The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  ‘That statue,’ said Nazreem, pouring herself yet another glass of wine, and gesturing vaguely towards the great stone bulk of the monastery, ‘is a sacred object all right. Even if it is just a copy. Like the others. Sacred objects with a pedigree that stretches far back beyond the dawn of Christianity, just like the holy grove, the lindens, in Altötting, were sacred long before there were any Christians there.’

  Nazreem was now quite clearly drunk. Marcus was beginning to get irritated with her. And with himself. This was not what he had intended at all. She was not used to wine, she was also understandably over-excited, but if she kept on like this she was in more danger than he was of insulting their host at his own table.

  ‘The whole thing is a fraud,’ she said, a little too loudly. In the far corner of the courtyard the violinists skipped a beat to glance in their direction. ‘You know, don’t you,’ she spoke directly to the abbot, ‘that it wasn’t just Isis the church appropriated, it was every vestige of the old religions. The Mary cult didn’t just swallow up Isis but Astarte too and the great earth mother, Kybele.

  The smile had vanished from the abbot’s face though his look was not so much angry as concerned, as if he too thought Nazreem had consumed too much wine.

  Nazreem swigged back the last of the wine in her glass defiantly.

  ‘You are a Muslim, even if not always a very devout one,’ he said with only the slightest of glances at her empty wine glass. ‘And I respect your faith. I really do. And for this reason I also understand that you have difficulty with the Catholic tradition of iconography – I mean of making what some would call “graven images”, an impression which I think you, Dr Frey, coming from your own rather different Christian tradition also find somewhat difficult.’

  ‘I like to think I can examine different faiths objectively,’ said Marcus.

  ‘Do you? Do you now? Deep down I think there is a part of you that believes we in the Roman Catholic Church particularly are in danger of becoming idolaters.’

  Marcus looked at the man in some surprise. He had not expected to hear the question put quite so bluntly, though the reality was that he thought it a radical understatement, and his face said so even before he could formulate a reply.

  ‘You are familiar with the old Latin expression Ars longa, vita brevis.’ Marcus blinked, taken aback by an apparently complete non sequitur, realising as the thought flicked through his mind that there was even a Latin phrase to express a loss of the train of thought.

  ‘Art lasts long but life is short,’ he rendered in a recollection of schoolboy translation.

  The abbot smiled. ‘I thought so. You are also an admirer of art, I suspect, including much of the art that was created in the name of the church, even the Catholic Church.’

  ‘Yes, of course, but …’

  The abbot held up one hand. ‘Please, let me finish. Yet you live in a country which was responsible for one of the greatest acts of vandalism in history.’

  Marcus gave him a quizzical look.

  ‘During the English Reformation, tens of thousands of the most sublime works of art were destroyed, finely hewn wooden carvings – the works of the greatest masters – hurled onto bonfires, exquisitely wrought gold and silver plate melted down, stone statues of saints taken from their niches and smashed.’

  He turned to Nazreem: ‘The history of Islam is also not exactly free from similar barbarism.’

  ‘We do not make images,’ said Nazreem simply, but there was no fire in her voice, as if she knew what was coming.

  ‘No,’ said the abbot, ‘and the decorative art of Islam is very beautiful as we can see even here in these rare examples where it has fused with the native art of Europe, but because art does not meet their religion’s approval, should it be destroyed? As in Afghanistan, for example.’

  She looked at him sideways, the taste of the wine souring in her mouth. She knew what he was about to say and said it for him:

  ‘Bamiyan, the great Buddhas.’

  ‘Indeed, the largest in the world, and nearly two thousand years old in the case of one of them. Blown to pieces by the Taliban. In the same way the gold and silver stripped from Catholic churches by English kings were used to buy powder and muskets, so the pieces of the great Buddhas of Bamiyan were hawked by the Taliban to buy AK47s. All, of course, in the name of God.’

