by Simon Mawer
We plunged into the lesson. ‘At the customs’ was the theme. It seemed appropriate. The students composed themselves to play the roles they dreaded, the surly faces of officialdom, the hopeful, hopeless faces of the dispossessed.
‘May I see your passport?’
‘Here is my passport.’
‘Where is the visa?’
‘The visa is at the back.’ Hollow laughter at this.
‘What is your purpose?’
‘I want to work.’
‘We have jobs for enthusiastic workers.’ More laughter. The hopelessness of the whole thing began to strike them: it transcended barriers of language and culture and became a universal all-comprehensible joke.
‘I work as a secretary,’ said Novotná. ‘I type good.’
‘Well. You type well.’
‘I type well. I am wilful.’
‘Probably. But you mean willing.’
‘I work as executive,’ said one of the other students. The laughter was general.
Was it after the sixth or the seventh lesson that I invited her to lunch? What would Madeleine have said about that? Probably she would have told me to let the girl alone. What does she want with a dry stick like you? she would have asked. But Novotná treated my invitation as she treated everything in life: with that indifferent shrug and a thoughtful chewing of gum. ‘OK.’ She seemed to pause for careful reflection and to gather together bits of fragmented English. ‘I think if we go to lunch, you call me Magda,’ she decided.
Magda, Madeleine: the congruity of the names amuses me. In whatever terms you measure the human personality, never have there been two women further apart. Magda is tall and silent and dressed in black, as though in mourning for something; Madeleine was small and ebullient, the kind of person who made her husband raise his eyes heavenward in mock despair. Madeleine was soft and comforting; Magda is anonymous and indifferent. Madeleine was open, Magda is shut. But both named for the same woman, the woman out of whom Jesus cast seven devils, the woman who stood beside the mother of Jesus at the foot of the cross, the woman who saw the stone rolled away from the tomb, the woman who made the first announcement of the resurrection to the disciples as they cowered in the upper room.
‘They have taken away the Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.’
So we had lunch at Zia Anna, Aunt Anna’s, a tawdry trattoria nearby that I have taken to using when I can’t be bothered to return to the flat. We ordered spaghetti alla puttanesca, spaghetti with tart’s sauce, a concoction of red tomatoes and black olives that brings to mind sin and hellfire and menstruation, and Magda sat across the exiguous table from me, deposited her gum (a momentary glimpse of grey amalgam within the scarlet depths of her mouth) in the ashtray, and ate the dish with the methodical determination of someone who is not quite certain where her next decent meal is coming from.
She used to work in a shoe factory, she told me between mouthfuls, in the design department. Life there was dull and the pay was bad, and she decided that she wanted something better so she came to Italy with a friend, just to see. A girlfriend. She shrugged the girlfriend off. ‘She goes back.’
‘And what job do you do now? In Rome there can’t be much work.’
Magda sniffed. With a sudden delicacy, almost as though she was touching up her makeup, she used her napkin to wipe red sauce from the corner of her mouth. ‘I draw.’ Then she reached down to her copious bag and produced a folder to show me, passing sheets across the table. They were charcoal sketches, skilled enough, the kind of facile things you see in Piazza Navona to attract tourists to have their own portraits done: there was Barbra Streisand, there was Madonna, there was the Pope. She shrugged. ‘And I do model.’
‘Artist’s model?’ I asked.
For the first time she smiled. It was a hurried, perfunctory thing, her smile – a mere widening of her mouth, a momentary expelling of air from her nostrils. ‘Pictures.’
‘Pictures?’
She shrugged, as though it were obvious. ‘Photographs. No clothes.’
The noise of the trattoria intruded on our conversation, the clash of cutlery, the scrape of plates, the noise of unheard conversations from the other tables. And I sensed the clash of two emotions, the scrape of two sensations, one that in my previous life was always allowed full rein, the other that was always suppressed: shock and lust.
‘Do you want to look at that also?’ she asked.
‘Perhaps not.’
