Warburg in Rome

by James Carroll

  “I saw you. I was passing in my car. I saw you sitting here. Do you sit here often?”

  “Sometimes. Only sometimes.”

  “Because of gelato.”

  She gestured with her glass. “Vermouth now. Wormwood.” She quaffed her drink, then threw her head back, laughing. “Waiter!” she cried. “More wormwood. More bitters.” She laughed again, and he joined her. Both their faces were happily transformed, but only for a moment. After the waiter put a fresh Cinzano in front of her, she raised it. “To the Book of Revelation.” She took a large swallow, then said gravely, “And the many people dying of the poisoned waters.”

  “I sensed that in you when you confessed to me.”

  “You sensed it because neither of us was made to be alone with bitterness.”

  He waited for her to lower her eyes, but she did not. He was not breathing.

  “Am I wrong?” she asked.

  “No. But when you confessed that night, you did not specify your sin. I was wrong to absolve you. It has troubled me since. The sacrament requires specificity. You refused. And I yielded.” He looked away from her, made a quick survey of the others in the café, of figures passing on the street. Who was watching them? Madre, he thought. But no, Madre was across the city. Madre was asleep. He brought his eyes back to the woman and said, “I was wrong to do that.”

  “Is this your confession, Father?”

  “I, too, am a sinner.”

  “But neither do you specify.”

  He found it possible to say, but quietly, “I am here with you.”

  Still holding his eyes, she put her glass down, retrieved a few lire notes from the side pocket of her dress, threw them on the table, and stood. As she turned and walked away, Lehmann understood that she expected him to follow, and so he did.

  Less than ten minutes later, after moving through a maze of narrow streets and small, crowded piazzas—the sweet life of Rome at night—she entered a small hotel, ignored the desk clerk, crossed to the staircase, and went up. In the cramped lobby Lehmann hesitated, but the clerk took no more notice of him than of her. Lehmann went to the stairs, and as he took them, he unconsciously reached to lift the folds of his cassock, only to realize again that he was a man without vestments, a man like any other.

  Marguerite had sensed at once that Lehmann was even less sexually experienced than she. Her advantage in what followed was in acting out of the numb core of dissociation.

  Lehmann’s disadvantage, the result of having hesitated slightly at the door he’d found ajar in the dark corridor, consisted in finding her already naked, stretched out on the bed. Her arms opened to him, but it was her inner thighs he saw, her breasts, nipples pink, the offering of Eve. The further arousal of his fully erect penis fulfilled an exquisite longing, yet the sensation alarmed him. Knowing nothing else, he knew to go slower, yet the pulse of blood was leaving him behind. No. No.

  He danced on alternate legs to remove his trousers. He pulled at his shoes, but snagged the laces. Because his eyes never left the unclothed woman before him, he stumbled. This, the most intense erotic sensation of his life, gave way, as he realized what was happening, to dread. Then dread gave way to humiliation, the dead opposite of pleasure, when his untimely ejaculation overrode his ferocious will. Will had nothing to do with it. Oh. Oh.

  He fell gracelessly upon her as sperm pumped itself out of his penis, soiling the woman’s leg. In truth the priest had rarely even masturbated. Those climaxes, quick as they were, had reliably left him briefly elated, but this was instant ignominy. He groaned—No, no—and rolled away, awash in shame amid the stench of his own mean emission.

  As he lay immobile beside her, the question came vox Dei: Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? He would have laughed—I tried to eat, I tried, and what a tree!—but in fact he was weeping. Sobs broke out of him in spurts, just as unwilled as the ejaculation had been. In control of almost nothing, he was yet able to choke back the unwilled words rising in his throat, Madre, mia madre, aware that such infantile pleading would obliterate the last vestige of his dignity. Debased and wretched. Craven. He loathed himself.

  Only gradually did Lehmann become aware of the finger tenderly brushing his cheek, blotting the tears. He had his back to her, and so had not seen it when she turned toward him. She enfolded his body in the curve of her own. Her mouth was by his ear. “Be still,” she whispered. “Be still.”

