A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

  Two opposing thoughts ran through my mind as I walked around Rome that night:

  You don’t have to do this.

  You can do this.

  Had I really discovered my vocation for myself, I asked myself. Had I ever woken with a sense of it or was it merely my mother who had forced it upon me? Christ above, but a terrible change had come over that woman the week my father and brother died and God in His wisdom had sent a vocation towards the southeast coast of Ireland – not to me, a nine-year-old child with no more sense than a thimble, but to her, a middle-aged woman, grieving, reaching for a lifebelt as her loved ones sank beneath the surface. And when she passed it my way and said, Here son, this is for you, it’s a gift from God, I picked it up without a thought and said, Grand, so.

  A group of young Italian boys were gathered together near the Lungotevere Vaticano on the banks of the Tiber, balancing against the seats of their parked Vespas, all shorts and thin brown legs, sunglasses perched in their slicked-back hair like characters out of a Fellini film, handsome and vital as they laughed and joked with each other. They were younger than me, these boys, but only a little. In their late teens, perhaps, the world opening up before them. How many of them had been kissed tonight, I asked myself. Were they impressing each other with stories of young girls, their virginities taken? And there was I, in my black suit, my tie and my hat. My starched white collar. My fingers still stinking of her essence.

  Twenty-three years old. A boy. A man. What was I? Even I didn’t know.

  ‘Padre,’ they cried, stretching their arms out before me as if they were appealing to a referee to award a penalty to a felled hero. I approached them warily. I remembered what it was like to be an anxious boy, passing playing fields and hoping that a miskicked football would not make its way in my direction, and I raised a hand to signal a greeting without slowing my stride. ‘This one needs absolution,’ they called, pointing to a good-looking boy, perhaps the youngest of their group, who was rushing around from one to the next, trying to silence them. ‘He needs to say a confession! You must hear the sins he has committed tonight!’

  They meant me no harm, I knew that, but I was afraid of them all the same. I thought that if they teased me or surrounded me in any way then I would lash out, I would fight them one and all as I had not fought the woman from the Café Bennizi or her lover.

  ‘What is it you want?’ she had asked me and I had no answer to that question, for in my innocence, I didn’t know.

  That night, that endless night, I wandered through parts of Rome that I had never seen before, a city of run-down hotels, of squalid apartment buildings with laundry hanging on wires above the streets. Prostitutes appeared from time to time, curious as to whether a young priest was looking to release the tension of his calling, for I had not even removed my collar over the course of these hours. I waved them away, one by one. I had no desires in this direction. I simply wanted to walk. This was my night, the night when I would know whether the path I had chosen was right or wrong.

  Ten o’clock, eleven o’clock. The bells at midnight. Church after church after church. One o’clock, two o’clock, three, four. Pope John Paul would be in the deepest of sleeps by now, his night-time tea stone cold outside his door.

  Where were my school friends tonight, I wondered. The ones I knew before I entered the seminary. The boys I had studied alongside in De La Salle Prep on the Churchtown Road, with whom I had walked across to O’Reilly’s for sweets at lunchtime and with whom I had strolled past the Bottle Tower as we made our way down to the Dundrum crossroads for our buses home. Working in their monotonous jobs in Dublin, no doubt. Paying their mortgages. Taking their wives out for a meal in the city centre on a Saturday night or doing a line with some girl they had met at a rugby match in Donnybrook. Or maybe they were only now leaving a nightclub on Lesson Street, recounting how they had scored the winning try in the Leinster Schools’ Cup six years before, persuading their conquests back to their place or hers, laughing at how great it was to be young, to be doing what men and women did together when they were alone, and then forgetting her name the following morning. Did I want to be one of those men? Was that what I wanted? What was it that I was missing out on?

  There were homeless people in Rome, too. Lying in sleeping bags in the Flaminio or outside the Tiburtina – as I would one day invite Tom Cardle to sleep in a bag in my room at Terenure College and he would decline – their heads poking out from their cocoons, woollen caps pulled low, past their ears, to keep the night cold away, their bodies hardly visible to the naked eye. A set of eyes, a mouth, little more. Signs printed in large black capital letters on cardboard ripped from boxes. Aiutatemi! Help me. Please help me.

  The sun was beginning to rise. My eyes felt sore and my legs had grown tired. I had wandered around the city all night. What time was it now, almost six? It was a new day. How could I have walked so long? And yet I had. I was entering St Peter’s Square and tried not to think of what Monsignor Sorley would say when he learned that I had not been at my post the night before. Would the Pope tell anyone? Would he even have noticed, considering how intensively he was studying his paperwork every night, how often and how late Signor Marcinkus from the Vatican Bank arrived in the papal suite, how loud the arguments behind closed doors were becoming. I had sat quietly while Marcinkus had dragged Cardinal Villot, who as well as being Camerlengo also acted as head of the Apostolic Camera, into dark corners after his meetings with the Holy Father and barked like a dog about how he could not get into the specifics of such complex transactions with a man whose idea of sophistication was to reference Pinocchio in his homilies. This needs to stop, he had snarled one night, gripping Cardinal Villot by the arm. If it doesn’t stop, I won’t be responsible for what happens next. You have no idea what these people are capable of. Could I lie to the Monsignor, who had shown me nothing but kindness since my arrival in Rome? Tell him that I had been ill? Or should I tell the truth, taking him for my Father Confessor? My time here was almost at an end, after all. The Italians were already choosing who should take my place in January.

