by Tim Parks
Morris hesitated, then thrust back his chair. ‘No, I’ve had enough of being treated like this. I won’t say a word more until I have spoken to a lawyer.’
‘So, we have arrived at the unanswerable question.’ Fendtsteig at last managed a smile and looked directly, coldly into Morris’s eyes. ‘Or is it that you need time to remember where you were only eight or nine hours ago?’
Meeting that freezing gaze, so perfectly timed, Morris was distinctly aware of having lost the initiative, of having made some awful tactical mistake. He wavered, stood up. ‘Not at all, Colonnello. But if you are so convinced I am guilty, then everything I say will be turned against me.’
Then, as he was getting to his feet, his whole body was swamped with scorching heat. It came up from his groin, fast and prickly, the skin on his hands and cheeks tingled with blood. There was even the thickening of an erection. If only he could just solve the whole damn stupid problem by wringing the little rat’s neck! At the same moment a voice deep inside, as if calling from the bottom of a well, screamed no. The sound swelled and echoed in his head. No, Morri, no! Don’t! Accompanied by an oppressive darkness. Curtains were being drawn in on either side of the world. Vision was narrowing and narrowing to the last bright glint of Fendtsteig’s spectacles.
Swaying on his feet, Morris leaned forward and grabbed at the desk. His hand closed on a great glass paperweight in the shape of a whale. He clutched at it. No! her voice was screaming. His head spun.
Part Three
22
From a sheet of paper, his fourteenth day in gaol, Morris cut out a cross. More difficult was crucifying Our Lord on it. But he remembered the curious twist the body must have, the curve following through from hips and torso to the head leaning on the left shoulder and then the undulating arms, sinking at the elbow, rising to cruelly nailed hands. Not unlike, he thought, the trained contortions of vines stark in winter sunlight on the Veronese hills. When he turned the hands to leaves his serial-murderer cellmate was most impressed. The face, as it must be, was hers. Androgynous, but identifiable. Morris stared at the nth effort and saw he’d got it right. Perhaps he did have a talent for the visual arts after all. He tucked the top of the cross into a crack above the room’s small mirror, then folded the rest of the paper down so that it seemed to divide his reflected face into four small segments around its twin axes of torment. IHS, Certainly Catholicism was more satisfying than his mother’s austere Methodism, infinitely richer; and staring at the face he’d drawn, Morris muttered the words he’d learnt at catechism when preparing for his marriage: ‘Ave Maria; hail, Mary! full of grace, blessed art thou among women.’
‘And blessed,’ his psycho-cellmate chimed in, ‘the fruit of your womb, Jesus Christ.’
Morris looked up. The fruit of her womb? He had forgotten that part. The other man’s eyes, looking round from the window, were glassily empty. But for Morris the message was only too clear. He had killed the fruit of her womb. In his dear Mimi, he had crucified Christ, even before he could be born. Upon reading the radiant alarm on his face, his cellmate, who it seemed had done away with his whole and remarkably extended family, burst into raucous laughter. The man had a frightening way of blowing out fat cheeks and chuckling for too long over things that weren’t funny. Morris, before the cross he had made himself, crossed himself, and fell to his knees. Somehow he would make amends. Indeed, his only real reason for wanting to get out of here, for being alive at all, was to make amends.
But when would he get out? The lawyer, when they finally let him see one, had explained that he hadn’t been officially charged as yet, was only being held because if released he might pervert evidence pertaining to a crime. Apparently they could do that for up to six months, though in Italy, Morris often felt, they could do more or less whatever they wanted anyway. And what they wanted most of all of course was for him to tell them what he had been doing that night; indeed they wouldn’t let him out until he did, because that would give him the chance, they said, to cook up a story with someone else. His wife for example.
This, the lawyer explained, was why a guard had to be present throughout their interview. This was why he wasn’t being allowed any visitors.
Morris had objected strongly to the notion that he might cook up a story. And he made it clear that he would never, never, never tell what he had been doing that night. It was his own private business. Anyway, there was no need for him to tell them anything when it was quite clear that whatever had happened to Bobo was the responsibility of the two immigrants. Why hadn’t they caught them yet?
