FOR Blaise Meredith, the days he spent in the Bishop’s house were the happiest of his life. A cold man by nature, he had begun to understand the meaning of fellowship. Withdrawn and self-sufficient, he saw, for the first time, the dignity of dependence, the grace of a shared confidence. Aurelio, Bishop of Valenta, was a man with a gift of understanding and a rare talent for friendship. The loneliness and the wintry courage of his guest had touched him deeply, and with tact and sympathy he set about establishing an intimacy between them.
Early the first morning he came to Meredith’s room carrying the bulky volume of records on the first investigation of Giacomo Nerone. He found the priest, pale and fatigued, sitting in bed with the breakfast tray on his knees. He put the volume down on the table and then came, solicitously, to sit on the edge of the bed.
“A bad night, my friend?”
Meredith nodded wanly.
“A little worse than usual. The travel perhaps, and the excitement. I must apologise. I had hoped to serve Your Lordship’s mass.”
The Bishop shook his head, smiling.
“No, Monsignor. Now you are under my jurisdiction. You are forbidden all but the Sunday Mass. You will sleep late and retire early, and if I find you working too hard, I may have to withdraw you from the case. You’re in the country now. Take time for yourself. Smell the earth and the orange-blossom. Get the dust of the libraries out of your lungs.”
“Your Lordship is kind,” said Meredith gravely. “But there is all too little time.”
“All the more reason to spend some of it on yourself,” the Bishop told him. “And a little on me as well. I’m a stranger here too, remember. My colleagues are good men, most of them, but very dull company. There are things I should like to show you, talk I should like to hear from you. As for this –” he pointed to the bulky, leather-bound volume – “you can read it in the garden. Half of it is repetition and rhetoric. The rest you can digest in a couple of days. The people you want to see are only an hour away by car . . . and mine is at your disposal at any time, with a driver to look after you!”
A slow, puzzled smile dawned on Meredith’s pallid face.
“You are kind to me and I find it strange. I wonder why?”
A youthful grin brightened the face of the Bishop.
“You have lived too long in Rome, my friend. You have forgotten that the Church is a family of the faithful, not simply a bureaucracy of believers. It’s a sign of the times – one of the less hopeful signs. This is the century of the machine and the Church has conceded too much to it. They have time-clocks in the Vatican now and adding machines and ticker tape to tally the stock market.”
In spite of his weariness, Meredith threw back his head and laughed heartily. The Bishop nodded approvingly.
“That’s better. A little honest laughter would do us all good. We need a satirist or two to give us back a sense of proportion.”
“We’d probably prosecute them for libel,” said Meredith wryly, “or indict them for heresy.”
“Inter faeces et urinam nascimur,” the Bishop quoted quietly. “It was a Saint who said it – and it applies equally to Popes and priests and the prostitutes of Reggio di Calabria. A little more laughter at our comic estate, a few honest tears for the pity of things – and we’d all be better Christians. Now finish your breakfast and then take a walk in the garden. I’ve spent a lot of time on it; and I’d hate an Englishman to ignore it!”
An hour later, bathed, shaved and refreshed, he walked out into the garden, taking with him the volume of depositions of Giacomo Nerone. It had rained during the night and the sky was clear, while the air was full of the smell of damp earth and washed leaves and new blossom. The bees were bumbling round the orange-flowers and the scarlet hibiscus, and the yellow gillyflowers stood straight and strident round the stone borders of the paths. Again Meredith was touched with hunger for a permanence on this thrusting earth whose beauty he was seeing for the first time. If only he could stay with it longer, root himself like a tree, to be weathered and blown, but still survive for the rain and the sun and the renewal of spring. But no. He had lived in the dust of the libraries too long and when the time came they would bury him in it. No flowers would grow out of his mouth as they did from the mouths of humbler men, no roots would twine themselves round the moult of his heart and his loins. They would screw him down in a leaden box and carry him to a vault in the Cardinal’s church, where he would moulder, barren as he had lived, until Judgment Day.
