Eminence

by Morris West

  “By all means. We have your mobile number. We’ll try to leave you in peace. And, Luca?”

  “Yes?”

  “Walk warily. Aquino and his friends are a powerful group. Some unkind people call them the Emilian Mafia.”

  “What can they do to a man who has nothing to lose?”

  “They can rob you of your power to do some good in the Church which, in spite of your personal problems, is greater than you know. Enjoy your evening.”

  Six

  He signed out from his office early that afternoon. The mood of black anger was still on him; he needed the open air and the press of heedless folk about him. He decided to walk home, across the Ponte Sant’ Angelo and through the old streets beyond Lungotevere Tor di Nona, where the bankers of another age had plied their trade.

  As he walked, the cloud began to lift from his spirit and he felt a growing sense of liberation. The truth was out now. His confession to the Secretary of State had been a necessary cleansing act. The Secretary, good diplomat that he was, had noted it and had asked him to defer a final decision. He had even provided a convenient piece of casuistry to save face for Rossini and good conscience for himself. There was a charity in that, which Rossini prized the more because of its absence in men like Aquino.

  Rossini wondered, not for the first time, why so many prelates, good liberal men in their youth, changed into tyrants when they were promoted to high office. It was as if suddenly they felt charged to upset the whole human order of things and replace it with a theological artefact instead of a new infusion of charity.

  Halfway across the bridge, he stopped, leaned on the stone balustrade and stared down at the muddy waters of the Tiber. He remembered another confession which he had made many years before, in his first interview with the late Pontiff. The old man had pressed him hard, chivvying him, now from this side, now from that, like a sheepdog working a stray lamb into the pen:

  “How do you feel about the man who flogged you?”

  “He was a brute and a sadist. I am glad he is dead.”

  “Have you forgiven him?”

  “I have not yet been given that grace, Holiness. I loathe everything that he represents in my country – the atrocities that are being planned and committed every day by high men and low ones. I hate – yes, I hate the silence and the connivance of those who call themselves priests and bishops. I ask myself what Your Holiness thinks about all this, because we do not hear what you say about it.”

  “You forget yourself, young man.”

  “I lost my youth when they strung me up on the wheel.”

  “And your innocence, my son? When did you lose that?”

  “Like many of my brother priests, I lost mine in the silence of our bishops and in the silence of Rome. There was torture and murder, Holiness – all done in silence. We didn’t understand that. I still don’t. That’s another thing I find it hard to forgive. It was a woman who killed my tormentor. It took weeks of negotiation for the emissary of Your Holiness to intervene.”

  “Meantime, you had entered into an adulterous relationship with this same woman, Señora Ortega.”

  “A woman whom I remember with love and gratitude.”

  “You see nothing sinful in that?”

  “My sins are my own, Holiness. I was a shattered man. Isabel put me together again, piece by piece. She put her life at risk to do it.”

  “She is out of your life now?”

  “No. She will never be out of it. I remember her every day in my Mass.”

  “You are still a believer then? You are still a priest.”

  “I practise my priesthood in public. I pray for light in darkness. I wrestle all day and every day with my doubts about this Church of ours.”

  “You’re a very difficult young man.”

  “I have survived difficult times, Holiness. Others were not so lucky.”

  “Other people are afraid of me. You sit there like a young Lucifer and defy me.”

  “I do not defy you, Holiness; but I am not afraid of you. I find you easier to understand than many of those who speak with your authority. I know you’re trying to be kind to me, but …”

  “You’re not making it easy for me, my son!”

  “Please, Holiness! Try to understand. You sit here, an undisputed monarch in your own kingdom, supported by the loyalties of the faithful all round the world. I’ve just come from a battlefield where your ministers and your people, men and women, are down in the bloodied dust. Their stake is simple survival. The government’s policy is total repression, ‘woe to the conquered’. The Gospel words that ring loudest are ‘My God, why have You forsaken me?’ It was a woman who answered for God to me, Holiness. I have left her, still at risk. I am shamed by the silence of those who claim to be defenders of the faith but will not raise voice or hand to protect the flock … I beg your pardon, Holiness. I am still angry. I have said too much. I beg your leave to go.”

  “Not yet, Luca! Let’s bear with each other a while longer. I want to talk to you about your future.”

  The talk which had begun that day extended itself over years as the Pontiff prepared him for higher office and drew him slowly into his personal confidence. Their relationship was a paradox which the Vatican gossips embroidered with even more contradictions. While his Holiness, like his namesake, Paul, committed himself to spectacular global journeys, Rossini was put into tutelage at the Secretariat of State and loaded with supplementary studies at the Biblicum, the Gregorian University and Propaganda Fide. It was a harsh therapy that gave him no time to brood, if never quite enough to order his life to a free choice of a new vocation.

  Slowly at first, and then more swiftly, the changes began. Now Rossini became the traveller and the Pontiff devoted more of his time to instruction and discipline within the Church. He gave more confidence and credence to rigorist theologians and hard-line disciplinarians in the Curia. At the same time, he turned to Rossini for private interpretations of a world which, as the years went on, was becoming less and less accessible to him, less and less welcoming.

