A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

  ‘Forster was an Englishman. He thought he could change a country simply by stepping into the heart of it. Italy will not be changed by Mr E. M. Forster and his flawed morality. The heroes of his novels come to Italy and profess to be enamoured of the people, but then when the natives behave as natives will, and not like characters out of a Galsworthy novel, the English turn their backs on them and pronounce them savages.’

  ‘But doesn’t he mock the visitors for their inability to recognize beauty when they see it?’ I asked. ‘Is that not one of Forster’s themes? The appreciation of beauty from an intellectual standpoint, but our – or rather, the Englishman’s – distrust of it in its native land?’

  He sipped his latte, turning his head to look at the people passing. One caught his eye and waved and he waved back. ‘Mio amico!’ he cried cheerfully. ‘Cardinal Siri’s secretary,’ he said, turning back to me. ‘You know Cardinal Siri?’

  ‘Only by reputation,’ I said. ‘Is it true what they say about him? That he should have been Pope?’

  He smiled. It had long been a subject of gossip that Cardinal Siri of Genoa had been elected Pope at the conclave of 1958 but had been persuaded at the last moment to step aside when threats were issued from Communist Russia. The white smoke had appeared, the balcony had been prepared, the doors flung open, but then the cardinals had mysteriously returned to the Sistine Chapel for a further two days, and when they finally reappeared it was with my companion’s predecessor, the then Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Roncalli – Pope John XXIII – at their head.

  ‘Rome is constantly filled with rumours,’ he told me, leaning forward. ‘There is always gossip, always politics, always power-plays. It has been like this since the time of the Caesars and it will never change. The foolish man immerses himself in it, the wise man ignores it all. But you spoke of the appreciation of beauty, my young friend. You find other beautiful things in the city of Rome, perhaps?’ He raised an eyebrow, glancing for only a moment in the direction of the kitchen, and I lowered my head. ‘The coffee is very good here,’ he continued, reaching across and placing a hand on my forearm. ‘I can understand why you would spend so much time in this café.’

  He sat back and pointed towards a building on the opposite side of the street, a yellow-bricked, six-storey structure overlooking the piazza. ‘I have been staying here for two weeks, away from my beloved Venice,’ he told me. ‘Working on some documents for the Holy Father. He has seen fit to place his trust in me and I am humbled, but tomorrow, at last, I go home.’ His face lit up in delight. ‘Home!’ he repeated. ‘How I long to smell the canals, to sit in the Piazza San Marco, to cross the Bridge of Sighs once again! If I could stay in Venice for ever and never leave I would be a happy man.’

  ‘I’ve never been there,’ I said.

  ‘Then you must come,’ he said. ‘If you can tear yourself away from the Café Bennizi, that is. You sit here every afternoon, Odran. I observe you from my window. You have fallen in love, I think?’

  I felt my stomach twist in embarrassment. ‘In love?’ I asked.

  ‘With the coffee here.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He nodded slowly. ‘It is not easy, this life we have chosen,’ he said finally. ‘There are temptations, of course. We would not be human if there were not temptations or if we did not sometimes allow ourselves to imagine the consequences of giving in to them. Whether our lives might be improved by succumbing. Or whether they might be destroyed.’ He turned around as the woman I had fallen for cleared a table beside us. Her blouse had come loose from her skirt, revealing an arc of brown skin that electrified me. I locked the vision into my memory, knowing that I would savour it again and again as I relived the moment.

  ‘And how are you today, my dear?’ he asked, turning to her and smiling that glorious smile. She dropped to her knees and leaned forward to kiss his hand. I watched as those red lips blunted against his fingers, the tip of her tongue emerging as she stood again, and it was all I could do not to groan aloud.

  ‘I am well, Eminence,’ she said.

  ‘You know my young friend, an Irish boy, Odran?’

  ‘He is our regular customer,’ she replied, addressing the Patriarch and not me.

  ‘He cannot resist you,’ he said. ‘He is shameless in his regard for your coffee.’

