The Abbey that Stood on a Hill
FOR CENTURIES people of many nationalities had recognized the high mountain at the south end of Italy’s Liri Valley as a distinctive spot. Who knows, but perhaps some of them even suspected that the lure it had on those who looked up at it reached beyond the merely physical.
Two and a half thousand years ago the Volsci built a village there called Cassinum, and it is from that name we now know the hill as Monte Cassino. Once the lands of the Volsci had been duly conquered and assimilated, the Romans were quick to build a shrine to their favorite god at its summit too. But then Apollo deserved a special place of worship, didn’t he? He was after all not just their god of the sun, but also the divinity they had placed in charge of truth, prophecy, medicine, plague, music and even poetry. Quite a portfolio that, and they must have kept the poor man at his wits’ end dealing with all the prayers for this, that, and the other thing, they habitually dispatched in his direction. But that was only half of it, for the ancient Greeks had worshipped him for even longer, still did for that matter, so poor Apollo had to know not just the right answers to all those prayers, but had to be bilingual when he supplied them.
But then for most of their gods learning Latin as a second language was pretty much the norm. Rome was a pretty smart place you see, and whenever they invited anyone to join the ever-expanding commonwealth of their nations, at spear point usually, they invariably ran off not just with their treasure, like most run-of-the-mill invaders, but also with whichever of their favorite deities looked in the slightest bit useful too. Thus Diana, Minerva, Venus and heaven knows how many other folks’ divinities were forcibly co-opted into Rome’s divine pantheon as well. But at least they had the good grace to treat these new found omnipotents with as much reverence as they treated their own, assuming anyone could recall who their own had originally been. They even went so far in 205 B.C. as to ask the Pergamons in modern day Turkey if they could possibly rent a share in Cybele, a particularly potent mother-goddess of theirs, and this even before they’d got round to inviting them into their commonwealth too, which they later did, and at spear point as well. But then Rome was in really dire straits at the time, and couldn’t wait quite that long. You see Hannibal of Carthage had invaded Italy, made mincemeat of their much-vaunted Roman army on three different occasions, and was now even threatening the Eternal City herself. But they’d read somewhere in their oracles, the Romans had, that if ever a foreign foe should invade their country, he could be driven back out if somehow Cybele was brought to Rome to watch over them. So a delegation was duly sent to the King of Pergamon requesting they allow the black stone of the Great Mother that symbolized Cybele’s power to be transported back. A fair price for sub-leasing the services of such a big-time goddess was negotiated, payment duly changed hands, the stone arrived in Rome soon after, and lo and behold a miracle came to pass, as barely a year later Hannibal had quit Italy and returned home. But then nobody should have been that surprised, for Cybele wasn’t just any old goddess was she, she was after all the embodiment of the fertile earth itself. Still, some of her more ecstatic male Roman adherents, even grateful as they rightly were for her intercession in their hour of need, may have taken their new found reverence a little far, when they decided that annually castrating a sacrificial bull was insufficient to do her honor, and unmanned themselves instead. But then Cybele’s festival day was called Hilario wasn’t it, so there was always a chance proceedings were going to get more than a little out of hand.
Notwithstanding Cybele’s impressive achievement though, deep down Apollo was always your average Roman’s most beloved god, partly one imagines because he didn’t require quite such debilitating displays of veneration. Just the odd pilgrimage up Cassino hill would usually keep him happy, maybe a few incense bowls lit on his offertory helped too, with some mumbled incantations tossed his way as well. Not surprising then that they also kept their shrine to him long after Emperor Constantine had supposedly converted the whole bunch of them to Christianity. I say ‘supposedly’ because you may remember our Constantine as the commander who’d put the sign ‘in hoc signo vinces’ on his army’s shields after having a dream in 312 A.D. in which he said God promised him victory if he did. ‘By this sign you will be victorious’ it meant, and was the first time any military commander since Joshua had made such an overt appeal for divine aid in exterminating fellow human beings. Of course that sort of thing has become almost clichéd these days, and now everyone seems to have God’s sanction whenever they head off to war. I even was told the supposedly amoral Germans are good for the occasional ‘Gott mit uns’ as well. But in Constantine’s day all this was a far more original notion. So comforted that however brutal his actions might by necessity be they still had the imprimatur of the biggest god on campus, he duly marched his legions out to battle his co-Emperor Maxentius, and decide which of them would control the entire western world. Maxentius however, locked up safe in Rome, must not have been saying his prayers at night, not to the right guy anyway. Possibly the poor man hadn’t got the memo sent out to all Romans that Mars was no longer the divinity charged with such matters, so he got no dream sent to him by anyone. Things were to get even worse for him though, for what was already looking less and less like a fair contest now became even more one-sided, when Maxentius’ augurs advised him to give up the advantage of Rome’s walls and go out and fight Constantine like a man – a very ill-augured one in his case.
