by Morris West
“I’m not sure. Some of it is good, but there are shadowy areas in the man I haven’t reached yet. But time’s run out. I have to file no later than tomorrow morning.”
“Do you mind if l take a look? We’re doing the piece in German, as you know.”
“Be my guest.”
She punched it up on the screen of her lap-top. As Ulrich sat down to read it, Angel-Novalis came to the table, and nodded a greeting to them both. He asked whether he was interrupting anything. Guillermin assured him he was not and explained what she was doing.
“It’s a final review of my portrait piece on Cardinal Rossini.”
“Would you mind if I read over your shoulder? I was there, remember, monitoring the interview. I’d love to see what you have made of it.”
“You may be able to help me tidy it.”
Angel-Novalis took up his position behind them and read the text as it was scrolled up on the screen. Guillermin sipped her drink and waited. Whatever Angel-Novalis said might be valuable or irrelevant. Ulrich, however, was a professional and his people in Germany had paid good money for the rights. He had a clear interest in the final text. His first comment was a compliment.
“It’s a good portrait, Steffi – even though you had to chisel it out of a very tough stone. But one question you haven’t answered.”
“Tell me.”
“His late Holiness was a black and white man. ‘Intrinsically good, intrinsically evil.’ Those two phrases keep popping up all over the documents of his reign. So why would he patronise a damaged man like Rossini? Why would he offer him the red hat? Why would he send him as his personal legate on missions of confidence all around the world?”
“I think I’ve answered that quite clearly,” said Guillermin. “If you go back to paragraph three, you’ll find it in the text. Since his return to Rome all those years ago, Rossini has lived a blameless life. He has refused to deny his debt to the woman who saved his life, or his affection for her. The late Pontiff respected that. How could he not? That’s what Christianity is about: reconciliation, growth, progress on the pilgrim road – and always love!”
This was the moment at which Angel-Novalis chose to intervene in the discussion. He asked:
“What is your final reading on Rossini?”
Guillermin frowned over her own admission.
“That’s my problem. I have no final reading. You were present at the interview. You saw what happened. He never refused a question. He answered everything I asked. But he explained nothing, least of all himself. I understand it in part. I’ve seen evidence of what was done to him all those years ago. It was a terrible violation.”
“Twenty-five years ago,” said Ulrich. “How long does any man need to heal?”
Guillermin rounded on him in sudden anger.
“Sometimes a lifetime isn’t enough!”
“And how would you know that?”
“Because I had a brute for a father,” said Guillermin curtly. “He turned me off men for life.”
“I’m sorry,” said Ulrich. “I’m sorry for all my bad jokes. I am truly sorry.”
“For the love of God, Fritz! Go back to your cursed Janissaries and leave me in peace.”
Ulrich got up without another word and shambled towards the bar. Angel-Novalis swung the talk swiftly to another subject.
“I understand the problem you have to define this Rossini. For more than a quarter of a century now, he has tried to make himself invulnerable. He has become – how shall I say it? – like a great iceberg at the heart of which a fire burns. You can see the fire, but you cannot get close enough to feel the heat. You ask yourself whether one day the fire will melt the ice or the ice freeze out the fire.”
“Would you like to hazard a guess, Monsignor? After all, you described your own experience after the loss of your wife. You found salvation, or at least a safe harbour, in a religious fraternity. Would you say the Church has filled that need for Cardinal Rossini?”
“I would say it probably has not – at least not to this point in his life.”
“Why not?”
“Because he has never trusted himself completely to the Church, which he saw in his own country all too often as a conspirator with military governments. It had its martyrs, to be sure. Rossini himself suffered for the faith, but its martyrs were what martyrs generally are, outsiders who become heroes and heroines after their deaths. In spite of his rise to power – and he does exercise power – Rossini’s surviving self was built around the woman who truly was the tangible saviour, the restorer of the shattered vessel. You knew she was here in Rome?”
