by Simon Mawer
‘… walking with him in the Kolonada, taking the waters and laughing at the horrid taste of it – rust, it tasted of rust, or blood, like when you cut yourself and you suck the cut – concerts and dances in the casino, and walks up through the woods – we went chaperoned by my aunt – and, oh, what days they were, Leo. Always sunny, always bright and sunny. He wrote me a poem, do you know that? A poem about me in Marienbad. Gretchen in Marienbad, it was called. Imagine having a poem written about you!’
Thus Frau Huber to her child. The Zamek is now a state museum with a ticket office in the gatehouse, and a shop in the fuchsarium. That’s 1997. What happened in between is what happened to the whole of middle Europe: the apocalypse.
‘Everything seemed so safe in those days, that is the strange thing. Everything seemed so safe. And yet it was the most dangerous place in the whole world.’
‘Mutti,’ the child asks, a precocious child with words that are older than his years. ‘What will happen now?’
‘Happen?’
‘Will the war come here?’
She laughs. Frau Huber laughs. For this city seems as safe as anywhere in the whole benighted continent, a refuge from the bombs and the guns, protected by the presence of a small man with an ascetic face and a smooth command of German: Papa Pacelli. ‘Of course the war won’t come here.’ But she laughs because she doesn’t believe it.
A disturbed night, a night of air-raid sirens and the sharp crack of anti-aircraft guns, a night played out against the drone of bombers, invisible in the darkness over the city. A hot night of flares bursting in the sky, apparently right over the Villa, and lighting up the dark streets and the churches and the palazzi with flashes of summer lightning. An airless, sultry night during which the Huber family spends hours in the shelters beneath the Villa along with others of the embassy, wondering when and where the bombs will fall. The anti-aircraft fire seems distant and desultory. ‘These Italians have no stomach for a fight,’ someone remarks. To Leo it seems an adventure, to the adults little more than an inconvenience. ‘It is a bluff,’ someone remarks, a third secretary whose previous posting was in Washington. ‘They will never bomb the city – the Catholic lobby is too powerful for Roosevelt to dare.’
Herr Huber’s report the next morning seems some kind of confirmation of this. ‘No bomb damage,’ he announces, coming into the apartment from his office while his wife and son are at breakfast. ‘No bombs at all, in fact. Aerial photography. They were photographing the city. The Americans. They seem to be interested in the railway station.’
It is chilling, this cold, analytical war in which invisible aeroplanes fly in the night and take photographs at will. ‘What do they want photographs for? How can photographs help them?’
‘They will use them as a guide when they bomb the city.’
‘Bomb Rome? But how could they bomb Rome? Francesco said …’
‘The man doesn’t know what he is talking about.’
The morning is a disturbed one, with messages and departures, and vague reports that are then denied. There are conflicting reports about the situation in Sicily, there is a rumour of a letter from the Pope to the American President, there is a report of contacts between elements of the Italian government and the Allies. Amidst it all comes a telephone message, taken by one of the secretaries – a domestic matter, an ordinary moment amongst the rumour of war: Leo’s tutor is ill and so cannot come today.
‘Is he injured?’ Frau Huber asks. Bombs, even nonexistent bombs, haunt the collective mind of the city.
‘Ill, gnädige Frau,’ the secretary says. ‘A fever, he told me.’
‘He told you himself?’
‘He sounded unwell. He sounded very weak.’
There is no reply when she rings the number. Does she wonder where the phone at the other end is ringing, in what apartment, behind what closed doors, ignored by whom?
‘He’s shirking,’ is Herr Huber’s judgement. ‘I never did quite trust him from the moment he started. He was frightened by the raid last night and fancied a day off. What do you call it? Pulling the lead?’ You means the English. It is a jibe, a faint provocation, an accusation: you have one foot in the enemy camp.
‘Swinging,’ she corrects him. ‘Swinging the lead.’