She shrugged indifferently and returned to her food, mopping up the remnants of sauce with a piece of bread, and then ordering pollo alla diavola with the eagerness of someone who had just devoured spaghetti with tart’s sauce and found that no problem. ‘And the nuns?’ I asked. ‘What do they think of the work you do?’
‘The nuns?’ She laughed. ‘The nuns know nothing.’
Three days later Magda was thrown out of her hostel. She was given ten minutes’ notice to clear her things. The nuns knew more than she had thought. She spent the night at the main railway station and probably earned 50,000 lire letting someone fuck her in the back of a car. I don’t know. I’m not a fool, but I don’t know for sure. The next day she came to her English lesson as usual.
‘I look for somewhere to stay,’ Magda announced to the class.
Magda, Madeleine, Magdalen. Mary Magdalene. She has long been a problem, has Mary Magdalene. Mary from Magdala, presumably. That’s not the issue. The issue is, who was she? The great sinner of Luke? Mary of Bethany? The woman who anointed Jesus with chrism and thus gave to him the title Christ? But whatever her identification, we cannot doubt the central fact – for she was a woman, and the early Church would have edited the story differently if it possibly could have done so: early on the morning of that first Easter Sunday, Mary of Magdala was the first person at the empty tomb; and, in the Gospel of John, which is likely to be accurate on this point for the very same reason, she was the first person to see the risen Jesus.
Magda standing in the midst of my apartment, a tall black figure: clumsy shoes, black stockings, black skirt (too short), black coat (tossed aside on to the broken sofa), black sweater stretched over small mammary swellings, black hair cut short round her face, red mouth chewing over the situation. An expression of indifference and wariness, a faint suspicion.
I showed her up the steps out of the living room on to the roof terrace. She turned to look. There was a betrayal of emotion here: a short, sharp intake of breath, a faint smile. All around her was the city – the surface of the city that the inhabitants never see as they go about their business down on the ground. The terrace seems like a boat adrift on a stormy terracotta ocean, the tilted, tiled rooftops breaking like waves against towers and gables and domes. Madeleine had cried out when she saw the view, she had projected her pleasure, she had exulted. Magda merely smiled, as thought she already knew.
‘I will draw,’ she announced. She put her bag down and went inside for a chair. When she came back she stood holding the chair for a while as she considered the prospect. From where she stood she could see, at a rough count, sixteen domes, including the biggest of the lot, the father and mother of all domes, the one that the whole world knows, quite wrongly, as Michelangelo’s; but lesser domes as well, artful, baroque cupolas, with lanterns like nipples. The Gothic tradition of the north has always favoured phallic spires and a lean, ascetic Christ figure; but in the south the female element in Christianity has ruled: subtle, comforting, seductive, redolent with the scent of other, more ancient cults – Demeter, Ceres, Cybele, Isis. Mariolatry, if you want a derogatory, Protestant term for it: Marian devotion if you want the party line.
Magda made her decision. She hitched her skirt up, sat down with her feet cocked up on the cross-bar of the chair, pulled a sketchpad from her bag and began. Her hand was sharp and assured, the strokes she made like cuts at a thing of flesh, something swift and surgical; and lines appeared that magicked a third dimension out of the mere two of the paper, so that as she worked the dome of
Sant’Andrea della Valle (Maderno) was plucked out of the lucid Roman air and methodically transferred to the sheet in front of her.
‘It’s good,’ I told her.
She shrugged. ‘Maybe I sell.’ She worked between the ribs of the dome, giving them a curve, a sullen pewter tone; then she moulded a ball of rubber and bent forward for a moment, working at the grey. When she straightened up, erasure had paradoxically given something positive, a gleam of sunlight to the leads.
Magda is an artist. The whole panorama encircled her as she worked so that somehow she seemed to be the axis round which all this revolved, this city of domes and bell-towers, of guilt and hypocrisy. Magda is an artist and like an artist she seems to possess whatever she observes.
