HALFWAY through the village, Paolo Sanduzzi ran, full tilt, into his mother. She was standing outside the smithy, talking to Martino’s wife. Rosetta was with them, dressed in her Sunday finery, ready to be taken to the villa for the first time. Nina stared at him in amazement.
“Where do you think you’re going? You’re supposed to be working. What’s all the hurry?”
The words tumbled out of him in a torrent.
“I don’t have to work today. The Contessa told me. I’m going to Rome. She said I was to ask you and tell you that Pietro’s going and Zita and I’m going to be trained . . .”
“Wait a minute!” Nina Sanduzzi’s voice was harsh. “Start again! Who said you’re going to Rome?”
“The Contessa. She’s going up there to see her doctor. She’ll be there for two months.”
“And she wants to take you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“She needs servants, doesn’t she?”
“You’re a gardener, son. There are no gardens in Rome.”
The boy’s mouth dropped sullenly.
“She wants me, anyway. She sent me down to ask you.”
The two women looked at each other significantly. Nina Sanduzzi said bluntly:
“Then you can go straight back and tell her you’re not going. I know who wants you in Rome and it’s not the Contessa.”
“But it isn’t like that at all! She told me to tell you. The Englishman is staying on here.”
“For how long?” Slow anger began to build behind the classic face. “A week — ten days, maybe! And then he’ll be packing his bags for the big city — and for you, Paolo mio. That trick wouldn’t fool a baby.” She caught at his arm roughly. “You’re not going and that’s flat. I’m your mother and I won’t allow it.”
“Then I’ll go anyway.”
She lifted her hand and slapped him hard on the face.
“When you’re a man and can pay your own fare, and find your own work — then you can talk like that. If the Contessa asks me, I’ll tell her to her face. And if there’s any nonsense I’ll have the doctor get in touch with the police at Gemello Maggiore. That’ll keep your Englishman quiet for a while. Now forget about it, like a good boy!”
“I won’t forget about it! I won’t! She asked me and I want to go. She’s the padrona and you’re nobody! You’re just — just a saint’s whore!”
Then he wrenched away from her and went running down the street, with his shirt-tails flapping over his rump. Nina Sanduzzi stared after him, her face a marble mask. Martino’s wife scuffed the ground with her bare feet and said awkwardly:
“He didn’t mean it. He’s just a boy. They hear things. . . .”
“His father was a saint,” said Nina Sanduzzi bitterly. “And his son wants to make himself a feminella.”
“He doesn’t at all,” said Rosetta, in her high clear voice. “He’s just a baby. He doesn’t know what he wants. I’ll bring him back and make him say sorry.”
Before her mother could protest, she had started away, running swiftly in her Sunday shoes, and the last they saw of her was a flurry of skirts and a pair of brown legs up-ended over the wall that screened the torrent from the road.
In a sunlit corner of the garden, Nicholas Black was putting the final varnish on the picture of Paolo Sanduzzi crucified on the olive tree. At the sound of Meredith’s footfall, he looked up and called ironic greeting.
“Good morning, Meredith. I trust you slept well.”
“Indifferently, I’m afraid. I hope I’m not disturbing you?”
“Not at all. I’m just finishing. Would you like to see it? I think it’s my best work so far.”
“Thank you.”
Meredith walked round to the front of the easel and looked at the picture. The painter grinned when he saw the expression on his face.
“Do you like it, Meredith?”
“It’s a blasphemy, Mr. Black.” The priest’s voice was cold.
“That depends on the point of view, of course. To me it’s a symbol. I’ve called it ‘The Sign of Contradiction’. An apt title, don’t you think?”
“Very.” Meredith walked a pace or two away from the picture and then said, “I’ve come to tell you, Mr. Black, that neither the Contessa nor Paolo Sanduzzi will be going to Rome. The Contessa would be pleased if you would leave the villa as soon as possible.”
The painter flushed angrily.
“She might have had the politness to tell me herself.”
“I offered to do it for her,” Meredith told him quietly. “She’s an unhappy woman who needs a great deal of help.”
“Which the Church is only too ready to give her. She’s quite rich, I believe.”
“The Church would like to help you, too, Mr. Black — and you are very poor indeed.”
“To hell with your help, Meredith. I want nothing from you. Now do you mind going? I’m busy.”
“I’ve brought you something that might interest you.”
“What is it — a tract from the Catholic Truth Society?”
“Not quite. They’re the personal papers of Giacomo Nerone. Would you care to look at them?”
In spite of himself, the painter was interested. He wiped his hands on a scrap of cloth and, without a word, took the folder from Meredith. He turned back the manila cover and scanned a few pages in silence. Then he closed the folder and asked in an odd, strained voice:
“Why do you show me this?”
