A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

  Our appointment was scheduled to last for no more than five minutes, between half past ten and twenty-five to eleven, and as we made our way along the marble corridors my eyes were out on stalks at the lavishness of the wall hangings and the beauty of the painted ceilings. From the windows I could see the tourists gathered in the square below and wanted to lean out, to wave at them and for them to notice me up here, in a place forbidden to others. Such vanity, but I was a young man so perhaps it can be forgiven. Monsignor Sorley rushed me along, however – presumably he had long since grown accustomed to the history and splendour that surrounded us – and we were admitted by the Swiss Guards through a heavy wooden door where we ascended a staircase and found ourselves in a small office, where a secretary – a priest, of course – spoke in Italian to Monsignor Sorley before staring at me warily.

  ‘Your audience will begin shortly,’ he said, testing my Italian by speaking very quickly as he glanced at his watch. ‘His Holiness is meeting with his Beatitude, the Patriarch of Venice, at the moment but they should not be too much longer.’

  We sat down on two well-stuffed velvet armchairs and I could feel my stomach turning in somersaults with anxiety.

  ‘Tell me again what I’m doing here,’ I said to the Monsignor, trembling as I sat separated from Pope Paul by nothing but a closed door.

  ‘Your duties are simple,’ he replied. ‘His Holiness rises every morning at five o’clock. The nuns prepare a pot of tea and bring it to the private parlour which is located just down there.’ He indicated a room along the corridor on our left. ‘You take the tray and bring it into the papal bedroom. The nuns may not enter until His Holiness has completed his ablutions and is fully dressed. He may make some simple request of you, but that is unlikely; you can just open the curtains and leave the tea on the table when you have woken him. Then you must be here again by eight o’clock at night, in case he decides to retire early. Before he sleeps, His Holiness enjoys a hot milk as he reads; you bring it or whatever else he needs. Again, the nuns will prepare it, but they do not enter the chamber after the Holy Father has prepared himself for bed. Then you sleep on a cot outside in case he needs anything in the night. From what I understand, he never does. It’s not a difficult job, Odran. You’re little more than a waiter twice a day. It doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes of your time. But it’s important that you’re on hand every morning and every night. You cannot be late and you cannot desert your post.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘And my classes?’

  ‘After you have woken His Holiness, you make your way back across the city to the Irish College. There are plenty of buses, but prepare yourself for a crush and the heat. You will study with us during the day until it is time to return to the Vatican. And I hope it goes without saying that you will not speak to the other students of anything that you see or hear in this place?’

  ‘Yes, Monsignor,’ I said. I thought about all this. It was a tremendous honour, but I was not thrilled by the notion of travelling back and forth across Rome twice a day for no other reason than to deliver cups of tea or hot milk, even if it was to the Pope. The Irish College had entranced me, with its manicured lawns and proximity to the Colosseum, and I wondered whether I might miss the camaraderie of the other final-year students when I could never spend my evenings in their company.

  The door opened and I thought I might be sick as a tall man with greying hair emerged. He smiled when he saw the Monsignor and reached out both hands to him.

  ‘Monsignor Sorley,’ he said. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’

  ‘Your Beatitude,’ replied the Monsignor, smiling too. ‘It has been too long. What brings you to Rome?’

  ‘Our beautiful cathedral is falling down about our heads,’ he said with a shrug. ‘And where else can I turn but to the man who controls the purse strings?’

  ‘Were you successful in your petition?’

  He opened his arms wide. ‘It is all taken under advisement, my friend. I am to return to Venice and await a decision.’ He turned in my direction, still smiling. ‘And who do we have here?’

  ‘A final-year seminarian, Your Beatitude. Lately arrived from Dublin. He has been selected to take up the position vacated by young Chatterjee.’

  ‘So you will be first up and last to bed every day in Vatican City for the next twelve months,’ he replied. ‘You’re either very lucky or very unfortunate. Which do you think?’

