A little red car darted forward from a junction. It shot into a stream of traffic jetting across a piazza and sped along a boulevard but, approaching the next crossroads it was seen to hesitate, signal left, then right, then, on the brink of commitment, it lurched forward, just escaping collision with a tourist bus to the side and a van in front. Horns and a klaxon and protesting, screeching brakes clam-oured in the car’s wake as it disappeared into the melée of Rome’s summer morning traffic. In it were three priests: two of them young.
“Are you a stupid man, Liam?” asked O’Reilly, the old one, from the front passenger seat. “Are you a man, now, who makes bad decisions under pressure, would you say?” Liam gripped the steering-wheel even tighter and even more tightly gritted his teeth, telling himself not to answer, not to rise to the bait. He hated O’Reilly. He wanted to swat him out of existence with the back of his hand like the whining irritant he was. “I always heard you were a great man for the technicalities of life,” O’Reilly went on. “Isn’t that so, Donal?” he added, tilting his chin towards the back-seat passenger but keeping his eyes on the road ahead.
Liam glanced into the mirror. Donal’s dark eyes met his there sympathetically, as he replied, deflecting their superior’s attention, “More the technologies in Liam’s case, Father. As for the technicalities, you yourself are known as being a stickler for them in your own work.”
“Yes, in texts, yes. But when it comes to machinery….” He sniffed. “I dare say it’s a talent. One about which I must needs be modest.”
He expected, and was provided with, a contradictory murmur from Donal. Liam flashed an angry look via the mirror and received an apologetic, good-humoured wink in return. Donal was hunched forward because the back seat was cramped and he was a burly man, broad-shouldered, with big country-man’s hands. His knees were pressed against the seats in front.
“Have you heard from the publishers?” Donal asked O’Reilly. “Have they a date yet?”
“They have. I’m to choose between three dates. They’re being very obliging, I must say. ‘Totally at your convenience, Monsignor O’Reilly,’ they said.” His complacent smile stretched his spare, pasty skin more tautly over his skull.
No doubt, Liam thought, O’Reilly considered his appearance appropriately ascetic. He could glimpse the old man’s hands, clasping a briefcase on his lap. They were swollen. Arthritis. Liam felt no sympathy. As O’Reilly talked on, Liam concentrated on getting them to the Vatican, grateful for Donal’s deliberate absorption of his tittle-tattle. Donal had the patience for it.
With the car stowed and security clearances done, they followed O’Reilly along a pillared portico. Why couldn’t the man just get a taxi, Liam fumed. What were he and Donal doing, trailing in his wake, like ducklings? No, like pages – bridesmaids, even, in their full-length habits! That’s all it was: vanity. O’Reilly wouldn’t do even a small commission like this one without a little retinue, making a point: “Look how healthy the Order is. We have men to spare for the smallest tasks.” That was their function today: walking billboards.
Liam saw, beyond the pillars, up above the balconies and the roof tiles, the sky. It was sharply blue. Someone opened a high window and a pane flashed like a semaphore. He felt himself respond: What? Up there? Come up there? Above it all! Yes! He felt a touch on his arm and turned to see Donal looking concerned. Had he groaned aloud? He sighed. “Donal, I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he muttered. “You’re the only sane one of them all.”
Ahead of them, O’Reilly announced his business to one of the Swiss Guards at an entrance. Out in the courtyard a troop of his colleagues marched past. Powerfully slender, on their way to some formal occasion, they wore the distinctive, conquistador-style, striped and slashed uniform – blue, orange and yellow – with a scarlet plume waving from their glinting, pointed helmets. How strange, Liam reflected: three men in funereal black – in skirts, basically – and others dressed like peacocks: the flamboyant, martial males. Truly there was a place for everyone in the Roman Catholic Church. The full spectrum.
The tall young man inspecting their credentials was wearing the plain, blue duty uniform and black beret. Liam saw a look pass between the Guard and Donal. Did they know each other? Neither spoke. Did Donal know everyone? Liam sometimes thought so. Donal: so quiet, so observant, given to good deeds without fuss. Who knew what he’d done for this man? Liam wouldn’t ask because Donal prized discretion. If questioned, his pleasant features would crimson to the roots of his black peasant hair and… ‘peasant’? Liam caught the word, displeased with himself. It was true, he knew, that that’s how he saw his friend: a big, Irish labouring man, white-skinned and curly-haired, needing to stoop through doorways and manage his great strength in narrow confines when his body might have been easier digging, lifting, striding… But Liam didn’t see himself as a labeller; he prided himself on seeing people as individuals. He tossed the peasant-thought from him.
