The Gospel Of Judas (37 page)

‘Where are we?’ she demands as though she has a right to know. ‘What place is this? Why are we stopping?’ Her maid is useless, reduced to mere whimpering and moaning. The carriages sit in the darkness and seethe, while beyond the windows the sky lights up with distant flashes that may be autumn lightning, may be bombs. The name
Bologna
is passed from mouth to mouth like a rumour.
Bologna
.

At last the train shifts, jolts, moves again through the desolate suburbs towards the station and rumour becomes fact and the signs saying
BOLOGNA
slide past the windows and steam rises in great gusts beneath the roof, like the vapours of inferno.

At Bologna there is a change of plan. Frau Huber has it all carefully worked out. She stands amidst the currents on the platform and holds her maid’s shoulders tightly as though to squeeze the stupid woman into comprehension. ‘You will continue on to Bozen,’ she says. Men in uniform push past them. Announcements are made over the loudspeakers in Italian and German about trains being delayed. ‘You will
continue on to Bozen,’ Frau Huber repeats. ‘You will go home just as we have planned. But I will not be coming with you.’

‘Not with me,
gnädige Frau
?’

‘You understand me, girl. Don’t be obtuse.’

‘But Frau Huber—’

‘I have other business to attend to. I may follow on later. Now get me a porter and then get yourself to the Bolzano train.’

‘But
gnädige Frau
—’

‘Do what I say!’

People do. The maid does, so too does the young transport officer, a pallid asthmatic youth who doubtless will only make it into the front line when all else is lost. He has probably never seen a diplomatic passport in his life but he is shrewd enough to guess that to argue with it is to invite more trouble than any number of shouting Italians, and sharp enough to recognise a woman who demands what she wants and gets her way. A seat on the next train to Milan? He will write the rail pass himself. Of course it is not necessary for him to ring the embassy. The
gnädige Frau
may do whatever she pleases. A soldier will see to the luggage. And if the
gnädige Frau
wishes she may take shelter in their office, away from all these Italians with their noise and their smell and their sense of defeat.

‘We will win, won’t we?’ the soldier asks her in a sudden wavering of conviction.

‘Of course we will.’

So there is a wait, a long and tiresome wait amongst the stench of cigarettes and the furtive smell of schnapps. The station is a seething ferment of rumour: the Allies have landed on the Italian mainland, the King has run away, Mussolini, sequestered in a mountain prison, has been
spirited away to Germany by special troops of the SS. Frau Huber dismisses such rumours as ridiculous fantasies when she hears them. She scolds the soldiers for listening to such stories and for diffusing them. ‘Such behaviour does nothing but damage to the German people’s morale,’ she tells them and they feel chastised, like resentful schoolchildren. She waits for hours in the fug of the movements office while people come and go and phones ring and cups of
ersatz
coffee are consumed and, as a thin dawn begins to draw the platform outside in tones of grey and ochre, a train slides into view.

‘This is it,’ the young officer exclaims. His tone suggests surprise and relief. Orders are shouted and soldiers come running. People, a struggling mob of people, are pushed aside and Frau Huber is handed up into her carriage. Doors slam and whistles blow and at six o’clock the train leaves Bologna, bound for Milan, and beyond Milan for the town of Chiasso on Lake Como.

The newspapers talk of a weeping Madonna. ‘I saw her shed tears of blood,’ one witness claims. ‘I held her in my arms as she wept,’ says another. The Madonna in question is a statue bought by a pilgrim at the shrine of Medjurgorje in Bosnia, and presented to the altar of some chapel near Rome. It is a glistening white plaster thing of no artistic merit, the product of an industrial process rather than a sentient human being. Works of artistic worth never attract the grasping mind of popular devotion. You can visit an ancient church in this country of ancient churches and gaze in awe at works by Perugino, by Pinturicchio, by Piero della Francesca – the tourists do, in their millions – but you’ll never find such works attracting the adoration of the pious and the penitent. The glimmering flock of candles are always ranged before an ill-proportioned painting of crude primary-school colours, a meretricious thing with an incongruous and ill-fitting silver crown pasted to its head like a paper hat from a
Christmas cracker. Pilgrims always pay homage to a piece of kitsch.