Delicately, the lawyer had hinted that his wife might not mind so much if he said he had spent those missing hours with another woman. Or even a man. Morris had dismissed the fellow at once. Both for impertinence and incompetence. For not only had it never occurred to Morris to be unfaithful to his wife, but he felt it must be perfectly clear to all and sundry that he was just not that kind of person. Nobody would believe such a story. He himself barely believed it of Bobo.
Then gaol was not without its consolations, for the moment. The humiliations of prison clothes, prison food, prison companions, Morris quickly decided, offered the sort of mortifying experience that set one apart, gave one a more human perspective on things. As if, like Dante, one had been allowed to make a brief visit to hell, check out everybody’s sins, their punishments, their state of mind, but always in the knowledge that one was not oneself one of the damned. For, consolations or no consolations, Morris had no intention of staying very long. It was just that, since Mimi had promised she would tell him how to get out, he simply didn’t need to worry about it.
In his prison cell he drew his crucifixions and kept his Mimi journal: page after page of philosophical dialogue, fulsome affection, bizarre narrative. It was she who invented all the wonderful inaccuracies there. She was so clever at that. Or if time hung heavy, he liked to psychoanalyse his cellmate, which he did rather well, he thought. Certainly the man seemed much improved by the kind of attention Morris was paying him. It even occurred to Morris that if they did ever manage to put him away for any length of time, he might do worse than take a degree and doctorate in psychology. It was something he was well equipped for and doubtless the prison would throw up analysis fodder in abundance. At mealtimes he was careful not to overeat, he must stay in trim. There would be so much to be done when he got out: completing the move to Quinzano, planning the renovation of Villa Caritas, developing the company into something rather more serious than it was at present.
In the evenings, on closing his eyes for sleep, Morris would lie back in the blissful peace that came with conjuring Mimi: Mimi as she had been on the beach at Rimini: the raven hair, the smell of her lotioned skin, the smooth length of her; Mimi in a bar drinking Coca-Cola, head tipped back, lips parted, eyes smiling; and now she was with him in the hotel room that moment when he turned from washing blood from his hands to find that she had let her night-dress slip down over those huge breasts. The first time he ever saw her naked, that splendid slim, full body. Morris was in paradise. What a rich life he had had!
But he didn’t masturbate. He just held her smiling image perfectly there before him, not unlike the way he used to remember his dead mother holding some Image still and full in his adolescent mind. And it was during one of these pre-sleep reveries that she came to him and very simply explained how it was to be done. There were parallels, he later thought, with the angel who threw open the prison doors for the Apostle Peter, who loosened his chains and took him past the guards. Just that Mimi was a shade subtler. Who would ever have thought it of her?
The priest, when Mimi decided it was time he should ask for one, was young and suave and clearly liberal, which unfortunately did not fit in at all with Morris’s vision of how their conversation should be. However, making do with what the Lord had provided seemed very much the story of his life. He explained to the man, who wore fashionable, gold-rimmed glasses, that although he, Morris, wasn’t guilty of any crime, his impri
sonment had brought on a sort of religious crisis. All this time he’d had to think and to see other people suffering had led him to appreciate that the life he had been trying to live till now, his modern, businessman’s affluent existence, had no meaning at all, was merely the voracious mouth of materialism chasing the arid tail of hedonism.
The priest no more than blinked at this gem.
Plus there was something else weighing on his mind, Morris said. Something that would give him no peace.
The priest watched Intently as he spoke and, being watched, Morris noted that the man had cut himself shaving too closely to a small snub nose.
The fact was, he said, that when he had converted to Catholicism something over a year ago, he had done so merely out of convenience. In order to marry. In truth, he had lied before God when he had spoken of his penitence, since the whole thing had been merely form to him, like getting some bureaucratic document stamped or something. In fact he hadn’t even believed in God at the time, he had been so bitter about this other thing in his life, this other thing that weighed on his heart, and that he had never mentioned. Morris looked the man straight in the eye, then bowed his head. Now he wished to make a proper, full confession and receive the Host and feel he had been accepted into Christ’s church.