But a holiday memory returned to him: Donal, in a cliff-edge field overlooking the Donegal Atlantic, tossing stones to his brothers from a broken wall, the steady pressure of the sea-wind preventing words; the same wind provoking white wave-caps on the dark, glittering ocean. A glittering day. That’s what Liam remembered. Now it occurred to him that that had been Donal in his element.
As the Guard let them pass through the doorway Liam wondered how Donal had disciplined himself to years of study. Perhaps his mind was hungry too? Not as hungry as mine, Liam thought, confident of his own keen intelligence. They had spent part of their novitiate together, then Liam had been loaned to a different province and within the last year they had both been assigned to Rome. Liam felt they got on well. Donal was a good listener.
On that same holiday, he’d been in a rowing-boat with Donal, on a calm day. The boat rocked a little as they let it float, just enough movement to be soothing. Liam lay under the sun, under the blue sky, opening himself to the heat. Sprinklings of light he allowed through his lashes: scintillae. He felt a little spark of pleasure at the exactitude of the word. He had sung, without effort, “Volare… oh ho; Cantare… oh woh oho; Nel blu dipinto di blu; Felice di stare lassù…” On he sang, repeating himself at random. To sing, to fly, in the blue painted blue, happy to stay there on high. When he’d opened his eyes, Donal was gazing at him in the frankest admiration. Sea-birds glided overhead with masterly ease. Liam had closed his eyes and continued humming, smiling, singing: “E volavo, volavo felice più in alto del sole… and higher again, while the world bit by bit disappeared far away down below.” He soared.
On the way back to shore he’d had the oars. Donal had fussed: it was too far, let him take over; no trouble and so on, and Liam, struggling, had persisted, irked that he should be thought incapable. Singing wasn’t all he could do!
And now, here they were, years later, fully trained, professed, fledged. Dry feathers, he thought resentfully. Dusty birds.
Voices reached him now from ahead, murmuring in Italian. O’Reilly stopped at an open office door, was greeted from inside and went in, closing the door behind him, abandoning them without explanation. Liam turned to Donal indignantly. Donal raised a hand signalling patience, walked along to the next office and spoke to its occupant. A smart young woman came to the threshold, smiling. She beckoned to Liam as she ushered Donal around a corner, chatting animatedly. Donal did know everyone!
“I never saw her before,” Donal insisted simply as they sat at the formica-topped table in a modest kitchen-cum-dining room. The woman had done her best to make them comfortable with coffee and dry little biscuits. Liam was at the head of the table, Donal at its broad side, on a metal chair whose spindly legs squeaked on the terrazzo floor at any movement. Time crawled past. Liam employed it in telling Donal what he thought of O’Reilly and his ilk, and all he stood for: the life-denying, status-seeking, petty-minded, cerebral…. “I hate him!” he said. He felt the pleasure of inserting the scalpel exactly on the puncture point. “His nit-picking, old-womanish ways and his rudeness, and his insinuations. Why doesn’t he just say things?”
Donal sat in silence, his discomfort evident in his hunched shoulders, his furrowed brow, his eyes that, Liam could swear, had grown even darker. But Liam ignored these signs. Never a bad word about anyone from Donal, he thought irritably, so he said a good few more to compensate. He didn’t notice himself leaning forward on his elbows, letting his clenched fist fall heavily onto the table, time and again, in an unconscious act of obliteration. Liam’s frustration and grievance absorbed him, exalted him and Donal’s very distress excited him. At least it was a reaction!
Suddenly there was a scrape of metal on stone and Liam, startled, felt his descending fist engulfed and arrested between Donal’s great hands. “Liam!” Donal said gruffly, urgently; and again, “Liam”. Liam felt his fist squeezed tightly and shaken a little. “This,” said Donal, “is your heart.” As though in a dream, he watched Donal gently prise open his fingers, bend his dark head over Liam’s palm and place a kiss right at its core. When Donal looked up at him, Liam read and re-read, in an instant, a message of love, reproach and devotion. He saw his hand still resting between Donal’s.
Then there was movement, a terrible clatter of metal, and the chair was falling behind him and he was wiping his hand on his habit and backing away and saying something searing – he could feel it in his mouth – and Donal was infinitely far away, his face signalling emotion which Liam could not bear to decipher.
Liam reached the exit and pummelled the glass panel. He saw the Swiss Guard’s face peer through and register that something was amiss. Before the man could raise any alarm, Liam called out, “I’m sick. Let me out!” To his relief, the door opened and the Guard caught him as he stumbled through.
