamel steered him diplomatically to the exit and then came back to Jean Marie. He was like a sleepwalker waking in a strange countryside. He was also most oddly humble.

  “I don’t know what you did or how you did it, but I think I owe you a life.”

  “You owe nothing to me.” Jean Marie spoke with a spartan authority. “You are in debt to God; but since you are in contest with him, why not make the payment to your little clowns?”

  “What made you come tonight?”

  “Sometimes, like all the mad, I hear voices.”

  “Don’t mock me, Monseigneur! I’m tired; and my night isn’t half over.”

  “I’ll be going now.”

  “Wait! I’d like you to meet my visitor.”

  “Are you sure he wants to meet me?”

  “Let’s ask him,” said Pierre Duhamel—and walked him into the library to meet Sergei Andrevich Petrov, Minister for Agricultural Production in the U.S.S.R.

  He was a short man, bulky as a barrel, part Georgian, part Circassian, who was born into the subsistence economy of the Caucasus, yet understood as if by animal instinct the problem of feeding a continent that stretched from Europe to China. He greeted Jean Marie with a bone-crushing handshake and a rough joke.

  “So Your Holiness is out of a job. What are you doing now? Playing grey eminence to our friend Duhamel?”

  His smile took the sting out of the remark but Duhamel rounded on him sharply.

  “You’re out of order, Sergei.”

  “A bad joke! I’m sorry. But I have to have answers for Moscow. Do we eat this winter, or are we on short rations? Our discussion was interrupted; so I am sharp-tempered.”

  “It’s my fault,” said Jean Marie. “I came uninvited.”

  “And made me a private miracle,” said Pierre Duhamel. “My wife is past the crisis.”

  “Perhaps he will make one for me. God knows I need it.” Petrov swung round to face Jean Marie Barette. “For Russia, two bad seasons make a catastrophe. When there’s no feed grain we have to slaughter the livestock. With no reserves of bread grains we have to ration civilians to feed the armed forces. Now the Americans and Canadians are cutting off supplies. Grain is classified as war material. The Australians are selling all their surplus to China. So, I’m running round the world offering gold bullion for wheat.… And, would you believe it, I can hardly find a bushel?”

  “And if we sell it to him,” Duhamel added the sour afterthought, “we are perfidious France breaching the solidarity of Western Europe, and exposing ourselves to economic sanction by the Americans.”

  “If I don’t get it somewhere, the Army has the final excuse it needs to precipitate a war.” He gave a humourless chuckle and flung out his hands in a gesture of despair. “So, there’s a challenge to a miracle worker!”

  “There was a time,” said Jean Marie, “when my good offices might have meant something among the nations. Not anymore. If I attempted now to intervene in affairs of state, I should be written off as a crank.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Sergei Petrov. “The whole world’s a madhouse these days. You’re original enough to provide some diversion.… Why don’t you call me tomorrow at the embassy? I’d like to talk with you before I go back to Moscow.”

  “Better still,” said Pierre Duhamel, “why don’t you call him at the Hostellerie des Chevaliers? I wouldn’t trust a laundry list to your embassy switchboard—and I’m trying to protect our friend as far as I can.… Now, if you’ll excuse me, Jean. We’ve got a long night ahead.”

  He pulled the bell rope by the fireplace and an instant later Charlot was at the door, ready to conduct the guest to his taxi. Jean Marie shook hands with the two men.

  Petrov said with a grin, “If you can multiply loaves I’ll give you my job tomorrow!”

  “My dear Comrade Petrov,” said Jean Marie Barette. “You can hardly write God out of the Communist manifesto and then expect him to show up every harvest time!”

  “You asked for that, Sergei!” Pierre Duhamel laughed and said to Jean Marie, “I’ll pass by tomorrow with the documents.… Perhaps by then I’ll have found words to thank you.”

  “I have a meeting at my brother’s bank in the morning. I expect to be back by early evening. Good night, gentlemen.”

  The impassive Charlot conducted him to the door. The taxi driver was drowsing in his cab. The police car was still parked at the gate. Far away in the garden he heard the baying of hounds, as the security men checking the perimeter flushed a fox out of the shrubbery.

  By the time he had finished his prayers and his preparations for bed it was one in the morning. He was desperately tired; but he lay a long time, wakeful, trying to understand the strange otherworldly logic of the evening’s events. Twice now—once with Carl Mendelius and again with Paullette Duhamel—he had experienced the inpouring, the offering of himself as a conduit, through which a gift of comfort was made available to others.