  ‘But the early Christians were just as bad, weren’t they,’ interrupted Marcus, ‘taking over temples of the old gods and stripping them of their statues.’ He suddenly stopped when he saw Nazreem staring at him and realised he had scarcely been listening to his own words; that was precisely the point – they had not got rid of all of them. Some they had made their own.

  The abbot was holding his wine glass in his hand like a chalice and watching him over the top of it, his face pregnant with revelation. He leaned back in his chair and set the half-full wine glass on the white tablecloth in front of him, a chalice on an altar and said quietly, directly: ‘Christianity is not one force, one religion, and never has been.’

  ‘But I thought the Catholic Church …’

  ‘… the name means universal Church,’ the abbot smiled. ‘But it is universal perhaps only in its aspirations. It has never truly contained the body of faith of all Christians. Or indeed only Christians.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Throughout the ages, there have been people who interpret things differently, those who would use religion to guide men and those who would use it to control them.’

  On the other tables, waiters were beginning to clear away dishes noisily; the young couple had long gone, to an early bed; the family were getting ready to go home, the young children now hoisted onto shoulders, half-asleep; even the dumpy little tripe-eater had finished eating and seemed to be nodding off over a cup of coffee and a strong cigar. In the corner the musicians shuffled their sheet music before launching into a string nocturne that sounded like a lullaby.

  ‘Some of us,’ the abbot said, ‘have always believed that religion and civilisation should go hand-in-hand rather than be opposed. That has, at times, made us enemies of fundamentalists, of whatever faith, men for the most part who reject culture and science almost equally, rather than embracing both and striving to see a unity.’

  Marcus feared he was beginning to miss the point.

  ‘I mean, for example, in the United States, primarily, those Christian fundamentalists who are ardent creationists, who insist on believing every word in the Bible so literally that they believe the earth to be only a few thousand years old.’

  ‘I seem to recall that it’s not so long ago that the Catholic Church persecuted people who said the earth was round.’

  ‘I think you’ll find it was longer ago than you think. I have never said we were always right or that there were never wrong-headed people, or that there are not now. But we have long since made our peace with Galileo. Some of us have no problem in seeing the Bible as a sacred text in literary form, containing truths to be interpreted and grasped at, not strictly meant to control our thoughts today. It is equally possible to take the wonderful literature of the Koran in the same way.’

  ‘It is?’ began Nazreem, and then stopped, remembering some of the verses her father had been fond of reciting, poetic yet almost impenetrable in meaning. And the apparent contradictions that could be found by those who tried to make the ‘word of God’ mean what they wanted it to mean.

  Then she rounded on the old man: ‘I’m right, aren’t I? You know that the statue here is a pagan idol, or a copy of one that was confused – deliberately – with the Virgin Mary, with the Madonna. The figurine we found in Gaza, the statue we found, might just be the missing link, the “original” of Mary that is clearly older than the pagan goddess. Not Isis or Astarte but the one that’s older than any of them – Kybele. In Madrid, at the fountain of Cibeles – Kybele – all that stuff about football, you were just playing with us?’

  ‘Playing with you? I hardly think so. Besides everything I sai
d was perfectly true – even about me having been a keen Réal Madrid fan. But in one respect you are not wrong: I was prompting you, not as a tease or a joke, but to see if our, if my suspicions, might be correct. I think the image that was unearthed in Gaza is indeed a figure of Kybele that at some stage was confounded with the Virgin Mary. And it may not be just any figure of Kybele.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The Marian cult and the worship of Kybele have such strong links to Rome. The worship of Kybele – like the worship of the soldier god Mithras’ – Marcus immediately heard in his head the words of the American Marine Colonel in the Madrid hotel room – ‘became prevalent in Rome in the third century BC, but never more than when the city was in mortal danger.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘When the troops of Hannibal were at the gates, of course. Leading citizens demanded that the most holy of all images of Kybele, a black statue carved of stone, be fetched from Phrygia and brought into the city. One of the foremost matronae of Rome allegedly bore it from Ostia harbour into the city herself.