  Naturally enough, this gave rise to criticisms and jealousies, which Rossini studiously ignored. He had no talent for clubbishness, no taste for cabals and conspiracies. He had seen more than enough of those in his own country. If he was lonely he never confessed it. He was his own man always, living at risk between the Almighty and Peter’s successor and all the thrones, dominations and principalities of the twentieth-century Church.

  The Pontiff’s speeches and writings were drafted by the most conservative theologians, and there was a concerted effort to extend their magisterial authority and stifle debate on their conclusions. There was small compassion in their juridical tone. They alienated instead of uniting the pilgrim Church. Expressions of dissent by the clergy were harshly repressed. Dissent by the laity was ignored so that, knowing themselves irrelevant to authority, they absented themselves from its bailiwick.

  Rossini, on the other hand, minced no words with his patron. He stood like a rock against the waves of his anger, deferring only when he was forced to bow to a direct command. His argument was always the same:

  “I know you want to be the Good Shepherd and when you visit your people they love you; but when you write, you are like a judge delivering a verdict. One can almost hear the seal slamming on the parchment: ‘There! That’s the truth, pure and undefiled. Let them swallow it or choke on it!’ Life doesn’t work like that, Holiness. People aren’t built like that. The best they can manage is a long way from perfection, and they need coaxing and gentling to get them even that far.”

  “Are you telling me I should dilute the truth?”

  “I’m asking Your Holiness to consider how Our Lord taught it: by tales and parables that took root and grew slowly in the minds and hearts of people. He called down woes only on the hypocrites and the overly righteous.”

  “Now you are presuming to teach the Pope?”

  “I’m a son of the house, Holiness. I claim the right to be heard
in it – and that is another warning I keep repeating. The daughters of the house also have been ignored too long. They hold up the rafters of our world and yet they have few voices and no votes at all in the assembly of the faithful. We are poor without their presence.”

  “This is old ground, Luca. I will not go over it again with you.”

  “It is ground you do not own, Holiness, though presently you claim to control it.”

  “And you give no ground at all, do you, Luca?”

  “The small space I stand on was bought with blood. Even for you, I will not surrender it.”

  Many times after such exchanges, he had expected to be exiled to some outland on the fringes of Christendom. Many of his colleagues wanted him gone. His roving commissions kept him far enough and often enough out of Rome so that the Curia could tolerate his existence. Yet whenever he came back, the Pontiff welcomed him like a returning prodigal and spent much time with him – time which others, with some justice, claimed as their own due. A few days before his final collapse, he had made a poignant confession:

  “You have been a good son to me, Luca, though you have often made me angry. I’m a stubborn old man. From where I sit on Vatican Hill, I am supposed to see the whole world and all God’s plans for it, plain and dear like a child’s picture-book. Yet you, my wayward Luca, have shown me things I have never dreamed. You have shown me the face of God, even in the Temples of the Strangers.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean, Holiness.”

  “You, yourself, called it to my attention: on the sacred island of Delos, where visitors came from all over the Mediterranean to take part in the Delian games, shrines were built in which each people could worship its own gods in peace. I thought of that often when I meditated on Saint Paul’s text about the Unknown God. The older I get, Luca, the more I regret all the time and all the fierce effort I have spent trying to create a conforming Church. I suppressed the liberal voices and the questioning ones. I raised blind men to power and set deaf ones to mediate the petitions of the people. In the end, as you warned often, I have failed. The people were tired of being berated, crushed with absolutes in a still unfinished universe. So they simply gave up the argument and absented themselves from the family. They retreated to the God who still dwells within them – who, they know instinctively, still dwells even in the Temples of the Strangers. They will not come back in my time, Luca! I shall have much to answer for when I come to judgment.”

  “We pray every day that our trespasses will be forgiven, Holiness. We have to believe that our end will be a homecoming, not a session with the torturers!”

  “Do you really believe that, Luca?”

  “If I did not, Holiness, I think I could not endure the chaos of this bloody world or the presence of whatever monster called it into being.”

  “Until this moment, I have never understood why you were so angry with me. Forgive me, my son – and pray for me.”

  Rossini still remembered the wintry silence that fell between them and the bleak sadness of the final confidence they had shared.

  He took one last look at the grey waters swirling about the foundations of the bridge, then resumed his homeward walk. The meaning of the stolen diaries was plainer to him now. They were the pillow-books of a sad and solitary old man, whose time was running out, whose deeply divided family was spread around the planet, and whose bishopric would soon be voted to another.

  A block from his apartment Rossini treated himself to a small Roman indulgence, a visit to the barber, for a haircut, shave and manicure. It was a small sensual pleasure and a large concession to his own male vanity. After all these years, he could not, would not present himself to Isabel only half-groomed. There were other reasons too. He still had time to kill and he was jumpy as a cat on hot tiles. The gossip of Dario, the barber, would be a welcome diversion. It was delivered always in a steady clattering flow. It covered the river-front and the alleys and the high-life and the low-life of the city from Quirinal Hill to Vatican Hill and the latest crop of murders on the Via Salaria. By the time the session was over, Rossini was fully sedated and his head was bursting with Roman trivia. Home at last, he bathed and dressed in street clothes, then took himself by taxi to the Grand Hotel.