So at the Milvian Bridge over the Tiber River, they call it the Ponte Milvio now, Constantine was inevitably victorious at the cost of untold thousands of Roman soldiers’ deaths, his and Maxentius’. Sounds pretty awful doesn’t it, and not at all the kind of thing we’d do, sacrifice thousands of our finest young men for the sake of personal glory? But then if the history books don’t record those young men having had any names, they hardly existed in the first place, so their death couldn’t have been that much of a tragedy could it? ‘Known only to God’ was the best historical headstone they could hope for. Poor Maxentius did have a name though, so we know exactly what happened to him, and it certainly was tragic, as regretfully the poor fellow was drowned in the waters of the Tiber. But anxious to show his new found loyalty to the teachings of Christ, Constantine quickly had his body fished out, decapitated post mortem, then hauled through the streets of Rome in front of Constantine’s victorious legions, what remained of them anyway. I’m not sure exactly which book of the Bible Constantine referenced as his authority for this display, but I’m sure if asked he could produce one. After all most folk can usually commandeer some lines from the Bible to justify most anything they want to do. And if he couldn’t, frankly who cared? Constantine had won, Constantine’s court historians would memorialize that God fought on his side, and Maxentius’ surviving apologists would either agree or they’d land up in the Tiber too. And who cared if it was a civil war where it could be a lot trickier to tell the good folk from the bad. Constantine’s historians would come up with a convincing explanation for that as well, and make it quite clear that of course you could tell which side was which because his legions’ horses were white and his opponents’ decidedly not. And if Hollywood ever gets round to making a movie of that, I’m sure they’ll concur. What precisely they’ll do with a few other inconvenient facts surrounding his life I’m less certain though. Like for instance after his victory having the Arch of Constantine erected full of Apollonian images, but no recognizable Christian ones. Then there was the fact that later he had his eldest son and wife Empress Fausta executed. Still, he was baptized on his death bed wasn’t he? So presumably he was forgiven all these offences on the grounds of unavoidable raison d’état.
Truth to tell, it wasn’t for another three hundred years that most Romans were able to wean themselves off Apollo either, and purge his shrine from the top of Monte Cassino once and for all. This permitted Saint Benedict to establish a Catholic monastery where it had previously stood. It had taken the loss of their whole empire to do it, but even in Rome polytheism was out and monotheism in, and Christianity could now take proper advantage of the spot’s beauty too. Dedicated to John the Baptist, Monte Cassino Abbey would be where Benedict would write his Rule which became the underlying principles for all Christian monasticism then and forever after. Proper principles I mean, not just the convenient made-up ones folk like Constantine were so enamored with.
Sometimes though, erecting even a peaceful sanctuary on a site of such significance is hardly the smartest of moves, and the monastery was sacked by the Saracens in 883, but rebuilt immediately after. Not at all the sort of thing we’d do, but let’s face it, it wasn’t difficult to see why any invader would prize its location. Situated halfway between Naples and Rome, and perched almost two thousand feet above the plain below, it overlooked the new town of Cassino and the Rapido River, and dominated the Liri Valley stretching northwest to the Eternal City. Built around five cloistered courtyards and now the most magnificent monastery in all Europe, by the 1930’s it had grown to be more than twice the length of even Buckingham Palace. But then it had to be, as it included a massive sanctuary, seminary, observatory, school, a library hundreds of yards long, and in its cellars a vast scriptorium of priceless archives and irreplaceable manuscripts. And if all that wasn’t enough, since 1866 it had also been a national Italian monument, with the Abbot left as its custodian. So by then all sorts of people had reason to venerate it, Benedictines, devout Catholics, everyday Italians, scholars of all persuasions, and just about any other human being who wanted to believe in a benign God, as I most surely did. And for that matter I still do.