Round the trunks of the olive trees the grass was green and the air was warm and still. He took off his cassock and his stock and opened his shirt to let the warmth fall on his thin chest: then he sat down, leaning against the bole of a tree, opened the big leather volume, and began to read:
“Preliminary depositions on the life, virtues and alleged miracles of the Servant of God, Giacomo Nerone. Collected at the instance and under the authority of His Lordship, Aurelio, Titular of Valenta in the Province of Calabria, by Geronimo Battista and Luigi Saltarello, priests of the same Diocese.”
Then followed the careful disclaimer:
“The following depositions and information are of a nonjudicial character, since to this date no court has been set up and no authorities promulgated to examine officially the cause of the Servant of God. Though every effort has been made to arrive at the truth, witnesses were not sworn, nor placed under canonical sanction to reveal any matters known to them. None of the processes of a diocesan court have been observed either as to secrecy or the method of recording. Witnesses have, however, been warned that they may be called to give evidence under oath at such a court, when and if constituted.”
Blaise Meredith nodded and pursed his thin lips with satisfaction. So far so good. This was the bureaucracy of the Church in action – Roman legality applied to the affairs of the spirit. The sceptics might sneer at it, believers might chuckle at its excesses, but in essence it was sound. It was the same genius that had given to the West the civilising code under which, in part at least, it still lived. He turned the page and read on:
“In view of the reports about the visits of pilgrims and the veneration paid by certain members of the faithful at the resting place of the Servant of God, we deemed it our first duty to inquire whether the decrees of the Pontiff Urban VIII prohibiting public cultus have been observed. We found that many members of the faithful, both visitors and local people, do visit the tomb of Giacomo Nerone and pray there. Some of them claim spiritual and temporal favours through his intercession. The civil authorities and, in particular, the Mayor of Gemello Maggiore have organised certain press publicity and improved transport facilities to encourage the flow of visitors. While this may constitute an indiscretion, it does not contravene the canons. No public worship is permitted in the canonical sense. The Servant of God is not invoked in liturgical ceremonies. No pictures or images are exposed for public veneration and, apart from garbled press accounts, no books or leaflets containing accounts of miracles have so far been circulated. Certain relics of the Servant of God are in private circulation among the faithful but no public veneration has been permitted to be paid to them. It is our view therefore that the canons prohibiting public cultus have been observed. . . .”
Blaise Meredith drowsed lightly over the formal phrases. This was old ground to him – familiar but reassuring. It was the function of the Church not merely to impose belief, but to limit it as well, to encourage piety but discourage pietists. The laws were there, however much they were obscured by ignorance, and their cool reason was a curb on the excesses of devotees and the harsh demands of the puritans. But he was still a long way from the heart of the problem – the life and virtues and alleged miracles of Giacomo Nerone. The next paragraph brought him no closer. It was headed:
“No writings of any kind attributable to the Servant of God have been found. Certain references, noted later in the depositions, point to the possible existence of a body of manuscript which has been either lost, destroyed or is being deliberately concealed by interested persons. Until a judicial process has begun and it is possible to bring moral pressure to bear on witnesses, we are unlikely to get further information on this important point.”
Blaise Meredith frowned with dissatisfaction. No writings. A pity. From a judicial point of view the things a man wrote were the only sure indication of his beliefs and intentions, and, in the rigorous logic of Rome, these were even more important than his acts. A man might murder his wife or seduce his daughter and still remain a member of the Church; but let him reject one jot of defined truth and he set himself immediately outside it. He might spend himself in lifelong charities, yet have no merit in him at the end. The moral value of an act depended on the intention with which it was performed. But when a man was dead, who was to speak the secrets of his heart?
It was a discouraging beginning and what followed was even less reassuring:
“Name: Giacomo Nerone. There is reason – noted later in the depositions – to assume that this was a pseudonym.
“Date of Birth: Unknown. Physical descriptions by witnesses vary considerably, but there is general agreement that he was from 30 to 35 years of age.
“Place of Birth: Unknown.