  He had just entered the foyer when he was stopped by a young woman whose appearance was vaguely familiar.

  “Excuse me, Eminence, are you not Cardinal Rossini?”

  “I am.”

  “I’m Steffi Guillermin, Rome correspondent of Le Monde. I’ve just been interviewing one of your colleagues, Cardinal Molyneux from Montreal. I recognised you from the photograph in my files.”

  “I’m flattered, Mademoiselle. Just now the city is full of people like me.”

  “Well, like all journalists, I’m an opportunist. I’d like to arrange an interview with you.”

  “Another time perhaps.”

  “How do I contact you?”

  “Call the Secretariat of State. They’ll connect you to my office.”

  “I’d like an hour of your time, if that’s possible.”

  “My office will let you know what time I have available.”

  “Thank you, Eminence.”

  “Excuse me now, Mademoiselle.”

  She watched him as he moved briskly to the concierge’s desk. She saw the concierge lift the telephone, speak briefly, then direct Rossini to the elevator. When the door dosed on him, Steffi Guillermin took his place at the desk and slid a fifty-thousand lire note under the blotter. She had found a lot of good stories here in her time. She had kept the natives friendly. They told her that the eminent person was dining in suite number thirty-eight on the third floor with an Argentine lady, Señora Isabel Ortega.

  He had a moment of panic before he rang the doorbell of her suite. There was a long pause before Isabel opened the door and drew him into the salone. The next moment she was in his arms and time stopped while they embraced and kissed and held to each other and wept quietly in wordless wonder. Time started again when he held her at arm’s length and said simply:

  “I’d forgotten how beautiful you are.”

  “And you, my Luca, you’ve become so grand!”

  It was only then that he thought to ask:

  “Where’s Luisa?”

  “In her bedroom. I’ll call her when we’re ready.”

  “I kept wondering how it would be when we came face to face again.”

  “I knew exactly how it would be.” She kissed him again and wiped a smear of lipstick from his mouth. “Luisa will join us for a drink, then a very presentable young man from the Embassy is taking her out to dinner.”

  “I asked myself how you were going to arrange that.”

  “Did I ever disappoint you?”

  “Never. I was afraid I might disappoint you.”

  “Pour yourself a drink. I’ll call Luisa. She has her own room down the corridor. She needs her privacy as much as I do mine.”

  When she left him, he crossed to the bar, poured himself a brandy and soda and made a silent toast to the dark-eyed passionate beauty whom the years had touched so lightly, dusting the raven hair with grey, leaving still the fire in her eyes and the laughter lines about her lips. The simplicity of their encounter after so many years had an air of miracle about it, even though Isabel had happily confessed to her contrivances. For himself, it was like the rising of a new moon: for this night at least, all fears were laid to rest, all mysteries swept aside; tomorrow could take care of itself. He had another surprise when Isabel came back with her daughter. Luisa Ortega was a startling replica of the young Isabel whom he had seen for the first time when he woke after his beating in the village square. He looked from one to the other, groping for words.

  “I can’t believe this, you are so like your mother. I’m happy to meet you, Luisa.”

  He offered her his hand. She bowed her head and made to kiss it in the old-fashioned style.

  “I am honoured, Eminence.”

  He declined the gesture and drew her to h
er feet with a smile.

  “Tonight, young lady, I am not an Eminence. I am Luca, your mother’s old friend.”

  “I hope you will be mine, too.”

  “How could we not be friends!”

  “What do I call you, then?”

  “Unless your mother has any objections, why not Luca?”

  “But only in private,” said Isabel. “In company he is always Eminencia.”

  “Mother! You can be so stuffy!”

  “Your father can be even worse, as you know. May I have a glass of white wine, Luca?”

  “And for me, a Campari soda, please.”

  Rossini poured and passed the drinks, then offered a toast.

  “To the friends of my heart, absent too long!”

  They touched glasses and drank. Luisa challenged him, smiling:

  “One of these days, Luca, I want to hear your version of how you and my mother met. Everyone seems to be using a different text. I really am quite confused.”

  “It’s a long story – we’ll keep it for another day. Your young man will be here any moment. Who is he, by the way?”

  “I haven’t met him yet. His name is Miguel Alamino. Mother set him up to get me out of the way while you’re here. His father is first Secretary at the Argentine Embassy – a friend of Papa.”

  “Where is he taking you?”

  “A place called Piccolo Mondo. Do you know it?”

  “I do. I can’t afford to eat there very often, but you’ll enjoy it.”

  “I thought all cardinals were rich. Aren’t they called Princes of the Church?”

  She was beginning to tease him and he was happy to play the little game.

  “Very few of them are rich in this day and age. As for being princes, that’s an old-fashioned notion, but a few still cling to it.”

  “Do you?”

  “Do I look like a prince, Luisa?”

  “Mother thinks you do.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I’m reserving judgment till I know you better. So far I’m impressed.”