  It was a sensation quite different from that associated with the rapture and the disclosures of the vision. Then he had been literally snatched out of
himself, subjected to an illumination, endowed with a knowledge which he had in nowise solicited or desired. The effect was instant and permanent. He was marked and burdened by it forever.

  The inpouring was a transient phenomenon. It began with an impulse of pity or love, or a simple understanding of another’s profound need. There was an empathy—more, a mode of identity—between himself and the needy. It was himself who urged mercy upon the Unseen Father, through the merit of the incarnate Son, and he offered the same self as the vessel through which the gifts of the Spirit might be passed. There was no sense of miracle, of magic or thaumaturgy. It was an act of love, instinctive and unreasoned, through which a gift was passed or renewed.

  But though the act was a free dedication of himself, the impulse that prompted it came from elsewhere. He could not say why he had offered himself as a mediator for Paulette Duhamel and not for Sergei Petrov, upon whom depended matters of vast consequence: famine and the pestilence of war. Petrov made jokes about miracles—but he wanted one desperately. Offer him half a loaf on the winter ration and he would happily sing the doxology with the Patriarch in Moscow.

  So why the difference? Why the prompting towards the frail one, the facile refusal of the other? It was not an act of judgment, it was an unreasoned response—the reed bowing to the wind, the migrant goose responding to the strange primal prompting that bade him begone before the winter.

  Once, a long time ago, while he was still a junior in the Sacred College, he had strolled with Carl Mendelius in a villa garden overlooking Lake Nemi. It was one of those magical days, the air vibrant with the hum of cicadas, the grapes full on the vine, the sky washed clean of clouds, the pines marching like pikemen across the ridges. Mendelius had startled him with a strange proposition:

  “… All idolatry springs from a desire for order. We want to be neat, like the animals. We mark out our territories with musk and feces. We make hierarchies like the bees and ethics like the ants. And we choose gods to set the stamp of approval on our creations What we cannot cope with is the untidiness of the universe, the lunatic aspect of a cosmos with no known beginning, no visible end and no apparent meaning to all its bustling dynamics.… We cannot tolerate its monstrous indifference in the face of all our fears and agonies.… The prophets offer us hope; but only the man-god can make the paradox tolerable. This is why the coming of Jesus is a healing and a saving event. He is not what we should have created for ourselves. He is truly the sign of peace because He is the sign of contradiction. His career is a brief tragic failure. He dies in dishonour; but then most strangely, He lives. He is not only yesterday. He is today and tomorrow. He is as available to the humblest as to the highest.…

  “But look what we humans have done with Him. We have bloated His simple talk into a babble of philosophies. We have inflated the family of His believers into an imperial bureaucracy, justified only because it exists and cannot be dismantled without a cataclysm. The man who claims to be the custodian of His truth lives in a vast palace, surrounded by celibate males—like you and me, Jean!—who have never earned a crust by the labour of their hands, never dried a woman’s tears or sat with a sick child until sunrise.…

  “If ever they make you Pope, Jean, keep one small part of yourself for a private loving. If you don’t, they’ll turn you into a Pharaoh, mummified and embalmed before you’re dead.…”

  The summer landscape of the Alban hills merged into the contours of the dream country. The sound of Mendelius’ voice faded behind the piping of the nightingales in the garden of the Hostellerie. Jean Marie Barette, dispenser of mysteries beyond his own frail grasp, lapsed into sleep.

  X

  He woke refreshed and immediately regretted his involvement with the moneymen. He reached for the telephone to call Alain at the bank and cancel the meeting of trustees; then he thought better of it. New in the world, already in quarantine as a plague-carrier, he could not afford to lose any line of communication.

  In this last decade of the century, bankers were better equipped than any other group to chart the progress of mankind’s mortal disease. At every day’s end their computers told the story and no amount of rhetoric could change the grim passionless text: gold up, the dollar down, rare metals booming, futures in oil and grain and soybeans climbing through the roof, equities on the seesaw, confidence eroding every week towards the panic point.

  Jean Marie Barette remembered his long sessions with the financiers of the Vatican, and how bleak a picture emerged from all their cabalistic calculations. They bought gold, but sold mining shares, because, they said, that was market advice. The real story was that the black guerrillas in South Africa were strong, well trained and well armed. If they could blow up an oil refinery they could certainly explode the deep tunnels of the mines. So you bought the metal and got rid of the threatened asset. One of the most potent arguments against the publication of his encyclical had been that it would put the markets of the world in a panic and expose the Vatican itself to enormous financial loss.