“Nationality: Unknown. There is evidence that Giacomo Nerone was at first accepted as an Italian, but that, later, doubts were cast on his identity. He was described as tall, dark and brown-skinned. He spoke Italian fluently and correctly though with a Northern accent. He did not at first speak dialect, but later learned it and spoke it constantly. During the period covered by his life in Gemelli dei Monti, there were units of German, American, British and Canadian troops operating in the province of Calabria. Various guesses have been made at his nationality, but the evidence advanced in support of them is, in our view, inconclusive.
“We are of the opinion, however, for reasons not yet clear that he did make a deliberate effort to conceal his true identity. We are also of the opinion that certain persons knew his identity and are still attempting to hide it.
“Date of Arrival in Gemelli dei Monti: The exact date is uncertain, but there is general agreement that it was towards the end of August, 1943. This date corresponds roughly with the Allied conquest of Sicily and the operations of the British Eighth Army in the Calabrian province.
“Period of Residence in Gemelli dei Monti: August, 1943, to 30th June, 1944. The whole of the testimony refers to this period of less than twelve months and any claims to heroic sanctity must be judged on the available records of this unusually short time.
“Date of Death: June 30th, 1944. 3 p.m. Giacomo Nerone was executed by a firing squad of Partisans under the leadership of a man known as Il Lupo, the Wolf. Both the date and the time are specific and confirmed by eye-witnesses. The circumstances are also confirmed by unanimous testimony.
“Burial: The burial took place at 10.30 p.m. on June 30th. The body of Giacomo Nerone was removed from the place of execution by six persons and buried in the place known as Grotta del Fauno, where it now lies. Both the identification of the body and the circumstances of the burial are confirmed by the unanimous testimony of those who took part in the interment.”
Blaise Meredith closed the thick volume and laid it down on the grass beside him. He leaned his head back against the rough bole of the olive tree and thought about what he had just read. True, it was only a beginning, but from the point of view of the Devil’s Advocate it was a dubious one.
There were too many unknowns and the imputation of deliberate secrecy was disturbing. All that was known and covered by testimony was a period of eleven months, out of a lifetime of thirty to thirty-five years. There were no writings available for scrutiny. None of these things precluded sanctity, but they might well preclude proven sanctity, which was the matter of Meredith’s investigation and the judicial process of the Bishop’s court.
Always, in cases like this, one was forced back to the cool logic of the theologians.
It began with the premise of a personal God, self-continuing, self-sufficient, omnipotent. Man was the issue of a creative act of the divine will. The relationship between the Creator and His creature was defined first by the natural law, whose workings were visible and apprehensible by human reason, then by a series of divine relations, culminating in the Incarnation, the Teaching, Death and Resurrection of God-made-Man, Jesus Christ.
The perfection of man and his ultimate union with the Creator depended on his conformity to the relationship between them, his salvation depended on his being in a state of conformity at the moment of death. He was aided to this conformity by divine help, called grace, which was always available to him in sufficient measure to guarantee salvation, provided he co-operated with it by the use of free will. Salvation implied perfection, but a limited perfection.
But sanctity, heroic sanctity, implied a special call to a greater perfection, through the use of special graces – to none of which a man could attain by his own power. Every age has produced its crop of saints, not all of them were known, and not all known were officially proclaimed.
Official proclamation involved something else again: the implication that the Divinity wished to make known the virtues of the saint by calling attention to them through miracles – acts beyond human power – divine suspensions of the law of nature.
It was this implication that troubled Meredith at the outset of the case of Giacomo Nerone. It was a simple axiom of every theologian that an omnipotent Being could not, of his nature, lend himself either to triviality or to trivial secrecy.
There was nothing trivial in the birth of a man, since it involved the projection of a new soul into the dimensions of the flesh. There was nothing trivial in the progression of his life, since every act conditioned him for the last moment of it. And his death was the moment when the spirit was thrust out of the body in the irrevocable attitude of conformity or rejection.
So, whatever the gaps in the personal history of Giacomo Nerone, they must be filled. If facts were concealed, Blaise Meredith must ferret them out, because he, too, must soon be called to judgment.