My mom and dad were amongst those who believed in one too. She and her family came to the Unites States from Italy just after the turn of the century. She met my father, who was a widower, when she was still in her late teens, and they married in 1914. They had me a year later, on the day the Lusitania was sunk by a German torpedo. My father was as they say ‘of independent income,’ and having already been in the National Guard he immediately volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army. Later he fought in the First World War in France, and when it ended joined the U.S. State Department, and had been a diplomat ever since. In 1936 he was appointed to a senior position in the U.S. Embassy in Rome under the new Ambassador Williams Phillips. Around then I had the chance to study classical history in Rome too, so I left Sarah Lawrence, and that boy David from Yale, and came out to Italy with them. My big sister Margaret, she was almost ten years older than me, and her mother was dad’s first wife, stayed in Washington where she worked as a lawyer. Our little brother Jack, he was born in 1919, stayed too, to complete his degree in education at Georgetown. During the three years I lived with mom and dad in Rome we came down to Monte Cassino a lot for mass. It was only about an hour’s drive, the way I drove anyway, and we got very friendly with Abbot Diamare and the townsfolk of Cassino where mom had been born. I even did my dissertation on the history of the Abbey, and considered myself quite the expert on it. Of course it turned out I wasn’t quite the expert I thought. But then there turned out to be quite a few things in life I wasn’t so expert in as I first thought.
It was interesting times living in Italy in the late 30’s, especially for my father helping manage U.S. relations with an increasingly more difficult Italian Government. In an attempt to belatedly create an Italian Empire, a New Roman one as he called it, Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and attracted widespread international disgust. He made matters worse soon after when he intervened in the Spanish Civil War on Franco’s side, and that pretty much killed any hope of him keeping in the good graces of Britain or France. And even though the United States had by this time received more immigrants from Italy than any other nation, our relations with them were fast souring too. But if you ask me Rome was becoming a somewhat trickier place to live by then anyway. Mussolini had come up with this fantastically bad idea for banning the use of car horns there, so drivers banged their hands against the flat of the door to get pedestrians out the way. Even the buses used the sound of their airbrakes as horns. But to keep an even playing field, jaywalkers meanwhile were fined on the spot by the police, which caused even bigger traffic jams. They even tried to fine mom and me once when we were crossing the road to the Ambasciatori Hotel on the Via Veneto just opposite the Embassy. Of course we refused to pay on account of our diplomatic immunity. But we’d both gotten about sick of that place for lunch too, as it had become increasingly filled with Mussolini’s Fascist black shirts, their sleeves all covered in braid, and all with goatee style beards. If you ask me they were all lechers, and used to eye mom and I up and down like we were pieces of horsemeat, particularly Count Ciano the Foreign Minister and husband to Mussolini’s daughter Edda. How the average Italians ever let any of them get into power I never understood. Of course it probably helped that Italian women didn’t have the vote, and being Catholic couldn’t divorce their lecherous husbands even if they wanted to, which I’ll bet deep down a lot of them did.
I was also there when Pope Pius XI, an outspoken enemy of fascism and Nazism, died in February 1939. His successor Pius XII was confirmed after only one day of deliberation, the shortest conclave I’d ever heard of, and I was in the square when the white smoke came out to announce it. They didn’t say who it was of course, you only knew that when he greeted the crowd. That was a privilege given the residents of the Eternal City, because the new pope also became the Bishop of Rome too. But I recognized him immediately as Cardinal Pacelli. He had been papal Secretary of State, and a zealous protector of the rights of the Catholic Church in the face of Hitler’s attempts to place it under state control. So it was one suspects as much a political as a spiritual decision that his feet should be next to wear the shoes of the fisherman.
For the most part though, and like so many other Americans at the time, I stayed out of politics, Italy’s and America’s, and hoped against hope that the whole fascist problem would somehow go away. My studies took up a lot of time, that was my excuse anyway, and I started taking a lot more photographs, intent on building a portfolio of all the ancient ruins and monuments in Rome I could shoot. I’d always been interested in photography, I was president of the photography club at Sarah Lawrence, and the drama, bird-watching and debating societies if you want to know the truth, but it was in Rome that I really became good at it. In some ways those were the best days of my life, fool that I was, as in our own way we were all appeasers too. But those best days didn’t last very long. One afternoon in May 1939 when I was sitting in a lecture hall at Rome University attending a seminar on the collapse of the Roman Republic, the Embassy sent an aide to tell me both my parents had been killed in a traffic accident.
Soon after their lawyer read their will to us and we learned they’d split their inheritance four ways between Margaret, Jack and I, and the Monastery, with the instructions that its share be used to help educate the children who lived in Cassino below. All they asked in turn of the Abbot was that they be buried there in some spot, and they were, in a lovely corner of a lower balcony looking down on the Liri Valley.
