The most complete and accurate report of those two days’ proceedings in the Vatican was filed by Nicol Peters of the London Times. His official source was the press office of the Pontifical Commission for Social Communications. His unofficial informants ranged from Curial Cardinals to second and third-grade officials of the Congregations and junior clerks in the Private Archive.
They trusted him because he had never betrayed a confidence, never distorted a fact, nor stepped over the invisible line that divided the honest critic from the captious headline-hunter. His old mentor, George Faber, Dean of the Press Corps under the Ukrainian Pope Kiril I, had hammered the lessons into his skull: ‘It’s all summed up in one word, Nicki: fiducia – trustworthiness. It’s not an Italian virtue, but, by God, they respect it when they see it. Never make a promise you can’t keep, never break a promise you’ve made. This is an old, complicated and sometimes violent society. You don’t want a man’s death or even damage to his career on your conscience … Another thing. Rome is a small town. Scandal spreads like wildfire. The Vatican is a toy kingdom – one square mile of it, that’s all – but its powerlines reach into every city on the planet. The report you file today will travel the world – and if it’s a crappy piece of work, the crap will finally end back on your doorstep. First you have to make sure that your files are always up to date. The Roman Church has a billion adherents all round the world. You never know, but one day a minor bishop in exile may turn up as a cardinal in petto!’
Nicol Peters’s files, stored on computer discs behind oak panelling in his study, were as jealously guarded as the Codices in the Vatican Library. They contained biographies of every senior prelate in the world and an updated analysis of each one’s influence and importance in the affairs of the Roman Church. He had plotted their public journeys and the tortuous private paths they were following towards eminence or oblivion in the global organisation. His information about the financial affairs of the Vatican was uncomfortably accurate.
His wife Katrina had her own sources. She ran an elegant boutique on the Via Condotti and had a sharp ear for political and ecclesiastical gossip. She entertained constantly in their apartment – the top floor of a sixteenth-century palazzo in old Rome. The guest lists for her dinner parties were among the more exotic in the city. It was she who pointed out to her husband that, although the bulletin on the Pontiff’s admission to hospital was unusually frank and optimistic, there was a distinct atmosphere of unease, both inside and outside the walls of Vatican City.
‘Everybody’s saying the same thing, Nicki. The odds are all in favour of his recovery; but there’s grave doubt about how he’s going to function afterwards. It’s said that he’s already consented to abdicate if he comes out handicapped; but everyone says that he’d have to be pushed pretty hard to make him go. Two abdications in a row would cause a hell of a scandal.’
‘I doubt it, Kate. The Electoral College is already prepared for a short-notice conclave in case of the Pope’s death or incapacity. The ground rules are in place. Gadda wrote them himself when he was a cardinal … But you’re right. The whole place is on edge. Drexel talked to me this afternoon – off the record, not for attribution, the usual thing. He asked what is the quickest way to break an actor’s heart? Let him do Hamlet in an empty theatre. Then he gave me a neat little discourse on what he called the Age of Indifference and on the audience which has absented itself from the Church.’
‘And how did he explain the absent audience?’
‘He quoted St Paul. You know the text … “Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not charity …” Then he added his own gloss: “In short, Nicki, the people turn away because they believe we no longer understand or share their concerns. They are not serfs to be disciplined. They are free people, our brothers and sisters; they need the hand’s touch of compassion. When we elected this Pontiff we chose a law-and-order candidate, an old-fashioned papal imperialist to make us feel secure in a time of doubt and confusion. We didn’t trust the people. We called in the gendarmerie. Well, we got what we voted for: a cast-iron man, absolutely inflexible. But we lost the people. We lost ’em, Nicki, in a vain attempt to restore the mediaeval notion of a papal monarchy, bolster that strange catch-all authority, the magisterium. The big gong booms, but people stop their ears. They don’t want thunder. They want the saving voice that says, “Come to me, all ye who labour and are heavily burdened – and I will refresh you.” I tell you, Kate, he was quite emotional about it. So was I. That’s the piece I’m trying to write now.’
‘But it still doesn’t fully define this edginess we’re talking about. Not everybody thinks the way Drexel does. Lots of Romans like the present Pontiff. They understand him. They feel a need for his kind.’
‘Just as some of the old ones felt a need for Mussolini!’