For three days she slept on the broken-backed sofa in the sitting room. She slept curled up with a blanket thrown over her, as one might sleep on a bench in a park or a station waiting room, and in the morning I would find her in the kitchen making a cup of coffee – turecka, she called it although its resemblance to Turkish coffee was minimal – her hair tousled, her face puffed up and creased from where it had been pressed against her arm or the folds in the blanket or the rough, worn velvet of the sofa. She would be wearing a large, shapeless black T-shirt. Her legs were pallid and awkward, as though embarrassed by their nudity. She would acknowledge my presence with little more than a nod, and then she would shut herself in the bathroom and emerge after half an hour wearing her makeup – thick makeup applied to her skin like clotted cream and lipstick like an open wound – and leave the apartment. She would say almost nothing to me beyond the word ciao, which perhaps appealed to her because it has been taken up by American youth and smacks of indolence and bubble gum. Each day I thought she might not reappear – her paltry things were hardly hostage against her return – but each evening she was back, the makeup less intense, the manner the same: quiet, introverted concentration. I seemed barely to exist for her.
And on the fourth night, as silent as a nocturnal mammal, she crept into my room and slid into my bed.
Magda knew immediately, of course. I was surprised at the time, but now I understand. Magda knew all about me. She lay curled up in my bed like a cat, indifferent but knowing.
2
‘Is that Father Leo Newman?’ A female voice with that faint and tell-tale accent, the th halfway between a fricative and a plosive.
‘It is.’
‘This is Madeleine Brewer. We met at that reception. Perhaps you remember?’
‘Of course I remember.’
‘I told you I’d ring. Will you come to dinner? Is next Wednesday all right? I know it’s rather short notice, but …’
Of course he would.
The Brewers had an apartment in the Borgo Pio near the Vatican City. It was the kind of place that embassies keep on for their staff, the square metres carefully equated with rank on the basis of some secret bureaucratic formula, their particular rating being high, for Jack was minister or something. They ate in a large and slightly dusty dining room with photographs of the children on a grand piano and a painting of a saint – female, distraught – above the vast fireplace. Madeleine felt the need to apologise for the place: ‘It’s like living in a sacristy. I think it once belonged to a cardinal and he left all his holy pictures behind and now we have to look after them because they’re so valuable and if we didn’t they’d just go into some cellar beneath the Palazzo Barberini or something.’
The saint over the fireplace seemed pained by the prospect. A monstrance in her hand betrayed her identity to those who could interpret such things. ‘She’s Saint Clare,’ Madeleine said. ‘Just up Saul’s street.’ This remark was directed at another of the guests, a journalist of some kind. ‘Clare’s your patron saint,’ she explained.
‘I have a patron saint?’ He was Jewish – Goldstaub – and looked nervous at the prospect.
‘Oh, certainly. Patron saints don’t give a damn about your religion. They are highly ecumenical.’ And Madeleine launched into a little dissertation on patron saints. ‘There is a typical Catholic logic to the whole matter of patron saints,’ she explained. ‘Saint Lucy had her eyes put out, so she’s patron saint of opticians. Saint Apollonia had her teeth knocked out, so she got dentists. Clare is the patron saint of television because popular legend has it that she appeared in two places at the same time. Pope Paul appointed her.’
‘Pope Paul the Sixth?’ The journalist seemed aghast.
‘The very one.’
‘They still do this kind of thing? You’re joking.’
‘I am deadly serious, aren’t I, darling?’
Jack smiled indulgently from the other end of the table. ‘Maddy is always at her most serious when she is being absurd.’
‘Now, Saint Lawrence was roasted alive on a gridiron––’
‘And got barbecues.’ The journalist was getting the idea.
‘Near enough. Cooks. Saint Stephen is bricklayers. They stoned him. Saint Sebastian, archers.’
‘Archers?’
‘They shot him. A hundred arrows. You’ve seen the pictures, surely.’
‘I thought that was Saint Bartholomew.’
‘He was flayed alive. Patron saint of taxidermists. Oh, and Saint Joseph of Copertino is the patron saint of airmen.’
‘Airmen? But, hell, they didn’t have airplanes.’
‘They do now. Saint Joseph used to fly around the place, so they chose him for the job.’
‘He used to fly?’
‘Fly. It’s quite well attested. He was some time in the sixteenth century, so it’s not all that long ago. Anyway, don’t you have flying rabbis?’