My studies were finished anyway, so I went back to the States and did pretty much nothing for months, content to just feel very sorry for myself. Margaret and I had always gotten on reasonably well without ever being the best of pals, and she did the best she could to get me out my fug, taking me to social events, introducing me to her girlfriends, and trying to get me married. Strange that, I always thought, as she showed no inclination to get married herself. In fact that was about the only thing we had in common, and otherwise we were very different she and I. She was her mother’s daughter. She’d been a member of high Washington society, dad’s first wife had, refined, conventional and like him very committed to public service. Margaret had even followed in her footsteps, and joined a law firm that specialized in defending indigents accused of all sorts of crimes, but didn’t have the funds to pay for a defense. But then public service was a big deal at Sarah Lawrence too, and like they used to say, you can take the girl out Shady L, but you can’t ever get Shady L out the girl. At least not with Margaret you couldn’t. But for the moment it looked like you could with me. Maybe that was because I was far more my mom’s child, a little wild, a little iconoclastic, and rather prone to discovering what I should do in any situation life threw up, and then doing pretty much the opposite.
Maybe it was because Margaret and I were peas from different pods that I started to rely more and more on my Uncle Mark for support back State-side. He was my godfather, had served with dad in the First World War, and been the best man at mom and dad’s wedding. I never understood quite why I had a godfather and Margaret didn’t. Maybe it was because the Lusitania sinking all of a sudden made dad feel far more mortal. Not surprisingly I suppose, as she was the very same ship my mother’s family had sailed from Europe on when they first came here. Or maybe it was because dad heard the jungle drums of war even in spring 1915. But whatever it was, I loved Uncle Mark from pretty much the moment I understood what a godfather was. He lived just outside Washington in late 1939, and I used to drive up and spend weekends with him and his wife Maurine. In between I was finishing my book about the antiquities of Rome that I had started writing when I was at university there. True to type, my type anyway, it had quickly developed into one of those large glossy, oversize tomes with loads of photographs, and that the well-to-do thought made them look intelligent lying on their reception room cocktail tables. As things turned out later though, it sure wouldn’t make the person whose name was on the cover look very intelligent. Of course I should have gotten a more worthwhile job than publishing an obscure piece of nonsense like that, heaven knows even Jack had, as a schoolteacher in a rather grim area of Washington. But like I told you, I didn’t have to worry about money, so I had the two-fold luxury of being useless without ever being required to admit it. And believe me that’s a killer combination in the arsenal of any spoiled brat.
It was early summer 1940, on the first anniversary of mom and dad’s death, before I returned to the Abbey to attend a celebratory mass the Abbot held for my parents. Maybe in retrospect it wasn’t a very smart place to be right then, given there was meant to be a war going on. But after the Germans invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war on them, not much had happened, not in continental Europe anyway. Some folk even called it ‘the phoney war,’ and most everyone had some silly name for it. The Germans called it der Sitzkrieg or ‘sitting war’, some regarded it as ‘the Bore War,’ and the French named it drôle de guerre which kind of means ‘joke of a war.’ Even Time Magazine christened it the ‘Lullablitz.’ They’d all turn out to be very wrong of course, but for the moment the United States wasn’t at war with anyone, so it seemed safe enough for us to come over. We agreed though that coming by sea wasn’t too smart. After all, the liner S.S Athenia, with more than 300 hundred Americans on board, was sunk by a German U-boat too within hours of the British declaration of war on them. But after some initial reluctance the Embassy was very helpful in arranging flights through Lisbon to Rome Airport, though they were insistent they be given our itinerary and a way of contacting us at all times. So Margaret and I came over with Jack, who needed some persuading, as he was married by now and very much in that honeymoon stage of thinking his new bride couldn’t survive without him. Truthfully, it was more like he couldn’t survive without her. I also convinced Uncle Mark to come. He’d never been in Italy, but was happy enough to join us after a bit ofpersuading. The Abbot set us all up with nice rooms too, so we could make a sort of family holiday of it.
So there we were just before dawn watching the torch-lit parade of the townsfolk of Cassino as it wended its way out of town far below. They didn’t have cars poor things, so it took them a few hours to reach the monastery up the long winding pathway they called the Serpentina that climbed the slope. But the bell kept on tolling to make quite sure they didn’t lose their resolve, and eventually we welcomed them in under the arched door way with its sign ‘Pax’, it means ‘peace’ in English, and Carlotta the pretty seven year old daughter of the town Mayor led them all into the sanctuary.
