Eminence
Page 1
MORRIS LANGLO WEST was born in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1916. At the age of fourteen, he entered the Christian Brothers seminary ‘as a kind of refuge’ from a difficult childhood. He attended the University of Melbourne and worked as a teacher. In 1941 he left the Christian Brothers without taking final vows. During World War II West worked as a code breaker, and for a time he was private secretary to former prime minister Billy Hughes.
After the war, West became a successful writer and producer of radio serials. In 1955 he left Australia to build an international career as a writer and lived with his family in Austria, Italy, England and the USA. West also worked for a time as the Vatican correspondent for the British newspaper, the Daily Mail. He returned to Australia in 1982.
Morris West wrote 30 books and many plays, and several of his novels were adapted for film. His books were published in 28 languages and sold more than 70 million copies worldwide. Each new book he wrote after he became an established writer sold more than one million copies.
West received many awards and accolades over his long writing career, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W.H. Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature for The Devil’s Advocate. In 1978 he was elected a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1985, and was made an Officer of the Order (AO) in 1997.
Morris West died at his desk in 1999.
THE MORRIS WEST COLLECTION
FICTION
Moon in My Pocket (1945, as Julian Morris)
Gallows on the Sand (1956)
Kundu (1957)
The Big Story (US title: The Crooked Road) (1957)
The Concubine (US title: McCreary Moves In) (1958)
The Second Victory (US title: Backlash) (1958)
The Devil’s Advocate (1959)
The Naked Country (1960)
Daughter of Silence (1961)
The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963)
The Ambassador (1965)
The Tower of Babel (1968)
Summer of the Red Wolf (1971)
The Salamander (1973)
Harlequin (1974)
The Navigator (1976)
Proteus (1979)
The Clowns of God (1981)
The World is Made of Glass (1983)
Cassidy (1986)
Masterclass (1988)
Lazarus (1990)
The Ringmaster (1991)
The Lovers (1993)
Vanishing Point (1996)
Eminence (1998)
The Last Confession (2000, published posthumously)
PLAYS
The Illusionists (1955)
The Devil’s Advocate (1961)
Daughter of Silence (1962)
The Heretic (1969)
The World is Made of Glass (1982)
NON-FICTION
Children of the Sun (US title: Children of the Shadows) (1957)
Scandal in the Assembly (1970, with Richard Frances)
A View from the Ridge (1996, autobiography)
Images and Inscriptions (1997, selected by Beryl Barraclough)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Terms used in the text do not always reflect current usage.
This edition published by Allen & Unwin in 2017
First published in Australia in 1998 by Harper Collins Publishers Pty Ltd
Copyright © The Morris West Collection 1998
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
Cover design: Julia Eim
Cover image: Shutterstock
ISBN 978 1 76029 775 6 (pbk)
ISBN 978 1 76063 831 3 (ebook)
For Carol and David Ashley-Wilson,
good companions, friends of the heart
“The Church in Argentina, and we its members, have many reasons to confess our sins and to beg pardon of God and society: for our insensitivity, for our cowardice, for our omissions, for our complicities in respect of illegal repression.”
MONSIGNOR JORGE NOVAK, Bishop of
Quilmes, Argentina
Quoted in Politica, 29 April 1995
“Where law ends, tyranny begins.”
WILLIAM PITT
Speech, 9 January 1770
Contents
Author's Note
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Author's Note
I offer a special word of thanks to my two editorial consciences, my personal assistant, Beryl Barraclough, and my wife, Joy, companion of many voyages, sharer in many literary enterprises. Between them, they have kept me as honest, consistent and self-critical as any man can be in a confusing world.
One
On his bad days – and this was one of his worst for a long time – Luca Rossini fled the city.
His staff were accustomed to his sudden exits and entrances. They could reach him at any moment on his mobile number. His peers, who could recite by rote his titles and offices, knew also that he was a special man commanded from the highest place. They accepted that he was charged with secrets. They had secrets of their own. They understood also that gossip was a dangerous pastime in this city, so they kept any resentments for private and comradely moments. His master, a curt man, never called him to account for his movements, only for his official transactions.
He travelled widely and generally alone. Few were able to chart his movements or the reasons for them, yet wherever one turned one was conscious either of his presence or of his influence. His reports were laconic. His actions were brusque. The reasons he offered were clear and precise, but he declined to argue them with anyone except the man who commanded him. He could be agreeable in society but he committed himself rarely to intimacy. Before he left the city, he would change into jeans, walking boots, a scuffed leather jacket, an old cap. He drove an elderly Mercedes which he kept garaged at his apartment twenty minutes walk away from his office.