But what a man must do and what his strength permits him are often two different things. The air was warm, the bourdon of the insects were deceptively soothing and the weariness of a sleepless night crept back insidiously. Blaise Meredith surrendered himself to it and slept on the soft grass until lunch-time.
His Lordship chuckled delightedly when Meredith made rueful confession of his morning’s slackness.
“Good! Good! We’ll make a countryman of you yet. Did you dream pleasantly?”
“I didn’t dream,” said Meredith with dry good-humour. “And that was as big a mercy as sleep. But I didn’t get much work done. I glanced through a few of the testimonies just before lunch, but I’m afraid I find them rather unsatisfactory.”
“How?”
“It’s hard to define. They’re in the normal form. They’re obviously the result of careful cross-examination. But – how shall I put it? – they give no clear picture either of Giacomo Nerone, or of the witnesses themselves. And for our purposes both are important. The picture may grow, of course, as I go further, but just now there are no clear outlines.”
The Bishop nodded agreement.
“It was my own impression, too. It is one of the reasons for my doubts about the matter. The depositions are all of one piece. There are no elements of conflict or controversy. And saints are generally very controversial people.”
“But there are elements of secrecy.” Meredith put it to him quietly.
“Precisely.” The Bishop sipped his wine and considered his explanation. “It is almost as if one section of the population had convinced itself that this man was a saint and wanted to prove it at all costs.
“And the other section?”
“Was determined to have nothing to say – either for or against.”
“It’s too early for me to judge that,” said Meredith carefully. “I haven’t read enough or studied enough. But the tone of the statements I have read so far is stilted and strangely unreal, as if the witnesses were speaking a new language.”
“They are!” said the Bishop with sharp interest. “Oddly enough, my friend, you have put your finger on a problem that has exercised me for a long time: the difficulty of accurate communication between the clergy and the laity. It is a difficulty which grows greater, instead of less, and which inhibits even the healing intimacy of the confessional. The root of it, I think, is this: the Church is a theocracy, ruled by a priestly caste, of which you and I are members. We have a language of our own – a hieratic language if you like – formal, stylised, admirably adapted to legal and theological definition. Unfortunately we have also a rhetoric of our own, which, like the rhetoric of the politician, says much and conveys little. But we are not politicians. We are teachers – teachers of a truth which we claim to be essential to man’s salvation. Yet how do we preach it? We talk roundly of faith and hope as if we were making a fetishist’s incantation. What is faith? A blind leap into the hands of God. An inspired act of will which is our only answer to the terrible mystery of where we came from and where we are going. What is hope? A child’s trust in the hand that will lead it out of the terrors that reach from the dark. We preach love and fidelity, as if these were teacup tales – and not bodies writhing on a bed and hot words in dark places, and souls tormented by loneliness and driven to the momentary communion of a kiss. We preach charity and compassion but rarely say what they mean – hands dabbling in sick-room messes, wiping infection from syphilitic sores. We talk to the people every Sunday, but our words do not reach them, because we have forgotten our mother tongue. It wasn’t always like this. The sermons of St. Bernardine of Siena are almost unprintable today, but they reached hearts, because the truth in them was sharp as a sword, and as painful. . . .” He broke off and smiled, as if in deprecation of his own intensity. Then, after a moment, he said gently, “That’s the trouble with our witnesses, Monsignor. We don’t understand them because they are talking to us as we talk to them. And it means as little either way.”
“Then how do I, of all people, come near them?” asked Meredith, with wry humility.
“The mother tongue,” said Aurelio, Bishop of Valenta. “You were born, like them, inter faeces et urinam, and they will be surprised to know that you have not forgotten it – surprised enough, maybe, to tell you the truth.”
Later that afternoon, while the sun blazed outside the closed shutters and the wise folk of the South dozed away the heat, Blaise Meredith lay on his bed and pondered the words of the Bishop. They were true and he knew it. But the habit of years was strong on him; the careful euphemism, the priestly prudery, as though his tongue should be shamed by mention of the body that bore him and the sublime act that gave him being.