‘Ah, yes. Of course. Swinging the lead. A nautical term. You have the sea in your blood. Whereas we are people of the land.’ He is in the mood for taunting her. They are absurd taunts for she has lived all of her life in the very heart of Europe, as far from the Atlantic as from the Urals, as far from the Baltic as from the Mediterranean. She knows the sea from childhood holidays to the Côte d’Azur, that is all; and a single visit to her grandparents’ home near Brighton. ‘Anyway, as Signor Volterra is not here, you can teach Leo, can’t you? After all, you have teaching in your blood as well.’
She ignores that further taunt, but gives life to it by setting her son to work despite his protests. So the morning drags past, the telephones ring, people come and go, Leo complains. Later she goes to the Villa and practises piano for a while, all alone in the reception room with the curtains half drawn against the heat, while the city lies splayed out beneath the sun, the summer sun beating on the tarmac like a hammer beating on brass, and cicadas shrieking in the trees, an insistent, nagging sound like the screaming of newborn babies. Shortly after lunch, a meagre unappetising lunch, she summons a car.
The embassy car, conspicuous with diplomatic plates, carries her away from the Villa and up Via Merulana to the summit of the Esquiline Hill where the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore stands sand-bagged in the hot sun. Pedestrians glance round as the car passes, with dull expressions that may signify resentment, may imply simple indifference. Italians have long learned to be indifferent to strangers in their midst. At one point the driver has to stop to ask the way. He is from the Alto Adige, the German-speaking Südtirol, and is a stranger to the city, a stranger to most things Italian. ‘Don’t trust these people,’ he advises Frau Huber, but whether he is referring to the directions he has been given, or to the people’s fidelity in general is not clear. Yet they find the street where Francesco lives easily enough: a long, narrow road leading down from the Esquiline Hill, paved with basalt, a ravine between two lines of buildings whose façades are rust-red and decaying, like the old red sandstone faces of the ancient men sitting outside the wine shop just opposite where the car draws to a halt. The street itself is awash with paper, sheets of paper lying in the dust, some of them crumpled underfoot, one or two torn, most of them entire and bright white in the sunshine: a summer snowstorm, like the legendary summer snowstorm that fell on the hill in the fourth century to mark the place where a church should be built to the name of the Virgin Mary. One of the men is reading aloud to his companions; Frau Huber picks up a leaflet and glances at it. The page is covered with bombastic, bellicose words, ugly threats:
… The war is at the gates of your country. The Italian people have the power to bring peace. You have the choice! If you want war, we will bring total war. Africa is ours. Our warships can shell the Italian coastal cities. Aeroplanes will darken the sun of Italy. Our soldiers can come ashore anywhere …
The leaflet is signed by the Allied High Command.
She folds the page into her handbag and turns to the door of number 26, a massive door like the entrance to a church. It opens on to a marble hallway, dark against the sun, dark and cool compared with the heat outside, as dark as the confessional. On the far side of a grille sits the portiere (does he comply with the secrecy of the confessional? Doubtful, because all portieri are rumoured to be Fascist spies) who directs her to the top floor, by the stairs because the lift is not working, signora, what with the war and the electricity cuts and everything. They say they will bomb the city, but I don’t think they can, do you, signora, what with His Holiness here and everything? They wouldn’t do that, would they? They’re not barbarians.
‘Aren’t they?’
She climbs the stairs slowly, out of the cellar-li
ke cool of the ground floor towards the roof, towards the heat. Finally, sweat-stained and breathless, she is standing outside flat D, piano 6, and knocking in the hope – what hope? why a hope? – that Francesco’s voice will answer. But there is no sound at all, and nothing from outside, from the street. Just the still and silent heat of a Rome midday.
‘Francesco? Francesco!’
She pushes, and the door yields to her push. There is still no sound. For a moment she hesitates, looking into the shadows of the apartment. All she can see is a square metre of floor, and the corner of a table and the edge of a closed door. ‘Francesco?’
And then comes a noise, muffled and vague, as though someone is speaking through some kind of gag.
‘Francesco?’
She steps across the threshold into a small hallway. To the right a half-open door shows the kitchen (plates unwashed on a draining board, saucepans on the gas stove, an empty bottle on the table). To the left a cupboard stands open to display two brooms and a water heater.
‘Francesco?’
