Two Weeks in Another Town (47 page)

“Lucky you,” Jack said.

“How about you?” she asked. “What’s your best period?”

The best period. It would have been easy to say. Starting the night of the dog and the Cadillac in the driveway, going through the mornings in the California garden and the calls from Delaney, that different, whole, exuberant Delaney, and ending with the war. But he didn’t say it. It was gone and no good would come of dwelling on it. “I haven’t figured it out yet,” he said.

“Are you surprised I said I was in despair when we broke up?” Carlotta asked.

“Mildly.”

“What did you think I was?”

“Well,” Jack said, “if I had to put it in a word, the word would be rapacious.”

Carlotta looked away from him, out the window. “That’s not such a nice word, is it?”

“No,” Jack said, “it’s not”

“I didn’t want you to go away,” Carlotta said, turning back to him, looking at him gravely, “and the lawyers suggested that if I made it cost you too much, you might reconsider, you wouldn’t act hastily…”

“In love,” Jack said, “it’s always wise to consult a lawyer.”

“Don’t make fun of me, Jack,” she said. “You told me over the phone you didn’t hate me.”

“I didn’t say anything about not hating your lawyer, though. It’s a funny thing, I don’t seem to remember—even when you knew I wasn’t coming back, that you cabled me saying it was all a trick, you were returning my money…”

“I wanted to punish you,” she said. “And by then I was in too deep. And I was worried about money. I never saved any, and I was on the way down. A man can always take care of himself.”

“I took care of myself magnificently,” Jack said. “Some years I even manage to buy two suits a year.”

“I had to have the security,” Carlotta said, and for a moment her voice was sullen and complaining and made Jack remember the day at the hospital in Virginia. “The way things were going then, in two more years I would’ve been a whore,” she said. “Oh, not one of those on a street-corner or in a house, but a whore just the same.” She smiled brutally. “Your stocks and bonds saved me from that. Did Wall Street ever do a better turn than that? You ought to be delighted you managed to save me.”

“I am,” Jack said, flatly. “That’s what I am—delighted.”

“I don’t need money any more,” Carlotta said. “Kutzer saw to that. So if you’re ever in trouble, you know where to come—for a loan.”

Jack laughed.

“Have it your own way,” she said, shrugging. “Don’t come to me. Listen, Jack, you’re not going to hurt me. I told you—this is my time to be happy.”

“I am well known,” Jack said, “as a man who likes all his wives to be happy.”

“You’re antagonistic, Jack,” she said. “I’d hoped it would be different. I had hoped that when we met we’d be friends. After all, after so many years…”

Jack said nothing.

“You don’t like the word friends,” she said.

“I neither like it nor dislike it.”

“It won’t hurt me,” Carlotta said. “I can’t be hurt any more. But until you learn to think of me as a friend, you will never be completely happy.”

“If you’ve gone in for Christian Science,” Jack said, “this is a queer place for it. St. Peter’s is staring us in the face.”

“Whatever you think of me,” she said, “I’m glad I got this chance of seeing you. To ask you to forgive me…”

“Where do I begin?” Jack said brutally.

“…for that day in the hospital in Virginia,” Carlotta said, ignoring his question. “It’s haunted me. It was the worst performance of my life. I came there to assuage you, to promise you that everything would be all right when you got out, to tell you I loved you, and then, when I saw you, I felt so guilty I couldn’t say a word I’d prepared. I let myself be a selfish, stupid, whining bitch. I knew what I was doing and somehow I couldn’t stop it. I cried all the way back to Washington in the train.”

“It was a short ride,” Jack said, unmoved.

The car stopped and they got out and Jack told Guido, in French, to wait for them, they probably wouldn’t be too long.

“On this stone, I shall build my church,” Jack said, as he and Carlotta went across the colonnaded piazza, and alongside the cathedral toward the chapel.

“In the book,” Jack said, touching the Baedeker, “it says the best light for viewing the chapel is in the morning.” He squinted up critically through the wintry grayness. “Maybe they mean a morning in June. We go everywhere at the wrong time, don’t we?”