And yet Christ himself had dealt in such common coinage. He had talked in the vulgar tongue of vulgar symbols: a woman screaming in labour, the fat eunuchs waddling through the bazaars, the woman whom many husbands could not satisfy and who turned to a man who was not her husband. He had invoked no convention to shield himself from the men He had himself created. He ate with tax-farmers and drank with public women, and He did not shrink from the anointing hands that had caressed the bodies of men in the passion of a thousand nights.
And Giacomo Nerone? If he were a saint, he would be like his Master. If he were not, he would still be a man and the truth about him would be told in the simple language of the bedroom and the wine-shop.
As the afternoon wore on and the first chill of evening filtered into the room, Blaise Meredith began, slowly, to understand the task that lay ahead of him.
His first problem was a tactical one. Although the notices had been published, and the two major officials appointed, the court itself had not yet been constituted. Since all court testimony would be sworn and secret – and since there was no point in wasting its time with frivolous or unco-operative people – it was necessary to test them first in private and unsworn interviews, in the same fashion as a civil lawyer tests his witnesses before presenting them.
They had already been interviewed once by Battista and Saltarello, whose records were in his hands. But these were local priests, and by presumption impartial – if not actually in favour of the candidate. His own position was vastly different. He was a foreigner, a Vatican official, the crown prosecutor. He was suspect by the very nature of his office, and if worldly interests were involved – as they undoubtedly were – he could count on active and powerful opposition.
Those who were promoting the Cause of the Saint would be careful to steer him clear of any contentious information. If they had given testimony in favour of Giacomo Nerone, they would not change it for the Devil’s Advocate – though they might break down if he could find grounds on which to challenge them. It was folly, of course, to make intrigues about the Almighty, but there was as much folly and intrigue inside the Church as there was outside. The Church was a family of men and women, none of them guaranteed impeccable even by the Holy Ghost.
His best chance therefore seemed to lie with those who had refused to give evidence at all. It might not be easy to find out why some people didn’t believe in saints and regarded their cults as a noxious superstition. These might well be willing to reveal anything that pointed to clay feet on a popular idol. Some folk believed in saints but wanted no truck with them at all. They found them uncomfortable company, their virtues a perpetual reproach. There was no one so stubborn as a Catholic at odds with his conscience. Finally there might be those who hesitated to reveal facts creditable to the candidate because they were discreditable to themselves.
The next problem was where to find such people. According to the records of Battista and Saltarello, all the positive information came from Gemello Maggiore, the prosperous village, and all the refusals from the depressed twin across the valley. The distinction was too obvious to be ignored and too artificial to be accepted without question. Meredith decided to discuss it with the Bishop at their next meal together.
His Lordship approached the question with more than usual caution.
“For me, too, this has been one of the most puzzling features of the situation. Let me try to put it into perspective for you. Here are two villages, twins by name and twins by nature, perched on the horns of the same mountain. Before the war, what were they? Typical Calabrian hamlets – small depressed places, inhabited by tenant farmers of absentee landlords. In their outward aspect and in their standard of living there was no perceptible difference between them; except that in Gemello Minore there was a resident padrona, the Contessa de Sanctis. . . .” The Bishop leaned ironically on the parenthesis. “An interesting woman, the Contessa. I’ll be curious to know what you think of her. You’ll be her house-guest when you go to Gemello Minore. However, her presence, then as now, made no difference to the state of the local population. . . . Then came the war. The young men were taken for the Army, the old ones and the women were left to farm the land. It is poor land at best, as you will see, and it got poorer and poorer as the years went on. There was a State levy on the crops, and by the time the landlords had taken their share, there was little enough left for the peasants, and often there was real starvation in the mountains. Now . . .” His Lordship’s long, sensitive hands gestured emphatically. “Into this situation comes a man, a stranger, who calls himself Giacomo Nerone. What do we know about him?”
“Little enough,” said Blaise Meredith. “He arrives from nowhere dressed in peasant rags. He is wounded and sick with malaria. He claims to be a deserter from the fighting in the South. The villagers accept him at face value. They have sons of their own who are far away. They have no sympathy with a lost cause. A young widow named Nina Sanduzzi takes him into her house and cares for him. He enters into a liaison with her which is later broken off . . . right in the middle of her pregnancy.”