‘If you like, sure! It’s the Führerprinzip, the illusion of the benevolent strongman, with the people marching behind him to death or glory. But without the people, the leader is a straw man, with the stuffing spilled out of him.’
‘That’s it, by God!’ Nicki Peters was suddenly excited. ‘That’s the theme I’ve been looking for. What happens to the Pontiff who alienates the Church? I don’t mean just historically, though that’s an essay in itself, a bloody and violent chronicle of pontiffs under siege, in exile, dogged by assassins. I’m talking about the man himself at the moment when he realises that he is a scarecrow, battered by the storms, with the crows pecking the straw out of his ears. Of course, if he doesn’t realise it, there’s no story; but if he does and if he’s looking down the barrel of a shotgun as Leo XIV is today, then what happens? His whole internal life must be a shambles.’
‘One way to find out, Nicki.’
‘Oh, and what’s that?’
‘Ask his surgeon to dinner.’
‘Would he come?’
‘How many turn-downs have I had in ten years? I’ll get him here; trust me.’
‘What do you know about him?’
‘I’m told he’s divorced, has no children, that he’s Jewish and an ardent Zionist.’
‘That’s news! Are you sure it’s true?’
‘I heard it from a normally reliable source, the Principessa Borromini. Salviati is a Venetian name and apparently he was born into one of the old Sephardic families who traded out of the ghetto of Venice into the Adriatic dependencies of the Republic. There are Swiss and Friulan connections too, because Borromini met him first in St Moritz and he speaks Ladino and Venetian dialects as well as Italian. It’s also said he’s a Freemason, not one of the P2 brand, but old-fashioned square and compass style. If that’s true, it’s an interesting speculation as to who at the Vatican chose him and why. You know how stiff-necked and sensitive they are on the whole Zionist question, not to mention divorce and secret societies.’
Nicol Peters took his wife in his arms, kissed her soundly and waltzed her round the tiled pavement of the salone.
‘Kate, sweet Kate! You never cease to amaze me. Divorced, Jewish, Zionist … what else?’
‘Fanatically devoted to his job and – again, I quote my principessa – to one of his senior women at the clinic.’
‘Do you have a name for her?’
‘No. I’m sure I can get one quickly enough. But you’re not going to write a scandal piece, are you?’
‘On the contrary. I’m following Drexel’s logic. Leo XIV has lost the people. Does he know it? If he does, what has it done to him? What will it do to him in the future? Why don’t you see if you can set up a dinner for Salviati – and his girlfriend, whoever she is?’
‘When?’
‘As soon as you like; but I wouldn’t make any calls or send out any invitations until we know the result of this operation. Even for Salviati, it’s no small thing to have the life of the Vicar of Christ in your hands!’
It had been a day filled with minor humiliations. He had been pierced for blood samples, hooked up to a machine that spewed out his heart’s history in scrawls and squiggles. He had been sounded, prodded, dressed in a backless gown and stood baretailed in front of an X-ray machine. All his questions had been answered in monosyllables that told him nothing.
As they wheeled him back to his room, he had a sudden, vivid recollection of those sessions at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where a luckless divine from Notre Dame or Tübingen or Amsterdam was quizzed obliquely on charges he had never heard, by men he had never met, and where his only defender was a cleric whose name was never revealed to him. As Sub-prefect and later Prefect of the Congregation, Ludovico Gadda had never admitted any need to change the procedures. The subject of the investigation, the central figure in the colloquy, was by definition less important than the subject of the discussion: the possible corruption of a truth, a morbidity of error which, being a disease, must be extirpated. Its old name was the Congregation of the Universal Inquisition, its later one the Holy Office and, last of all, the seemingly innocuous Doctrine of the Faith. But its competences were still the same, defined in the clearest terms: ‘all questions that have regard to the doctrine of the faith and of the customs and usages of the faith, examination of new teachings, the promotion of studies and conferences about these same teachings, the reprobation of those which turn out to be contrary to the principles of the faith, the examination and eventually the condemnation of books; the Privilege of the Faith, judgment of crimes against the faith.’