  The Swiss Guards were standing in place beneath the arch and although of course they recognized me, I showed them my pass and they separated to let me through. I had come home. I was at the Vatican once again, back in time to bring the Pope his breakfast, and I would ask his forgiveness for not attending to my post and hope that he would not reveal my indiscretion to anyone.

  I met one of the nuns on the back stairs that led to the papal suite, curled up on a small sofa before an alcove window that overlooked the eastern side of St Peter’s Square, a place that I had never seen anyone sit before, let alone a nun. Nuns did not sit, that was the truth of it; they were in constant motion, they went places, they had duties to fulfil. I recognized her and was surprised to realize that she was rocking back and forth, weeping.

  ‘Sister Teresa,’ I said, approaching her, kneeling down. ‘Are you all right? What has happened?’

  She looked up at me and I noticed for the first time how pretty she was. Such clear skin and deep brown eyes. She shook her head and pointed in the direction of the staircase, up towards the large chamber whose door led first to the small ante-chamber that housed my cot and then to the Pope’s private bedroom.

  I stepped past her and bolted up the steps into the parlour, where a small gathering of distraught nuns were huddled together, and in the corner of the room I spied Cardinal Siri and Cardinal Villot deep in conversation. Their faces were pale and all heads turned to me as I stepped inside. I wondered what I must look like after eight or nine hours of walking the streets, my hair askew, my face red, my eyes drawn.

  Cardinal Siri turned to me with a disbelieving expression on his face and marched over, guiding me by the elbow towards the corner of the room.

  ‘Your Eminence,’ I asked in Italian, ‘what has happened? What is wrong?’

  ‘The Holy Father,’ he told me. ‘He is dead.’

  I stared at him and resisted the urg
e to laugh. ‘Of course he is,’ I told him. ‘He died more than a month ago. Why are you saying this?’

  He shook his head. ‘I do not refer to our late Holy Father, but our current one. I mean our most recent one.’ He rolled his eyes, confusing even himself by his words. ‘His Holiness, Pope John Paul. He is dead.’

  I had no response for a moment. The idea was absurd. ‘When?’ I asked.

  ‘In the night.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘You don’t need to concern yourself with that.’

  ‘But it cannot be.’

  ‘And yet it is. He was all right when you took him his tea last night?’

  I thought about it, uncertain what to say. ‘He told me that he wanted to be alone,’ I said. ‘I took it away.’

  We both looked over towards the side table where Sister Vincenza had left the tray for me before retiring for the night. It was still there, of course, the silver pot full and stewed, the small plate of biscuits. Cardinal Siri noticed nothing unusual about it, but I did: there were always three biscuits left for the Pope and he never ate any of them; on this plate, however, there were only two, with some crumbs scattered beside them as if someone had picked up the third biscuit as they left the apartment but snapped it in two over the plate before eating it. No one who worked in this place would ever have done such a thing; it had to have been a stranger. But what would a stranger have been doing here?

  ‘I left it there,’ I added.

  ‘And he was well?’

  ‘He was tired,’ I said, compounding my lie, wondering why I was getting locked into such deceit when the truth would surely emerge. ‘He went to bed early.’

  ‘Where were you this morning?’ he asked. ‘Sister Vincenza told me that you were not here to collect the breakfast tray.’

  ‘I slept late,’ I explained. ‘I don’t know why.’

  ‘You weren’t in your cot.’

  ‘I was in the bathroom,’ I said. He narrowed his eyes and I knew that he could tell I was lying.

  ‘She brought the tray into the Holy Father,’ he told me. ‘She didn’t know what to do, of course. She didn’t want his breakfast to grow cold. She knocked, told him that it was ready, asked whether she might enter. He didn’t answer, so she knocked again. Called out to him. In the end, she had no choice but to go in. That is when she found him. He died, Odran.’ He leaned forward, so close that our faces were almost touching. ‘He died of natural causes, do you understand me? When you are asked – and you will be asked – this is what you will say. He died of natural causes. Or you will answer to me.’

  The new Pope, the Polish Pope, relieved me of my duties almost immediately after his election. I was tainted by the events of September 28th and although I was told at the time that my removal was no reflection on the work that I had done over my nine months in Rome, I didn’t believe this for a moment. There was no more talk of Vatican banks in my hearing, and certainly no discussion of the problems in Ireland the Pope had mentioned, and when I would think of these, years later, I would realize that they had been locked away as too dangerous to consider.

