The Gospel Of Judas

by Simon Mawer

  ‘The portiere gave us the key.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s a poor enough place. This whole palazzo is a poor place, old and rotting like me. I am the last of the line, do you know that? Oh, there are cousins of some kind, there are always cousins in an Italian family, but no one that I see. I am the last. My father’s only child, and the line dies out with me. Why shouldn’t you come and live here, eh? Gretchen’s little boy, sterile just like me. Why not?’ The idea seemed to amuse her. She began to laugh once more, a laugh that soon transformed itself into a racking cough, so that a female attendant hurried in from the room next door to help her. ‘Gretchen’s little boy,’ the old woman cried through coughs and laughter, ‘Gretchen’s sterile little boy.’

  Madeleine and Leo left awkwardly, in the midst of medical ministrations. They went down wide marble stairs past a group of tourists going into the public rooms where dusty things were roped off and approximately guarded. ‘What a nasty old woman,’ Madeleine said. ‘What did she say? The German, I mean. I could follow the Italian, but she said something in German.’

  ‘Die gute alte Zeit.’ Leo laughed at the idea. ‘It means “the good old days”.’

  They emerged from the staircase into the shadows of the entrance archway. In the courtyard (Giacomo da Vignola, 1558) was sunlight and greenery, a circumference of columns, a floor of sloping basalt, a pond with a clump of vegetation around the central fountain. From the midst of this growth a carved figure peered out at whatever tourists were around, a gnarled and leery satyr dribbling water into a stone bowl like a senile man dribbling saliva into a kidney basin. The vegetation included elegant fronds of Cyperus papyrus, the papyrus plant.

  They climbed other stairs in the building, the back stairs, stairs that led behind the scenes and had once been for the servants.

  ‘How did the principessa know your mother?’ Madeleine asked as they climbed. ‘I didn’t realise she lived in Rome. Or was it in London?’

  He evaded the question. ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘And she remembered you as a child?’

  Leo laughed. ‘Of course she didn’t. She’s gaga.’

  ‘But she knew your name.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘she knew my name.’

  The apartment was high up beneath the roof of the building. Leo unlocked the door and stepped inside. The place was more like an abandoned attic than a place to live, a loft filled with rejected, broken furniture. The ceilings sloped towards the floor. The floor itself creaked and flexed. There was the smell of dust, the smell of age, the smell of nameless events in a nameless past. ‘A lair,’ she exclaimed, following him inside. ‘Leo’s lair.’ They went through the cold and empty rooms with something like amazement, something like amusement, something of the pent-up, unspoken excitement of children.

  ‘It’ll be hot in summer.’

  ‘Unbearable. And cold in winter.’

  Ancient pipes snaked around the margins of the rooms like relics from the industrial revolution. ‘But there’s heating of some kind.’ She peered out of a dormer window on to a stretch of broken tiles. There was a short struggle with the latch before the window yielded. She pushed it open and climbed out, calling him to follow, calling to him to share her astonishment. ‘Good God Almighty,’ she cried. ‘Come and look at this!’

  He clambered out after her. He must have been startled by the view. Bewilderment, delight, an amalgam of emotions. It must have shown in his face. He stood there in the middle of the terrace with the city around him, circling round him, wheeling round him as though he was the axis and the whole place was his circumference; and Madeleine laughed at him and his new-found independence.

  Together with Jack she helped him move his things from the Institute. There were books but little else, almost nothing physical that bore witness to the existence on earth of Father Leo Newman, priest of the Roman Catholic Church: no accoutrements, no furniture, no things. Even when he had installed himself in the apartment, the place remained shabby and bare, a mere dormitory. Madeleine helped him buy things for the kitchen, cutlery, some saucepans, things that he had never needed before – sheets, towels, all the stuff of domestic life. ‘The civilising of Leo,’ she called it. They bought him an armchair, to set against the broken-backed sofa that was part of the sparse furnishings. And Madeleine bought him an alarm clock to rouse him in the mornings. It had the words CARPE DIEM across its face.

  ‘Must be like getting a divorce,’ Jack observed. ‘You suddenly find yourself out on your own after years of dependence. Not easy, old fellow, not easy.’