Now he, the master of that ancient but still sinister machine, was himself under inquisition, by smiling nurses and blank-faced technicians and nodding note-takers. They were polite, as were the prelates of the Piazza del Sant’Ufficio. They were detached, impersonal. They cared not one whit for what he was or what he felt. They were interested only in the diseases that inhabited his carcass. They told him nothing of what they found. They were like his own inquisitors, dedicated to the Disciplina Arcani, the Discipline of the Secret, a cult of whispers and concealment.
By early evening he was frayed and ill-tempered. His supper pleased him no more than his luncheon. The walls of his room closed in on him like a monastic cell. He would have liked to walk out in the corridor with the other patients, but he was suddenly shy about his bulky body and the unfamiliar vestments of dressing-gown and pyjamas. Instead, he sat in a chair, picked up his breviary and began to read vespers and compline. The familiar cadences of the psalmody lulled him, as they always did, into a calm, not joyful, but close to the relief of tears which he could not remember to have shed since childhood.
Create in me a clean heart O God
And renew a right spirit within me
Cast me not away from thy presence
And take not thy holy spirit from me
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation …
The strophe hypnotised him. His eyes could not see past it. His lips refused to form the antistrophe …
Joy was the missed experience in his life. He had known happiness, satisfaction, triumph; but joy, that strange upswelling of delight, that tingling near-ecstasy in which every sense was like a fiddle-string, making music under the master’s bow, joy had always eluded him. He had never had the chance to fall in love. He had deprived himself by a lifetime vow of the experience of bodily union with a woman. Even in his spiritual life, the agonies and exaltations of the mystics were beyond his reach. Catherine of Siena, Little Brother Francis, St John of the Cross, St Theresa of Avila, were alien to his mindset. The role models he chose were the great pragmatists, the orderers of events – Benedict, Ignatius of Loyola, Gregory the Great, Basil of Caesarea. His earliest spiritual director explained to him the degrees of meditative communion with God: the purgative, the illuminative, the unitive. Afterwards, he shook his head and patted his young disciple on the back and dismissed him: ‘But for you, Ludovico my boy, it’ll be the purgative way from beginning to end. Don’t fret yourself about it. You’re born to the plough. Just keep plodding, left right, left right, until God decides to lift you out of the furrow Himself. If He doesn’t, be grateful still. The joy of illumination, the wonder of the mystical marriage with God, bring pain as well as ecstasy. You can’t have one without the other …’ It was strange that now, at sixty-eight, he felt suddenly so deprived and cheated. The remainder of the psalm echoed his sadness:
Uphold me with the presence of thy spirit
For thou desirest not sacrifice, else I would give it thee.
Thou hast no delight in burnt offerings
The Godly sacrifice is a troubled spirit
A broken and contrite heart thou wilt not despise …
He had just finished the last prayer when Salviati walked in with a lean, shambling fellow in his late fifties, whom he introduced as Mr James Morrison of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Morrison had a rumpled, comfortable look about him and a humorous, faintly mocking twinkle in his brown eyes. To the Pontiff’s surprise, he spoke passable Italian. He explained with a grin.
‘I have what you might call Italian connections. One of my ancestors led a train-band of Scots mercenaries in the service of Pius II. The Morrisons, who now call themselves Morrissone, manufacture expensive shoes in Varese.’
Leo XIV gave a short, barking laugh and shrugged off the joke with a Latin tag: ‘Tempora mutantur … times change, and we with them. Thank you for coming, Mr Morrison. May I ask your opinion on my case?’
‘It differs not at all from that offered by Dr Salviati. In fact, I have to say I have nothing new to offer. I am expensive and redundant.’
‘On the contrary, James, you’re my insurance policy – medical and political.’
Morrison picked up the little comic book from the bedside table and asked: ‘Have you read this, Holiness?’
‘Yes. I can’t say I found it amusing.’
Morrison laughed. ‘I agree. It’s a good try; but heart disease is not exactly a laughing matter. Is there anything you’d like to ask me?’
‘How long will I be in hospital?’
‘That’s up to Dr Salviati. The average time is about two weeks.’
‘And after that?’
‘Six to eight weeks of convalescence while the bones in your ribcage knit. We have to cut the sternum, you see, then stitch it back with wire. There’s quite a bit of discomfort attached to that part of the convalescence, but it’s still pretty controllable. Also it takes time to recover from the anaesthetic. The physical and psychic traumas are great, but the procedures, thank God, are almost fail-safe. How do you feel in yourself?’