Meredith was puzzled by the strangeness of him, but he answered simply:
“They make a very moving document — the spiritual record of a man who had lost the Faith, as you have, and then came back to it. I felt they might help you.”
Nicholas Black stared at him a moment; then his lips drew back in a smile that looked more like a grimace of agony.
“Help me! You have a wonderful sense of humour, Meredith! You know what you’ve done, don’t you? You’ve had me thrown out of the house. You’ve robbed me of the last chance to finance an exhibition that might have re-established my reputation as an artist. And you’ve dirtied the one decent thing I’ve ever tried to do in my life.”
Meredith gaped at him blankly.
“I don’t understand you, Mr. Black.”
“Then I’ll explain it to you, Monsignor,” said the painter, in the same taut voice. “Like everyone else in this damned village, you’ve convinced yourself that my only interest in Paolo Sanduzzi is to seduce him. That’s true, isn’t it?”
Meredith nodded but did not speak. The painter turned away and stood for a long time looking out across the sun-dappled lawns towards the villa. When he spoke at last, it was with a strange, remote gentleness.
“The irony is, Meredith, that any time in the last fifteen years you might have been right. But not now. I’m fond of this boy – yes. But not in the way you think. I’ve seen in him everything that’s been lacking in my own nature. I wanted to take him and educate him and make him what I could never be — a full man, in body, intellect and spirit. If it meant denying every impulse to passion and every need I have for love and affection, I was prepared to do it. But you’d never believe that, would you?”
Then, without thinking, Meredith made the most brutal remark of his life. He said gravely:
“I might believe you, Mr. Black, but you could never do it — not without a singular grace from God. And how could you ask it, not believing?”
Nicholas Black said nothing. He was staring at the picture of Paolo Sanduzzi, nailed to the dark olive tree. After a while he turned to Meredith and said, with bleak politeness:
“Will you please go, Monsignor? There is nothing you can do for me.”
Blaise Meredith walked slowly back to the house, sick with the consciousness of his own failure.
Luncheon was a dismal meal for him. His head buzzed, his hands were clammy and whenever he breathed deeply he could feel a sharp pain in the region of his ribs. His food had no taste, the wine had a sour edge to it. But he was forced to smile and make conversation with the Contessa, who, now that her fear of him was gone, was disposed to be talkative.
Nicholas Black did not appear at all. He sent a message by the manservant excusing himself and asking that a collation be sent to his room. The Contessa was curious to know what had passed between them, and Meredith was forced to fob her off with the courteous fiction that they had exchanged a few bad-tempered words and that Black was probably too embarrassed to join them.
When the meal was over, he went upstairs to rest through the hot hours. The climb up the stairs told him, more plainly than a doctor, how ill he was. Each step was an effort. Perspiration broke out on his face and his body, and the pain in his ribs was like a knife whenever he breathed deeply. He knew enough of medicine to understand that this was what happened to cancer patients. The growth and the haemorrhages weakened them so much that they lapsed into pneumonia, which killed them quickly. But, by all the norms, he was still a long way from this stage. He was still on his feet and he wanted to stay there as long as he could.
When he reached the landing at the top of the stairs, he did not go straight to his own room, but turned down the corridor to the one occupied by Nicholas Black. He could hear the painter moving about inside; but when he knocked there was no reply, and when he tried the handle he found that the door was locked. He knocked again, waited a moment and then went back to his own room.
Alone in his high room, with the sun slanting through the lattices on to the picture of Paolo Sanduzzi, Nicholas Black lapsed quietly into the final blankness of despair. There was no madness in the act, no wild ruin of reason under the impact of unexplainable terrors. It was a simple, final admission that life was a riddle without an answer, a game not worth the candle that guttered over its last, profitless gambits.
Those who won might surrender themselves a little longer to the gambler’s illusion; but those who lost, as he had lost, had no recourse but to walk away with as much dignity as possible from the scattered cards and the spilt liquor, and the staling smoke of the last cigars.
He had staked everything on this last play — money, the patronage of the Contessa, the opportunity to re-establish his reputation as an artist, the hope to justify even the maimed and incomplete manhood with which nature had endowed him. But now he knew that he had been playing, as always, against marked cards and with every pack stacked against him. His own nature, society, the law, the Church, all conspired to shut him out from the simplest and most necessary satisfactions of existence. He was stripped clean — bankrupt even of hope. There was no place for him to go but back to the half-world, which had already laughed him out.
The Church would take him back, but it would exact a brutal price: submission of intellect and will, repentance, and a lifelong bitter denial. The grey inquisitors like Meredith would purge him relentlessly, then coax him forward with the stale carrots of eternity. He could not face it and he would not. No man should be asked to pay for the freaks and whims of a sardonic Creator.