  ‘When Rome was spared and Hannibal put to flight, the goddess was given the credit. Great temples were built to her all over Italy, the most famous on a hill outside Naples. The poet Virgil retired there. The ancient Romans called it Mons Sacer, the holy mountain, but in the seventh century it was christened – quite literally – Monte Vergine. A nice touch because some local folk confused it with the Virgil connection. It was dedicated to the Madonna, but the ruins of the original temple to Kybele are still there.’

  Marcus and Nazreem exchanged glances. He could read in her face astonishment to hear so much of what she had obviously been trying to deduce confirmed from the mouth of a Roman Catholic abbot.

  ‘The greatest temple,’ the abbot continued, ‘was built on the summit of the Esquiline Hill to house the black statue of Kybele and act as a home to her priesthood. It stood there for half a millennium.’

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘A church was built there in the middle of the fifth century AD, a church that was later greatly expanded to become the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, the largest church in the world dedicated to the Virgin Mary.’

  ‘And the statue?’

  ‘The figure of the goddess disappeared. It is widely believed that it was taken to Constantinople, when the capital of the empire was moved, and simply lost en route. Or later disregarded as just another pagan idol. But some of us have always thought that that was most unlikely, given its importance. The other possibility is that it was hidden, deliberately. To protect her until a more civilised age when men would no longer destroy such sacred things. But it may be that such an age will never come.’

  There was a cold fire in Nazreem’s eyes as she listened to him and then with ringing scepticism in her voice she said: ‘I’m not sure whether to be impressed with your intellect or horrified by your cynicism. You knew that your precious Madonna here might be a copy of a pagan idol?’

  ‘That’s not exactly what I said.’

  ‘Not exactly, but pretty close and that still makes you a hypocrite,’ Marcus joined in.

  The abbot raised his eyebrows. ‘Am I? I would have thought I was being anything but hypocritical.’ Then abruptly he wiped his mouth with his napkin, discarded it on the table top, and said: ‘Come. It is late. We can discuss all this in the morning.’

  He signalled to the head waiter who bowed low indicating that he regarded payment as unnecessary. Immediately another waiter appeared behind the abbot’s chair pulling it back to make it easier for him to rise, while a second did the same for Nazreem. Marcus, it was clear, would have to help himself. He took Nazreem’s arm unable to help noticing she was unsteady on her feet. There was a glare behind the glazed film of her eyes as they watched the abbot’s back retreating towards the Gothic arch that led into the monastery cloister.

  ‘You can’t leave it alone, can you,’ Nazreem called after the old man. ‘Any of you. That’s why you tried to steal it.’

  ‘He’s right. It’s time for bed,’ said Marcus putting an arm around her. He could feel her slim frame shaking, but whether it was from the sudden chill of the night air or some repressed rage, he could not be sure. Her eyes remained fixed on the door in the far corner long after the abbot had closed it behind him. For not the first time since she had come back into his life, Marcus was worried about her. He was also worried by the final taunt she had flung at the elderly clergyman. ‘Tried to steal it’. Was she accusing the church? And if not, who? And what did she mean by ‘tried’?

  52

  ‘Psst! Get up! We’re getting out of here.’ Marcus stirred in his sleep, then opened his eyes to a darkness that was total. Heavy wooden shutters on the windows were designed to keep out the noonday sun; they had no problem with moonlight. There was someone shaking his arm, then the next thing he knew the duvet cover was thrown back off him.

  ‘What the …? Who the …?’ he all but shouted aloud, reaching up and pulling the light cord that dangled above the bed. At once the room sprang into illumination to reveal Nazreem standing there above him, fully dressed and with her light travelling bag slung over her shoulder.

  ‘Don’t!’ she said urgently. ‘Someone will see.’ And pulled the light cord again, plunging them back into darkness.

  ‘Stop it, will you. This is getting ridiculous,’ said Marcus, pulling the cord again and flooding the room with light. ‘Who or what are you talking about. Besides, those shutters are completely lightproof.’