“You look dreadful,” the man said and next moment was speaking into a mouthpiece pulled from somewhere inside his uniform while Liam rubbed his upper arm in the wake of his strong grip. “Leave by the way you came in, with your I.D. ready. Take it easy, Father.” The Guard’s blue eyes were sympathetic but Liam turned away, recalling the look that had passed between this handsome man and Donal. Had he failed to read that right? As he had failed to read Donal?
He hurried out. The crowds in Saint Peter’s Square, the honking coaches, the souvenir displays, the guides holding umbrellas aloft to shepherd their charges – he plunged through them all, away down a side street and towards the river. He walked in inner turmoil as he reviewed his whole conception of Donal: that afternoon in the boat; times they’d gone swimming together; confidences he had made; ambitions confided; gestures accepted. He dodged the traffic and crossed the Tiber. He hurried past a couple of blocks and, when he came to an open junction, instinctively veered towards the narrowest of the streets that led off it. How much he had shown Donal and, looking back on it now, how little Donal had ever revealed in return. Till now!
“Are you a stupid man?” he heard O’Reilly’s voice. “Would you say you’re a man prone to errors of judgement?” He burned with shame. How did it look to men like O’Reilly? To other people? Could they see what he hadn’t? Did they think that he…? God! He covered his face with a hand and that slowed him down. He realised that he was being stared at by passers-by.
The street was in shade, being very narrow. It was lined with workshops, of upholsterers and leather-workers – dusty, dry things anyway – yet here and there was a window glinting with niche-market luxuries. It was a very Italian mixture of the homely and the high-end. A bulky man, seated in his open-fronted shop, surrounded by domestic appliances, was eyeing him uncertainly. Liam moved on, though each step was leaden. He replayed the incident in the dining-room. He was… desired? Could what he had thought of as admiration be – his stomach tightened – lust? As quickly as images occurred to him of intimacies with Donal – being looked after during an illness last winter; falling asleep on his shoulder during an endless bus journey; accepting kindnesses (Donal taking the draughty seat, queuing for tickets, forgoing the last of the wine) – he pushed them away. They were tainted.
He stopped. He had come to a halt at a shop window, a single large pane of glass. Behind it were brightly coloured, jumbled things. He stared, unseeing, but he felt. He felt acutely. Humiliated. Deceived. Donal was going to open him up, was he? Free up the tight-fisted, tight- … ! Liam swerved away from the thought.
The shop doorbell pinged and a man emerged, close enough to touch: a slim, middle-aged Italian in a good suit, smiling. “I see you are very interested, Father. I’m not surprised. A gem. And you spotted it at once. It’s only been in the window half an hour and for half that time you’ve been looking at it. Don’t deny it! I was watching you.” He held the door open.
Liam entered the shop because that was easier than explaining his behaviour and he could make an excuse after a moment and leave. He didn’t even know what he was supposed to be intrigued by. Luckily the man seemed very sure. He motioned to Liam to be seated on an elegant chair at a small, baize-covered table. An antiques shop, Liam realized. He felt totally in the shop owner’s hands and would perhaps make a fool of himself so when the man said emphatically, “However, if you will allow me, I will put before you something of even greater interest,” he assented at once.
The shop owner switched on a lamp that cast a circle of light onto the table and into it he placed a rectangular object of A4 size. A portrait. It gleamed. It was like nothing precisely that Liam had seen before yet it resembled an icon. A three-quarter-length figure was placed solidly at the centre against a plain gold background. It was a priest, or at least a cleric. He wore a white surplice over a black cassock. His right hand was raised in blessing, his left hand rested on his solar plexus. It was like an icon, but the face…! What a beautiful face. In no way abstracted to its essentials as in a true icon, this was the face of a thoroughly observed individual. No one could doubt that whoever had painted this had seen and known the subject: a man aged about thirty, black-haired, strong-shouldered, strong-featured and attractive.
“You see!” the shop owner announced triumphantly. “He smiles and he does not smile. He smiles without smiling. The artist has managed a great thing.” He paused. Liam understood that he was being offered the pleasure of stating the obvious. When he didn’t – couldn’t – the man tapped the table with a finger and said, “He has painted the interior joy – here around the eyes – and in the entire demeanour.” Liam nodded readily, because, yes, this priest had a certain quality, something grounded, humane. The shop owner, noting Liam’s assent, sat back, pleased. He slid something underneath the painting to prop it up for Liam’s inspection. There was no frame and it seemed to be done on card or light wood.