A sound, if it is a sound, comes from the closed door directly opposite. She tiptoes up to it and listens.
‘Francesco?’
The sound is nothing more than a low moan, as of nightmare. Frau Huber grasps the handle and turns it and the door swings open to discover a darkened room, a carpet, a bed against the far wall, a washstand with a basin and a jug of water, a chest of drawers, a crucifix on the wall in this city of crucifixes, and a figure lying on the bed, wrapped in a sodden sheet, twisted into a sodden sheet, a figure that is barely sensible in the heat.
‘Checco?’ There is an edge of panic in her voice, and a flicker of anger at the words that her husband used – swinging the lead. Standing at the bedside, she can feel the heat from him, the heat radiated out from his fever, a heat that reaches over and above the heat of the summer day. His face glistens with sweat, his mouth is rimed with saliva, his hair is damp and matted. Sweat stains the grey pillow. He moves vaguely, as though trying to rid himself of something, and his eyes stare upwards, perhaps at the ceiling, perhaps at her, seeing little or nothing. She places her hand on his forehead to feel the sharp burn of fever and he mumbles something almost as though he is aware of her touch. She makes more sense of his mumbling than there actually is: ‘Some water, you need some water.’ The jug is empty. She carries it to the kitchen and opens the tap. You might expect nothing in this chaotic city in the middle of summer in the midst of a war, but ever since the Romans built the aqueducts down from the hills there is one constancy in Rome: water, limpid water, cold once she has let it run.
She returns to the bedroom and pours some water into a glass and crouches beside him, lifting his head for him to drink. The smell of his body comes up to her, rancid and sour. ‘Water, Francesco. Water.’ Water floods over his lips and down his unshaven chin, round the curve of his neck, into the grimy pillow. She lays his head back, as one might lay the head of a corpse, and looks round. A sponge. She grabs the sponge from the washstand, pours water into the basin and carries both to the bedside, placing the basin on the floor, soaking the sponge and holding it to his lips, to his brow, to his cheeks. She wipes his face with cool water, and then his neck. He moans and turns vaguely, as though searching for the light and not finding it.
More water, the sponge laden with water like something live in her hand. She pulls the sheet down and sponges his shoulders and his chest and his upper arms. More water. His chest is flushed beneath the tan, his nipples as sharp and dark as damsons, circled by a few strands of hair. She sponges him gently, sponging the fever down, her hand circling his chest, circling the nipples, running over the ribs. More water. The water is tepid now and she takes the basin to replenish it, returning with it laden, setting it down beside the bed again, kneeling down herself and pulling the sheet down to his abdomen. His torso glows in the sultry shadows of the room, glowing with the amber glow of suntan and the flush of fever, a hot and heady mix. She blows gently across the damp skin, breathes in and blows again. He moans and turns his head and seems to look at her with focus for an instant while she loads the sponge once more and begins to bathe him again, first the face and chest, and then his flat belly, round the small knot of the umbilicus, down to the thin line of hair that vanishes beneath the sheet.
‘Checco?’ she calls, and he moves his head as though in pain. Kneeling beside him she takes the edge of the sheet and pulls it off him, and stays there motionless for a moment, looking down on him, at the lean and naked legs, the narrow hips, the dark mass of hair and the crumpled penis with its lucid purple cap. She breathes deeply, as she does when she is about to play, when she sits in front of the keyboard and composes herself, hands folded into her lap, as though waiting patiently for something to happen, some small surge of energy that will enable her to proceed. And then she reaches out and touches the small crumpled phallus softly with the tips of her fingers, as she might touch the keys of a piano in an adagio passage, merely stroking them, so softly that any sound they might make seems to have some other cause.
He stirs faintly under her touch. She starts and snatches her hand away. Her heart is beating, so loudly that she feels the sound in the room, reverberating like a drum. She kneels there beside the bed and waits while the young man stirs and moans and returns to some kind of rest, and then she takes up the sponge once more and begins to bathe his hips, his thighs, his chest again, anointing the thin, strong body as it lies there insensible in fever.