He got up, walked to the writing desk, pulled a sheet of notepaper towards him, scribbled three hasty lines and signed them. Then he picked up a palette knife, walked to the picture on the easel and began coolly and methodically, to cut the canvas to pieces.
Never in his life had Meredith felt so ashamed of himself. Whatever the past sins of Nicholas Black, whatever the follies of his thwarted nature, he had still been the subject of calumny, and he had revealed in himself a deep and not unnoble impulse to good. Kindness might have nurtured it, gentleness might have bent it to better purpose. Yet his only comment, his only offering as a priest, had been a cloddish and brutal indiscretion. There was no excuse for it. To invent one would be a hypocrisy. The charity he thought to have acquired through Giacomo Nerone was a monstrous sham, which had failed him when he needed it most. He was what he had been at the beginning: an empty man, devoid of humanity and godliness.
The thought haunted his shallow sleep and when he woke in the late cool, it was still with him. There was only one thing to do. He must make an apology for his grossness and try again to make a humane contact with Black, who must be suffering greatly.
He got up, washed and tidied himself and walked back along the corridor to the painter’s room. The door was ajar this time, but when he knocked there was no answer. He pushed it open and looked in. There was no one there. The bed was unruffled. But the picture of Paolo Sanduzzi stood on its easel by the window, slashed to ribbons.
Meredith stepped into the room and walked over to look at it. As he passed the writing desk his eye was caught by a single sheet of paper lying on the green baize top. The superscription bore his own name:
My dear Meredith,
I’ve taken the Almighty’s jokes all my life. Yours is one too many. You’ll be able to make the old sermon on me — Galilean, thou hast conquered. All the best preachers use it.
Yours,
Nicholas Black.
Seconds ticked past unnoticed as he stood there, staring down at the paper in his pale hand. Then the full horror of it burst on him and he hurried from the room, down the stairs, along the gravelled path, shouting for the gatekeeper to open for him. The old man opened the grille, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and then trotted out into the roadway to watch the crazy Monsignor pounding up the hill with his cassock flapping about his heels.
It was quite late when they were missed and later still when they were found — Nicholas Black swinging aimlessly from a branch of the olive tree and Blaise Meredith prone at the roots of it. At first it seemed they were both dead, but Aldo Meyer heard the faint beating of Meredith’s heart and sent for Father Anselmo, while Pietro drove the Contessa’s car like a madman to the Bishop’s Palace in Valenta.
Now the thing he had feared most of all was come to pass. He was trying to explain himself — not to justify, because he knew that justification was impossible — but just to explain to God how it had happened, and how he had lapsed, without any intention of malice.
But there was no God, there was only a mist and silence and, out of the silence, the echo of his own voice.
“ . . . I was sleeping, you see. I didn’t know he was gone. I ran to find him and he was already hanging there. I couldn’t get him down; I wasn’t strong enough. I thought he might be alive and I tried to pray with him. I said the Acts of Contrition and of Love — of Faith and Charity, hoping he would hear and join me in them. But he didn’t hear. After that I don’t remember. . . .”
“But God would hear and God would remember.”
The voice came to him out of the mist, familiar, but far away.
“I failed him. I wanted to help, but I failed.”
“No one can judge failure but the Almighty.”
“A man must judge himself first.”
“And then commit himself to mercy.”
The mists cleared slowly and the voice came nearer; then he saw bending over him the face of Aurelio, Bishop of Valenta. He stretched out one emaciated hand and the Bishop held it between his own.
“I am dying, My Lord.”
Aurelio, the Bishop, smiled at him, the old, brotherly ironic smile.
“As a man should, my son. With dignity and among friends.”
He looked beyond the Bishop and saw them grouped at the foot of his bed. Anne de Sanctis, Aldo Meyer, Nina Sanduzzi, old Anselmo in his stained cassock with the sacramental stole round his neck. He asked weakly:
“Where is the boy?”
“With Rosetta,” said Nina in dialect. “They are friends.”
“I’m glad of that,” said Blaise Meredith.
“You shouldn’t talk too much,” said Meyer.
“It’s my last chance, Doctor.” He rolled his head on the pillow and turned back to the Bishop. “Nicholas Black . . . you’ll give him a Christian burial?”
“Who am I to deny him?” said Aurelio, the Bishop.
“I . . . I wrote a letter to Your Lordship.”
“I have it. Everything will be done.”
“How are the oranges?”
“Ripening well.”
“You should . . . send some to His Eminence. . . . They might help him to understand. A present from me.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Will Your Lordship confess me, please? I’m very tired.”
Aurelio, the Bishop, took the grubby stole from the neck of Father Anselmo and laid it on his own shoulders; and when the others had gone from the room, he bent forward to hear the last tally of the last sins of Monsignor Blaise Meredith. When he had absolved him, he called the others back and they knelt around the bed holding lighted tapers while old Anselmo gave him the Viaticum, which is the only food for the longest journey in the world.