  As if she were the mistress of nature, he obeyed. Stillness soon came, and he entered it as a sacred space. His sobbing quieted, his heaving chest settled, his fists unclenched themselves. All the while she moved her forefinger lightly on his cheek. Nestled against him, she pressed her legs into the hollow of his bent knees. He sensed a moist warmth against his buttocks, the faint scratch of her pubic hair. She enclosed him with her arm around his chest and drew him fully into the bow of her flesh.

  Slowly, he became aware that the soft pushing against his back was pressure from her breasts. Her tranquility engulfed him. He’d been schooled in mystic contemplation, yet here was an unprecedented coherence between his relaxing body and his quiet interiority, a vacancy of the mind combined with acute awareness of every sensation.

  Time meant nothing. At some point—minutes? an hour? longer?—he felt the stirring in his loins. She seemed to sense it too, for her hand moved slowly to his penis, and with her caress the stiffness came back. Growing erect, he turned to her and she welcomed him. When he moved to kiss her, he found her lips parted, and she fondled his tongue with hers. All the while she continued to hold his erection, pressing it, then guiding it. He was in her, pumping as quickly as before, but now in sync with the bouncing of her hips. He sensed the detached willfulness with which she moved, but mistook it for expertise. The surprise to Lehmann was in the way the physical communion about which he’d read, and dreamed, and offered spiritual counsel—ecstatic communion, a mode of transcendence—boiled down to fucking.

  After, the word that spilled from his lips, pressed into the hollow of her shoulder, was “Gracias.”

  As if his speaking even that word broke the spell, she came up onto her elbow, stared hard at his face, waited for his eyes to find their focus on her, and said, “Bless me, Father.”

  “What?” He craned back, away. “What?”

  She pulled the sheet free, wrapped herself with it, rolled off the bed, and fell to her knees in the posture of a child at bedtime prayers. Wrapped in white, not diaphanous, a vestal virgin. She crossed herself and bowed her head. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” She buried her face in her hands, just when he was most desperate to see her eyes, to read what madness was glowing there.

  Lehmann did not move. Like Adam, aware in the instant of being unclothed, exposed. Vox Dei: Who told thee that thou wast naked? Paralyzed, he waited.

  Instead of God’s, her voice came, a whisper he could barely understand. “I have sinned against chastity, Father.”

  Lehmann sat bolt upright, reaching to the foot of the bed for the tattered blanket. He covered himself, draping his shoulders as if with the amice, the first of the vestments donned for Mass. “No, Signorina, no.”

  “I engaged in sexual relations with one to whom I was not married. For this and all my sins, I am heartily sorry. Please forgive me.” She raised her face to him, a wretched display of rebuke, yet aimed at herself. Now it was she whose face was streaked with tears. And, given how tenderly she had rescued him from the pit of self-loathing, and given, equally, that he was in possession of the means of her relief, it was all at once unthinkable that he should refuse her. Surreal, bizarre, baffling—but yes, unthinkable.

  He knew the canon law: “Latae sententiae . . . de delictis gravioribus . . . anathema sit.” A priest who attempts to absolve a partner in a sin against the Sixth Commandment is himself ipso facto excommunicated. But all of that was in a realm apart, a realm that held no meaning for him then. Lehmann realized that he had been at this point with her before, as if she’d tested him,
or prepared him—her request for absolution when she had refused to specify her sin. He had granted it, a sin of his own. Rehearsal. But now her sin was as specific as it could be, and who knew better than he? Her sin, his sin.

  But sin pales before sacrilege—this sacrilege. It would belong to him alone, absolute and permanent, pure blasphemy. The sullying of his holy orders, the debasement of his vow. Yet already he had chosen her above all virtue, above all faith, above all hope. He had chosen love. And now he was choosing love again.