The service was simple yet beautiful. Margaret insisted we both wore white dresses with head shawls. But then she was always more punctilious over those kind of things than I am. In fact she’s more punctilious about everything than I am, and it took Uncle Mark’s occasional interventions to make sure I did what she asked, and kept the shawl on the whole time. Truth is though, his intervention seemed to annoy her even more.
But then I would have done anything for him, my godfather, because without him I’d have fallen to pieces many times since mom and dad died, including during the service. But he was there too as he always was, with the right word, the right prod, the right encouragement, so that I more or less held it together that day as well. I wondered if maybe that was what Margaret didn’t really care for, that he represented some kind of rival in her position as my surrogate parent. But I know now it was more than that. She thought I was too prone to hero-worship at the best of times, and told me more than once that the big trouble with a girl putting any man on a pedestal was that if they ever fell off it they were apt to fall on her. Maybe that’s the reason Margaret still hasn’t got married. Oops! I’m afraid she didn’t at all care for that remark.
The Abbot took Margaret, Jack and Uncle Mark on a tour after the service and I tagged along even though I knew as much about the place as anyone, at least I thought I did. So Uncle Mark saw the classes for the children dad’s endowment was helping to finance, and the hospital that treated them, and then we all went down to the Scriptorium and saw the monks at work amongst all the manuscripts framed by magnificent old master oil paintings and the finest tapestries. It was the most valuable collection of patristic manuscripts in the western world, and even Uncle Mark had to be impressed. I remember showing him a painting of the previous monastery there, being burned by mean-looking Moorish types, putting every man, woman and child to the sword. “When the last Abbey was destroyed by invaders, some folk thought it brought on the Dark Ages,” I whispered to him.
But before he could respond a slightly guttural voice from behind us continued my thought, “And if this one ever is, we may be fated to return to them.”
I answered whoever it was without even looking round I remember, with a very dismissive, “I think we’re all a bit too civilized now for that kind of thing to happen again.” But as we both turned we saw the speaker was a thin, aquiline-faced monk, with the demeanor of a country schoolmaster. “Let us hope you are right,” he said in an accent I at least picked up as not being Italian. He reminded me right away of that painting of Savonarola by Fra Bartolemeo that hangs in the National Gallery in Florence. But for some reason he was wearing a grey cassock where every other monk there wore black, after all, Benedictines aren’t called the ‘black monks’ for nothing are they? Maybe I should have guessed his accent right then, but I didn’t. But then what difference would it have made if I had?
I think Uncle Mark took an instant dislike to him, why I’m not sure, but he rather pointedly headed off to another part of the Scriptorium to check out some other painting that had caught his fancy, or at least to pretend it had caught his fancy, because truth to tell he didn’t know the first thing about any kind of art. But meanwhile my attention was drawn to a tapestry behind the odd, grey-cassocked monk. It was half-hidden in a corner, and was of Daniel leading Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego out the lions’ cave. Truthfully it wasn’t the tapestry that I’d noticed, but the air ruffling it from behind. Being the nosey person I invariably was, I walked over and pulled the tapestry back a little to see the source of the draft. Behind it was an iron grated door rusted by the centuries and behind it a dark rock-corridor completely blocked up by fallen rock. “I’ve never noticed that before?” I was at least honest enough to admit.
“It was cut out the rock when the Abbey was rebuilt,” said the strange monk.
“In case of more invaders?” I asked.
“They say it once ran down to the Nun’s Chapel near Mark Anthony’s amphitheater below here. I doubt anyone’s been down it for years though,” and he smiled, bowed his head slightly, and walked off. I went back over to the others, showed them some more paintings, then we all headed to the refectory for lunch. And a very nice lunch it was too, fish I remember, in a garlic sauce, Uncle Mark’s favorite.
Later we came back outside. “Think I’ll go down and check on mom and dad. Want to come with me?” I asked him. “It’s a perfect spot for taking some shots back up at the monastery buildings. Fancy joining us, Jack?” I said.
So I led them both off down the steps to a small lower balcony. In the middle of it was a simple little metal grave stone and on it was inscribed ‘Ansel Hampton September 1, 1885 –May 10, 1939 & Maria Hampton February 6, 1894 – May 10, 1939.’ “I can still remember their wedding day,” Uncle Mark mused, “Seems like yesterday. I made the worst best man’s speech ever.”
