Eminence

by Morris West

  “So, gentlemen!” Doctor Mottola addressed his colleagues. “Diagnosis and prognosis. We have to be as plain as we can. The gentlemen in the other room are under the grill. They need us to turn the heat down. They’ve brought Angel-Novalis back into the loop. He’ll fit the right words to what we tell him. You first, Ernesto.”

  Doctor Ernesto Cattaldo shrugged resignedly.

  “What you see. Deep coma, fixed stare, no sensation. He can’t swallow, his respiration is low and spasmodic, with moments of apnoea which will become more frequent. He can’t cough to clear fluid from his lungs. I’d list him terminal.”

  “Piero?”

  Gheddo, the cardiologist, spoke first.

  “I’d agree terminal, but the decline is more gradual than one had hoped. He could last a few days yet. I’d suggest that the Sala Stampa leaves a little leeway in the prose: ‘The Holy Father’s life is ebbing peacefully to its close.’ That sort of thing.”

  “So, prognosis negative. How do we describe the treatment?”

  Doctor Gheddo shrugged.

  “Tell them the truth but not necessarily all of it. We’re administering oxygen, which still isn’t enough to balance the carbon dioxide levels in the blood. We’re hydrating him enough to keep him from burning up. We’re not nourishing him at all.”

  “We’re walking on egg-shells here.” Doctor Mottola was dubious.

  “No we’re not.” The neurologist was sharp. “We’re carrying out normal ethical treatment. Our business is with our patient, not with the press or the Roman Curia.”

  “I think,” said Doctor Mottola judiciously, “it’s rather a question of helping them to find the right words to fit both the circumstances and their consciences. I count on your support in there, gentlemen!”

  “All they need,” said Gheddo, “is a few well-rounded phrases: ‘limited intervention’, ‘studious care for the comfort and dignity of a dying man’. The gentlemen in there are even less disposed than we are to a debate on ethical principles.”

  “Are we ready then?” Doctor Mottola put the question.

  “Ready as we’ll ever be,” said Doctor Gheddo with weary resignation. “Christians to the lions! Let’s get it done!”

  They were surprised to find how little was required of them. The half-dozen senior prelates assembled in the room gave them a subdued greeting. The Camerlengo presented Monsignor Angel-Novalis who would, in due course, seek any clarification of their medical reports for inclusion in his bulletins for the world media. He asked Doctor Mottola to deliver the report in simple non-clinical terms. Doctor Mottola summed up concisely the conclusions he had reached with the assistance of his distinguished colleagues. Then he waited. The first response came from Domingo Angel-Novalis, who was no mean professional himself. He was good-humoured and he cut clean to the heart of the matter:

  “Thank you, gentlemen. May I rehearse what you have told me, to make sure I have it right. First, the Holy Father is dying. The end is expected very soon. You are delivering oxygen and hydration. His body cannot deal with more than that, because its functions are deteriorating. Correct so far?”

  “Correct,” said Doctor Mottola.

  “And your colleagues agree?”

  “They do.”

  “Will they continue to attend the Pontiff until his demise?”

  “If the Cardinal Camerlengo so directs, of course.”

  “A question, then, for all of you gentlemen. You have initiated the treatments you describe. You are continuing them at this moment?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you terminated any treatments for any reason?”

  “No.”

  “Would you recommend any treatments which are not presently being given?”

  “No.”

  “Have you had any invitations from the media to discuss this case?”

  The three doctors looked at each other. Doctor Mottola hesitated a moment before he answered.

  “I have been questioned, yes. I cannot answer for my colleagues.”

  Cattaldo and Gheddo nodded, but did not speak. The quiet inquisitor continued.

  “I am sure, gentlemen, your responses were respectful of the patient-doctor relationship, and of the family-doctor relationship which subsists between you and all members of the Papal household.”

  “That goes without saying,” said Doctor Mottola.

  “I wonder, therefore,’ Doctor Cattaldo was annoyed, “why it was necessary to say it at all!”