“I saw her but our talk was off the record. I hear from the hotel that she has been taken ill and is leaving tomorrow for New York with her daughter.”
“She is, in fact, mortally ill,” said Angel-Novalis. “Rossini called the Papal physician, Doctor Mottola, to attend her.”
“So what will happen when she is gone from him altogether?”
“I don’t know. I’ve sometimes asked myself what would have happened to me if all my supports had failed me. Sometimes I’ve wondered whether I might have been a wiser man, a better man in the end if I had been forced into another pattern of growth. Other times, I’ve thought …”
“Thought what, Monsignor?”
“About the parable of the empty house, all swept and garnished and the seven devils who moved in to live there.”
“And you think Rossini has devils in his house?”
“We all have, but you’re going to have to put your own names to Rossini’s demons.”
Even as he uttered the words, he remembered that there was one mischievous imp tapping at the window of his own soul. His fraternal colleague in Rio had introduced the small devil, not as a serious tenant but rather as a jester in the house. It was amusing to contemplate Claudio Stagni, secure in his exile and his new wealth, suddenly pestered by gadflies and stinging wasps. Then, because he was a man with a finely honed conscience, Angel-Novalis understood that this was no jesting imp but a very gentleman of a devil, demonstrating with clear reason how the perversions of power might serve the cause of justice. He gave a small involuntary shiver. Steffi Guillermin cast him an enquiring look.
“Is there something the matter?”
Angel-Novalis grinned in embarrassment.
“An untimely thought. We were talking about devils. I just caught a glimpse of one out of the corner of my eye.”
“Now, there’s a thought!” Guillermin turned back to her screen. “Perhaps that’s the key to him. Rossini is a man who has seen the naked face of evil and he can’t look past it to any vision of goodness. Belief in a beneficent creator is hard to sustain. I understand that very well.”
“Have you ever read Don Quixote?”
“Years ago. Why do you ask?”
“There’s a sentence that sticks in my mind. ‘Tras la cruz está el Diablo’ – Behind the cross stands the devil.”
“I don’t remember it. But it makes sense. Let me play with this for a while. Buy me a drink will you, please – a gin and tonic – and offer one to Fritz Ulrich with my compliments. He was trying to be nice and I snarled at him. But, for God’s sake, don’t bring him back here!”
She turned back to the screen and tapped in a new introductory sentence:
“Luca, Cardinal Rossini, who is slowly emerging as a possible Papal candidate is a complex man, not easily deciphered.”
In the privacy of his own office, Frank Colson was putting together his version of Angel-Novalis’s subversion theory. He knew that the provenance and authenticity of the documents were dead issues, soon to be buried under an avalanche of speculation over the election, and picture journalism on the new incumbent of the See of Peter. He had two reasons for picking up the tag end of the story: Angel-Novalis himself, and the future of Opus Dei under a new pontificate.
Angel-Novalis was adequately explained by his own personal history. A bereaved man, he had committed himself to the point of obsession to a
fraternity which had given meaning and direction to his life. He had been trained in a bankers’ world where every item in an audit must be sedulously noted. Opus Dei, therefore, presented itself as the last and safest refuge of orthodoxy in a world going rapidly to hell in a handcart. The perilous notion of a remnant Church, faithful amid universal decay, was etched into their thinking. The emphasis on the highly coloured word ‘subversion’ seemed to be the key to large areas of their thinking, and to the sense of outrage in Angel-Novalis himself Colson began, as he usually did, by jotting down a lead-line.
The Papal diaries, believed to be stolen and published with forged provenance, may well be something more: a blueprint for subversion of the spiritual life and discipline of the Church.
This was the personal view clearly expressed today by Monsignor Domingo Angel-Novalis, head of the Vatican Press Office and its official spokesman. It should be said clearly that this comment was not solicited by us. Monsignor Angel-Novalis asked that his personal point of view be published. He came to us because we were not one of the publishers of the diaries.
