Cherry shook his head. He looked almost ill, as if perhaps he had gone up and down too many stairs. ‘Like stepping into a nightmare. I don’t say he was mad—not mad—but he was certainly…’ He shook his head again.
‘Yes, I suppose he was.’
Denton led them out to the street.
CHAPTER
17
The only benefit of Janet’s leaving was that Lucy Newcombe no longer visited. Harriet Guttmann had given up coming, too. Denton took Janet’s last words to him to mean that he was to ‘do something’ for Lucy only if asked; if she didn’t appear, she couldn’t ask.
He rattled around the emptiness of the Casa Gialla, had at least plenty of leisure to study the ledger from the Palazzo Minerva.
Fra Geraldo’s ledger was written in a hand so small that Denton needed a magnifying glass, thinking of Cherry’s ‘The game’s afoot, Watson!’ as he ferreted one out of a still-unpacked box. Most of the writing was in English, but he found Greek, as well, the symbols recognisable to him as Greek but meaningless; now and then, a few words of Latin came in, as well. Latin was as opaque to him as Greek, but he did have a Latin-English dictionary, useful until then only in trying to puzzle out people like Havelock Ellis. He was able to decipher one word, pecavi—I sinned. It occurred often in the early pages, shortened then to P. In his first years in Naples, Gerald Sommers seemed to have sinned a good deal.
He had kept his record of sins and salvation by years, except for his first three years in Naples, which were summarised in a narrative of several pages at the beginning. That story was pretty much what Denton had expected, although presented with a self-flagellating contempt that he found overdone. In essence, what that early narrative said was that Sommers had used the English church choir as a means to recruit boys from the poorest families of Naples, and that, when he had found a suitable one—suitable to his tastes and his sexual needs, that is—he took the child over. He had succeeded with two of them, whom he called only E and M, because one was a foundling and one was a street kid—no families to buy off. Three other boys had had families and had made trouble; something from those scandals must have got back to the rector, because Sommers had been asked to leave the church. He had done so and had taken E and M with him, buying the Palazzo Minerva as a home. He had envisioned it as a resident singing school of the medieval sort, full of boys whom he could, Denton assumed, seduce or buy as he chose, although he seemed not to have gone beyond the two.
Sommers had been brutal about what he had done to E and M. The brutality may have been partly self-titillation, for once he had crossed through an account of sodomising M and inked in a thick, black P; another time, he had done the same to a description of E’s buttocks and his hairless scrotum and had written I am a miserable sinner, I am past forgiveness. Some of his pleasures had amounted to torture, some to the sexual initiation of a child into things that might have destroyed a childhood. It was a vicious account, made not poignant but bitter by Denton’s awareness of the chapel. Could a man who painted himself as a tormented martyr, even as a dying Christ, be said to have repented?
After seven months in the Palazzo Minerva, the two boys had tried to kill Sommers. They had almost succeeded. They had crept into his bedroom at night with a hammer and a sculptor’s maul and beaten him unconscious; probably thinking him dead, they had run away. Sommers hadn’t dared to go to the police. Patched up by his doctor, he had gone back to his house to find a man claiming to be E’s father. There had apparently been a long wrangle, because E had been living on the streets, but finally Sommers had found it easiest to accept his tale and buy him off: he underwrote the family’s emigration—E included—to Argentina. The other boy, the one he called M, did not come back—not then, at any rate.
Sommers had begun his record of repentance immediately after E and his family (if such they were; he had least attached himself to them) had left Naples. He recorded great hopes and abrupt falls, a recurring pattern of repentance and insistent sensuality. The letter P appeared often in those first years—for encounters with street boys, for experiments with prostitutes, for flirtations with other men. A code of sexual symbols appeared on the pages; Denton, knowing the real limitations on sex, thought he knew which meant oral, which anal, which vaginal. A stem with five lines shooting from it evaded him for several pages; then he realised it was a schematic of a hand. Masturbation.
It appeared after Sommers saw M on the street, M now an apparently homeless scugnizzo who ran off when he recognised his former singing master. The encounter brought some of Sommers’ behaviour vividly back to him—P and the hand symbol.