  He reached to her, his lover, and placed his left hand upon her head. His right he held above her. If he could do this, it was because she wanted him to. He would do anything for her, and how, given the purity of his love, could that be wrong? “May Our Lord Jesus Christ absolve thee, and I by His authority do absolve thee from every bond of excommunication, or interdict, as far as I am able and thou art needful. I absolve thee from thy sins . . .” And here he made the sign of the cross, warding off all demons except the one alive in him. “. . . in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

  “Amen,” she said in a clear, firm voice—certain. She blessed herself again, then came back up onto the bed, letting the sheet fall away, once again caring nothing for her nakedness. She leaned toward him. They went into each other’s arms and reclined. She kissed his brow and pulled him close. She arranged the sheet to cover them both, and, after all of that, they found an unexpected repose, and, lo and behold, it was chaste. She was his Madonna. He was her Child. Lehmann heard nothing but the beating of her heart until, out of their astonishing serenity, she said, “Tell me about the Casa.”

  Nine

  Obbedienza

  IT WAS MORE than a year since he’d first entered the Great Synagogue of Rome. The place had made a better recovery than the people who worshiped there. For this Friday-night service, Warburg sat in his accustomed bench toward the rear, where, unobserved, his focus could shift from the text to the soaring space and back. He was dressed, as usual, in gray, but in here he wore the black yarmulke he’d first worn some months earlier. He had yet to don the tallit, however.

  Moorish windows rose above him in three tiers, but after sundown the light came from the repaired wall fixtures and electrified candelabra that once again decked the columns and balconies. The sanctuary could hold about a thousand, but for this, the weekly ushering in of the Sabbath, perhaps a hundred men were scattered in the main space in front of Warburg, with a few dozen women in the balcony above. The tapestries had been restored to the walls, and the painted ceiling rainbow had been brightened, but the prayers were being recited in disjointed murmurs, and the rabbi, with his back to the congregation, rocked gently toward the ark as if he were praying alone.

  Warburg liked the way the service called participants only loosely together, leaving him to wrestle with the text at his own pace, to brood. The recovered beauty of the synagogue contrasted with figments of those he’d met in the camps, whose funerals he’d attended, whose names he’d upheld while reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish. In Warburg’s mind, the roll call had never ceased: Simone Luzatto, Bettina Chiara, Isaac Samuel Reggio. Here in the synagogue his people hovered in the air above him, witnesses to all that he had failed to do in their behalf. Giuseppe Nathan. Fiorella Coco. And always, still missing but never far from his mind—Wallenberg. Reciting their names to himself was as close as he could come to prayer for the living and the dead.

  The others in attendance included elderly and middle-aged Romans, a number of ill-clad refugees who were housed in the city, and a smattering of uniformed American GIs, present more out of homesickness than devotion. For tomorrow morning’s service, at which the Torah would be brought out, there would be twice this many in attendance, and the prayers would be recited more robustly. Warburg, though, preferred this quieter ritual. And tonight it was a harbinger of what was coming in an hour.

  He himself had insisted on what was sure to be an awkward confrontation with the leaders of these people. No longer badgered by inquisitors or popes, now their nemesis was the British government. Hence the bombing of the embassy.

  Some Jews had rejoiced: the British were the new tribunes of an eternal Jew-hatred, and retaliation was overdue. But other Jews still saw the British as valiant conquerors of the Nazis: to attack London was cowardly and treasonous.

  Warburg surveyed such arguments within himself. If the violence of the embassy bombing had shocked him—and he had gone at once to see the wreckage for himself—his own violence in response to Mates that same night had been even more unsettling. What a dawn had broken then. As if by controlling a group he could control himself, Warburg had demanded a meeting of the leaders of the Delegation to Assist Hebrews, his main Roman counterparts in getting aid to the camps.

  The meeting convened immediately after the service, in the Jewish library across the square. Warburg had been in the second-floor room dozens of times since that first meeting, when the issue was Fossoli. The glass-enclosed shelves held the same books. Sepia landscapes of a dream Jerusalem still decorated the brown walls. The cone-shaped light fixture hung over the same table, but now a dozen chairs were pulled up to it. In each chair sat a man—bespectacled or sharp-eyed; bearded or clean-shaven; between the ages of about twenty-five and sixty; jackets open, neckties; several wearing yarmulkes, making a Sabbath exception to conduct business. At Warburg’s entry, they had all stood.