  “Please!” Angel-Novalis was instantly the diplomat. “Please don’t be offended. I am simply uttering a caution. My colleagues and I deal every day with media folk all round the world. They are adept at building headlines around the most fragmentary phrases. Your simplest answer to any question is that you cannot discuss the case.”

  “That can raise problems, too.”

  “I submit, my dear doctor, that we are better equipped than you are to pre-empt them and to solve them. I would not presume for one moment to trespass on your professional ground. In my own field, however, I am quite expert. I am sure, for instance, that in the next few days, you and your colleagues will be offered substantial sums of money by the media, either for press statements or television interviews, on the last days of His Holiness. When you refuse them, as I am sure you will, then you may be invited to answer some innocent-seeming questions. I counsel you to decline.”

  A small murmur of agreement went round the assembled prelates. They approved this man. He did not mince words. He waltzed lightly round the booby traps. Angel-Novalis picked up his notes and left the room. The Cardinal Camerlengo made a little face-saving speech.

  “Before you leave, gentlemen, I should like to express on my own behalf and on behalf of all members of the Curia, our thanks for your care of the Holy Father. We know that you will continue to support him to the end, which, we pray, may not be long deferred.”

  He swept them to the door, shook hands with each one and was back in half a minute to face the assembly once more. He looked like a man who had just eased a great weight off his shoulders.

  “So, my brothers, we are losing our Father. I do not think any of us will grudge him relief from the burdens of his service to the Church. It falls to me as head of his household to prepare for his passing and then to assume the governance of the Church while the See is vacant. There is much to do. I should like your permission to begin work now. Placetne fratres? Do you agree, my brothers?”

  “Placet.”

  The old-fashioned formula ran like a ripple through the assembly. To this they could all assent. Whatever their rivalries and discords, the community of the people of God continued in Christ.

  Luca Rossini had dispensed himself from the early morning meeting at the Vatican. The Secretary of State had counselled him to silence. It was not easy to be silent in an assembly of curial Cardinals who were keeping a death-watch on their supreme pastor, preparing for his obsequies, waiting to elect his successor, wondering what would happen when, as custom demanded, they resigned their offices, and waited for the new Pontiff to redistribute them.

  He had little to add to their discussions of protocol and procedure. They were the inner cabinet. He had always been a rider on the farther marches, an emissary to the outposts of Christendom. More than any of his eminent colleagues, he would be vulnerable to the sharp winds of change. He had strong adversaries and few advocates in the Sacred College and he lacked the patience to placate the hostile or cultivate those who favoured him.

  Soon his patron would be dead. The man who had used the power of his office to salvage a damaged body and spirit would absent himself for ever. Luca Rossini would be alone then. They called him a Cardinal – a hinge-man, one upon whom the gateways to power were swung. Soon he might be a hinge to a gate that opened into nowhere. He, too, would have to resign the shadowy office he held and swear fealty and obedience to a new Bishop of Rome, a new successor to Peter the Apostle. Was he prepared to do that? Leaving aside any questions of morality or ethics, was
he prepared to accept the perquisites of office, and use them without guilt or remorse for his own ends, however those ends might define themselves? Once, he had believed the definition was easy. His first medical counsellor had given it to him: “You will seek redress, justice, retribution. You will never get full payment. You will declare vendetta against the ungodly – and the godly who have collaborated with them. You will demand vengeance as of right …”

  At his first audience in Rome, the Pontiff, who was to become his patron and protector, had offered another definition:

  “You are scarred. You are bitter. You are angry. If I were in your place, I should feel the same. In a way, I am in your place, because I appointed some of the prelates who, by their silence or their connivance, permitted these atrocities to happen. Because they were dumb, we here in Rome were rendered blind and deaf I’m ashamed of that. I am ashamed of the many barbarities we appear to condone, through culpable ignorance or the false opportunism that induces us to make pacts with evil. So, wear your scars with pride. Keep your anger, but learn to forgive! Meditate every day on the words of our Saviour at the height of his agony: ‘Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.’ Do not forget either that this was the same man who strode through the precincts of the temple striking out with a lash at the peddlers and money-changers who defiled the house of God … you will not change the world or yourself overnight, but you have to try. You have to practise every day – so I will give you work to stretch your strength and enlarge your spirit.”