From his cassock the priest produced a diary with the Reader’s Digest logo, and a further appointment was fixed. So that during the recreation hour of two days later, Morris knelt in a prefab confession box in a small cement chapel and began to tell, among other things, how he had been in love with and had had sex with his wife’s sister, Massimina, before she was kidnapped and killed some years ago, and how he had then married his wife only because she reminded him of her sister, with whose soul in paradise he was still in love, and whom he regularly saw in sleep and sometimes even awake in the form of the Madonna and other saints, and whom he thought about quite constantly, with the result that he lived in a state of profound alienation from his wife, as if he wasn’t really with her at all. Of course he made hundreds of simple material decisions with Paola, about furniture and meals and means of transport and suchlike, but really it was as if he never spoke to her at all, because that bourgeois outward aspect of his life, the practical accumulation of wealth and so on and so forth, was completely meaningless - and when they made love it was Massimina he saw, Massimina he imagined, even calling out her name sometimes, so that he felt desperately guilty and at the same time blocked, paralysed, unable to move forward in his life, unable to be generous or even true to himself.
Morris spoke for about twenty minutes like this, responding to a question here and there, some small request for clarification, but for the most part pressing on blindly, or rather cleverly and passionately inventing, even as he spoke, what was after all the inescapable underlying truth, the deep structure of his unconscious mind, this profound mental malaise into which life had plunged him and from which he earnestly desired to escape. Yet his obsession was such, as he explained, that recently he had arrived at extremes of perversion he would never have imagined possible in his saner days. Terrible, impure things.
‘Tell me, figlio mio,’ the priest said softly.
But Morris felt too embarrassed, he said, too deeply ashamed.
It was through the unburdening of shame that the soul achieved liberation, the priest said persuasively.
Morris fell silent. The truth was his knees were hurting on the hard floor, although at the same time he realised how appropriate this was.
‘Figlio mio, all have sinned. There is nothing the Lord has not heard and forgiven before.’
This reminded Morris of his reflections on the carnival crowd in Piazza Bra, the Draculas and Saddam Husseins, though all that seemed a very long time ago now.
‘Grazie, padre,’ he said, then let a good thirty seconds pass before offering: ‘Shortly before I came into prison, my mother-in-law died.’ He stopped.
That was hardly your fault,’ the priest remarked.
‘In order to bury her in the family grave’ - there was an edge in Morris’s voice now - ‘they had to . . .’
‘Yes, my son?’
He shifted his weight to shake a cramp out of his right leg.
They had to pull out Massimina’s coffin. That is the girl I loved. I love.’
The priest now filled the considerable space Morris left here by remarking that this was perfectly normal procedure.
‘When I . . . when I heard that her coffin would be left out the night before the burial, I went to the cemetery. I went after it was closed. I climbed over the wall’ - here Morris faltered -’I climbed over the wall and found her coffin and sat by it for hours.’
‘Again that is hardly a sin, my son.’
‘I sat by it, in the dark, and I masturbated. Twice,’ Morris said.
The priest was silent now. Morris became acutely aware of his breathing just the other side of the small grille. ‘But it’s not so much what I did that was bad. It was what I was thinking.’
There was a pause. ‘And what were you thinking, my son?’
‘My heart was full of bitterness,’ Morris said.
This was true.
‘You had thoughts you are now ashamed of?’
‘I thought,’ Morris said, enunciating very carefully, but as if against all the odds, ‘I thought that I ... I wished it was my wife who had been kidnapped and killed, not Massimina, and I wished I could have sex with Massimina, even dead as a corpse, even decomposed as she must be in that awful box.’ He hesitated, wondering if this wasn’t going rather too far. ‘I wished I could pour my sperm into her, even in the state she is in now.’