  Once they were seated, Warburg came right to the point. “I bring a message from Mr. Morgenthau in New York. I can tell you that the telexes nearly caught fire with his anger. Joint Distribution Committee funds are not to go to the killing of Englishmen. I must know how your groups are tied to the so-called Hebrew Rebellion Movement. If the Irgun war against the British has moved from Palestine to Europe, the cutoff of JDC funds will be complete.” Warburg’s statement was met with silence.

  Finally Lorenzo Anselmo, the Delegation chairman, spoke. He was a white-haired man, formerly the prosperous manufacturer of porcelain ware who had lost his company in the Fascist requisition of Jewish property. The courtly Anselmo had spent the war years in Switzerland, but because of the force of his personality and the memory of his open defiance of Mussolini, he had resumed his role as a leader of Rome’s Jews. “You know, Mr. Warburg, that we are not the ones to whom you should be conveying this message. No one here is associated with the Haganah. And the Haganah would be foolish to associate with us. Is that not obvious?”

  Another man spoke, Stanislaw Monash, the head of the new Central Committee of Liberated Jews. This coordinating body of DPs in various camps had, in fact, been formed at Warburg’s insistence, and with his help. Monash, a survivor of Warsaw, was a Dante scholar and fluent in Italian. “The British secret service watches all of us,” he said. “They are watching this meeting. To them, one Jew is like another.”

  “To Morgenthau also,” a man whom Warburg did not know put in. He was glaring at Warburg. “The JDC will punish those still languishing in the camps because of the actions of Jewish resisters? That is collective punishment, a Nazi tactic.”

  “The JDC will do no such thing,” Warburg said firmly. “You think I will abandon those in camps? Do you know me, Sir?” Warburg returned the man’s unfriendly stare.

  “Yes, I know you,” he said, but with sudden sheepishness. “You said the support will be cut off—”

  “Yes, from expressly Jewish groups. From your groups. Bricha, the Delegation, Merkaz, Aliyah Bet, even Comunità Ebraica di Roma. That is the message the Hebrew rebels need to hear, whoever they are. Jewish groups will be cut off, not Jews. The JDC is under pressure from Washington now, because Washington is under pressure from London.”

  “Truman already bars Jews from America.”

  “Yes,” Warburg said. “That is why he supports Jews in Israel. Israel solves his problem. That works for us so long as we do not defy him. The JDC cannot sponsor war, period. JDC support of refugees will continue through other channels. The International Relief Committee,
the Red Cross, our own medical centers. JDC’s work will not flag. But nothing will go to groups associated with attacks on the British.”

  “Every group with Zionist sympathies will be associated,” another said.

  “We all have Zionist sympathies,” Warburg said. “But we are not killers.”

  “No one died at the embassy. Whoever did that put up police barricades ahead of time, to keep innocent people away.”

  Warburg himself had made that point to Mates that night, even before knowing about the barricades. But now he was making a different point. “We all want the British to open up immigration. Hell, Truman wants it. He’s leaning on Attlee right now. But American support, both financial and political—and support from American Jews themselves—depends on the widespread sympathy for the plight of refugees. If refugees become a pawn in the war, justifying terror and assassination, then the sympathy disappears. Disappears from the White House. Disappears from American synagogues. Disappears! Who here does not understand that?”

  Warburg cast his eyes slowly around the table, inviting dissent, ready to snuff it out. He placed his hands together, leaning forward. “The Jewish war must not come to Rome. Palestine is another matter. The Jewish war must be kept separate from the Jewish refugees. I am delivering the message to you because I assume some at this table can carry the message further. Leave morality out of it. Violence against the English will only stiffen their refusal to open immigration.”

  No one disputed Warburg’s declaration. After another interval of silence, they began to turn toward each other, speaking in twos and threes, in Italian and Yiddish, stepping on one another’s statements, preferring contention among themselves to confrontation with the American. Voices were raised, a release of the tension that had built in the room, a resumption of the arguments Rome’s Jews had been having with themselves since the bombing. Catching snatches of what was said, Warburg listened as if the “he” referred to were not himself.