NAPOLI

Giuseppe, Lodovico and his confessor, Father Diego Galasso, are walking the final miles to Napoli after more than a month on the road. Despite the reason for the journey, the accusations which Giuseppe must face, the three men are in high spirits. To their right: the best-defended and largest port in the Spanish Empire, embroiled in what hindsight will deem a golden age. To their left: Vesuvio, enjoying a seventh year of rest after its most recent destructive burst. They pass palaces and Spanish villas, hectic markets and churches that dwarf anything Giuseppe has seen in his circuits of Puglia.

They enter the friary of San Lorenzo Maggiore at the centre of the metropolis. Galasso announces their presence. A pack of friar-brutes descend on Giuseppe and part him from his companions.

High spirits: squashed!

They lock Giuseppe in a room.

No food. No water.

No messages until the next morning, which history will record as 25 November 1638, when he is dragged out of his cell and across the courtyard. On one side: one of the brutes from yesterday, a man of perhaps fifty who smells of the sea and brims with its pugnacity. On the other: a young friar who does not lay a hand on him.

‘Think upon that other saint,’ the young friar says, ‘who grew tired of preaching the true Gospel to those who would not listen, and turned to the mouth of the Marecchia and preached to the fish instead.’

‘Other saint?’ Giuseppe asks.

The young friar, his smooth skin radiant in the morning sun, continues. ‘The fish did gather and the heretics did follow.’

‘Brother Giuseppe?’ Lodovico calls from a doorway.

Giuseppe raises his hand to greet his friend, turns back to the young friar, but he is gone.

Giuseppe is brought before the court. Chief among them, Antonio Ricciullo, former ambassador to Rome and Bishop of Belcastro. Giuseppe has been subjected to stories about this man ever since that painful letter arrived from Rome. How he styles himself Inquisitor-general and has condemned three clerics for functioning without priest’s orders, and had them strangled and burnt in public. A fourth was strangled in private.

Would he be given a choice?

As the court creaks into motion, following processes as mysterious as the Mass had once seemed, Giuseppe thinks about that other Antonio, the saint of Padua with the blessed tongue who preached to the fishes. But what were the people before him now: the fish or the heretics? Neither. He mustn’t think such things about his superiors.

He bows his head and dares not raise it.

During a break in proceedings, without a single question having been put to him, and without him looking up, Giuseppe asks the brute, still affixed to his side — as if he would run away, as if he had not travelled two hundred and fifty miles on foot to face the Inquisition — who the other friar was.

‘What friar?’

‘The one on my left as we crossed the courtyard. Young. Handsome.’

‘There was no such person.’

Lodovico will later confirm he saw no one but the brute. That Giuseppe was indeed granted a vision of San Antonio of Padua ahead of his great trial.

When Monsignor Ricciullo finally addresses Giuseppe, he asks him to recount the facts of his life. Where he was born. Where he first entered the Order. When he was examined, and by whom. To test his suitability as a priest he is asked to read from the breviary, and is then sent away, back to his cell, though there is food and a little water this time.

Two days pass before he is called before the court once more. Ricciullo summarises the accusations of Monsignor Giuseppe Palamolla, Vicar Apostolate of a vacant diocese, present in Giovinazzo when Giuseppe and the Father Provincial of Puglia, Antonio of San Mauro Forte, visited a second time.

‘It is said that you stirred up such enthusiasm with your first visit that members of both the nobility and the clergy requested your return. Is that correct?’

‘That is my understanding.’

‘And what happened when you celebrated Mass before the Blessed Sacrament in the cathedral at Giovinazzo?’

‘I do not remember what happened to me. There was a large crowd of people. As in all such places, my superior directed me to go among the people. I went reluctantly.’

‘Reluctantly?’

‘I did not wish to commence the tour but was bound by obedience. Because I am weak, however, at every stop I asked the Father Provincial that it might be the last.’

‘And yet you persisted for more than a year?’

‘Under obedience, yes. I came to see the tour as a means of mortification sent by God himself. Even so, I was continually praying that God would free me of it.’

‘These are not the words of a man acting as a Messiah,’ says the man to the left of Ricciullo.

‘Words will not settle this,’ Ricciullo says. ‘Not words alone. Padre Giuseppe, would you be so kind as to celebrate Mass for us, that we might judge you on your deeds and not rely on words that any pauper could muster?’

Giuseppe agrees. Indeed, his heart alights at the thought of celebrating Mass for the first time in over a week.

But another two days pass in his cell with no indication of when he will be called upon.

It is daybreak when Ricciullo commands the man outside Giuseppe’s cell to let him in.

There is no light in the room. Ricciullo curses the prisoner for his sloth. He asks the guard to bring him a candle. While he waits, the sound of mumbled prayer finds his ears. It is coming from within the cell. Not from against a wall, where he presumes the pallet is positioned, but from the very centre. The prayer clarifies. The accused, Giuseppe Desa, is asking Our Lady to withhold her blessings from him that he might celebrate the Mass in its entirety without any external show of his internal ecstasy.

Ricciullo considers announcing his presence, getting Desa to turn and walk into the light of the passageway, but the guard arrives with a candle before he can summon his voice.

He takes the flame and steps into the room, which takes on an orange-brown glow that intensifies around the habit of the man kneeling in prayer five feet off the ground in the centre of the room.

The Inquisitor does not find his voice. He steps back, out of the room, slams the door and instructs the guard to get Desa ready to say Mass in the church of San Gregorio Armeno.

Ricciullo and the other inquisitors occupy the first row of pews, but they are joined by others. Officials of the court, and too many nuns for his liking. But he holds his peace.

Desa’s Mass passes without miracle.

‘What are we to make of this?’ one of the officials asks Ricciullo.

‘I say it gives credence to the charge that he cannot fly without contraptions,’ remarks another.

Giuseppe cannot hear this. He is facing the altar, saying, ‘Oh, Blessed Virgin, thank you, thank you,’ over and over again. His heart is in flame, his feet off the ground before he knows what is happening. His ascent takes him almost to the top of the altar.

Ricciullo turns to see the nuns have all taken to their feet. The young and foolish among them are already making their way down the aisle.

No, they are not all young.

The nuns have stormed the sanctuary and are leaping to take hold of Giuseppe’s habit, so that they may tear off a piece for themselves.

The Inquisitor folds one hand over the other, stands and walks back up the aisle.