He had been there twice before, on other visits, but each time the place had been crowded and the effect of the paintings had been diluted by his consciousness of the sightseers shuffling and whispering about him. This morning, there were very few people there, two men in black sitting silently on the benches along the side and a student or two moving quietly from time to time across the bare floor. Now the full impact of the room hit him. The effect was not like the effect that any other work of art had had on him. It was like peering down into the deep crater of a volcano, momentarily quiet, but secretly dangerous, unpredictable, explosive, beneath its calm surface.

The effect was not religious, either. Actually, he decided, it was antireligious. He could believe in Michelangelo after looking at the ceiling of the chapel, but he could not believe in God.

Flesh, the paintings announced, flesh. Man is flesh, God is flesh, man makes man, man makes God, all mysteries are equal, the sibyls and the prophets are equally right, equally wrong, believe in any one of them at your peril. On the scroll of the Delphic sibyl, if only your eyes were keen enough to make it out, is the same message that covers the pages of Zacharias’ book—“I am guessing.”

And on the wall behind the altar, the bodies of the aged athletes writhing in the Last Judgment, below the shadowy figure of Christ high under the vault, repeated a similar message. The saved souls on the right hand of Christ were indistinguishable by any marks of merit or holiness from the damned souls being dragged down to hell on Christ’s left hand. Salvation was the caprice of the usher who made out the seating plan on the last day.

The painting made him remember another painting—Titian? Tiepolo?—that he had seen once in Milan. It was called La Fortuna, if he remembered correctly, Chance, Luck, Fate, and it was of a beautiful woman striding along, with her left breast bare. From the nipple of the bare breast spouted a stream of milk which was being drunk by a group of happy, smiling men, the lucky ones of life. Charming and ludicrous and arbitrary nourishment. But to the right of the beautiful woman, there was a group of men in agony, who were being driven along, scourged by a whip that the woman held in her right hand. The unlucky ones. The ones who came in at the wrong time or who had bought the wrong ticket and who got the dry right teat and the whip. Equally arbitrary. Put
that
up in your church, Jack thought. It makes just as much sense. Call it the First and Last and Only Important Judgment, and pile the altar in front of it with votive offerings.

Looking at Michelangelo’s huge dark painting, Jack was reminded, more than anything else, of photographs he had seen, just after the war, of thousands of naked women being paraded before SS doctors in the German concentration camps. The doctors examined the women briefly, decided within ten seconds whether the women were useful for work or for whatever other purposes the Germans used women like that, and made a sign. The women he had saved were put into one line and lived that day. The women he put into the other line were sent to the furnace. Maybe, thought Jack, staring at the smoky whirl of bodies behind the altar, God is an SS doctor, and Michelangelo had advance information.

He thought of Despière, born and baptized a Catholic in Bayonne and being buried as a Catholic this morning in Africa, and the idea of Despière, or Despière’s soul, being subject, this morning or on any morning, to this inaccurate and grotesque selection, was intolerable to him.

“I’ve had enough,” Jack said to Carlotta. “I’ll wait for you outside.”

She had stood next to him silently, staring up through her glasses at the ceiling. Her face looked grave and puzzled. “I’ve had enough, too,” she said. “I’ll come with you.” She took off her glasses and put them in her bag and they walked across the bare floor and out together without any further words.

The sky was overcast when they came out and the piazza was gray and melancholy in the flat light. They stood in front of the fountain and stared back at the huge bulk of St. Peter’s.

“I had a curious feeling in there,” Carlotta said. “I had the feeling that Michelangelo didn’t really believe in God.”

Jack looked at her sharply. Momentarily, he wondered if he had spoken in the chapel without realizing it.

“What’s the matter?” Carlotta asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because that’s what I was thinking in there, myself,” Jack said.

“Married people,” Carlotta said. “After a certain number of years they begin to think the same thoughts at the same time. It’s the final fidelity.”

“We’re not married.”

“Sorry,” Carlotta said. “I forgot.” For a moment, uneasy, they both stared at the cathedral. “How many people who helped build this church,” she said, “do you think
really
believed?”