Magda saw the article about this weeping Madonna. She found the newspaper thrown aside and the photograph immediately caught her attention. I watched her pick the paper up and take it over to the sofa, where she curled up cat-like and read the article slowly and thoughtfully, with the small pink bud of her tongue lodged between her lips in childish concentration. There is something childlike about her. She has the manners of a child dressed up in the disturbing garb of an adult. ‘Have you seen?’ she asked when she reached the end.

‘It’ll be a load of rubbish,’ I said. ‘A bit of pious superstition and a lot of commercial exploitation.’

My indifference seemed to annoy her. ‘We go there,’ she decided. The inclusive
we
. The uncertain present tense. ‘We go there and I am praying for you.’

I confess to a small
frisson
of delight at the thought that Magda intended to pray for me at the shrine of a plaster Madonna. It is a novel experience to be the subject of prayer rather than the object of damnation.

A train in peacetime, a stuttering progression through the Roman
campagna
in overcrowded, grimy carriages. One almost expects chickens in the luggage racks and pigs in the baggage van. A dull and expressionless countryside traipsed past the windows. Dull and expressionless passengers stared at us with a fine lack of discrimination: they would have stared at anything and anyone. Hunchbacks and gypsies would have been equal objects of their gaze. Respectable lawyers and dubious businessmen, anyone would have been regarded with insolent curiosity. There was only us and so they stared at us. What did they
see? An incongruous couple speaking in foreign words: he well into his middle age, with a dry and withered face; she with the blemished complexion and heavy makeup of a tart. He biting the inner surface of his lower lip, she chewing gum with the empty concentration of a cow chewing the cud.

Did the electric current of physical contact pass between this disparate couple?

No.

Did they show a fraction of affection?

Minimal.

Did they share the same bed?

Probably.

Were they man and wife, man and lover, man and mercenary?

Impossible to say.

The passengers stared.

We left the train at a station somewhere near the coast, a halt with a single station building and a single platform. Electric blue letters, blocked on the wall of the station by some spray-paint artist, announced, in English:

The Beast

As we waited for a bus Magda produced a sketchbook from her bag and roughed out some pencil strokes on one of the sheets. A section of wall, the biblical slogan, the broken windows of the station building emerged from the plain white paper. She has that ability, the strange power of the artist to take possession of the world, to possess it and remodel it in her own manner.

The bus finally arrived to take us and a few other lost
souls to the Sanctuary of the Madonna delle Paludi (Our Lady of the Swamps). There was nowhere to purchase tickets and thus on the final leg of our pilgrimage to salvation we travelled illicitly.

The sanctuary lay amongst eucalyptus trees on reclaimed ground that had once been part of the Pontine Marshes. There was a large car park with a section reserved for coaches, but on this indifferent autumn day in the middle of the week there were few vehicles – a single coach of Polish tourists, a few private cars, a minibus loaded with nuns. Beyond the car park was a small encampment of stalls selling trinkets and amulets. Things fluttered in the breeze like bunting at a fair: rosaries, crucifixes, medallions. Heads of Christ dripped blood from their thorns, portraits of Padre Pio held bandaged hands in prayer. Effigies of the Pope hobbled over his episcopal crook; Saint Francis fondled the wolf.

And there was the weeping Madonna. Everywhere there was the weeping Madonna. White and glistening she lay in careful rows like grubs in a beehive, like clones on a laboratory bench. There were pocket-size madonnas and madonnas for the mantelpiece and madonnas for the hallway, and doubtless madonna-shaped soap for the bathroom. There were madonnas that glowed in the dark and others with internal lighting. They all had the same form, the same praying hands clasping the same rosary; and the same witness to the miracle: a smear of rust red running down from sightless eyes over passive alabaster cheeks.

Magda picked over these items like a customer at a market stall looking for the best fruit. ‘Let’s see the sanctuary,’ I suggested.

‘Wait.’

‘We didn’t come for this. We came to see the real thing.’
My tone was mocking, I knew that. I worked on my tone of voice, had always done so. Tone is fifty per cent of the meaning. But Magda couldn’t read my tone. Madeleine would have laughed.