“And then?” The Bishop prompted him shrewdly.
Blaise Meredith shrugged in puzzled fashion.
“Then I find myself at a loss. The record is unclear. The witnesses are vague. There is talk of a conversion, a turning to God. Nerone leaves the house of Nina Sanduzzi and builds himself a small hut in the most desolate corner of the valley. He plants a garden. He spends hours in solitude and contemplation. He appears in church on Sundays and takes the Sacraments. At the same time – the same time, mark you – he appears to have taken over the leadership of the villages.”
“How does he lead them, and to what? I’m quizzing you, Meredith, because I want to see what you, the newcomer, have made of this story. I myself know it by heart, but I am still puzzled by it.”
“As I read the evidence,” said Meredith carefully, “he began by going from house to house offering his services to anyone who needed them – an old man whose land was getting away from him, a grandmother, feeble and alone, a sick farmer who wanted someone to hoe his tomato patch. From those who could afford it he demanded a payment in kind – goat milk, olives, wine, cheese – which he passed on to those who were in need of these things. Later, when winter came, he organised a pooling of labour and resources, and enforced it rigorously, sometimes violently.”
“An unsaintly proceeding, surely?” suggested the Bishop, with a thin smile.
“That was my own feeling,” admitted Meredith.
“But even Christ whipped the money-changers out of the temple, did he not? And when you know our Calabresi, you’ll agree that they have the hardest heads and the tightest fists in Italy.”
Meredith was forced to smile at the trap the Bishop had set for him.
He conceded the point, smiling:
“We mark it then to the credit of Giacomo Nerone. The next thing is in his favour too. He nurses the sick and appears to have given some kind of rough medical service in collaboration with a certain doctor, Aldo Meyer, a political exile, who curiously enough refused to give any testimony in the case.”
“That point, too, has been much in my mind,” the Bishop told him. “It is the more interesting since, before and after the war, Meyer himself had tried to organise these people for their own benefit, but failed completely. He’s a man of singular humanity, but handicapped by being a Jew in a Catholic country – perhaps by other things too. You should try to get close to him. You may be surprised. . . . Go on, please.”
“Next we find evidence of more religious activity. Nerone prays with the sick, comforts the dying. He makes journeys in the snow to bring the priest with the Last Sacrament. When there is no priest he himself waits out the death-watch. Now there’s an odd thing . . .” Meredith paused for an uncertain moment. “Two of the witnesses say: ‘When Father Anselmo refused to come . . .’ What would that mean?”
“What it says, I imagine,” His Lordship told him coolly. “There has been much scandal about this man. I have thought often of removing him, but so far I have decided against it.”
“You have a reputation for rigid discipline. You have removed others. Why not this one?”
“He is an old man,” said the Bishop softly. “Old and, I think, very near to despair, I should hate to think I was the one who drove him into it.”
“I’m sorry.” Meredith was instantly apologetic.
“Not at all. We’re friends. You have a right to ask. But I’m a Bishop, not a bureaucrat. I carry the shepherd’s crook and the stray sheep are mine, too. Go on. Read me more of Giacomo Nerone.”
Meredith ran a hand through his thinning hair. He was getting tired. It was an effort to keep his thoughts in order.
“Somewhere about March, 1944, the Germans came – a small detachment at first, then a larger one – garrison reinforcements for those fighting against the British Eighth Army, which had crossed the Straits of Messina and was fighting its way up the toe of Calabria. Giacomo Nerone is the one who negotiates with them, successfully, it seems. The peasants will supply a guaranteed minimum of fresh food in return for medicines and winter clothing. The garrison commander will discipline his troops and protect the women whose husbands and brothers are away. The bargain is kept reasonably well, and Nerone establishes himself as a respected mediator. This association with the Germans was later alleged as a reason for his execution by the Partisans. When the Allies broke through and began pushing up towards Naples, they by-passed the villages and left the local Partisans to deal with the scattered and retreating German forces. Giacomo Nerone stayed on . . .”