Challenged by this writer on his use of the word “subversion”, Angel-Novalis insisted that it was accurate. He claimed that the diary entry made by the late Pontiff the night before his collapse was a “panic revelation, a sudden failure of nerve on the part of a very old and over-worked man”. He expressed the fear that this momentary loss of confidence might be used to destroy the Pontiff’s own policies and disciplines.
It was pointed out to him that there was an inherent contradiction in the argument, namely that the words were those of the Pontiff himself. Angel-Novalis immediately took refuge in a legalism: The See of Peter is vacant. All existing determinations hold good until a new Pontiff changes them. He went further, asserting again that the documents had been stolen, were in fact private utterances with no canonical validity.
Pressed further, Angel-Novalis admitted that no evidence had been brought against the seller of the documents, Claudio Stagni, now living in some luxury in Rio de Janeiro. Clearly such evidence had been sought, at least unofficially, by a colleague of Angel-Novalis in Brazil.
For this correspondent, the most curious features of this situation are the apparent indifference of Vatican authorities, who seem resigned to writing off the diaries as an unfortunate incident which will be forgotten in time, and the sudden burst of anger and zeal on the part of Angel-Novalis himself.
His personal loyalty to the late Pontiff is well known. His demeanour has always been one of cool detachment from controversy and a purist precision in the statement of Vatican views.
One asks whether he has become suddenly sensitive to the inevitable partisanry of the sede vacante period, or has he, too, become partisan enough to invent labels for those who disagree with the prevailing policies and seek change through the electoral process? My own view is that, having founded his life on the fraternity of Opus Dei, he is disturbed by any challenge to its rigid conditioning. Those who live close to the seat of power grow restive when the power is in abeyance, or when it begins to pass into other hands …
The more he wrote, the more eloquent Colson became. By the time he had closed the story, he realised that what he had written was the obituary of a loyal servant who had put his career at risk to defend a position which his late master had already abdicated. Still, Colson felt very little remorse. This was the name of the news game. Everyone was playing to win. Someone had to lose.
He reread the piece and decided he would recant nothing of what he had written. This was, after all, the standard practice of the Vatican itself. “Quod scripsi, scripsi.” What I have written, I have written. A change might be considered, but it would take centuries to get around to it – unless a new Pontiff intervened; but even his name was still secret in the mind of God.
Frank Colson signed off on the piece and sent it to London.
Luca, Cardinal Rossini, came early to his house that evening. The black winter mood was still on him, the sense of desolation and fruitless endeavour. He knew from long experience that the only remedy against it was routine, a drudgery of habit with no expectation of relief.
He greeted his staff, asked that a light supper be prepared for him, then retired to his bedroom to bathe and change into pyjamas and dressing-gown. Next, he read the last hours of his breviary – vespers and compline. The cadences of the psalms were familiar on his tongue, soothing to the ear; but it was as if they were spoken by another. They were incantations, not prayers. It was almost as though his will stiffened itself against them, as it might against pounding drums and clashing cymbals in the temple of unfamiliar gods.
He ate his supper to the sound of music, Haydn’s Oxford Symphony played by the Vienna Philharmonic. The music did for him what the psalms could not. It laid the chattering ghosts to rest. It silenced argument and imposed the structured unreason of pure sound on the convoluted reasonings of theologians and philosophers, and the obdurate legalisms of canonists.
When the music ended, and his meal was finished, he carried his tray out to the kitchen, said goodnight to his staff, and settled himself back at his desk with pen and paper in front of him. Normally he would have used his word processor, but the task on which he was now embarked was an intimate and private venture in which the machine became suddenly an intruder. He did not stumble or hesitate over the beginning, but set down the words the Secretary of State had suggested. “I am Luca, your brother …”
Even as he wrote them, he knew they would not be acceptable to all his audience. At second glance, it was perhaps not so good a beginning. Brotherhood and sisterhood were loaded words even in the millennial Church. The taint of populism still hung about them. Orders and hierarchies were a more stable and more recognisable currency. Even in the electoral college itself, there were grades and degrees: Cardinal Archbishops, Cardinal Bishops, Cardinal Priests, Cardinal Deacons – and not so long ago, laymen, too, carried the title and the benefices of the rank. In the electoral college all men were equal – but in the order of being, some were more equal than others. So, he changed the phrase a little: “I am Luca, your brother. Like you, I am a servant of the Word.”