  He had accepted the counsel in good faith. He had discharged the tasks he had been given with energy and good judgment. He had accepted promotions as they were offered because, though they healed no wounds, they put power into his hands. He learned early to use it with restraint, mindful of its misuse against himself. The last thing he wanted was to create tyrannies of his own.

  He was scrupulous to weigh all the evidence in a cause against any cleric or clerical institution. He allowed the largest tolerances common sense would permit; but a case once proven, he was as ruthless and precise as a surgeon excising a malignant tumour.

  It was this draconian discipline, and the secrecy within which he was permitted to exercise it, which had driven him up the steep slopes of preferment. It was this same discipline which had leached out of him, drop by drop, the last life-sustaining dregs of passion, leaving him parched and empty, a lost traveller walking in circles.

  He had seen it happen to others, older and wiser than himself. Trapped in their careers, lacking the will or the inducement to break out of them, protected always, they declined all risk and surrendered themselves to a sceptical conformity in creed and conduct. In his early angry days he had mocked them. Now he was faced with the choice they had been offered at some stage of their lives: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. If you still want to wear the chef’s hat, step back from the stove and content yourself with licking the spoons to test what real cooks have made.” Now he himself was confronted with the same bleak proposition: “Stay without honour, until the mask you wear becomes your own face. Or quit and walk out to become a no-man in a no-place.”

  The thought brought back the terrors of his nightmare. He thrust them away from him, rang for his morning coffee, then switched on his computer to down-load his overnight e-mail.

  There were letters from Manila and Djakarta, from Taiwan and Thailand, from Shanghai and Bombay. All of them dealt with tinder-box issues in the less known bailiwicks of the Church, where he had been sent or called to mediate contentions or establish constructive dialogues. This was where his best work was done. His scars were his passport to the least friendly territories, even to old men in Beijing, who had survived the cultural revolution. There was a curious freemasonry between political martyrs. There were perennial unspoken bonds between the victims of the rack and the inquisitors who had put them there.

  He toyed with this thought as he dealt with his correspondence. He remembered how Paul the Apostle described himself in his letter to the Ephesians: “Paul the prisoner of Jesus Christ … a prisoner in the Lord.” For Luca Rossini, the phrase carried a sour aftertaste. Unlike Paul, he had no zeal left, only a stale conviction that common decency required him to finish the work that lay to his hand.

  Just as he was about to switch off the machine, Isabel’s letter appeared on the screen. The superscription showed it had been sent from New York at 0215 hours. He looked at his watch. Rome time was 0820 hours. The transmission had been immediate. The tone of the letter itself was urgent, almost peremptory.

  My dearest Luca,

  As you see, it is very late for me, but at least I can be private and alone. My husband is spending two days in Washington. However, I telephoned him with the news that you are prepared to commend his appointment when the time is ripe. He was, of course, delighted and he has asked me to convey his thanks to you. He will write personally to you in due course, but, prudent fellow that he is, he feels that any correspondence at this time would be inopportune!

  I found it, however, an opportune moment to get his approval for Luisa and myself to leave immediately for Rome and to stay there long enough to show an unofficial family presence, with Argentine diplomats, at the obsequies of the present Pontiff and the installation of a new one. I put it to Raul also that this would be a useful introduction for Luisa into diplomatic circles abroad. He thought that, too, was an excellent idea. Since he has maintained for a long time now a mistress in New York, he will not find himself too deprived of home comforts.

  Why am I doing this? I am my father’s daughter. You know how little taste I have for pomps and ceremonies.

  I am coming to see you, Luca. I have been desperate with worry since I read your letter. I have known you in every mood. I have held you in my arms while you wept like a child. I have seen you murderous with rage. I, your Isabel, taught you to turn the rage into passion and spend it on my body in nights that I shall remember till I die. I reopened your heart to love. I cannot bear to see it locked again under this glacial calm which you display to the world.

