The Gospel Of Judas (8 page)

‘
Amerikaner!
’ the boy cries in excitement, getting to his feet and running to the entrance to the theatre as though he might catch the great, dark machine.

‘Nonsense,’ says one of the men. ‘Luftwaffe! A Messerschmidt.’

‘Leo!’ shouts the woman after the running child. The noise is background now, a distant, departing roar against the spring day. ‘American,’ agrees one of the men, and Herr Huber begins a lecture, directed mainly towards the youngest of the men, the dark, Latin one, a lecture about how the great tragedy of the war is that it has given the Americans an excuse to get into Europe, and things will never be the same again, whatever happens …

The Villa was built by some Polish count in the nineteenth century during the brief and hopeless flowering of the Kingdom of Poland. It is a grandiose pile, all pillars and porticoes, cupolas and pediments, as though the architect had a rudimentary grounding in the work of Palladio but none of his sense of harmony and balance. But the garden that surrounds it is another thing altogether: formal and classical behind the building, it transforms into a Piranesi fantasy below, a temperate jungle with Roman brickwork (the remains of one of the aqueducts that used to supply the city), falling water, sinuous paths, damp, vegetable shade. Columbine, clematis, honeysuckle, dog rose, the heavy scents of jasmine and orange (a small orangerie with the blossom as white as distant doves amongst the lucid leaves), the elusive perfume of box, the vulgar scent of tuberose, everywhere a litter of Roman marble fragments found during the building of the garden in the previous century and left scattered around, mossy and mildewed,
for the passer-by to rediscover for himself. Halfway down the hill is a small
tempietto
, modelled on Bramante’s masterpiece. The whole is a perfect Roman phenomenon, at once artefact and natural, fantasy and reality, past and present.

Two figures are in the garden. They have made their way from the formal garden on the far side (still ponds, an artificial grotto, clipped hedges, parterre paths) round the side of the building and down the paths of the lower garden. The woman appears to be giving her companion instructions, and the instructions (a shock to any would-be eavesdropper) are in English.

‘If you were to over-water the plants they might easily die,’ she says.

‘If I were to over-water the plants, they might easily die,’ the young man enunciates. Then he repeats the phrase
they might easily die
as though trying to consign it to memory.

Frau Huber pauses to inspect a casual blossom beside the path, a florid fuchsia dancing in the shadows, the Adelaide variety she happens to know. ‘To tell you the truth,’ she admits, ‘I’m not certain whether it should be
might
or
may
.’

He seems shocked. ‘You don’t know? Are not there rules?’

‘You’d say
aren’t
. In ordinary conversation.’

‘
Aren’t
, then.’ He is slightly impatient. ‘You see, there
are
rules.’ His face is solemn, bright, made up of contrasting lights and shadows. You might hesitate to use the word of a young man, but he is beautiful. No one would have any hesitation in his own language:
bello
.
Un bel uomo
.

‘Yes, I suppose there are rules. But English is a funny language. Perhaps you could describe it as …’ The woman pauses, as though the word that has occurred to her is rather shocking ‘…
democratic
. So the rules get broken,
and then people forget them, or don’t bother with them, and …’

‘I like your definition of democracy. I will remember it. It sounds very like Italy. And yet there
are
right words, because you say I have wronged.’

‘You say, I
am
wrong.’ She glances round from the plant. ‘It’s difficult, Checco. It’s an
instinctive
language.’ Her own use of it is almost perfect. A native speaker might wonder about her origins, about the overemphasised vowel sounds and the precision of her consonants, but the wondering would not lead anywhere very much. There are no real clues. Frau Huber. Gretchen. Blonde, sharp of both body and mind, possessed of a kind of beauty. You might hesitate to use the word of a woman, but she is handsome. You wouldn’t hesitate in her own language:
schön
. ‘You don’t think of the English as instinctive, do you? People imagine them as hidebound and obedient. But they are not. That is the mistake the Germans have made.’

‘The Germans have made a mistake?’

‘You must work on your endings, Checco. It’s the great problem with Italians speaking English.
Mistake
, not
mistakah
. Chop the consonant off at the end. Oh, yes, they have made a mistake all right.’

‘And you?’

‘Me? Oh, I’ve made many mistakes.’

‘Was marrying Herr Huber one?’