‘Afraid.’
‘That’s normal. What else?’ ‘Troubled.’
‘By what in particular?’ ‘Things done, things undone.’ ‘That’s normal too.’
‘Your counsellor came to see me this afternoon.’ This to Salviati.
‘Tove Lundberg? I know. I read her first report this evening.’
‘Report?’
Salviati laughed. ‘Why are you shocked? Tove Lundberg is a highly trained professional. She holds doctorates in Behavioural Sciences and Psychiatric Medicine. Her information is vital in our post-operative care.’
‘And what does she say about me?’
Salviati considered the question for a moment and then delivered a cool, judicial answer.
‘She points to two problems. The first is that a man like yourself, vested with enormous authority, resigns himself with difficulty to the dependence of illness. That’s not new. We have had Arab princes in here whose tribal power is as absolute as yours. They have exactly the same problem. But they do not repress it. They rage, they protest, they make scenes. Bene! We can deal with that. But you, the report tells me – and my own contacts with you confirm it – have a second problem. You will repress, hold back, brood in silence, because this is both your training in clerical discipline and your notion of the comportment of the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Church. You will also, consciously or unconsciously, react against ministration by women. This will not help your recovery, but rather delay it. To use a figure of speech, you are not made of spring steel, forged and tempered and flexible. You are iron, cast in a mould. You are strong, yes; but you are not supple. You are rigid, vulnerable to shocks. But,’ he shrugged and spread his hands in a dismissive gesture, ‘we are used to that too. We shall cope with you.’
‘Why,’ asked Leo the Pontiff flatly, ‘why should you care? You fix the plumbing. You pack your tools. You turn to another job.’
James Morrison gave a pawky Scots smile and said: ‘Never tangle with the Church, Sergio! They’ve been playing the dialectic game for centuries!’
‘I know,’ said Salviati tartly. ‘Ever since Isidore wrote his first forgeries and Gratian turned them neatly into a Code!’ To the Pontiff he gave a softer answer. ‘Why do I care? Because I’m more than a plumber. I’m a healer. After the operation, another job begins. We have not only to retrain you to cope with what has happened. We have to educate you to ensure it doesn’t happen again. We also hope to learn from your case lessons we can apply to others. This is a research and teaching institution. You, too, can learn much here, about yourself and about other people.’
At that moment, Salviati’s beeper sounded, a series of sharp, fast signals. He frowned and turned to Morrison.
We have an emergency. Cardiac arrest. Come with me, James. Excuse us, Holiness!’
They were gone in an instant, leaving the Pontiff with one more ironic comment on his own impotence and irrelevance in the life and death situations of common folk.
It was this irony which had troubled him more and more in the last months, as he tried first to explain away and then to comprehend the growing rift between himself and the Christian Assembly. The reasons were various and complex; but most had to do with the spread of popular education and the speed and potency of modern communications: press, radio, television and satellite dissemination of information.
History was no longer the domain of scholars, ferreting in dusty libraries. It was relived every day, in fiction or in documentary form on television screens. It was invoked in panel discussions as a paradigm of the present, a warning for the future. It stirred in the dark pools of tribal memory, raising old ghosts and the stink of ancient battlefields.
It was no longer possible to rewrite history – the facts showed through the overwritten fiction. It was not possible to plaster over the graffiti scratched into ancient stone. The plaster flaked off or fell away under the tapping hammers of the archaeologists.
He himself had written two encyclicals: the one on abortion, the other on in vitro fertilisation. In each, the words were his own; in each, he had insisted with absolute sincerity and unaccustomed eloquence on the sanctity and the value of human life. Even as he was writing them, the prancing demons of the past mocked his noble rhetoric.
Innocent III had claimed sovereign dominion of life and death over all Christians. He had decreed that the mere refusal to take an oath was a crime worthy of death. Innocent IV had prescribed the use of torture by his inquisitors. Benedict XI had declared the inquisitors who used it absolved from blame and penalty …. What respect for life was there in the madness of the witchcraft trials, the carnage of the Crusades against the Cathars, the persecution of the Jews down the centuries? The massacres of Montsegur and Constantinople were still remembered, like Belsen and Auschwitz. The unpaid debts were still on the books, piling up interest.