‘Figlio mio,’ the priest said, clearly finding this heavy going, although, working in a prison, Morris thought, one must get to hear some pretty ugly stuff. The man could hardly afford to be squeamish. He waited.
After a moment the priest asked: ‘Is that all, my son?’
Wasn’t it enough? Morris thought for a moment, then said: ‘Sì, padre, sì, except . . . you see, ever since then I’ve been unable to get these thoughts out of my head. I think of nothing else. It’s humiliating. Totally humiliating. My mind is completely blocked. I mean, they’ve put me here for something I didn’t do, and I don’t even care. I’m even happy to be here. Because my mind is so blocked and paralysed I wouldn’t know what to do if I got out. I can’t bear the thought of seeing my wife and feeling so guilty with her all the time. Then to make matters worse she’s expecting a child, which should . . .’
Quite unexpectedly, quite genuinely, Morris began to cry. It was the third or fourth time in just a few days. His ugly infant sobs filled the enclosed space. And what he was crying for, he thought quite lucidly, was all the lies he had to tell, and what a true picture those lies nevertheless painted of his perverted soul.
After a few more minutes of this, of Morris trying to stem the tidal wave of his self-pity and the voice the other side of the grille murmuring words of comfort into the tempest of his tears, the bell sounded for the end of the recreation period and hence the time had come for ecclesiastical authority to announce the required penance.
Morris was hoping for something dramatic, something that might quite convincingly confer forgiveness, but in the end and after what was, when you came to think of it, remarkably little reflection, the young priest betrayed his liberalism by offering nothing more than a modest dosage of Ave Marias and mea culpas.
‘But. . .’ Morris began.
‘Your sins are not sins of wilfulness,’ the priest explained. They are sins of sickness, a sickness so profound that I do not imagine any penance, however extravagant and well meant, could resolve it.’ He paused. ‘On the contrary, this is a case where even penance itself might become a perverse form of indulgence. You must understand that your heart and your soul are sick. You must pray to God to cure your sickness. Above all, you must learn to want to be cured.’ The priest hesitated. ‘Frankly, if you will let me advise you, my son, I believe it is your duty both to God an
d to your wife to see a psychiatrist.’
Morris made a noise of protest. If he had come to a priest rather than to a psychiatrist, it was because he believed that help lay only in God and in a complete turning away from the life he had been living. He had been having strange visions in his sleep recently, he added quite truthfully, visions that seemed to him profoundly religious in nature. He saw the Madonna.
‘Figlio mio’ - the priest got up and began to move - ‘so long as it remains obedient to His will, learning is a blessed virtue. I suggest that I get in touch with the prison psychiatrist and arrange a meeting for you as soon as possible.’
Again Morris appeared to object, upon which the priest’s voice hardened. ‘Consider it, if you like, an integral part of your penance. I repeat, the Lord has given us skill in medicine precisely in order to deal with cases like yours.’
This was a fair comment, Morris thought as he emerged from the cramped confessional to shake the man’s hand and return to his cell. But far more importantly it meant that some three or four days later he would be able to hand over to that prison psychiatrist the scores of pages of notes he had been writing under her dictation ever since they had put him in prison. After which, assuming the man actually read them and had checked up some file or other on his case, it should be nothing more than a matter of time before they let him out. Because they could hardly accuse him of reticence after reading that lot. If it was a story they wanted, then they had got one, and far more convincingly than if he had just told it to them: a brilliantly concocted alibi, and brilliant precisely because it had been she had thought of it. Though when in sleep Mimi returned to him as the Vergine incoronata, he insisted that, fabrications apart, the conversion part of his story was real. Truly it was. But Mimi said of course she knew that anyway, since she could read inside his soul. She knew he believed, just as she always had, in the almighty God and in Christ crucified and in the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the blessed body and blood. It was just that if he were to make good use of the life and talents God had given him, if he were to help those poor immigrants and be a good father to Paola’s child, then there was no point in his getting himself put away for the rest of his life, was there? So she had had to invent this rather unpleasant story of the cemetery and the coffin, to get her lover out of here.