He was painting portraits in those years, although his real life seemed to have been in his sexuality. In 1867, he wrote his first entry in Greek. A period of great hope followed, then the first return of P, but not of the hand. ‘My thoughts, my thoughts!’ he wrote. ‘My thoughts are as evil as my deeds!’ In 1870, he wrote another few sentences in Greek. Soon after, he started the chapel and gave up his career as a painter—‘I lay my art at the feet of the dying Christ; I will become a penitent and a flagellant.’ Fra Geraldo was born.
Denton rubbed his eyes and gave up for the night, wanting to talk to Janet about it, missing her clear, sometimes brutal mind. Missing her.
Next morning, he copied out the two Greek passages, a painful procedure because he had no sense of the symbols he was copying, and took them to a bookseller who dealt in classics. The man said he read Greek, ma certo, of course. In his forties, grey-haired where he was not balding, he wore thick eyeglasses that he pushed up on his forehead when he needed to see anything more than an arm’s length away. He read Denton’s copying, his nose almost touching the paper; he tut-tutted and wrinkled up his nose each time he found a mistake, but he was able to translate. The first said, I cut the devil from my body with a sharp knife, first tying tight a string at the root; there was not so much blood as I feared. I went after to the physician for—
The bookseller pushed his glasses up and looked at Denton. ‘It says “for burning the devil’s feet”. What does this mean?’
‘I think it means he cut off his cazzo and had the wound cauterised.’
The bookseller, who had told Denton that he believed himself a man of the world because he dealt also in pornography, paled and looked as if he might be sick. Denton asked him to translate the second passage.
He read it, his lips moving, and looked sicker. ‘He went to his doctor to have his testicles cut off.’ He pushed his glasses up again and almost shouted at Denton, ‘What kind of book is this?’
Denton took the piece of paper from his fingers. ‘An unhappy one.’
Maltby and Cherry turned up at his house at midday. Cherry was leaving that evening, and Maltby apparently could think of nothing to do with him. Denton, annoyed but at the same time amused, took them off to a hole-in-the-wall that sold freshly baked pizza and various quick, fried things. Maltby was appalled, Cherry fearful; Denton said it was one of his favourite places and the food wouldn’t poison them.
‘They use garlic,’ Cherry said.
‘Absolutely.’
‘Smelly stuff.’
‘Live wildly, Mr Cherry—it’s your only chance!’
Cherry ordered a slice of pizza margherita and stared at it when it came. ‘If my daughter could see me now,’ he murmured. Still, he ate it and pronounced it ‘quite tasty, in its way’ and drank a glass of decent red and said he preferred beer. Maltby sat with his arms folded and sulked.
They walked along the Rettifilo, Denton and Cherry side by side, Maltby dragging behind. Cherry asked about Denton’s ghosts, seemed disappointed that he hadn’t found any real ones. ‘And the mediums and spirits?’
‘All rubbish.’ Denton thought of Palladino and the voice that had said, L’amore non c’è. ‘Almost all, anyway.’
They passed the Galleria and crossed to the Caffè Gambrinus, where Denton offered them dessert. Both men perked up. Maltby’s sulks seemed to retreat in the face of so
mething filled with sweetened cheese; Cherry, his chin dripping chocolate, beamed.
They went down to the seafront and walked along by the Porto Militare. Ahead, Denton could see DiNapoli’s friend the photographer, his huge camera like a fat insect on spindly legs. He was about to suggest that Maltby and Cherry have their pictures taken when Cherry banged himself on the chest with a hand and said, ‘Damn me, I’ve lost my pocketbook!’
They both turned to him. Had his pocket been picked? When had he last had it? Cherry shut his eyes. ‘By glory, I don’t think I brought it. I think it’s in the hotel. I’ve got to go back to my hotel.’
Denton said, ‘It won’t run away if it’s there.’
‘I have to know—you know how it is. It’s the uncertainty of it, isn’t it.’ He pumped Denton’s hand. ‘If we don’t meet again—a great pleasure—my apologies for that long performance yesterday—but that room!—yes, goodbye, goodbye—perhaps we’ll meet in England one day—’ And he was off, moving very quickly for such a big man.
‘Does he know the way to his hotel?’ Denton said.