It was no longer enough to say baldly that these horrors belonged to other times, were committed by primitive or barbarous men. The acts were ordered under the same magisterium which he exercised. They were justified by the same logic in which he himself had been schooled. He could not establish his own probity without admitting that the logic was flawed, that the men who preceded him had been in error.
But Roman policy had long since determined that no Pope should recant or attempt to explain the mistakes of his predecessors. Silence was prescribed as the safest remedy – silence, secrecy and the incredible tolerance of believers whose need of faith was greater than their disgust for its faithless ministers. But their tolerance was wearing thin and their faith was sorely tried by the garbles and glosses of its official interpreters. For them, the only time of salvation was now.
The only hope of easement was a grand illusion; a universal amnesty, a single cleansing act of repentance, universally acknowledged. But if the man who called himself the Vicar of Christ could not contemplate a public penitence, who else would dare dream it?
Decades ago, the good Pope John had acknowledged the errors and tyrannies of the past. He had called a great Council, to open the minds of the People of God and let the wind of the Spirit blow through the assembly. For a brief while there was a surge of hope and charity, a message of peace for warring nations. Then the hope waned, and the charity cooled, and Ludovico Gadda came to power on the wave of mistrust and fear that followed. He saw himself at first as the stabiliser, the great restorer, the man who would bring unity back into a community wearied and divided by a chase after novelties.
But it had not turned out so. In the privacy of his own conscience, at this moment of close encounter with Brother Death, he had to admit defeat and default. If he could not close the widening breach between Pontiff and people, then he had not merely wasted his life, but laid waste the City of God.
He looked at his watch. It was still only eight-thirty. Desiring to be spared the humiliation of his illness, he had declined all visitors on this first night in the clinic. Now, he regretted it. He needed company, as a thirsting man needed water. For Ludovico Gadda, called Leo XIV, Bishop of Rome, Patriarch of the West, Successor to the Prince of the Apostles, it promised to be a long, restless night.
At eighty years of age, Anton Cardinal Drexel had two secrets which he guarded jealously. The first was his correspondence with Jean Marie Barette, formerly Pope Gregory XVII, now living in a secret Alpine retreat in southern Germany. The second was the pleasure of his old age, a small villa estate in the Alban Hills, some fifteen minutes’ drive from the Villa Diana.
He had bought it many years before from Valerio Cardinal Rinaldi, who had been Camerlengo at the time of the election of Kiril I. The purchase had been pure indulgence. Valerio Rinaldi had been a papal prince in the old mode – a scholar, a humanist, a sceptic, a man of much kindness and humour. Drexel, recently made a cardinal and translated to Rome, had envied both his lifestyle and the skill with which he navigated the shoals and over-falls of Curial life. Rinaldi had made a generous deal with him and he entered with zest and skill into his existence as an elderly anonymous gentleman retired to the country.
Then, an extraordinary thing happened. At seventy years of age, Anton Cardinal Drexel, Dean of the Sacred College, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, fell hopelessly in love.
The manner of it was very simple. One warm spring day, dressed in country clothes, checked shirt, corded trousers and hobnailed boots, he walked the five kilometres into Frascati to discuss the sale of his wine to a local cantina. The orchard trees were in flower, the new grass was ankle high, the first young tendrils were greening on the vines. In spite of his years, he felt supple and limber and ready to walk as far as the road would take him.
He had always loved the old town, with its baroque cathedral, its crumbling palace and the dark, cavernous wine shops in the back alleys. Once upon a time it had been the episcopal seat of His Serene Highness, Henry Benedict Mary Clement, Cardinal Duke of York, last of the Stuarts, who had once proclaimed himself Henry IX of England. Now it was a prosperous tourist resort, filled with a weekend horror of motor vehicles and petrol fumes. But in the cobbled lanes the charm of the past still lingered, and the old-fashioned courtesies of country folk.
Drexel’s destination was a deep cave hewn into the tufa rock, where great tuns of ancient oak lined the walls and the serious drinkers and buyers sat at long refectory tables, with dusty bottles and plates of green olives set in front of them. The padrone, who knew Drexel only as il Tedesco – the German – haggled a while over the price and the delivery, then agreed to accept a sample consignment and opened a bottle of his best vintage to seal the bargain.