  ‘Very lucky, Your Beatitude,’ I said, dropping to my knees and kissing the golden ring bearing the seal of Venice, a city I had long wanted to visit. I tried to imagine the canals and bridges, the Piazza San Marco, and me wandering alone among the Venetians.

  ‘You might not think that when you have bags under your eyes from so little sleep. The Holy Father is often late to bed and early to rise, they say. There is so much work to be done, of course.’

  I nodded, intimidated, uncertain whether I should speak or not. But he looked at me kindly and laughed, placing a hand on my shoulder and looking me directly in the eyes.

  ‘Don’t be nervous,’ he said. ‘This is a place of friendship. What’s your name, anyway?’

  ‘Odran Yates,’ I said.

  ‘Well, Odran,’ he replied, ‘you need have no worries. You should relish this experience. 1979 will be here before you know it and then it will be the turn of …’ He thought about it for a moment. ‘Who will come next, do you think? After Ireland?’

  I ran through the names of countries in my mind for the correct alphabetical order. ‘Israel?’ I suggested and his eyebrows raised. He turned to the Monsignor, who covered his mouth to stifle a laugh.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said the cardinal. ‘La bella Italia, of course.’

  The sound of a tinkling bell was heard from the next room and the Patriarch turned to Monsignor Sorley. ‘It was good to see you, my friend,’ he said. ‘We will have lunch together when I am next in Rome. And good luck to you, young man.’

  He stepped away, the black cassock with scarlet piping, the fascia, the zucchetto on his head all combining to give an air of majesty to this prince of the Church. It had been like this since medieval times and I imagined the Borgias, the Medicis and the Contis all jostling for position in their common apparel. It was an impressive sight, impossible to behold without feeling a sense of one’s own insignificance.

  The secretary looked up from his desk. ‘You may enter,’ he said.

  ‘Come on so,’ said Monsignor Sorley and I followed him into the next office, where a thin man with deep-set eyes was seated behind a desk, dressed in a white cassock and pellegrina, a gold pectoral cross hanging around his neck, scratching away on a document with a fountain pen. He continued to write as we stood there, ignoring us for perhaps two minutes, before finally standing up; he offered us his hand and we both fell to the floor to kiss it.

  ‘Holy Father,’ said Monsignor Sorley. ‘This is the boy I spoke to you about. Odran Yates. He’ll be taking young Chatterjee’s place.’

  The Pope turned to look at me, his expression chilly. ‘Arise,’ he said.

  I stood. I dared to look him in the face. His skin was grey and there were dark bags beneath his eyes. He looked exhausted, as if life was ebbing out of him.

  ‘Are you quiet?’ he asked me.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Your Holiness?’ I said.

  ‘I do not care for noise in the mornings or at nights. It’s bad enough with …’ He waved towards the window, which was ajar to let in some air, and I could hear the sounds of the tourists even from this height. ‘Can you promise me that you will be quiet?’

  I swallowed nervously and nodded. ‘Quiet as a mouse,’ I said. ‘You’ll barely know I’m here.’

  He nodded and sat back down. ‘Ireland,’ he said, considering the word.

  ‘Yes, Holy Father.’

  ‘What will we do with Ireland?’

  I didn’t answer; I didn’t understand the question. He waved me away and that was it; the audience was over. The Monsignor
and I took our leave. And over the course of the seven months that followed, these were the only words that Pope Paul VI ever spoke in my presence. I might have been a ghost in the Holy See for all the notice he took of me.

  I had never experienced profound attraction before. I had read about it in novels; I had seen its victims floundering like drunks or imbeciles on television and in films. But I had not known what it was like to look at someone and feel such intense desire that the rest of the world seemed diminished in comparison. Even during my brief romance with Katherine Summers, I had never felt any great stirrings other than the natural curiosity of a teenager. Unlike Tom Cardle and some of the other boys at the seminary in Dublin, I didn’t find myself racked with desire through those lonely nights, tossing and turning as I longed for a woman to do those things to me that other boys of my age dreamed of. Celibacy did not feel like such a terrible burden and occasionally, when I allowed my mind to drift towards these matters, I wondered whether perhaps there was something wrong with me, an element of my personality that had been omitted during my creation.