When he received it, he lay back with closed eyes and folded hands, while the room filled slowly with the murmur of the old prayers for the departing spirit. A long time after, after they were finished, Meredith opened his eyes and said, quite clearly:
“I was afraid so long. Now, it’s so very easy.”
A faint rigor shook him and his head lolled slackly on to the white pillow.
“He’s dead,” said Aldo Meyer.
“He is with God,” said Aurelio, the Bishop.
Eugenio Cardinal Marotta sat in his high-backed chair, behind the buhl desk on which his secretary had just laid the day’s papers. Beside him was a small box of polished wood, in which were six golden oranges, each nestling in a bed of cotton-wool In his hands was a letter from His Lordship, the Bishop of Valenta. He was reading it, slowly, for the third time:
. . . I regret to inform Your Eminence that Monsignor Blaise Meredith died yesterday morning at nine o’clock in the full possession of his faculties and after receiving the full rites of our Holy Mother the Church.
I regret him, as I regret few men. I mourn him as the brother he had become to me. He had great courage, a singular honesty of mind and a humanity of whose richness he was never fully aware. I know he will be a great loss to Your Eminence and to the Church.
Before he died, he charged me to apologise to Your Eminence for what he termed the failure of his mission. It was not a failure. His researches have thrown great light on the life and character of the Servant of God, Giacomo Nerone, and have proved him, in the moral if not the canonical sense, a man of great sanctity. I am still doubtful whether any good will be served by advancing this Cause even as far as the Ordinary Court, but I have no doubt at all of the good that has already been done through the influence of Giacomo Nerone and the late Monsignor Meredith. An erring priest has returned to God, a child has been kept from great moral harm and a lost and unhappy woman has been given light enough to seek remedies for her condition.
In the worldly sense, these are small and insignificant things. In the true sense of our Faith they are very great ones, and in them I, who am normally sceptical, have seen clearly the finger of God.
The oranges which I send you are a last gift from Monsignor Meredith. They are from my own plantation — first fruits of a new strain which we have imported from California. Next year, God willing, we hope to have more of these trees to distribute on a co-operative basis to local growers. Monsignor Meredith was much interested in this work; and, had he lived, I think he would have liked to take part in it. His request to send this gift was made on his deathbed. He said — and I quote exactly: “They might help him to understand.” Your Eminence will no doubt understand the allusion.
The body of Monsignor Meredith is now lying in the Church of the Madonna at the Dolours in Gemello Minore, from whence it will be buried tomorrow, in newly consecrated ground, close to the tomb of Giacomo Nerone. I shall myself officiate at the Mass and the interment.
The usual Masses will, of course, be said, and I myself shall make special, permanent remembrance in my own Masses — as Your Eminence will no doubt wish to do in yours.
I understand that Monsignor Meredith once made a request to be buried in Your Eminence’s church in Rome. The reason for his change of heart may be of some final interest. In his last letter to me written on the eve of his death, he says: “Rome is very far — and here, for the first time, I have found myself as a man and a priest.”
I am humbled by the thought that many of us have lived longer and done much less.
Yours fraternally in Christ Jesus,
Aurelio +
Bishop of Valenta.
His Eminence laid the letter down on his desk and leaned back in his chair, thinking about it. He was getting old, it seemed. Or perhaps he had lived too long in Rome. He could neither read a letter nor judge a man.
The man who had died was not the man he had sent away — a desiccated pedant with the dust of the libraries thick on his heart.
The Bishop who had written the first request for a Devil’s Advocate was not this Aurelio, with his trenchant mind and his more than a hint of irony.
Or perhaps they were the same men, and only he was changed — another victim to the insidious temptations of princes: pride, power, blindness and coldness of heart. Christ had made bishops and a Pope — but never a cardinal. Even the name held more than a hint of illusion — cardo, a hinge — as if they were the hinges on which the gates of Heaven were hung. Hinges they might be, but the hinges were useless metal, unless anchored firmly into the living fabric of the Church, whose stones were the poor, the humble, the ignorant, the sinning and the loving, the forgotten of the princes, but never the forgotten of God.
It was a disturbing thought and he promised himself to return to it at the time of his evening examination of conscience. He was a methodical man and now he had other things to attend to. He took out of his pocket a small leather notebook and wrote, under the date for the following day, “Remembrance in Mass . . . Meredith.”
Then he put the notebook back in his pocket, glanced quickly through his correspondence, and rang to have his car brought round to the entrance. The time was a quarter to eleven. It was the second Friday of the month, the day when the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Rites waited on His Holiness the Pope to discuss, among other things, the beatification and canonisation of Servants of God.