  She smiled and raised an eyebrow in mockery. ‘We are grateful for all our customers,’ she said. ‘Especially you, Eminence.’

  ‘Ah, but I leave tomorrow,’ he told her. ‘It is my last day in Rome.’

  She looked genuinely crestfallen. ‘But you will be back?’

  ‘Always,’ he said. ‘I always return to Rome. But then I always find my way home again. And that is exactly as I like it.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I should go,’ he said. The woman walked away and returned to the counter as he stood, beckoning me to stay seated. ‘If you ever find yourself in Venice, Odran,’ he said, ‘make sure to let me know. I enjoy the company of young people and there is much we could talk of, I am sure. You have a friend in me, should you want one.’ He reached into his cassock and removed a set of rosary beads which he handed to me. ‘Say a prayer for me occasionally, Odran. But perhaps you should think about sampling some other cafés,’ he added. ‘You are missing out on the best of Rome if you sit in the same place every afternoon.’ He turned to leave, but stopped himself, turning back for a moment. ‘Remember, my young friend, life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practise.’ He winked at me. ‘Forster.’

  And then I started following her.

  I felt embarrassed that my interest was so obvious and could not bring myself to sit at the Café Bennizi any longer, so I stopped coming and did something far riskier, far more stupid. My classes ended at five o’clock and I didn’t need to be back at the Vatican until eight so I would stand halfway along the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele and watch as she left for the evening, sometimes stopping at a market on the way home to buy food, occasionally taking a seat at a café and relaxing for a half-hour, but more often than not making her way along the Lungotevere Tor di Nona, the Castel Sant’Angelo rising on her left, before turning right to slip into a small residential side-street, the Vicolo della Campana, stopping halfway along to put her key in the door and disappearing inside, at which time I felt safe emerging from the shadows. There I would stand, watching her building, waiting for a moment – not every day but some days – when she would appear in the upper window, and as she turned away her shirt might slip from her body so that for a moment, for only a few seconds, I would spy her bare back as she slipped away into the privacy of that privileged room.

  I would not stay long – there were too many people passing through and I could not risk being caught – and if I saw her father walking home too, as I made my way back towards St Peter’s Square, then I would cross the street and hope that he did not notice me. I would enter the Vatican by a private door, sign in with the Swiss Guards who were stationed there, and arrive in time to take the tray containing the Holy Father’s milk and perhaps a slice of lemon cake, if he had requested it, into his private quarters as he sat in prayer, ignoring me as he always did. And then I would leave and return to my cot and pray too, for my mother, for Hannah, for the woman from the Café Bennizi. And I would try to sleep, and sometimes I would succeed and sometimes I would fail.

  Escaping the heat of the city, the Pope was in residence at Castel Gandolfo in August when he died. He had been in ill health for some months and grown depressed when Aldo Moro, his friend from childhood, had been captured and ransomed by the Red Brigades, a crime which had provoked the unprecedented step of a papal intercession, Pope Paul writing directly to the kidnappers, pleading for mercy. But his appeals had fallen on deaf ears and Moro’s body was discovered in a car on the Via Michelangelo Caetani in May, his body riddled with bullets, an assertion of the Brigate Rosse’s growing fearlessness and the Pope’s diminishing influence.

  He faded visibly during those last days, and in my selfishness, my concer
n for the Holy Father diminished as my dismay at being stranded on the Alban Hills increased. Away from his private quarters I tortured myself with visions of who might be entering her building when I was not there to witness it, what man might be invited to her room, and may God forgive me, but when Pope Paul suffered a heart attack on a Sunday evening after Mass, my first thoughts were how quickly our travelling party might return to the capital. A shameful admission, but a truthful one.

  Throughout the week leading up to the funeral, a spectacle of such drama and theatre as I had never seen before, I did not get to see her at all, so busy was I with the Masses being held, the rosaries being said night and day and the fact that the Camerlengo, Cardinal Villot, had asked me to assist with archiving and storing the late Pope’s effects and helping with the restoration of the papal apartments for whoever might next be chosen by God to occupy them.