His destination was always the same: a smallholding in the foothills which he had bought twenty years before from a local landowner. The property, invisible from the road, was enclosed by an ancient stone wall, pierced by a heavy wooden gate studded with hand-forged country nails. Inside the walls was a small cottage, once a barn, with a roof of barrel tiles. It consisted of one large living space on to which he had built with his own hands a country kitchen and a paved bathroom. There was water and electricity and the gas was delivered in cylinders. The furniture was sparse: a bed, a dining table, a set of chairs, a battered sofa and armchair, a modern CD player with a large collection
of classics, a bookcase over which hung an olivewood crucifix with a grotesquely agonised Christus. The garden contained a vegetable plot, a stand of fruit trees, a trellis of vines, a pair of rose bushes in pots. During his absences, which were many and long, the garden was kept by a villager whose wife cleaned the house. When he came, as he was coming today, he lived a hermit’s life. When he departed he left money in an envelope propped against the table-lamp to pay the custodian.
This was the one place in the world where there was no curiosity about his identity or his station in life. He was simply, Signor Luca, il padrone. Heaven or Hell – and sometimes he had wondered which it was! – this was his true home. No one could look in on him. He could not see beyond his own garden wall, yet he recognised that this was a place of healing. The cure had been slow. It was not ended yet; perhaps it would never be ended; but as he pushed open the gate and walked into a garden rich with the first flush of autumn fruits, he felt a sudden surge of hope.
His rituals began the moment the gate closed behind him. He walked into the house, laid out the few purchases he had made along the way: bread, cheese, wine, mineral water, sausage and ham. Then he made the circuit of the room. It was clean, dusted every day as he required. There was fresh linen on the bed and towels in the bathroom. He tested the pressure in the gas cylinder and checked the pile of wood in the locker by the fireplace. He would have no need of it in this mild weather, but there was comfort in the thought that he could set and light the fire if he chose. He paused by the bookshelves and looked up at the twisted figure on the olivewood cross. He talked to it in a sudden burst of Spanish:
“It still isn’t settled between you and me! You’re out of it – out of it and into glory. That’s what we claim anyway! I’m still here. I’m held together with string and sticking plaster. The moment I got out of bed this morning, I knew it would be a bad day. I’m in flight again. What else can I do? I’m still in the dark.”
He pushed aside the volumes on the top shelf of the bookcase. Behind them was a small steel safe let into the wall. The key hung around his neck. He opened the safe and took out a pile of letters held together with faded ribbon. He did not read them. He knew every line by heart. He held them in his hands, rubbing his thumbs over the thick paper as if he were handling an amulet. Then he put the letters back in the safe, relocked it and replaced the books.
Isabel and he still corresponded; but her letters now were evanescent texts on a computer screen, read and erased, leaving only a trace of her in his memory, like the track of an insect in desert sand.
The disc on the CD player was Mozart’s Prague Symphony. He switched it on and let the music take hold of him. Then he moved to the bed. He stripped off his jacket and his shirt and laid them carefully on the bedspread. Although the air inside the house was warm, he shivered. He wrapped his arms around himself so that his finger-tips touched the first ridges of the scars that covered his back and reached around his rib case. He could not see them. He did not want to see them. He could only feel them. After a while, he released himself from his own embrace and walked out into the sunlit garden.
Outside the door, a number of simple country tools were stood against the wall: a spade, a mattock, a fork, a rake. He picked up the mattock, feeling as he always did a pleasure in the touch of the rough handle. He laid the mattock over his shoulder and began to work his way around the garden, grubbing out weeds between the lettuces and the bean rows, chopping back grass from the edges of the plots.
All the time, he was aware of the sun upon his back, of the trickles of sweat along the raised surfaces of the scars. That, too, was a comfort but the greatest comfort of all was to be able to expose the scars and feel no shame, because here there was no witness to what, so many years before, had diminished him to a nothing.
He worked for more than an hour, finding new tasks, even in the well-kept garden. He raked leaves and burned them. He clipped dead flowers and leaves from the rose bushes. He picked tomatoes and salad leaves for his supper. He inspected the ripened fruit and damped the ground under the vine trellises. By the end of it, his jangling nerves were quiet and his familiar demons had stopped their chattering. He was where he needed to be: in the quiet of a physical world far from politicians, philosophers and the contentions of warring pedants.
He cleaned the tools and set them back in their place against the wall. He spread dust on the embers of the fire, then went inside to take a shower. He found a childish delight in the grouting he had done to the tile work and wished there were someone to whom he could demonstrate his handiwork.
He was still towelling himself when he heard the shrilling of his mobile phone. He hurried into the living room and answered in his usual laconic style:
“This is Rossini.”