“Probably most of them,” Jack said. “The age of faith…”

“I don’t know,” Carlotta said. “It’s hard to tell from their work. For example—in there—those scenes from the Bible. The Botticelli of Moses kneeling before the burning bush. But Botticelli also painted Venus rising from the foam. What did he believe? The miracle of the burning bush or the miracle of the birth of Venus from the sea? Why one more than the other? What do
you
believe?”

“When we were married,” he said, “what did you think I believed?”

“Oh, I supposed you thought there was a God, of some kind—”

“Maybe I still do,” Jack said reflectively. “There is a God. Yes, I believe that. But I don’t think He has any interest in us. Or at any rate, not the interest that any religion says He has. That is, it does not affect Him whether we murder our fellow man or honor our father and mother or covet our neighbor’s wife. I can’t feel that self-important. If there is a God, maybe He’s a scientist and this world is one of His laboratories, in which He practices vivisection and observes the results of chemical experiments. Why not? We are cut apart living, we are poisoned, we die by the million, like monkeys in laboratories.” He spoke savagely, allowing the bitterness he felt over Despière’s useless death to flood through him. “The monkey who dies because he is used as a control and is not inoculated against a disease certainly is not more of a sinner than the monkey who has been protected and merely has a low fever for a couple of days. Maybe we’re God’s monkeys and we suffer and die for His information. And the guilt we feel from time to time when we break what we consider His laws may be just another interesting virus He’s managed to isolate and control. And faith may be just a side effect or symptom of the guilt virus, like the hives people get who can’t tolerate penicillin.”

Carlotta was frowning. “I don’t like to hear you talk like that,” she said. “It’s too gloomy.”

“Actually, it’s not as gloomy as Christianity,” Jack said. “After all, you believe in vivisection, don’t you?”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Of course you do. If one child in the world is saved by the death of a million monkeys, you feel it’s a fair bargain, don’t you?”

“I suppose I do,” Carlotta said reluctantly.

“Well, isn’t that a more cheerful thing to believe than that we’re going to be consigned to eternal punishment for characteristics over which we have no control and which are built into the human animal, just like his eyes and ears and his five senses? At least, this way, we can hope that there is some Purpose behind it all, that somewhere in the universe some profit will accrue because of our sufferings. Until now, we’ve been able to believe that the experiments of scientists had a useful, constructive object. Now, of course, what with the hydrogen bomb and germ warfare and all the rest of it, we’re not so sure. A scientist today is suspect. And with good reason. After all, if you judge by the harm it’s done to humanity, a good-sized segment of the scientific community should be locked away as criminally insane. But we can still hope that God is a pre-1940 scientist, Whose hand perhaps has slipped a little, but Whose intentions are still reasonable. Only God’s reasons of course must not be confused with our reasons—any more than the experimenter’s reasons must be confused with the monkey’s, cut open on his table.”

Carlotta shivered inside her light cloth coat. “I hate talk like that,” she said. “Let’s go back to the car.”

Jack took her arm and they started walking toward where the car was parked. “Did you feel all this all the time?” Carlotta asked. “Even when I knew you?”

“No,” Jack said. “I think only in the last week or so. Since I came to Rome. I’ve moved into a new department of my life. Some curious things have happened to me in the past two weeks.”

“If I were you,” she said, “I’d stay away from this city from now on.”

“Maybe I will,” he said. “Maybe I will.”

Before they got to the car, where Guido, alert and polite, was standing, with the door open, Carlotta turned and took a last look at St. Peter’s. “So many churches,” she said, “all over the world, and all for nothing, for a lie, a dream…What a waste.”

Jack shook his head. “It’s not a waste,” he said.

“But you just said…”

“I know what I just said. But still, it’s not a waste. Even if that was the only thing to show for it—” Jack gestured toward the mass of the church. “Even if the only thing that had ever come out of the whole process was what Michelangelo did in there, it would be worth it. And, of course, there’s infinitely more than that. Not only the substantial things, the stones, the statues, the windows, the paintings—but the comfort it has given on this earth to the faithful…”

“The faithful,” Carlotta said. “Trapped by a lie.”

“Not trapped,” Jack said. “Ennobled. I envy them, I envy every true believer with all my heart.”

“Then why don’t you believe?” Carlotta asked. “Can’t you stand a little comfort yourself?”