  As the conclave approached, Rome was an electrifying place to be. One could scarcely move for groups of black-cassocked cardinals moving in groups through St Peter’s Square or along the corridors of the Vatican itself, gathering in tight circles to discuss whether they should agree on a candidate. The heat was stifling and the gossips had it that the new Pope would be elected on the first count as these elderly men would not be able to suffer the intensity of the Sistine Chapel for any longer than that. There was talk of Cardinal Benelli from Florence, and Cardinal Lorscheider from Brazil as Papabile, and the suit of Cardinal Siri came to the fore once again. Media groups from around the world had been here since the Pope’s death and they stood before their cameras and microphones, suggesting regnal names, comparing biographies, while the crowds gathered, packing St Peter’s Square to capacity when the conclave actually began.

  And when I think back to that August evening when the cardinals elected one of their number to serve as the 263rd Pope and the names written on scraps of paper were pulled from the pins and burned by the scrutineers, sending white smoke into the air above the basilica to the cheers of the faithful, I feel shame that I was not there to see it, for of course it was a moment of history and I was caught up in more secular affairs.

  As the world waited for the new Pope to be introduced, I was making my way across the Ponte Umberto, in the opposing direction of the crowds rushing towards St Peter’s; and when they stood together to receive his first blessing, I was taking up position in my usual place at the corner of the Vicolo della Campana for a glimpse of that bare back.

  When she emerged on to her balcony wearing a light summer blouse and looked out towards the hills of Rome in the distance, I heard a great cry ascend and travel through the air as another balcony was occupied less than a mile from where I stood and Cardinal Luciani, the Patriarch of Venice – who had shown such friendliness to me upon my arrival in Rome, and kindness and humour when he suspected the depth of my attraction to this unnamed woman – stepped out into the overwhelming heat of a Roman summer’s night, spreading his arms wide as the crowds cheered and smiling before delivering the first benediction of a new papal reign.

  CHAPTER TEN

  1990

  DURING THE SUMMER, when the classrooms were empty and the library abandoned, I sought a break from Dublin and thought of Tom Cardle, who by now was based in a parish in Wexford. I cared far less for the school after the exams were finished, when the corridors, usually so noisy with the competitive chatter of effervescent schoolboys, fell silent. The building had a haunted feeling to it during July and August and if I found myself alone in the staff-room, puzzling over the Irish Times crossword with my morning coffee, then there seemed to be something slightly pathetic about my solitude.

  Curiously, those boys who spent term-time doing everything they could to escape the place now gathered in clumps on the playing fields; were they afraid to leave, I wondered. Did the high walls of the college offer a security they could not find elsewhere?

  Tom and I had agreed upon my visit a couple of months earlier when he was stationed in Longford, in the diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise, and I had bought a return ticket, which CIE in their ignorance had refused to refund when he had been moved, once again and with little notice, to the south. The poor man was being treated unfairly, I thought, for no sooner did he find his feet in a parish than he was on the move again.

  I had not been in Wexford since the summer of 1964, a quarter-century before, when my family arrived as five and left as three. In the intervening years I had deliberately avoided the place, so when Tom told me where his new parish was located, I wondered whether or not I should cancel the visit entirely, but decided that I should face whatever demons might be lying in store for me in that county.

  I look back now at those years and think of all the phone calls I made to Tom in different counties of Ireland and wonder that I did not make more of it at the time. He started his career in Leitrim, but spent only a year there before being transferred to Galway. There he had stayed for three years before moving to Belturbet in County Cavan, then Longford and then Wexford. In subsequent years he would spend time in Tralee in County Kerry, in a small parish whose name I forget in Sligo, another two years in Roscommon and two more in Wicklow, before passing through a corner of Mayo while barely taking his shoes off on his way to Ringsend. Eleven parishes! It was unheard of for a priest to be transferred so often. No – almost unheard of. There were others, of course. I simply didn’t know their names yet.