‘God, I hope so.’ Maltby frowned, like a child trying to make an ugly face. ‘Good riddance.’
‘Well, look on the bright side—he’s probably sick of you, too.’ Denton clapped him on the back and led him towards the photographer, then stopped at the appropriate spot and let Spina photograph them. Maltby said he didn’t like ‘show’ and he didn’t like such ‘middle-class seaside diversions’ as having one’s picture taken. Still, he seemed absorbed in the photograph of himself once he saw it.
Denton said to Spina in his crude but improving Italian, ‘I thought I’d have another subject for you, but he ran off.’
Spina showed his few teeth and laughed. Decades of dealing with tourists had given him a rough English. ‘Some peoples not piace the picture.’ He shrugged. ‘Non import’, I got his picture before. He was wit’ somebody—his son. Di Sardegna, I t’ink. I never forget a face, non mai, mai.’
‘Mr Spina, he’s English. He’s never been in Naples before.’
Spina shrugged. ‘Maybe got a brother. Or a doppio.’ Denton got ‘double’, doppio, from the context. ‘They say we all got a doppio someplace.’ He laughed, opening his terrible mouth. ‘Cuts down the soldi, people got doppi—one photo do for two.’
Denton and Maltby walked on along the waterfront. Ahead and to their right, the Porto Commerciale stretched its long piers into the bay; masts and funnels clustered along them like trees. Maltby said, ‘I’ve made a balls of everything here.’
‘You’ll get over it.’
‘I’ve blotted my copybook. I’m finished.’
‘Maltby, I’ve had thirty years more than you to learn things. D’you think that at twenty I wasn’t in the same muddle as you?’
Maltby trudged along.
‘Tell you what, when we get back to my house, I’ll give you a card to give a friend of mine at New Scotland Yard. Maybe he can help you get into the coppers. How would that be?’
Maltby stared out through the gathered shipping as if his own boat had just gone down with all hands. ‘I doubt they’ll have me.’
CHAPTER
18
Presumably, Cherry got on his train and left that night. Denton stayed up late in his workroom reading Fra Geraldo’s diary.
After 1870, after his self-mutilation and his castration, Sommers’ pecavi seemed to have been entirely of the mind, although no less real for him. He admitted that he had no control over his dreams, which he described with some of the same relish as his earlier accounts of abusing E and M. The erotic dreams were his sins; the tormented ones became the paintings in the chapel.
Sommers saw M more often on the street now, the event important enough that he put an M at the top of the page when they met. After he had settled into his Fra Geraldo persona and given up painting and begun going out among the poor, he began to seek M out. M was a young man by then, apparently a petty criminal. He spat once at Sommers, another time threatened him with a knife. Still, Sommers was able to befriend him after a fashion. On 11 January 1877, he wrote, ‘I have atoned!’ He had managed to bring M to the Palazzo Minerva, where he had fed him and washed his feet and made some sort of apology. M had been drunk, but Sommers hadn’t cared. God had seen.
Then the self-whipping began. By the mid-eighties, he was bringing M into the house to do the whipping, although never that Denton could tell into the chapel, which Sommers always called ‘the upper room’, surely a monstrously arrogant appropriation. M was by then a drunkard; Sommers seemed not to care. His concern was with his own repentance. However, at some time before 1890 he saw that what he had done to the child might have caused the drunkenness of the adult; he welcomed this as a new cause for self-disgust.
For it was all, in the end, self. Perhaps, Denton thought, it could never be otherwise. My sin, my redemption. As love was always part ego, so perhaps was guilt, so prayer. We are prisoners of ourselves. By 1902, Sommers seemed to be coming to that conclusion himself. The chapel was finished; he was out all day among the poorest of Naples’ poor; M had become simply a recurring opportunity for penitence, a ruin drinking himself to death. Sommers now wanted to do good distinct from his own salvation. He went to see ‘the Av. F’ about creating a foundation to help the basso neve in perpetuity. He did not write down how this was to work or what money was involved, but he did say ‘all my wealth’, and he added, ‘That this will be to the detriment of my aristocratic title—vain folly!—and my line is of no consequence: I dedicate both to GOD.’