The voice of the caller was familiar but rasping now with anxiety.
“This is Baldassare. Where are you?”
“An hour out of town. What can I do for you?”
“Get back here as soon as possible.”
“Why the rush?”
“We have a problem, Luca.”
“Don’t describe it. Just give me the code.”
“Job and his comforters.”
“Don’t tell me Job has left so soon.”
“That’s the problem. He’s very much with us and we’re all sitting on the dung-hill with him.”
“I presume you’ve shut down communications?”
“As far as that’s ever possible in this place. That’s why we need you, Luca. You’re good at this kind of thing.”
“I wish I felt flattered. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
When he switched off the phone he burst out laughing. This was a moment of purest irony. He had survived the flaws in himself. He had survived with singular distinction the flawed system to which he had committed himself. Now he was summoned out of his private nowhere to lend counsel, strength and political skill to its most potent counsellors – of whom, most surprisingly, he was one of the juniors.
The image of Job on his dung-hill was a vivid one. The password signified much more than it said: that an irreversible event was taking place, but that until it had been completed Job’s comforters were themselves squatting on the dung-hill and if they failed to comport themselves with sufficient cunning, they themselves would be loaded with all Job’s disasters.
Once again, the scars on his back began to tingle, this time as if a small chill wind were blowing over them. Out of the past came the voice of one of his earliest physicians, a psychiatrist who specialised in the treatment of trauma victims:
“For a long time, my friend – how long I cannot tell you – you will find yourself looking backwards, worse still, wanting to live backwards. You will even find yourself using two mirrors, trying to look at the scars on your own back. You will seek redress, justice, retribution. You will never get full payment. You will declare a vendetta against the ungodly – and the godly who have collaborated with them. You will demand vengeance as of right. You will claim it even as a necessity for your personal survival.”
“There’s an old proverb among my people: ‘Before you start a vendetta, make sure you dig two graves.’ I’m not sure you can have both vengeance and survival.”
“For a while, you may. The Nuremberg trials disposed of certain war criminals. The Israelis caught Eichmann, tried him and executed him. Nevertheless, the tally of atrocities has mounted over the decades. The Christian faith offered other solutions. The churches reconciled their criminals by demoting some of them and sending others into a penitential silence. There was a cost in that, too, but spread over a few centuries, no doubt it seemed reasonable.”
“To the institution. Never to the victims.”
“What do you expect me to say?” The doctor shrugged and spread his hands in a gesture of resignation. “I am not a miracle worker. I cannot rewrite your past. I cannot prescribe your future. You will make your own terms with life in your own time.”
So, he had made a choice: to
stay within the system, use it as a fortress from which to wage his private wars. The choice was highly dangerous. It involved another rift within his damaged self. He was now both victim and vindicator. By all the beliefs which he professed, vengeance was itself a crime. It pre-empted the rights of divinity. None the less, he was committed to it. From the moment of that commitment, everything he did became a calculation and a contrivance. His public life was based upon a private lie. He could not surrender to uncertainty. The belief by which he lived had to be stronger than that to which he was bound by public profession. Very carefully, therefore, he sealed up the springs of compassion and the small seepages of doubt. He could not afford confusion. He could not afford illusion either. He could work only by the clear light of his own reason. If that light proved in the end to be a darkness, so be it. There had been a moment when, spreadeagled on the cartwheel and waiting for each stroke of the lash, he had prayed for darkness as the last mercy.
He dressed quickly, put the food he had brought in a wooden bowl in the centre of the table, scribbled a note on an envelope, stuffed the envelope with money for the custodian and propped it against the bowl. He left, slamming the old studded gate behind him, then drove at speed through the gathering traffic towards the city. He switched on the car radio, listening intently for any news item that might indicate that security had been breached in the matter of Job and his comforters. When he heard nothing, he rehearsed in his own mind the meaning of the parable.
Job was the code name of the Roman Pontiff, ageing, ill and crotchety but still assertive. The comforters were the members of the Curia, the most ancient court in Europe. Mention of the biblical dung-hill signified that the Pontiff had been stricken with the illness which his physicians had predicted: a massive stroke involving severe brain damage. Already, there had been a series of minor preludes, ischaemic episodes which, according to the doctors, presaged a major incident.
The man who telephoned him was the Cardinal Camerlengo, Chamberlain of the Vatican City State, whose responsibility it was to consult with the physicians over the treatment of the sick man, run the Papal household and, finally, when the Pontiff died, to take over the interim government of the Church while a successor was elected. The Camerlengo was a skilful man, but he was faced with a large and uncomfortable dilemma.