“I’ve heard some of your speeches. I doubt you could make a bad one.” But as I answered I saw the strange little monk was now sitting beneath a nearby tree, watching us, with an Italian newspaper open in front of him. I should have realized right there and then there was something different about him. Benedictine monks simply didn’t sit around reading newspapers, they were always buzzing about doing something useful, even if it was only praying. But then maybe this one was a member of a more contemplative part of the Order, a diplomatic type maybe, charged with keeping in contact with goings on in the outside world. Whatever he was, I could see his newspaper had a photo of Benito Mussolini, the now self-styled Field Marshall of the Italian Empire, haranguing a huge crowd of his fascist supporters in a square in Rome. He had that arms akimbo position he used after making a particularly trenchant point, or one he thought was particularly trenchant, and whatever the point was his gallery below thought so too, or more likely thought it better to have it believed they did.
“Do you know Mussolini insists that every photo of him is taken from below knee-level, so he looks like he’s seven feet tall,” I said. “I remember one afternoon I was nearly dragged off to the Regina Coeli prison when I didn’t remember that, and tried to take a photo from a balcony above him.”
“Vain men are invariably particular about the photos taken of them,” the monk responded.
“Can I take it you don’t particularly care for Il Duce either?”
“Because he is a fool,” the grey-cassocked monk said.
“But a very dangerous one,” I replied, surprised though that any monk would be quite so openly critical of another human being.
“He is like Adolf Hitler,” he continued. “He will not settle for just being his country’s leader, he would be her conquering Caesar too.” The thin little monk smiled up at my godfather and sighed. “But then marching one’s army in triumph through Rome is a temptation few commanders have yet proved able to resist,” he mused.
“American ones could,” Uncle Mark interjected, clearly even more miffed at him.
“Who knows? So far no-one’s seen too many of them round here,” laughed the grey-cassocked monk.
This time I could really feel the tension rising, so I suggested to Uncle Mark that I took a photo of him between us and the Abbey towering above. He thought that would be just fine, so I positioned him looking out to his left between me and the Abbey behind him. But before I could even take the shot he said, “Mind if you took me looking the other way? I always think my left side is much more presentable than my right.” And before I could answer he had turned to his right whether I minded or not. And to tell the truth even if I’d been trying to I couldn’t have seen much difference between one side of his profile or the other.
“Some say a man should only allow an image of himself looking to the right, guarding his sinister side from which his ego continually seeks to dominate him,” the monk said as I took my godfather’s picture.
“But what if that person doesn’t have a sinister side?” I said.
“Then he is need of photographs at all for he is no longer a man, but already a god,” was the monk’s smiling response.
“Why don’t I see you back upstairs,” Uncle Mark said and walked off.
The monk looked down at mom and dad’s grave plate, “The Abbot told me how generous your parents were to the Abbey. You must be very proud of them.”
“I’m Patricia,” I said not quite sure what else to say. “And this is my brother Jack.”
“I am…” he paused for a moment then added, “Brother Frido.”
“Mind if I took a photo of you too?” I asked him.
“Why not?” and I took it. But as I did I couldn’t help noticing that unlike my godfather he looked off to the left, as if taking his own advice.
But just then I looked up at the balcony and saw Margaret trying to catch our attention, and motion to us to come back up. “Something’s got Margaret flustered again,” I said and turned back to Brother Frido, “Perhaps we can spend longer together the next time we get back here.”
“Who knows?”
And Jack and I walked back up the steps to where Margaret, Uncle Mark, the Abbot and his secretary Fra Matranola were standing.
“What’s the matter now?” I asked Margaret.
“Maybe we are returning to the Dark Ages,” she said.
“Why? What’s going on?” Jack asked.
“The Germans invaded France in massive force this morning,” Margaret answered, handing a cable to Jack.
“So what do we do?” I asked.
“The State Department says it might be smarter for all visiting Americans to get out of Italy immediately,” Margaret answered.
“But what’s any of that got to do with her?”
“They think there’s a good chance Mussolini is going to declare war on France and Britain too,” my godfather added.
“Even he wouldn’t be that stupid,” I laughed.
“There’s a U.S. Army transport out of Rome airport at midnight tonight. They’re strongly advising us all to be on it,” my godfather said.
“And that was strongly advising, not politely asking,” Margaret added with finality.
“I’ll be right behind you,” I sighed and she, Jack and Uncle Mark walked off leaving me alone with the Abbot. I looked back down at the balcony and the strange monk. “Why doesn’t he wear black like all the rest of you, Abbot?”
“Brother Frido is not of our order. He merely visits us when he can to… refresh his faith.”
“And the rest of the time?”
“If he did not feel able to tell you that himself, it is not my position to,” the Abbot responded.
“Till better times then,” I said to him.
“If there ever are any,” I heard him whisper as I followed the rest of them off.