  Leo felt a sense of relief when the Brewers had gone, relief and guilt, just as he had as a child when leaving his mother on his return to school. The solitary was ingrained in him, like a scar burned into the skin. Celibacy means more than mere sexual abstinence: it means that you become sufficient unto yourself, contained, self-absorbed. He walked round the flat not like a prisoner examining his cell, but like an explorer on a new and limitless island. Below him the traffic noise of the city; up here beneath the tiles a sense of space, of liberation, of solitude. He prayed for an hour, reading his breviary, reading bits from the Bible, muttering words, keeping long silences. He prayed to a lean and twisted Christ-figure; he prayed to a God who veered between the patriarchal mythic figure of childhood and an abstract concept as vast as a galaxy, as vast as the space between the galaxies, as vast and nebulous and meaningless as the space that contained all the galaxies and all the spaces. That evening he slept in his clothes, foetus-like on the ugly, lumpy bed, and awoke to a morning that was pregnant with possibility. It was a strange delight to move around the place in his own time, to make a cup of coffee with the caffettiera that he had bought with Madeleine, to walk out on to the roof terrace and watch the early sun rise over the Capitoline Hill.

  Thoughts? More a sensation. A sensation of possibility.

  He was to meet Madeleine and some of her friends at a Roman church, to play the expert guide. In the event it was raining, one of those sudden, surprising storms that strikes the city in early spring, turning dry streets into boiling torrents within a few minutes. The traffic ground to a halt. Cars appeared marooned like islands in the stream. The Janiculum Hill was capped by a grey pall and the dome of Saint Peter’s basilica vanished in the murk. He waited in the exiguous shelter of the narrow Romanesque portico of the church that was to have been the meeting place and wondered how long it would be before he would be allowed to escape beyond the wall of falling water.

  Thoughts of a solitary priest caught in a rainstorm: he cannot ignore rain, not rain like that, elemental rain, diluvial, Noachian rain. He cannot merely think about the papyrus fragments he is editing for the World Bible Center, those precious flakes whose existence was stirring the world of textual analysis, or the homily that he must deliver at next Sunday’s mass. He cannot do all of this when confronted with that rain. And thunder beating over the cupolas of the city, like someone moving furniture in the anteroom of heaven. And lightning illuminating the face of the city with a sudden ghastly pallor, the pallor of arc lights. The questioning of the elements. Where, poor priest with doubts, were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Has the rain a father? Is it nothing more than a concatenation of static and water vapour and the clash of bodies of air, warm and cold, dissipating the energy of a hydrogen bomb with all the random carelessness of a child? From which direction does the lightning fork? Who carves a channel for the downpour and hacks a way for the rolling thunder?

  What did they think when He stilled the storm? Did it make them any happier? You get short, sharp storms on the Sea of Galilee. The wind descends from the Golan Heights, the country of the Gadarenes, and rushes down the slope like a herd of wild pigs and crashes against the water. Shifting masses of air, local heating, sudden confusion, just as suddenly quiet. So what happened on that occasion? Did they think everything was going to be plain sailing with this man, who, it seemed, might be able to work meteorological miracles?


  Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?

  And then a figure, some kind of hood held over its head, splashed through the downpour and skidded into the shelter beside him. ‘Christ, how embarrassing,’ it said. ‘Not really appropriate language, is it? Golly, maybe. Golly how embarrassing.’ She shook water from her hood (now revealed as a plastic bag with a supermarket logo printed on it) and grinned up at him through plastered hair. There was water on her cheeks and a brightness in her eyes, as though, amongst other things, the rain had washed away some of her years. ‘I’m afraid there’s only me, you see. I tried to phone you to cancel it, but there was something wrong with your line and I couldn’t get through.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s working yet. I’ve rung the company, but you know what they’re like.’

  ‘So I came.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘I’m awfully sorry, Leo. I mean, I did get through to the others … and we cancelled. But now that I’m here, I mean we might as well have a look …’

  He tried to get out of it, tried to suggest that they postpone it to another day, but she insisted. ‘I really want to see the place, and here we are, for goodness’ sake, and so let’s. If it’s all right for you to be alone with a woman. I must say’ – regarding him with a comic, inquisitive expression – ‘you don’t look like a priest.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  She smiled, pulling a handkerchief out from her bag and wiping her face. ‘We will not create scandal. Priest alone in church with woman. I don’t think the News of the Screws could do much with that, do you?’