After a few moments, the padrone left him to attend to another customer. Drexel sat relaxed in the half-light, watching the small passage of people on the sunlit pavement outside the entrance. Suddenly, he felt a tug at his trouser leg and heard a strange gurgling sound, like water swirling down a pipe. When he looked down he saw a cascade of blonde curls, an angelic little girl-face and a flurry of spidery legs and arms that seemed to have no co-ordinated connection with the tiny body. The voice was out of control too, but the mouth seemed to be trying to form sequential sounds. ‘Ma-no-no, ma-no-no …’
Drexel lifted the child on to the table, so that she sat facing him. Her tiny marmoset hands, soft as silk, groped at his face and hair. Drexel talked to her soothingly.
‘Hullo, little one! What’s your name? Do you live around here? Where is your mama?’
But all he got was the agonised twisting of the mouth and the sound gurgling out of the tiny gullet. ‘Ma-no-no, ma-no-no.’ Yet she was not afraid. Her eyes smiled at him and there was, or seemed to be, a light of intelligence in them. The padrone came back. He knew the child by sight. He had seen her before, sometimes with a mother, sometimes with a nurse. They came to Frascati for shopping. They didn’t belong in town, but maybe to one of the villas in the near countryside. He had no name for them, but the mother seemed to be foreign. She was a bionda, like this one. He shook his head sadly.
‘Poor little mite. You have to think God must be dozing when he makes mistakes like this one.’
‘Do you think you’re a mistake, little one?’ Drexel stroked the blonde curls. ‘I’m sure you know angel talk. I don’t. What are you trying to tell me?’
‘I’ve got fifteen grandchildren,’ the padrone told him. ‘Not a runt among ’em. A man can be lucky. What about you?’
Drexel smiled and shook his head.
‘No children. No grandchildren.’
‘That’s hard, for a wife especially. A woman always needs someone to cluck over.’ ‘No wife,’ said Drexel.
‘Well then!’ The padrone seemed embarrassed. ‘Maybe you’re the lucky one. Families keep you poor – and when you’re dead they pick you bare like vultures. Would you like me to call the police and let them know we’ve got this one?’
‘I could perhaps take her outside and look for the mother.’ ‘Not a good idea!’ The padrone was very firm about it. ‘Once you leave here with her, you’re suspect. Abduction, abuse. That’s the times we live in. Not our folk here, but the forestieri, the outsiders. You could have a hell of a time proving different. Best you sit there and let me call the cops.’
‘Do you have something for her to eat or drink – an aranciata, a biscuit perhaps? Do you like sweet things, little one?’
The tiny soft hands groped at his face and she said, ‘Ma-no-no, ma-no-no.’
The padrone produced a saucer of sweet biscuits and a glass of aransoda. The child slopped over the drink, but Drexel steadied her and wiped her lips with his handkerchief. He helped her to manipulate the biscuit into her mouth. A woman’s voice spoke behind him.
‘I’m her mother. I hope she hasn’t been too much trouble to you.’
‘No trouble at all. We’re getting along famously. What’s her name?’
‘Britte.’
‘She seems to be trying to tell me something. It sounds like Ma, no, no.’ The woman laughed.
‘That’s as close as she can get to Nonno. She thinks you look like her grandfather. Come to think of it, you do … He’s tall and white-haired like you.’
‘Aren’t you worried about her being lost?’
‘She wasn’t lost. I was just across the street in the salumeria. I saw her come in here. I knew she would come to no harm. The Italians care for children.’
The child scrabbled awkwardly for another biscuit. Drexel fed it to her. He asked: ‘What’s the matter with her?’
‘Cerebral diplegia. It’s due to a defect of the nerve cells in the central cortex of the brain.’
‘Is there any cure?’
‘In her case, there’s hope of improvement, but no cure. We work very hard with her to establish muscular co-ordination and adequate speech. Fortunately, she’s one of the special ones.’
‘Special?’
‘In spite of the lack of muscular co-ordination and the almost incoherent speech, she has a very high intelligence. Some victims verge on idiocy. Britte could turn out to be a genius. We just have to find ways to break into this – this prison.’
‘I’m being very rude,’ said Anton Drexel. ‘Won’t you sit down and take a glass of wine with me? Britte hasn’t finished her drink or her biscuits. My name is Anton Drexel.’