Liam gazed with pleasure, taking in the skilfully rendered details. Here was a real person. Someone he’d like to meet.
“Of course, it was done after his death,” the shop owner went on.
Liam felt let down – ridiculously, he knew. Of course the subject of this painting was dead. But he looked so alive!
“It’s a beatification portrait,” the man explained.
“You mean he was dead when it was done!” Liam said, rather stupidly. “I mean, he just seems so young – to be dead,” he added lamely. “He was a saint?”
“Well. Certainly somebody thought so. Or hoped he would be. It was commissioned by a religious order during the cause for his beatification.”
Liam understood. “A sort of advert. A bit of promotion.” This portrait before him must be early twentieth century, he thought, but progressive for its time because the face of holiness for centuries had been lean, ascetic, distant and this portrait’s candour and warmth would have been unusual. It was the sort that would be done today when approachability was to be emphasized for a more touchy-feely age: the saint as someone-you’d-like.
“It’s late eighteenth century,” the shop owner said.
“But he’s so….” Liam was lost for words.
“Modern?”
“He’s like someone you’d meet any day!”
“And he’s very special.” The shop owner pulled up a chair so that the two of them considered the painting together.
Liam felt obscurely privileged, then recognised that he was feeling the awe that comes from being in the presence of beauty. “Who is he?” he asked, aware of an excitement, like the anticipation on the point of meeting someone significant.
“Antonio Tramasco.”
The name meant nothing. The shop owner shook his head regretfully. “He was well-known… at one time. The founder of….”
He named a religious order familiar to Liam.
“But Alberetti founded them.”
“Co-founded,” the man corrected him. He sat back in his chair. “Tramasco was the real inspiration. It is to him they owe their charism but they chose to forget that.”
“Why? Didn’t he become a saint?”
“His process was halted. Very close to beatification. Some letters were found and the order withdrew of its own volition. It’s a wonder this painting survived.”
“How did you find it?”
“It’s a little speciality of mine – these beatification portraits. Saints always sell. Archives clamour for them. I’ve been keeping an eye open – mildly, you know – for Tramasco, for a long time.”
Liam watched him look at the portrait, not with avidity, not as an object of profit, but with a sad affection. He was the more surprised then when the man added, glancing at Liam, “People pay for things they love – and for things they fear.” Liam, irritated at being out of his depth, moved to get up but the man laid a restraining hand on his arm. “Am I too cryptic? I guessed you wouldn’t know.” He smiled, waiting till Liam sat down again. “I am a businessman.” Liam nodded impatiently. “I see you arrive… outside my window. I think at first – trouble! But then it seemed, perhaps not. I watched you. Very unguarded!” He laughed. “You were seeing nothing. But I saw you. Now, my young friend – because you are young (with all due respect for your station in life) – you were in the grip of some great emotion and Monsignor O’Reilly is in town.” Liam was astonished. “Do you not wear the same habit? The esteemed O’Reilly is a customer of mine. He will buy this painting. He is a connoisseur.” At Liam’s scorn towards this assessment he leant forwards in amused chastisement, saying, “My friend! My friend! He collects items of archival interest. Tramasco’s order flourishes, does it not, and in an area of work similar to yours?”
“Yes?”
“Almost – were it conceivable – competitors?”
Liam began to see. But even so! “He wouldn’t buy it just so they couldn’t have it. And I suppose they would want it. Even if he’s a bit in the shade he’s still their co-founder.”
“Yet you’ve never heard of him. He is in darkness, not shade. Even though it was to him that God spoke and without him the order would not exist. They have hidden him well. Why should they put him on display now, whereas….” He looked at Liam. “Would our O’Reilly hide him?”
Liam considered. O’Reilly would enjoy the drama, taking the portrait out for a select few. If there was some scandal attached to it, even a mild one, it would provide an opportunity for barbed witticisms at the other order’s expense. How distasteful!
He became aware of the shop owner’s eyes on him. “I am a businessman. I saw you, and now you will tell O’Reilly about the portrait and I will contact Tramasco’s order and tell them, and then business will be brisk!” He smiled. Liam was about to be indignant but the man pre-empted him. “Don’t worry. I will sell to O’Reilly because otherwise this portrait will disappear for good. It will be safe with O’Reilly.”
Liam was reluctant to relinquish his indignation even though he knew the man had read O’Reilly aright. The shop owner looked sad. “At least it will be safe,” he repeated. He gazed at the portrait and Liam followed suit. They sat side by side for some time. Tramasco’s handsome, reposeful face was impressive. It seemed to Liam that he looked happy; at once purposeful and fulfilled. “I probably am looking at his essence. An icon of goodness,” he thought. At last Liam asked, “What did he do wrong?”