  The calm will not last. It cannot. Either the Luca I know will wither and die of the cold, or he will burst out like the volcanoes of Iceland and blow himself to fragments. So, like it or not, I am coming. In the morning I have to make final arrangements. I have to get there fast, before you go into conclave to elect a Pope. What if they elect you and you never escape from your prison-house? That’s a nightmare, isn’t it?

  Don’t write again. I’ll contact you as soon as we arrive. One special request: please spare a little attention for my daughter. She is a beautiful young woman and much interested in this important man whom her mother and her grandfather had rescued from the brutal militia. Expect us very soon.

  All my love always,

  Isabel.

  He leaned back in his chair, sipped his coffee slowly and contemplated the text on the screen. He smiled and shook his head, admonishing himself for his own self-deceit. This was the visitation he had dreamed often – and now, albeit subconsciously, had contrived.

  There was nothing exaggerated in Isabel’s memories of him, nor his of her. She was too open and forthright a woman to tolerate the half-truths which, as a celibate cleric in a high place, he used to assist his commerce in society. Everything she claimed to have done for him, she had done.

  There was more still to be told. There were omissions even from the last story that had been told to him by Carlos Menéndez, Isabel’s father:

  “You know I’m running a big prospecting operation in the foothills for Petroleo Occidental. We have our base-camp in the mountains, but I keep an apartment over the colonnades in the square. Sometimes Isabel comes in from Buenos Aires to stay with me. She’s been married to Raul a little more than a year; but the honeymoon is long over. He’s always been ambitious, always a snob. Isabel despises his lick-spittle defence of the military who, God knows, are a pretty shabby bunch. I’ve been a military engineer myself, rank of major. Then I quit to
join Petroleo Occidental. Still, I’ve remained on the reserve, and I keep a uniform handy. It pays when they send the bully-boys around to frighten the country folk. It happened that Isabel and I were both in the apartment when the militia hit the town. We saw you strung up. We saw the beating begin.”

  “And you let it happen?”

  “We let part of it happen. I knew that sergeant, he was an ugly sadistic brute. He was quite capable of ordering his men to open fire on the people in the square. I gave Isabel my rifle and told her to keep him covered while I climbed into my uniform and buckled on a sidearm. I knew you’d survive a beating, but no one survives a bullet in the head.”

  “But, for God’s sake, Carlos, that beating went on for a long time.”

  “Long or short, by the time I was ready to intervene, it was over and the sergeant was challenging the boys to sodomise you.”

  “That’s as far as I remember. I blacked out.”

  “Didn’t Isabel tell you the rest of it?”

  “She fed it to me in small doses like medicine. She said you’d give me the whole story later.”

  “I’m giving it now. The troops held back. The sergeant laughed and told them he’d show them how to do it. He started unbuttoning his breeches. I rushed down the stairs. When I hit the square, I saw him showing off his penis at the troops. Just as he turned to rape you, Isabel fired and blew the back of his head off. The troops were still standing, flat-footed in shock when I fired two shots in the air and shouted to them to come to attention. When they saw the uniform, they obeyed. I ordered them to toss the sergeant’s body in the truck and get the hell back to their barracks. As soon as they were gone, I cut you down. The townsfolk helped me carry you to the apartment. Isabel dressed your wounds as best she could. I called the military commandant at Tucuman. I told him he had big trouble on his hands, trouble with the junta and with the Church, whom the junta were wooing like a virgin bride. I had sent the troops back to him, with a body to bury. I told him to bury it fast and deep. Then I made two calls, one to our base-camp to send in a chopper with our camp doctor, the other to a friend of mine who has a big estancia north of Cordoba. We flew you there. Isabel stayed with you. I went back to Tucumán and then on to Buenos Aires to square things off with the junta and get the Cardinal Archbishop and the Apostolic Nuncio on side. My company helped, too, but God! – it was the roughest six weeks of my life. Isabel’s husband was useless. In the end, we cut a deal. I would fly you into Buenos Aires and hand you over to the Apostolic Nuncio, who would have you flown out immediately to Rome. I would go back to my work. Isabel would return to her husband. No publicity. No comment. Case closed. Is there anything else you want to know before you leave Argentina?”