What next? What of value could he say to this assembly of hinge-men that they had not heard and preached a thousand times over? What could he, the doubter in darkness, offer them of light and energy to direct their choice of the Servant of the Servants of God? So, begin again. “I am Luca, your brother. Like you, I am a servant of the Word. I want to open my heart to you. I am not here to teach you anything. You know it all, better than I. Allow me simply to declare my thoughts to you, as a brother in that huge family of the faithful who do not know even our names, who would not recognise us if they bumped into us in the street.”
He paused there. He asked himself again what he was trying to do in this address. He wanted them to feel vulnerable, responsible, self-doubting, self-searching. They had lived so long under the protection of the institution that many were afraid or unwilling to venture beyond it. For these, the formal obediences were like the old Roman testudo: a canopy of shields under which they retreated from dangerous or threatening decisions.
So long as one remained in obedience, one lived safely and meritoriously under the system. Protest it, however, and one was marked, or thought oneself to be marked, as a disturber of the peace. Subtle penalties were exacted. Direct access to the Pontiff was curtailed. Visits to him were difficult to arrange and reduced, in any case, to formal exchanges. The Vatican was still a court, and if one did not learn the manners of the court, one should expect to be disadvantaged. So, forget the brotherhood then. Think your way again through the maze. Prepare yourself for blind alleys and water-tricks.
He wrestled with the text for a long time, filling his waste-basket with crumpled sheets of rejections. Finally the humour of the situation dawned on him. The Secretary of State, his good friend, Turi Pascarelli, had presented him with the spiky end of a pineapple – an unsympathetic role in the most boring stretch of ritua
l drama.
Turi himself had the easiest part: to demonstrate the demography, the geography and the geopolitics of a millennia! Church. He had all the facts in his head and in his files. He could, on his own confession, demonstrate them with a globe and coloured lights.
But the mind of the pilgrim assembly, the disposition of all the churches everywhere, their loyalties, their griefs, their angers, these were not easy to grasp. They were most damnably difficult to communicate to this polyglot group of electors, each jealous of his own corner of the vineyard and the quality of the wine it produced.
There was more, much more to the joke, however. In this celibate assembly, there was no voice for women, who held up more than half the sky. There was no one to speak their language, express their growing concerns, their relationship to God, who was expressed only in masculine gender. Luca Rossini, laconic and stumbling to express the passion of his own life, would have to remind them of their duties and shortcomings. He, the doubter in darkness, was nominated lampbearer to this assembly of electors who would appoint a pontifex, a bridge-builder to span the vast gap between the sexes. And, for a final dash of vinegar in the joke, Turi Pascarelli had given him two days to come up with a text.
It would certainly not be written tonight. He poured himself a glass of mineral water, switched on the CD player and surrendered himself to Mozart’s Oboe Concerto. The piece was almost ended when Isabel called from the hotel. His heart lurched at the sound of her voice. He stammered like a schoolboy:
“I wanted to see you; but Luisa thought I shouldn’t …”
“She was right. I was very fragile after you left; but I’m calm now. I wanted you to know that I’ve spoken to Raul. I told him I blamed myself for much of our unhappiness, that I wanted us to live in peace for whatever time I have left. I told him I didn’t expect him to change his life, just to keep our part of it in a separate compartment. He was grave and quiet and tender – which proved your confessional advice was right. Also, it makes the homecoming easier for me and for Luisa. How are you, my love?”