  The subject of women was not one that was discussed often in Clonliffe College. To show too much of an interest in girls was to suggest that your vocation was an unstable one and that you might be one of those who would end up leaving the seminary before ordination or, worse still, resign from the priesthood for a secular life – a wife, children, a job like other men. And so the boys said little to each other on the topic, we carried our secrets and desires tightly within ourselves, furtive and clandestine, just another aspect of the world beyond our walls of which we were afraid to speak.

  And then, one afternoon several months after arriving in Rome, I found myself sitting alone at a small café in the Piazza Pasquale Paoli in the late afternoon, the sun descending as I watched the tourists stroll across the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele on their way towards the basilica of St Peter, a copy of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View face-down on the table before me. I lifted my coffee to my lips just as a woman emerged from the kitchen to remonstrate with an older man, who I took to be her father. She screamed at him, throwing her arms in the air in a dramatic gesture, but he simply shrugged and dismissed her before flinging his apron off, hurling it to the floor and roaring back with equal gusto. The pair of them were carrying on so much like a caricature of Italian fiery passion that I wondered whether or not it was a show they were putting on for the tourists. Did they do this every afternoon, I asked myself. But the question melted away as I stared at her and that was it. I was lost.

  She was not, perhaps, the obvious candidate to turn my head. She was much older than I, perhaps thirty or thirty-one years of age, while I was still a young man of only twenty-three. She was tall, taller than her father – taller than me – with dark hair that was pulled back and wrapped securely into a complicated arrangement at the back of her head that merited further study. Deft fingers, I thought, might unloosen the knots of that package. When she turned away from the man and glanced around at the customers, none of whom were paying any attention to the altercation playing out before them, she caught my eye and raised her hands and shoulders as if to say ‘What?’ and I blushed and stared down at the table. When I dared to look up again, she was still there, a half-smile on her face, the third finger of her left hand balanced between her lips as she nibbled at it, and I longed to be a nail upon that hand, an idea that turned my face redder again. I loosened the stiff collar around my neck, its very existence a barrier between us, and tried to return to my book. I couldn’t concentrate; the words swam around the page, and when I glanced up once more she had disappeared back inside the kitchen. There was no reason for me to feel such overwhelming desire, but I did. I wanted her to step outside again, to loosen her hair, and to watch as it fell about her shoulders. I wanted her to rage at her father and bring a saucepan down upon his head. I wanted her to come over and lean above me, to reach down and pull the collar from my neck.

  I sat there too long; when she eventually re-emerged, she walked slowly towards me, lifted my empty cup and said three words – ‘Un altro, Padre?’ – and I shook my head. I could not bring myself to speak. When she turned away, I left, returning to the small cot in the Vatican’s papal suite, where I lay on my back and stared at the frescoes on the ceiling above me, considering the extraordinary and turbulent sensations that I was feeling.

  This, I realized, is what normal men feel. You’re not different at all, Odran, I told myself. You’re just like everyone else.

  Every day that followed, I found myself back at the Café Bennizi in the Piazza Pasquale Paoli and every afternoon she would emerge to shout at her father, to cry out about the latest injustice, and when her venom was exhausted she would turn to look at me and shake her head, as if I irritated her almost as much as he did. In my imagination, I concocted an elaborate history for the two baristas: he had been widowed at a young age and left to bring up his daughter alone, perhaps with the help of a brash and opinionated mother – in Italian stories, there were always brash and opinionated mothers – and the girl had joined him in his business when she came of age. It was not a criticism of her virtue, but I pictured her with a small child of her own at home, a little boy of three or four perhaps, child and mother abandoned by a worthless priapic Neapolitan who had passed through Rome only long enough to seduce her and leave her with a baby to rear. She wore no wedding ring – I saw that every time she came over to take my cup away and say ‘Un altro, Padre?’ – but there was an indentation around the fourth finger of her left hand and I wondered whether she took one off when she was at work; she might hide it in a safe place so that it would not get damaged while she was washing dishes. Or perhaps she left it at home every morning in case it slipped off her hand at the sink. I did not want her to be married, but I did not mind if she had a child. I didn’t especially care for children, but I would care for hers. Did she speak English, I wondered. Would she be able to settle in Dublin? Would I, with her by my side? These were the ludicrous thoughts that passed through my head as I sat there each afternoon, drinking coffee after coffee, the only time of day which was mine, where I was neither taking cups in and out of the papal bedroom, partaking of my studies at the Irish College, or saying my distracted prayers in the many churches and chapels around which the streets of the Eternal City were constructed.