  By now I was thirty-four years old. I had been ordained a priest in the basilica at St Peter’s in a ceremony attended by my mother and sister, one of whom wept while the other remained stony-faced, uncomfortable in the face of so much splendour and recognizable wealth. By then we had a Polish Pope, an astonishing thing in itself after 450 years of Italian dominance, and I found an opportunity to introduce my family to him at a ceremony afterwards in the Vatican gardens. My mother might have passed for a member of the Islamic faith for she had covered her entire body and head with dark clothing, her face concealed behind a heavy veil, and she practically curtseyed when the Pope approached her, smiling and taking both her hands in his. Hannah, I recall, was wearing a pale-green shawl around her bare shoulders that slipped slightly as she stepped forward for the blessing and the Holy Father reached out immediately, an expression of near disgust on his face as he pulled it back into place. She gasped a little in surprise and he tapped her twice on her cheek in what might have been intended as an affectionate gesture, but it left a red mark on her face and she appeared to be disconcerted by it, telling me later that she had felt it almost as a slap, a rebuke against her impropriety, and it had taken all her self-control not to challenge him.

  ‘That man,’ she said the following afternoon, sipping a glass of red wine as we sat together outside Dal Bolognese in the Piazza del Popolo, ‘hates women.’

  I rarely spoke of Rome to anyone and almost never to my colleagues in Terenure. I preferred not to speak of my past life, of the things I had seen, the people I had met, the mistakes I had made, which were multitudinous. But I did feel like something of a man of the world for having seen them. I was glad that I had spent a year outside Ireland, while others, like Tom, had been confined to the twenty-six counties and had little chance of escape unless they joined the missions. But I was also something of an anomaly, for those students who had been selected to spend a year in Rome could usually expect speedy advancement in the ranks of the Church. And there was I, ten years a priest and hiding away in the library of a boys’ private school on the Southside of Dublin.

  My brother-in-law, Kristian, asked me about that once, for although he was not a religious man he had a peculiar interest in the politics and internal positioning of the Roman Catholic Church. ‘Am I right in thinking that those who held that role,’ he asked, referring to my responsibilities as a student in the papal apartments, ‘were usually top of their class in the seminary?’

  ‘Usually, yes.’

  ‘And you were top of your class, Odran?’

  ‘Near enough,’ I admitted.

>   ‘I read of another man who held that role who became the Prelate of Hungary. And another who became Archbishop of São Paulo.’

  ‘It’s a far cry from picking up a tray with an empty cup on it,’ I said, smiling at him.

  ‘But what about you, Odran?’ he asked. ‘Are you not ambitious at all? Would you not like to be a bishop? Or a cardinal? Or even—’

  ‘You know what the Bible says about ambition?’ I said, cutting him off.

  ‘What?’

  ‘“For what shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”’

  He frowned. ‘That’s from a film,’ he said.

  ‘It’s from the Bible, Kristian.’

  ‘No, I heard it in A Man For All Seasons. It was on television last Saturday night. Paul Scofield said it.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’d say he was quoting it, to be fair,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m happy as I am.’

  ‘But there’s so much you can do if you have advancement,’ he insisted. ‘Why do you not want more from your life?’

  He seemed perplexed by me, and I in turn was confused by this, for Kristian was not a man who himself sought worldly advancement. Anyway, I had made a decision when I left Rome that I would not be one of those priests who wrote papers and published books or – God forbid – tried to muscle my way on to the national airwaves or The Late Late Show with an opinion on everything, a voice for rent to the highest bidder. I would not spend my days clearing my throat in front of a microphone or preening before a camera. My name would remain Father Yates, not Father Odran. Even if I had not disgraced myself in Rome, disappointing those who had put their trust in me, I did not have any ambitions towards climbing any ladder. The truth was that if I had a vocation, which Mam had said that I had, then I wanted to explore it privately. I wanted to understand who I was and why I had been chosen for this life and what I could offer the world from within it. That did not seem to me to be a bad ambition in itself.