  Monsignor Sorley interviewed me at length in the feral days between the death of Pope John Paul and the October conclave about why I had not been at my post on that fateful night, and in the end, I told the truth – I told him everything that I had felt and done during my time in Rome, from my afternoons at the Café Bennizi to my conversations with Cardinal Luciani, who saw where my interests lay; from my crazed walks from the Piazza Pasquale Paoli to the Vicolo della Campana, up to and including my decision to break into her apartment – and although he was angry with me, he took me at my word and backed me up with the Vatican police, who were suspicious but could not afford to make it known that something unlawful may have happened in the Apostolic Palace that night. I held my tongue when it came to the issue of the biscuits; no one else had noticed and I could see nothing to be gained by expressing something that might sound ridiculous to their ears. The Pope had died of a heart attack, that was what was said, and whether it was true or whether it was not, that became the official story.

  The Polish Pope spoke to me even less than Pope Paul VI had, seeming nervous whenever I was in his presence, and I imagined that he knew the tale of my wanderings on the night his predecessor died and thus considered me an untrustworthy presence. Perhaps he was right; I had proved myself to be an unreliable soul. But then, in time, he would prove himself to be my equal in this regard.

  It was Monsignor Sorley who told me that I was no longer required at the Vatican. The Polish Pope had decided that the Italian should start two months early and so I was pushed aside, given a few hours to gather up any personal possessions and sent back to the Pontifical Irish College to complete my studies.

  Between then and now, I have set foot in the Vatican only once. On the day of my ordination, four months later, when my mother and sister would be greeted by the Pope, in a meeting that would leave Hannah to utter those four words about Pope John Paul II that I have never forgotten, for they had a ring of truth about them that even I, as the years went on, could not deny.

  That man hates women.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  2008

  IT WAS A mistake to wear my clerical clothes to the first day of Tom Cardle’s trial; I should have chosen something non-descript that wouldn’t draw attention to my position within the Church. I kept a pair of corduroy trousers somewhere in my wardrobe, after all, and some shirts and jumpers. I rarely wore them, but they were there. I might have looked like anyone else and the day would not have proved so difficult. But then I had been dressing in my black suit and white collar every day for more than thirty years so it had become something like a second skin to me. I simply didn’t give the matter a second thought.

  However, even as I boarded the bus that morning into the city centre and made my way north along the quays towards the Four Courts, I was uncertain whether or not I should attend. After all, I could read about it the following morning in the newspapers. I could watch the coverage of the trial on the television news or hear about it on the radio. Cases such as these had been going on for a few years now and the media was obsessed with them; every prosecution only added to a growing anger in the country and a sense that the men being brought to court represented only the tip of the iceberg. They were the ones who’d been caught, that was all. But we were all under suspicion. None of us were to be trusted.

  Tom’s arrest had left me feeling shattered. He had often vanished out of my life for long periods at a time, neither replying to letters nor answering phone calls, but to disappear for more than a year as he had done since the summer of 2006, hidden away by Archbishop Cordington in a monastery like some medieval king’s discarded wife, suggested only one thing. When I first heard where he’d been sent, it was in a phone call from my old friend Maurice Macwell, who had been parish priest in a thriving Mayo parish for a decade or more. I hadn’t heard from him since his former cell-mate Snuff Winters had died and he had refused to attend the funeral, for reasons he wouldn’t specify. To me, at least.

  ‘You’ve heard, I suppose?’ he said when I lifted the phone that day, not a word of introduction.

  ‘Who’s this?’ I asked, although I knew well from the voice.

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Who’s me?’

  ‘Maurice.’

  ‘Maurice Macwell? How are you anyway? How’s life in the West?’

  ‘Wet. And in Dublin?’

  ‘Cold.’

  ‘Grand so. Anyway, you’ve heard the news?’

  ‘What news would this be?’

  ‘About your old pal?’

  ‘Which old pal?’

  ‘Tom Cardle.’

  I felt a chill run through me. ‘What about him?’ I asked.

  ‘Arrested. Kiddie-fiddling.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘What am I supposed to think?’

  ‘It’s all been very cloak
and dagger. They first interviewed him six months ago and they’ve been building a case ever since. He’s in hiding. Cordington will have the full story. Has he not talked to you about it, no?’

  ‘He has.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That they have him somewhere safe.’

  Maurice seemed to be taking great delight in the news, and in sharing it with me. I remembered reading an interview once with the writer John Banville, who said that if he got a bad review in the paper for one of his books, then he could rely on one of his friends to phone him up and let him know. That was exactly how this felt.

  When the court dates were finally set, I spoke to my parish priest, Father Burton, and asked for a few days off, explaining where I would be, and he seemed reluctant to let me go, which surprised me for he was a relatively young man, only thirty-seven, and I would have thought that he would be less stifled by the old ways that were crumbling around us. I hoped he might show a bit more compassion.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ he asked, sitting back in his chair and making a temple of his hands under his chin in the way that he did whenever he wanted to appear intelligent. ‘Does it not seem a little unwise to get involved?’

  ‘He’s an old friend,’ I said.

  ‘You’re aware of what he’s accused of?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ I sighed. ‘I know all about it.’

  ‘So why do you want to go?’

  I had asked myself this question many times over the previous few days and come up with no satisfactory answer. Only I felt that I should be there, that I wanted to see him with my own eyes, to discover whether, by looking closely at him, I would see something that I had missed all these years. Something terrible.