  Jean Marie had come out of every meeting wrestling with his conscience, because his clerical experts, like all others of their ilk, were forced to speculate, without distinction, upon the moralities and immoralities of mankind. It was one domain of the Church’s life where he approved of secrecy—if only because there was no way he could justify or even explain the faint bloodstains on every balance sheet, whether they came from exploited labour, a rough bargain in the market, or a reformed villain buying a first-class ride to heaven.

  The trust which his father had set up to preserve the fortune he had accumulated for his family was a substantial one. Jean Marie’s share of the funds was administered in a special fashion. The capital remained untouched, the increment was at his disposal. As a parish priest and later as a bishop he had dedicated it to works connected with the welfare of his flock. As Pope he had used it for charities and gifts to people in personal crisis. He still believed that while social reform could only be accomplished by effective organizations soundly financed, there was still no substitute for the act of compassion, the secret affirmation of brotherhood in affliction. Now, he himself had to make claim for sustenance. He was sixty-five years old, statistically unemployed—and in need of a minimal liberty to spread the word that had been given to him.

  There were four trustees, with whom he must dea!. Each was a senior official of a major bank. Alain introduced them with appropriate ceremony; Sansom from Barclays, Winter from the Chase, Lambert from the Crédit Lyonnais, Mme. Saracini from the Banco Ambrogiano all’ Estero.

  They were all respectful, all a trifle wary. Money lived in strange houses; power was controlled by unlikely hands. Besides, they were being called to account for their stewardship—and they wondered how well this onetime Pope could read a balance sheet and a profit-and-loss account.

  Mme. Saracini was their spokesman: a tall, olive-skinned woman in her late thirties, dressed in a suit of blue linen, with lace at her throat and wrists. Her only jewellery was a wedding band, and a gold jabot brooch set with aquamarine. She spoke French with a faintly Italianate lilt. She also had a sense of humour and was obviously prepared to exercise it. She asked innocently:

  “Forgive me, but how do you like to be addressed? It can’t be Holiness. Should it be Eminence or Monseigneur? It cannot possibly be Père Jean.”

  Jean Marie laughed. “I doubt there’s any protocol. Celestine the Fifth was forced to abdicate and after his death they canonized him. I’m not dead yet so that doesn’t apply. I’m certainly less than an Eminence. I’ve always thought Monseigneur was an unnecessary relic of monarchy. So, since I’m living as a private person, without a canonical mission, why not just Monsieur?”

  “I don’t agree, Jean.” Alain was upset by the suggestion. “After all…”

  “After all, dear brother, I have to live in my skin and I do like to feel comfortable.… Now, madame, you were going to explain the mysteries of money.”

  “I’m sure,” said Mme. Saracini with a smile,
“you understand there are no mysteries at all—only the problems of maintaining a firm capital base and an income that keeps ahead of inflation.… This means that there is need of an active and vigilant administration. Fortunately you have had that, since your brother is a very good banker.… The capital, valued at the end of the last financial year, is some eight million Swiss francs. This capital, as you will see, is divided in a fairly stable ratio: thirty percent real estate, both urban and rural, twenty percent equities, twenty percent prime bonds, ten percent in art works and antiques and the remaining twenty percent liquid in gold and short-term money.… It’s a reasonable spread. It can be varied at fairly short notice. If you have any comments, of course…”

  “I have a question,” said Jean Marie mildly. “We are threatened with war. How do we protect our possessions?”

  “So far as commercial paper is concerned,” said the man from the Chase, “we all have the most modern storage and retrieval systems, triplicated and sometimes quadruplicated in strategically protected areas. We’ve hammered out a common code of interbank practice that enables us to protect our clients against document loss. Gold, of course, is a strong-room operation. Rural land is perennial. Urban developments will be reduced to rubble, but, again, war-risk insurance favours the big operators. Art works and antiques, like gold, are a storage job. It might interest you to know that for years now we’ve been buying up disused mine workings and converting them for safe deposits.…”

  “I am comforted,” said Jean Marie Barette with dry irony. “I wonder why it has not been possible to invest similar money and similar ingenuity for the protection of citizens against fallout and poison gas. I wonder why we are so much concerned with the retrieval of commercial paper and so little with the proposed mass murder of the infirm and the incompetent.”

  There was a moment’s stunned silence and then, with cold anger, Alain Hubert answered his brother.