  I didn’t even like coffee all that much.

  Occasionally I wondered whether she or her father would challenge me. They must have noticed me staring, thought it odd that I came here at the same time day after day, week after week. The father glared at me sometimes; perhaps he would have told me to leave had I not been in clerical garb. As things were, he could say nothing; there were conventions to uphold. And sometimes when she came over to say ‘Un altro, Padre?’ I would catch her looking at me, something in her eye revealing that she knew that the young man at the corner table with the halffinished Forster before him was imagining scenarios, ruthlessly libidinous scenarios, that would have made a dead man blush.

  Almost two months into my voyeurism, I was surprised by a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see His Beatitude, the Patriarch of Venice, whom I had not encountered since that first day in the Vatican, standing before me. He smiled down, his expression one of pure happiness and serenity.

  ‘Remind me,’ he said. ‘You’re the Irish boy, aren’t you? The one Monsignor Sorley recommended to the Holy Father?’

  ‘Odran Yates, Your Eminence,’ I said, standing up in order to kneel before him, but he dismissed this and told me to remain where I was.

  ‘May I join you?’

  I hesitated for only a moment. On any other occasion I would have been thrilled by such exalted company, but to be joined by anyone here, to be forced into a conversation which would deter from my preferred occupation, this was something that I did not want. I recovered quickly, however, and said of course he must sit, but I think he noticed my reluctance and the manner in which my eyes flickered towards the woman behind the counter; his
own looked over and his smile faltered a little before he sat down. A moment later, she came over and placed a tall latte before him – perhaps he was a regular too and she knew his order – and she glanced at me, her eyes widening in a gesture that was a foreign language to me. Other boys, I thought, other boys would know what such a look meant.

  ‘And how are you finding your responsibilities?’ asked the cardinal, taking a sip from his cup. ‘Does the Holy Father keep you busy?’

  I shook my head. ‘The duties are surprisingly light,’ I said. ‘I am the envy of the college for my proximity to His Holiness, but I’m not sure he even notices me most of the time.’

  ‘And does that bother you?’

  ‘He has many things on his mind, of course,’ I said. ‘I’m just the boy who brings him his milk late at night and wakes him in the morning.’

  ‘But my dear Odran,’ he replied, ‘you are not a boy at all. You are a man. Why do you think of yourself in these terms?’

  I considered it. It was true, I was twenty-three years old. I was in my final year of studies to become a priest. I had a position of some responsibility, even if it took no great intellect to fulfil it. Why was I unwilling to accept that my childhood was behind me?

  ‘I feel sometimes,’ I told him, ‘that until my ordination I will remain a boy.’

  ‘Perhaps I felt something similar myself when I was your age, all those hundreds of years ago.’

  It was my turn to smile now. Although he was in his midsixties, he looked ten years younger and had a healthy, youthful complexion. I could scarcely think of anyone I had met in Rome with more vigour than he.

  ‘Are you missing Ireland yet?’ he asked and I shook my head.

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘I think about it, of course. Often. But I love Rome.’

  ‘What do you love about it?’

  ‘The buildings. The streets. The Vatican. The sense of history. The weather. The language, I adore. I have been reading what Forster says of Italy, do you know it?’