  ‘News of the …?’

  She laughed. ‘World. News of the World. Goodness, which cloister do you come from? Come on, show me.’

  So they ran round the corner – a burst of rain, a burst of laughter from Madeleine – and reached the door. On the noticeboard inside the vestibule there was a faded announcement giving the times of mass and a poster explaining that it had recently been World Mission Month and that there were many people out there who were very much worse off than any of you here. The inner door creaked open on a pulley system and slammed abruptly behind them. They were inside, in a vault as empty as a sarcophagus – as dusty, as stony, as cold. Grey columns rose up to a dank and shadowy roof. There was a tentative smell of incense, like the smell of mothballs clinging to some long-out-of-fashion dress. A sanctuary light burned dimly in the shadows at the far end, and a frescoed figure stared out of a nearby pillar like a ghost looming in the shadows of a haunted house. Outside the rain came down, an amalgam of noise like the rushing of a great wind, the wind of Pentecost perhaps.

  Madeleine bobbed perfunctorily in front of the altar and clipped in her narrow shoes across the floor – cosmatesque spirals and circles – to the only painting that the place possessed, an entombment of Christ that looked to the untutored eye to come from the thirteenth century, but which was actually fifteenth and simply old-fashioned even when it was painted. ‘So?’ she asked, standing before her dead Saviour and looking across the uneven pavement at Newman. ‘Where are the secrets?’

  ‘In the sacristy.’

  The sacristy was populated by heavily varnished wardrobes and a sideboard with the instruments of mass on it. Set into the wall beside the door there was a lavabo with a ceramic Mother and Child above the basin, the work, so a handwritten notice assured the onlooker, of the school of Andrea della Robbia. Surprisingly in this still and dusty place, there was also a human being, an ancient crone hiding in ambush behind a stand of dog-eared postcards. She glared at the couple as though they had already committed some gross act of desecration. Newman wished her buon giorno, although all the evidence from outside (a crash of thunder which set the whole building shaking) was to the contrary. The ancient woman remained impassive in the face of the storm and the greeting. ‘Mille lire, per le luci,’ she demanded.

  Madeleine scrabbled in her handbag. ‘I must pay.’

  ‘It’s only a thousand lira.’

  ‘It’s the principle.’

  The old crone regarded the money with suspicion. Then she surrendered a rusty key and gestured towards the corner of the room where there was a narrow door that looked as though it might lead into a broom cupboard or something. ‘Giù,’ she said. Down.

  The door opened to discover a narrow spiral staircase descending into the bowels of the city. Madeleine peered into the pit. ‘How horrible. You go first.’

  So they wound their way down into the past, like a descent into a tomb, like a descent into Hades, Madeleine’s shoes clipping on the iron stair just behind his ear and her voice echoing in the drum of the stairwell. ‘I don’t like this kind of thing,’ she said. ‘I hated it under Saint Peter’s. I get all claustrophobic …’

  But there was nothing enclosed about the space below the church where the stairs led, nothing cramped or claustrophobic – it was wide and empty and grey with dust. A string of bare bulbs lit the place with a blank and inquisitorial light. They climbed down on to the dusty floor and clambered over wall footings and round pillars. There were bits of pavement beneath their feet and earthenware pipes and blocks of volcanic tuff. Pillars rose up like stalagmites in a cave to support the roof of the building, which was the floor of the modern church directly above.

  ‘Where are we?’ Madeleine asked. She craned to see, her face open with amazement. ‘When are we?’

  ‘About the second century AD. Some kind of public hall converted into a Christian place of worship. People probably worshipped here who remembered Paul and Peter in the city.’

  The idea stopped her. She stood there in the midst of the urban litter of the centuries like a flame, a bright flame in the grey ashes. What did she think? Did she feel that frisson that comes from an apprehension of the past, that little thrill of propinquity? That is what he assumed. He read nothing more than that into the glance she cast in his direction (hazel eyes, the scattering of faint freckles, the slight frown of concentration). ‘Can you feel them?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Those early Christians.’

  ‘That’s your fey Irish for you.’

  ‘It’s imagination.’

  ‘Do we want imagination?’