  She glanced across at them and nodded uncertainly. ‘Quick,’ she said. ‘Get up, get dressed. We have to go.’

  ‘What is this? Why?’ said Marcus sitting up and instinctively pulling the duvet back over the boxer shorts that were all he slept in. Nazreem threw it back again.

  ‘There’s no time,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

  Reluctantly Marcus began to do as he was told, if only to humour her for the moment. ‘Will you tell me what this is all about?’ he said.

  Nazreem shushed him. ‘Not so loud. Everyone is asleep. Even on the reception. If we go now, we can sneak out before anyone notices.’

  ‘And why on earth would we want to do that?’

  She raised her eyebrows impatiently. ‘You weren’t listening to a thing, were you? He knows. That means he knew all along. If we leave it too long they won’t let us leave.’

  ‘What makes you think …?’

  ‘It’s obvious. We talked, back in Munich, about who would have reason to steal the statue. We dismissed the Catholic Church because if an independent museum had discovered the oldest image of the Virgin Mary, it would have been universally hailed as a miracle. Gaza would have become a point of pilgrimage for the whole Christian world. It would even have been a threat to the dominance of Islam in the area, that’s why we decided that Muslim extremists might be after it too.’

  ‘Yes, but … you’re saying now that it’s not Christian at all.’

  ‘Precisely, don’t you see. And they knew that. That’s why they’re so worried. Compare the statue from Gaza with the one here and you start to expose the whole Black Madonna cult for the sham it always has been: a cynical takeover of the old earth mother religions. The link between the Gaza statue and Kybele is clear. It would blow Marianism out of the water, and a good proportion of Catholic devotion would disintegrate.’

  Marcus remembered the ‘Texan Taliban’ and their phobia about the spreading cult of the Mexican Madonna. If that were proved to have been all along just an old Aztec cult given a makeover …

  ‘But that doesn’t mean we’re in any danger.’

  ‘Doesn’t it? I’m not waiting to find out.’

  ‘But if the original is still missing,’ Marcus said, climbing into his trousers and doing up the belt, ‘what does it matter?’

  She gave him a pointed look and said simply: ‘Hurry up.’

  ‘But … I know you said that if you found out what the statue really was you could …. Wait a minute!’ The reali
sation came over him like a cold shower: ‘You know where it is! You’ve known where it is all along. It wasn’t really stolen, was it? It’s still there, back in Gaza. Hidden. By you!’

  ‘Come on, Marcus, let’s get going. There’ll be time enough for questions and answers later.’

  53

  Even the smallest Spanish towns go late to bed. In the bar on the corner of the square below the steps that led up to the great monastery’s façade they were still stacking chairs inside while a few locals lingered over a last pacharán or anis with the late-night waiters. The dumpy little man Marcus had seen salivating over his tripe earlier in the restaurant was smoking a cigarette at the counter poring over horse-racing form in the local paper.

  Marcus and Nazreem crept by like thieves in the night or illicit lovers doing a moonlight flit, but if anyone paid them any heed there was no sign of it. The reception at the Parador had been deserted and they had left their keys in their rooms. The desk clerk had again swiped Marcus’s credit card on arrival so he did not have the excuse of worrying that they hadn’t paid. Even so, he felt more foolish than clever creeping out of a plush hotel in the small hours of the morning, uncertain of where they were headed or why.

  Beyond the square the dark streets were empty, the Gothic pinnacles and parapets of the monastic fortress a brooding presence over the little low dwellings. The main road out of town led past a post office, a few shops and a bus station, but a cursory examination of the timetable revealed the first bus passing through was the daily service to Cáceres, the provincial capital, at five-fifty a.m., in more than two hours’ time. There was no sign of a taxi firm, and even if there was, Marcus wondered where they would go. It was a long drive back to Madrid. And then what? Whatever was in Nazreem’s mind, she wasn’t sharing.