‘I’m Tove Lundberg …’
And that was the beginning of the love affair between an elderly Cardinal of the Curia and a six-year-old girl-child, a victim of cerebral palsy. His enchantment was instant, his commitment total. He invited the mother and child to lunch with him at his favourite trattoria. Tove Lundberg drove him home, where he introduced the child to the married couple who cared for him, and the gardener and the cellar master who made his wines. He announced that he had been officially adopted as her nonno and that henceforth she would be visiting every weekend.
If they were surprised they gave no sign. His Eminence could be very formidable when he chose – and besides, in the old hill towns discretion about the doings of the clergy and the gentry was a long ingrained tradition. The child would be welcome; the signora also, whenever His Eminence decided to invite them.
Afterwards, on the belvedere, looking out over the fall of the land towards the hazy cupolas of Rome, confidences were exchanged while the child limped happily among the flowerbeds. Tove Lundberg was unmarried; her partner’s love had not been strong enough to bear the tragedy of a maimed love-child. The break-up of the union was somehow less tragic than the damage to her own self-image and self-esteem as a woman. So, she had fought shy of new attachments and devoted herself to her career and to the care and education of the girl. Her medical training had helped. Salviati had been more than supportive. He had offered to marry her; but she was not ready yet, perhaps she would never be. One day at a time was enough … As for His Eminence, she would not have taken him for a sentimentalist or an impulsive man. What in fact did he have in mind when he proposed himself as a surrogate grandfather? A shade less eloquently than was his wont, Anton Cardinal Drexel explained his folly …
‘According to some of the most ancient protocols in the western world, I am a prince – a prince of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. I am the most senior member of the College of Cardinals, Prefect of a Congregation, member of Secretariats and Commissions – the perfect and perfected ecclesiastical bureaucrat. At seventy-five I shall offer my resignation to the Holy Father. He will accept it, but ask me to continue working, sine die, so that the Church may have the benefit of my experience. But the older I get, the more I feel that I shall leave this planet the way a snowflake disappears, without a trace, without a single permanent imprint to mark my passing. What little love I have left is withering inside me like a walnut in the shell. I should like to spend the last of it on this child. Why? God knows! She took possession of me. She asked me to be her nonno. Every child should have two grandfathers. So far she has only one.’ He laughed at his own earnestness. ‘In another age, I’d have kept mistresses and bred my own children and called them, for decency, nephews and nieces. I would have enriched them out of the coffers of the Church and made sure my sons became bishops and my daughters married nobly. I can’t do that for Britte, but I can get her whatever training and therapy she needs. I can give her time and love.’
‘I wonder,’ Tove Lundberg was suddenly withdrawn and thoughtful, ‘I wonder if you will understand what I am about to say.’
‘I can try.’
‘What Britte needs is the company of her peers, children who are handicapped but of high intelligence. She needs the inspiration of loving and enlightened teachers. The institute which she attends now is run by Italian nuns. They are good, they are devoted, but they have the Latin view of institutional life. They dispense charity and care by routine, old-fashioned routine … That works for children who are mentally handicapped and who tend to be docile and responsive. But for those like Britte, imprisoned intelligences, it is far, far from enough. I don’t have the time or the money, but what I would love to see started is a group, what the Italians call a colonia, properly staffed with trained people from Europe and America, supported by parent groups, subsidised if possible by the State and the Church.’ She broke off and made a little shrugging gesture of self-mockery. ‘I know it’s impossible, but it would be one way to getting yourself a late-life family.’
‘For that,’ said Anton Drexel, ‘one needs more life than I have at my disposal. However, if God has endowed me with a granddaughter, He will hardly deny me the grace to perform my duties towards her. Let’s walk awhile. I’ll show you what we have here, the vineyards, the farmland. Then you will choose the room where you and Britte will stay whenever you visit … A colonia, eh? A colony of new intelligences to grace this battered planet! I’m sure I can’t afford it, but the idea is wonderful!’
And that, whenever he looked backwards, was the day he identified as the beginning of his career as a surrogate grandfather to Britte Lundberg and sixteen other girls and boys who, year by year, had taken over his villa, most of his income, and the happiest corner of his life – from which small, secret standing place he now proposed to launch the most foolhardy venture of his career.