‘Not in Borough Park, we don’t.’ The man turned to Newman for some kind of authoritative judgement. ‘Hey, this is your scene, Father. Is all this true?’
Leo Newman, sweating and awkward at the other end of the table, agreed that it was, more or less. ‘The trick is to treat the absurdities of the faith as genial eccentricities, as proof of the boundless confidence of the believer. It’s not an article of faith. You don’t have to believe it.’
‘I should hope not.’
Madeleine caught the priest’s eye. ‘Does Father Leo believe it, though?’ And that was the moment when something turned inside him, something visceral, like the first symptom of disease. That was what made it all the more disturbing, that it seemed so profoundly organic. The cerebral he could deal with. The cerebral he could battle against, had long ago learned to battle against. Mental images were things he could chase from his mind like Christ chasing the money-changers from the Temple (an incident that is generally accepted by the most sceptical of New Testament scholars as genuine, indeed pivotal). But when it was the temple of the body that was under assault, the dismissal was not so easy. No easier to dismiss a cancer. And her glance at him as they sat at the long dining table beneath the benevolent eye of Jack and the agonised eye of Saint Clare Contemplating the Eucharist, School of Guido Reni, seemed to plant the first seeds of some disease in his body.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied lamely.
‘I think you do,’ she said with that smile. ‘I think Father Leo is a sceptic.’ And the word sceptic splintered the atmosphere in the room with its harsh consonants, its barbed resonances.
Newman was one of the last to leave that evening. He felt a need to apologise as he was shown to the door. ‘I’ve outstayed my welcome.’
Madeleine helped him on with his coat, turned him round like a child to adjust the lapels. ‘Not at all,’ she said. Others were already going down the stairs, opening the outside door on to the street, allowing a draught of damp winter air to scurry into the stairwell. ‘We’re delighted that you thought it worth staying. You’ll come again, won’t you?’
‘Will I?’
‘If you’d like to. I’ll be in touch.’ She looked at him curiously. ‘I tell you what …’
‘What will you tell me?’
‘Show me your work. Can you do that? That’s what I’d like to
see.’
‘At the Institute? It’s very dull. Books, documents, nothing interesting at all.’
‘Let me be the judge of that.’
‘Look.’
They were in the manuscript rooms of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, surrounded by grey steel shelving, lulled by the distant hum of air conditioning and dust filtering, enveloped in a sterile atmosphere designed to suspend what had been previously suspended only by good fortune: the subtle decay of the texts. The old Dominican who was the archivist fussed somewhere in the background, searching for something spectacular and mediaeval to show her, something miniated, rubricated, illuminated with its own inner, pious fire.
‘Look,’ Leo said. He had a computer on, the screen live and shining. A dun-coloured fibrous fragment hung there behind the glass, a fragment of papyrus the colour of biscuit, inscribed with the most perfect letters ever man devised, words wrought in the lean and ragged language of the Eastern Mediterranean, the workaday language of the streets, the meanings half apprehended, half grasped, half heard through the noise of all that lies between us and them, the shouting, roaring centuries of darkness and enlightenment. How was it possible to communicate to her the pure, organic thrill?
‘Is this is one of your pieces? One of the things you are working on?’
He nodded. ‘The En-Mor papyri.’
‘What exactly is En-Mor?’
‘A place. A God-forsaken place by all accounts, except that I suppose these finds show that God never forsakes anywhere. I’ve never been to the actual site. It’s just a dig run by the Israeli authorities. And they found these fragments in a cave nearby.’ He traced the words on the screen with his finger. ‘Kai eis pyr. And into the fire. That’s what it says. Possibly from Matthew, a proto-Matthew. Matthew chapter 3, verse 10: Every tree that does not produce good fruit is to be thrown into the fire. Or Luke. They both have the same words.’
He could hear the whisper of her breath beside his ear. She leaned forward to see, leaned over his shoulder; and he was enveloped not by the mystery of the ancient script, its perfect characters, its tantalising context, but by the soft warmth of her presence, by the touch of a stray wisp of her hair, by her scent.