  She glanced round and up. ‘If not, why come?’

  The smell: a smell of the centuries, dead and airless. Somewhere beyond a low wall a mosaic emerged from beneath the dust like a sore showing through an animal’s pelt: the outline of a fish drawn in grey basalt tesserae. He called her over to see. ‘It’s time for your fish lecture,’ she said. ‘Go on.’

  Symbols, signifiers, signs. Fish is a curious one: ichthys, a fish. It is an acronym, in fact, for Iesous Christos Theou Hyios Soter, Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. They used it as a sign of recognition, casually tracing the design in the dust with an idle, scraping toe, or scrawling it on a wall just as they do nowadays, just as someone had chalked the slogan Dio c’è – there is a God – on the wall of the Palazzo Casadei just beside the main entrance. Dio c’è. It’s an interesting proposition.

  ‘If you’ve heard it already, why ask for it again?’

  ‘You’re offended. I only meant it as a joke. The others, you know what they say? They say, goodness he’s serious.’

  ‘Isn’t that what you’d expect from––’

  ‘A priest? I suppose so. And they also say––’

  ‘What do they also say?’

  She crouched down and brushed her hand over the fish shape, and as she bent her hair fell forward like a cascade of seaweed. Even her hand was like something marine, a pale starfish floating over the fish, tapering fingers with a scattering of freckles like a subtle cryptic coloration. She swept some dust away from the single crude eye so that it could see more clearly. ‘They say, why on earth did he become a priest? What a waste.’

  Madeleine looked up and there was something else there, some other sign, perhaps: the silent, eloquent gape of her neckline, her breasts hanging there in the shadow like forbidden fruit amongst th
e leaves of a tree, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. ‘What a waste,’ she repeated.

  That was the moment when there was a crash of thunder outside, a massive explosion from the upper world that intruded even there eighteen centuries earlier, reverberating around the ancient walls like an earthquake. That was the moment when the lights went out and plunged the two of them into an all-consuming darkness.

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ Madeleine’s voice was shrill with panic. Darkness, total darkness pressed up to the eyes and lay against the skin like a suffocating cloth. It offered no perspective. Only her voice, sharp, momentarily terrified, gave depth to the darkness around them. ‘Oh, my God. Where are you? Leo? Where are you?’

  ‘It’s all right. Don’t be frightened.’

  ‘Of course I’m bloody frightened.’ Darkness as a substance, pressing against the cornea, pressing in on the body like a shroud. ‘Where are you, Leo. Leo?’

  ‘Here. Come towards me. Mind the wall.’ There was a movement, a scrabbling like rodents amongst the dust, a suppressed cry as she stumbled; and then something live crept through the mask of darkness and grasped his hand, a small, fragile animal clutching at him.

  ‘There you are.’ Her voice was suddenly mere inches from his face, just below his chin. The sound of her breathing was palpable in the blackness, a disturbance in the tissue of darkness, as though something were tunnelling through it to reach him. ‘Thank God,’ she murmured, clambering up and leaning against him in relief, shaking with what he supposed was fear. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

  He felt her breath. He put out his hand speculatively into the void and touched her cheek and the soft pulp of her lip. ‘What is there to apologise for?’

  ‘Don’t let me go, Leo,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t. I’m sorry. Don’t.’ A strange alternation of demand and apology: I’m sorry. Don’t. I’m sorry. Don’t. Her hair had a scent about it. He half recalled it from the enclosed, airless intimacy of the confessional: a warm mammal smell mingled with other perfumes – the scent of citrus, the scent of musk, the scent of other things that he could not name or imagine. Frankincense and myrrh, perhaps. Scent is dangerous, stirring dull roots. The word redolent comes from the Latin verb olere, to emit a smell. He had once read that the centre in the brain that is concerned with the perception of aroma is next to the memory centre, so that the one stimulates the other. Smell recalling the past, the smell of attar of roses and lemon. The first time he had embraced anyone for years. His mother. The distant girlfriend called Elise. No others. Proust with his madeleines, he thought, and smiled through the faint sense of revulsion, the feeling of wanting to push her away, the sensation of something at his throat, clasping the windpipe, constricting the windpipe, choking him and making him want to vomit, closing and opening at one and the same time. Aperient and astringent.