The Bishop checked him with a slim, up-raised hand.
“Stop there a moment. What do you see, so far?”
“Ignotus!” said Meredith calmly. “The unknown. The man from nowhere. The lost one, who suddenly becomes the godly one. He has a sense of gratitude, a touch of compassion, a talent, and perhaps a taste for leadership. But who is he? Where does he come from, or why does he act as he does?”
Meredith shook his head.
“Not yet. Godliness perhaps, but not sanctity. I have not yet examined the evidence for the alleged miracles, so I leave this out of consideration. But I make one point. There is a pattern in sanctity, a great reasonableness. As yet I see no reason here, only secrecy and mystery.”
“Perhaps there is no mystery – just ignorance and misunderstanding. Tell me, my friend, what do you know of conditions here in the South at that time?”
“Little enough,” Meredith admitted frankly. “For all of the war I was locked inside Vatican City. I only knew what I heard and read – and that was garbled enough, God knows.”
“Then let me explain them to you.” He got up and walked to the window, to stand looking out on the garden, where the wind stirred faintly through the shrubbery and the shadows were deep because there was still no moon over the hill-tops. When he spoke his voice was tinged with an old sadness. “I am an Italian, and I understand this story better than most though I do not yet understand the people in it. First you must realise that a defeated people has no loyalties. Their leaders have failed them. Their sons have died in a lost cause. They believe in no one – not even in themselves. When our conquerors came in, shouting democracy and freedom we did not believe them either. We looked only at the loaf of bread in their hands and calculated exactly the price they would ask us to pay for it. Hungry people don’t even believe in the loaf until it is safely swallowed and they can feel it aching in their unaccustomed stomachs. That’s the way it was here in the South. The people were defeated, leaderless, hungry. Worse than that, they were forgotten; and they knew it.”
“But Nerone hadn’t forgotten them,” Meredith objected. “He was still with them. He was still a leader.”
“Not any more. There were new barons in the land. Men with new guns and full bandoliers and a rough rescript of authority from the conquerors to clean out the mountains and hold them tidy until a new and amenable Government was established. Their names and their faces were familiar – Michele, Gabriele, Luigi, Beppi. They had bread to bargain with and meat in tin cans and bars of chocolate, and old scores to settle as well: political scores and personal ones. They saluted with the clenched fist of comradeship, and with the same fist beat the faces of those who dared to differ from them. They were many and they were strong, because your Mr. Churchill had said that he would do business with anybody who could help him to clean up the mess in Italy and let him get on with the invasion of France. What could Giacomo Nerone do against them – your Ignotus from nowhere?”
“What did he try to do? That’s what interests me. Why did some folk cling to him as the holy one and others reject him and betray him to the executioners? Why were the Partisans against him in the first place?”
“It’s in the record,” said His Lordship with a tired smile. “They called him a collaborator. They accused him of profitable commerce with the Germans.”
Meredith rejected the suggestion emphatically.
“It’s not enough! It’s not enough to explain the hate and the violence and the division and why one village prospers and the other lapses deeper into depression. It’s not enough for us either. The people claim a martyrdom – death in defence of the Faith and moral principles. All you’ve shown me is a political execution – unjust and cruel maybe – but still only that. We’re not concerned with politics, but with sanctity, the direct relationship of a man with the God who made him.”
“Perhaps that’s all it was – a good man caught up in politics.”
“Does Your Lordship believe that?”
“Does it matter what I believe, Monsignor?”
The shrewd patrician face was turned towards him. The thin lips smiled in irony.
Then, quite suddenly, the truth hit him, cold water in the face. This man too had a cross to bear. Bishop he might be, but there were still doubts to plague him and fears to harry him on the high peak of temptation. A rare compassion stirred in the dry heart of Blaise Meredith and he answered quietly:
“Does it matter? I think it matters much.”
“Why, Monsignor?” The deep, wise eyes challenged him.
“Because I think that you, like me, are afraid of the finger of God.”