The shop owner sighed. “I think he was a man ahead of his time. He fell in love.”
Not that! The most banal of falls, Liam thought bitterly, disappointed.
“Not in the way you think,” said the shop owner. “He fell in love with a man.” He scrutinised Liam, who felt himself flushing. “He wrote some letters… before he drowned. They didn’t come to light for some time. When they did….”
“He was scuppered!” Liam knew he was being brutal, taking an unpleasant pleasure in Tramasco’s downfall.
“His chances of sainthood were, yes, for the time, but times change.”
“You can’t have a saint with a gay lover!” Liam stood. He longed to get away.
“Who said he had a lover?” demanded the shop owner. “I said he fell in love with a man. There’s nothing dishonourable in that.”
Liam spluttered. “Dishonour comes, not from the feelings, but from what is done because of them.” They were both standing now. “Look at this face,” the shop owner demanded. “Do you see dishonour there? I have seen some of those letters and there’s nothing in them that doesn’t speak of devotion and sacrifice. I say ‘love’ and you hear something sordid. He is a saint! A saint for our age.” Liam headed for the door. “My regards to Monsignor, remember.”
Liam found the shop door locked. Calmly the owner walked to it, saying, “I intend to find out more about Antonio Tramasco and O’Reilly will help me do it – for the wrong reasons. But as you – a clever young man – know, O’Reilly is not as clever as he thinks.” He held Liam’s gaze challengingly, making him feel the implied rebuke, through the implied comparison, before he unlocked the door and released him into the street.
Liam chose to sit on a stone bench by the road along the Tiber because the roar of the traffic hurtling past cocooned him. He needed to think. He reflected on Tramasco’s portrait, its hieratic pose of benediction. “They loved him,” he thought, “those brothers of his who commissioned the portrait.” Tramasco must have looked at them like that and they wanted to feel that look again. They didn’t portray him as an ascetic, a penitent or a man of action but as a man in the act of bestowing blessing and – he had to admit it – transmitting love, the presence of love. He imagined meeting Tramasco. “What if he had fallen in love with me?”
He was flooded with sorrow, then with a dreadful sense of being crumpled in a heap. If he were to die now what would – could – be painted? A cocky sneer, an aggressive tilt of the head and a cynical expression; perhaps one hand thrust out to the side to keep others back out of his way? And if he died in thirty or forty years’ time? He pictured O’Reilly’s desiccated features.
He nearly cried aloud. Donal had been ashamed of him this morning because his love was not blind. “He has seen me!” Liam realised with alarm. He had been seen, right through to his clenched heart. And then? Liam made himself re-live the unfolding of his fingers, the touch of lips in his palm. He stood, abruptly. Donal loved him despite everything. How often had he himself preached that to people, telling them that that is how God loves them: “despite everything”?
Cautiously, he approached the concept of Donal’s being in love with him. He could only see… Donal… being Donal. He could see himself. He let his memory range, but with this new information, and time and again, Donal’s generosity and affection were obvious and his own careless acceptance of what he regarded as his due. Had he not paused to consider this dynamic? Yes. Now and then. He felt shame creep to every pore. He broke into a sweat. He had taken and taken. Was that not a form of collusion?
Collusion! In what? What had Donal done that was wrong? In fact… the wonder was how Donal had managed to love so much while being in love. Liam’s own experiences of that had been characterised by possessiveness and appetite. Donal had curbed the desire for a response. “He loves me,” Liam realised, “without asking anything in return.” He was overwhelmed afresh.
He had to move. The traffic came back into earshot. The car. The keys were in his pocket so O’Reilly and Donal must be marooned!
Back at the Vatican he let O’Reilly’s fury assail him without defending himself, standing with his head bowed. “Have you nothing to say for yourself?” the older man demanded eventually. “No ingenious explanation? No word of wisdom?”
Liam raised his eyes, but to Donal’s face, and said, “I can’t see what’s in front of me, Monsignor. That’s true.”
“Well, I’m glad that’s plain to you,” snapped O’Reilly.
Liam continued to look at Donal, hoping to signal a willingness to reconnect. Donal, bravely, as Liam now realised, looked steadily, painfully, back. O’Reilly, feeling ignored, extended his tirade as he marched them towards the car.
Once they were seated, Liam turned to O’Reilly and said, “I have a message for you.”