‘Nothing is real,’ Magda said. Whether she was speaking of this miraculous Madonna or of life in general, I couldn’t be sure.

‘I’m real,’ I said. ‘You’re real. This whole awful place is real.’ I waited while she chose her statuette and handed over the money. She fed the statuette into her bag and turned to the business of the day with a solemn expression.

The sanctuary itself was a recent building of concrete slabs and steel joists, a modern place slung together as though in haste. Angles didn’t quite meet: awkward gaps were bridged by slabs of coloured glass so that the whole construction looked like something built by a child out of plastic pieces. The words
I AM THE HANDMAID OF THE LORD
were inscribed in gold above the entrance.

A crowd had developed around the paltry building. Where they had all come from was impossible to say, but there was something like a real pilgrim crowd edging towards the entrance. ‘You keep close,’ said Magda and her hand snaked into mine, her tough, paint-stained fingers lacing through my own. We shuffled through double doors of glass into an atrium where posters announced trips to Lourdes, trips to Fatima, trips to Medjurgorje itself. Portraits of Padre Pio smiled benignly upon us. Hidden speakers played Schubert’s
Ave Maria
on instruments that had never been seen on earth. The expectancy of the crowd was a palpable thing, a substance in the air around which any ancillary noise had to edge its way. Stewards searched for naked shoulders or bare knees. Under their guidance the random herd of pilgrims coalesced into a queue and
shuffled forward into the body of the church like a single organism, a snake.

Magda clutched at my fingers like a child drawing comfort from a father. ‘This is pure nonsense,’ I whispered. She hushed me to silence. She wore a beatific smile, as though she had just seen the light. Her black figure was like the black of the old women in the queue, a funereal, penitential black. ‘Strange,’ she whispered.

There were shadows and pools of coloured light in the body of the church. Hunched forms knelt before the main altar. A disembodied murmuring seemed to be extruded from the tawdry fabric of the building, a muttering, a whimpering, like the mumbling of the feeble-minded. The queue snaked round the inner wall of the church and down a side aisle, edging towards a niche at the far end where a dazzling light splintered from edges of tinsel and gilt, where the Madonna awaited her supplicants, her poorly modelled hands fused together in prayer, her tears, the miraculous tears, mere workaday smears of rust red like a poorly staunched but trivial cut. K
EEP MOVING
said the signs in four languages, but the snake tried to disobey, pausing and writhing as though in pain, bowing its head before the Virgin to allow it to be bruised. Old women and young women, men and boys, the halt and the lame all stumbled before the image as though they were witnessing a celestial vision and not a cheap and tawdry statue, a thing of pure spirit not a machine-made lump of glazed plaster. Magda knelt and signed herself, and pulled me down beside her. For a moment I was there on my knees beside her, her hand still clutching mine to hold me down. What passed through my mind? A faint glimmer of prayer, like a last ember in a fire that has otherwise died out? A mere emptying of the mind in the
hope, the impoverished hope, that someone might speak there, into the space?

Madeleine, I thought.

Outside, the daylight was dazzling. Magda was solemn with the grandeur of the moment. She found a seat and sat down with her sketchpad to make some little intricate drawings from memory – figures hunched, figures shuffling forward like prisoners in a queue for the latrines, broken figures with bent and twisted limbs. I stood beside her and tried to pray.

Beside the sanctuary was a
trattoria
announcing
pasta delle lacrime
, pasta with tears. We had lunch there before getting the bus back to the station. On the journey home Magda’s face seemed heavy and coarse, like a clumsy, badly made carnival mask. At one point she took the plaster statuette out of her bag and looked at it thoughtfully. I knew what she would do with it when she got back to the flat. It would find a place out on the rooftop terrace, where it could see the whole panorama of the city, where she could watch it carefully as though daring it to weep before her. And then she would pull out a canvas and some pots of paint, clotted round the lids like blood round the edge of a fresh wound, and she would begin to work, and the Madonna would float in the midst of a collage of newspaper and holy picture, of worshipping crowds and damned souls, and a serpent would crown the whole scene.