She is silent, perhaps considering the question, perhaps wishing to ignore it. ‘This flower.’

‘Fuch-sia,’ he says.

‘In English one says
fushia
.’

‘But it is
fuch-sia
, after the botanist Fuchs.’

‘But in English that sounds rather rude. So it is
fushia
.’

‘To be polite. That is typical, isn’t it? Instinctively polite.’

She laughs. ‘We grow these at home, do you know that? My father’s hobby. We have a
fuchsarium
. Very famous in Moravia.’ Her hand holds the flower, turning it upwards so that the delicate inner parts are exposed, the stamens and the inside of the corolla. ‘Have, had, who knows what will happen to it?’

She drops the flower and goes on down the path towards the gravel clearing where the
tempietto
stands. The wooden door opens as she pushes it. Inside is swept bare. Light filters down from the lantern at the summit of the cupola, but it is not strong enough to disperse the shadows that collect at the circumference of the floor. He closes the door behind them. Standing inside the cylinder it is as though they are at the bottom of a dry well, cool and damp and secret.

‘We had a hut amongst the rhododendrons,’ she said. ‘
Have
. It’s still there, I suppose. It was our den,
die Bude
– my brother’s and mine. It was … oh, dozens of things: a ship, a cave, a fortress, a home.’ She glances round the drum that surrounds her, the exactly fitted stones, the ribs of the dome, the lights above them. ‘The light was like this. There must have been some kind of skylight … yes, a window in the roof … and it gave light just like this.’

‘And your brother?’

‘My brother is dead. He died at Rostov.’

They stand still for a moment, and let that fact – a distant, presumably cold death that is difficult to picture in this lush, bright garden, with the paths winding down between the beds, and the sounds of crickets and birds loud in the luminous air – lie between them.

‘Why did you marry Herr Huber?’

She looks at him in surprise. ‘Why is it anything to do with you?’

‘Was that a mistake, marrying him?’ He talks in German now, and with the change of language his tone is more insistent, as though he is now more confident that what he means is what he says. ‘He is so much older than you. Gretchen, tell me.’ And suddenly, surprisingly he takes hold of her hand, as though almost to shake her into giving some kind of answer – ‘Was it a mistake?’ – while she looks at him with an expression of faint bewilderment. ‘That is none of your business.’

But what is his business? Where do the bounds of intimacy lie? He holds her hand – a narrow, fragile hand – and watches her as though waiting for an answer.

‘Please let me go,’ she says quietly.

‘Do you realise what I feel for you?’

‘Francesco, don’t be absurd. Please let me go.’

He lets her hand drop. She stands for a moment looking at him, bewilderment still there in her expression.

‘Have I offended you?’ he asks.

‘Of course not.’ She smiles. ‘You have flattered me. But you have trodden on dangerous ground.’

‘A minefield?’

‘If you like. It might be better if you wait here for a while,’ she says. And then she has pulled open the door and gone out into the sunlight, leaving him alone in the block of light that comes in through the doorway. Her steps are brisk on the path, fading away into the general sounds of the morning.

Far below the apartment, on the
piano nobile
, groups of tourists shuffle round the relics of the once great past of the Casadei family, peering at the portrait of the family pope – Innocent the something-or-other – and wondering when the ceiling will be re-gilded. Up here beneath the rafters birds and rodents scrabble in the wainscot. When it rains water drips through on to the kitchen floor with a dull persistence. A bucket stands ready and provides an echo of rain long after a storm has passed on.

Apart from the kitchen – little more than a galley – there is a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom. The bathroom is awash with Magda’s things: her tights hanging like flayed black skins over the bath, her knickers soaking in the cracked bidet, her pots of face cream, her lipsticks, her mascara brushes littering the shelves.

Days pass. Spring becomes summer, with that imperceptible shift that brings harsh white out of effulgent amber; and Magda draws, observes, takes domes and roofs and
towers and transfers them, with a soft mutation, on to her paper. She draws other things, and paints them as well (the apartment fills with the organic smell of oils and turpentine and acrylic resin, like an artist’s studio). She paints the sun, setting like a bloody wound behind the ragged knife edge of the Janiculum Hill; she paints the strange, spiky plants that grow around the terrace (abstract shapes these, like something by Yves Tanguy); she paints the interior of the flat.