6
Limbo. Limbo is neither one place nor the other, neither heaven nor hell, neither paradise nor punishment, neither ecstasy nor execration. Limbo was invented by mediaeval theologians to overcome a problem – where to put those people who died unbaptised, particularly the innocent, particularly the dead babies. Limbo was where Leo Newman found himself. In limbo he lived out a new routine that was yet surprisingly like his old one, as though you might die and find the afterlife no different from your earthly existence: he lectured as he had always lectured to a motley audience of students on the Development of the New Testament Canon. He argued for an earlier establishment of the canon rather than a later, proposing that the Papyrus Egerton 2 was evidence of a four-gospel canon in the second century, rather than an independent gospel as suggested by Mayeda and later by Daniels, and positing the En-Mor papyri as evidence of this. ‘Here we have the teachings of the Lord and the teachings of his cousin John the Baptist recorded by a small group of adherents before the disaster of the Jewish War, written down some time in the eighth decade of the common era. Perhaps earlier.’ And the students nodded and scribbled, as though what he said was proven and doctrinal rather than mere speculation. He spent afternoons in the library or in the document rooms working through the texts, unpicking them, arguing the words this way and that; and in the early evening he returned to the flat, to make some kind of supper out of the few things he had gathered together. He felt like a hermit in a cave, a hermit who was hoarding the few fragments of his faith lest they too be swept away by circumstance.
Night was a desolate time, a darkness beset by dreams he could not recall when he awoke, and fears he could not enunciate when he confronted them in the cold light of dawn. Daytime painted over the fears of the night with a thin wash of immediacy.
The telephone rang.
It would be her. They had spoken on the phone but seen one another only twice, once when all three of them, Jack and Madeleine and Leo, had gone to some concert together and she had sat between the two men and Leo had sweated in his narrow seat, knowing her presence beside him, the contact of her shoulder, her knee against his, the quick, covert clasp of her hand. He wondered if he was the subject of some complex game, a game of finesse and sacrifice, the rules known only to her. Perhaps known to Jack as well. As they left the concert hall and walked down the wide triumphal way that leads towards the Basilica of Saint Peter’s, she clung to his arm and extolled his virtues to her husband. ‘My favourite confessor,’ she called him. ‘Saint Leo the im
perturbable.’
‘He doesn’t look imperturbable to me,’ Jack had remarked. ‘He looks damned embarrassed, you clinging to him like that, and only a hundred yards from headquarters.’
The telephone rang.
Their phone conversations had been cautious and oblique, as though each was concerned that someone might be listening, someone else on the line, someone else hidden in the fabric of the world around them like a actor behind the scenery, a third party looking over their shoulders – God, perhaps, reduced to the status of an eavesdropper.
The telephone rang.
He was hurrying with his breakfast – the alarm clock that she had bought him showed the time as nine-thirty, and he had a seminar at ten.
The telephone rang.
Who else phoned him here? The phone lay on the floor in the living room, the cable snaking across the floorboards. It had been abandoned by the last occupant and activated only after arguments with the phone company, only after that rendezvous at the Church of San Crisogono, when she alone had turned up and they had been precipitated together by circumstance or chance or whatever it was that governed the pure caprice of the world.
The telephone rang.
And they had met, just the two of them together, just once. They had driven up in her car and parked on the Janiculum Hill with the whole of the city splayed out before them. There were tourists up there to see the view, and puppeteers performing for groups of shrieking children, and a trick cyclist and a fire-eater, a stall selling ice cream and another selling trinkets, all this around the refuge of her car. ‘Safety in numbers,’ she said. She sat half-turned towards him, her knees up on the seat so that if he wished he could put out his hand and touch the smooth, silken mound of her patella. He felt a delight in her presence, something of the delight of juvenile love, the breathless longing to be the other, to be subsumed in the other. There were snatched moments of rapture that were no more than a clasp of hands (mature hands, these, lined with sinew and vein, their knuckles wrinkled; mature hands, but clinging to each other like children’s). There was confusion and anguish. ‘If we were any other couple,’ she said, ‘we’d be deep into adultery by now. Do you realise that?’