He began to hear ‘the ghosts of the boys’ only towards the end of 1903. He was a man with real physical fears, thus the more courageous for going into the most dangerous parts of the city alone. But the ‘ghosts’ were particularly terrifying—because they were ghosts or because they were children, therefore like the imps of the chapel? He had frightened himself, debased himself with scenes of torture—as Janet had said, he had suffered torture with his brush—and now did he think those scenes were coming to life? The ghosts had manifested themselves only as sounds, but they were sounds he had recognised at once: screams, squeals, laughter, singing. As if it were 1859 again and the choirboys had become fiends.
Fra Geraldo had received two actual threats. The first had been in 1885—a cat hanged on his front door. The second had been in early 1903—a pair of human hands found nailed to the floor of his bedroom. Sommers had written, ‘I fear my Heavenly Father, not men. If they murder me for doing good, they win me time out of Hell.’ He did not explain who ‘they’ were or why they might kill him for doing good.
Denton lay on his back in the dark. What had the inspector said—‘a madman’? Perhaps. But not the mere eccentric he might have been thought. Mad, if he was mad, for a good reason, and in a disturbing way. And dead for a good reason, too?
He slept badly, his dreams infected by Fra Geraldo’s—Denton was no stranger to guilt, himself—and was glad when daylight showed through his curtains and he could leave his bed, although he felt as if some obscene bird had perched on his back. He felt used up. He made himself coffee on his spirit stove, then as he drank it studied the photographs of the old man’s chapel. Mad. And were the two childish torturers the two choristers, M and E? And were the paintings portraits of them, as their victim was a portrait of Gerald Sommers?
He went out to his café. The day was blustery. He turned his overcoat collar up against the chill and sat outside, glad for once to escape the other customers. The owner brought him coffee and a finger-length of bread cut off a fresh loaf. He watched the women head for the cigarette factory. He watched the donkey carts. He drank more coffee and tried not to feel as if he had been embalmed. He would have walked off then, but Maltby came running towards him from a corner of the piazza, then walking, then trotting again; when he got close, he was red faced, breathing hard and fanning himself with his hat, but he managed to say, ‘You must come! They’re tearing out the chapel!’ They looked at each other. Denton knew wh
at he meant but made no sense of it. Stupidly, he said, ‘Who?’
‘Workmen. Come on, come along, they’re tearing it to bits. It’s awful. I couldn’t believe it.’
They got into a carriage. Maltby explained that he’d gone to Denton’s house and the maid, for a wonder, had explained where Denton had gone. The carriage horse tried to trot up the Via Toledo but the crowds were already too thick. People were walking in the street, all of them on the way to work, none very cheerful yet. They didn’t want to make way for two swells in a carriage.
‘Tell me again. Who’s tearing out the chapel?’
‘Workmen! The estate agent! I just happened to go by—I’m cleaning out my things from the consulate today; I don’t know why I went there—that room!—to say goodbye after a fashion, though you’ll laugh. There they were, and people starting to gather—you know what they’re like here. I was stunned. I couldn’t think what to do. So I came to get you.’
The people he’d seen gathering were now a crowd. Denton from the height of the carriage could look into the courtyard over their heads. It was as if some great event was about to happen, an execution or a miracle. The crowd was thin towards the street but denser as it got closer to the Palazzo Minerva. A donkey cart stood close to the house, already piled with smashed plaster and a few pieces of wood that jutted out like broken bones. The window farthest to the right on the top storey had been removed, and men in shirtsleeves were tipping out burlap sacks of plaster and lath. Denton recognised a piece of wainscoting as it fell and landed with an explosion of grey dust. By the donkey cart, two men were wrestling over something.
Denton got down with Maltby and went into the courtyard. A workman came to the window with one of the vertical beams of the chapel; it had been ripped from the wall, still encrusted with the little carvings that now looked like branches and galls, as if it were a diseased tree. The crowd cheered. They shouted. Denton caught the word for ‘give’—give it to us, as if it were theirs and he was withholding it. He grinned and took a better grip of the beam and threw it forward; it sailed out and down, just missing two women, so eager were they to be where it landed. At once, the crowd fell on it. Denton saw a stonemason’s hammer raised and then heard a hatchet’s chop.
The Haunted Martyr Page 23