Magda is an artist, and an artist possesses what she sees. It was an insidious possession, step by cautious step: first the view, and then the flat itself, the random assembly of things within it, the broken furniture, the dusty books, the dirty dishes, the sagging, ruined sofa in the sitting room; and then the occupant: Leo at the stove making coffee, Leo asleep in the armchair (his mouth half open, a thin ribbon of saliva trickling from one corner of his lips; pen and ink with a grey wash), Leo sitting and watching her quizzically and hiding who knows (except Leo) what thoughts? Leo the lion, looking old and ragged, scarred by time and circumstance. Interior with figure.

Magda is an artist, and an artist possesses what she touches. She touches my flesh, with the tenderness of a nurse, the softness of a mother. She touches the slick, waxy skin of my trunk, the frozen waves of lucid skin which lap at my neck, the wax-paper tissue on the back of my hands where the tendons have fused and the fingers are clawed and almost useless. She touches this silently, as though the touching alone may do something for me.

‘What happened?’

‘Flames,’ I tell her. ‘Fire and brimstone.’

Fire she understands, but not brimstone. Fire she can understand, but not hell. ‘You can feel?’ Her finger moves down the smooth, morbid tissue. ‘You can feel?’

My skin is dumb. But I can still feel. I am alive to every twitch and whisper of the world, every movement she makes in the shadows of the flat, every breath she takes, every murmur of the city outside our walls.

‘Tell me,’ she says.

Leo on fire, squatting like a pope on his throne, like a Bacon pope, Pope Innocent the something-or-other, screaming and burning, his flesh falling like molten wax, dripping like wax, his eyes staring out of his agony as though through a grimy pane.

Magda is an artist and an artist possesses what she sees. She possesses the flat and all that is in it.

Dear Father Newman
, someone wrote,
may you burn in hell
. The letter was anonymous, of course. It was signed ‘a good Catholic’.

You cannot separate belief from context, that is what I have discovered. You cannot divorce what you hold from the circumstances that are holding you. When did the disciples’ faith let them down? During the storm on the lake, when Peter tried the same conjuring act as his Master and attempted to walk on the water – ‘Oh, ye of little faith’. Or when the man was being led away, a political prisoner, to a drumhead trial and death: ‘And they all deserted him and ran away.’

So what do I believe now, living as I do in the midst of this rotting, chaotic city, with the centuries piled up around me like so much debris on a rubbish tip? I believe in the one force that is more apparent here than anywhere – I believe in the force of time, the impetus of that dimension that seems to have baffled even the physicists, the power of that force that will, in time, cure every ill, solve every problem, fulfil every nightmare. Time. I see time all about
me, like a substance. I see it in the clutter of my apartment, in the fabric of the city, in the lessons that I teach. The tyranny of time, as dictatorial as any god. I see time in the face that stares back at me from Magda’s portraits: a grotesque caricature of the fresh and innocent face that started out from the seminary some thirty years ago. Bright and hopeful then; lined and staring now, the elements dispersed and various, as in a cubist portrait. But that is me: once brown hair now scrubbed to a short, grey brush like a convict’s; the whites of the eyes tinged the colour of weak tea; the mouth (almost lipless, almost a trap) turned down at the corners and merging in with narrow creases that come diagonally down from the edges of the nose. Leo Newman, now.

And Leo Newman then? How do you get to this strange solitude, with a girl who speaks little English and says more to you through the medium of paint than through speech? What are the territories you cross? What wilderness of stone and thorn, with the jackals lurking in the background and the vultures circling overhead on high, invisible thermals?

On the corner of the palazzo where we live, Magda and I, just where an alley leads back into the ghetto, there is the local grocery shop. I go there every morning for milk and bread; but I go no further into the depths of the ghetto, fearful of what I might find. The shop calls itself a Minimarket, a grandiose title which means simply that you must fetch and carry for yourself and pay at the desk. Usually I go alone. Sometimes Magda comes with me, and the
signora
treats her with a curious indulgence, as though she might be my daughter, giving her cheese to taste or a piece of ham or some sweets, calling her
signorina
and
smiling on her in the fond manner of a distant aunt. What does she imagine about Magda and me, I wonder? Father and daughter seems unlikely. Man and mistress? Client and customer? Perhaps that. This city has seen everything except heresy, every sin, every failure, every vice; it has learned to accept.