‘But Father Antonelli is dead. And who knows how long it took him to translate those few lines?’
The car was now crossing the practically deserted city. The rain had stopped and the streets were swept by a cold, damp wind. Father Hogan started down Lungotevere and was soon on the other side of the Vatican walls. He parked in the San Damaso courtyard.
‘Father Antonelli had the key for deciphering “The Book of Amon”. He must have translated much more than just those few lines. Why else would he have been ranting on about a “different” Bible? Antonelli just didn’t want to reveal what he’d learned, not even on his deathbed.’
‘Perhaps he destroyed his translation.’
Father Boni shook his head. ‘A scholar never destroys the fruit of his life’s work, especially when we’re talking about the discovery of a lifetime. A poet maybe, a writer even, but not a scholar. It’s not in his nature. All we have to do is look and we’ll find it.’
He left the car without saying another word and walked across the abandoned square, disappearing into the darkness of an archway.
PHILIP GARRETT WOKE EARLY, after a restless night. He had a bath and went down for breakfast. Along with his caffé latte, he was brought an envelope from the Vatican. A few lines from Father Boni, informing him of Father Antonelli’s death. Boni apologized for not having been able to do anything for Garrett, and hoped to have the pleasure of meeting him again.
Disconsolate, Philip dropped his head into his hands. His search had aborted before he’d begun. Played for a fool again by the irony of fate. He thought of returning to Paris at once and forgetting about this crazy idea of finding his father. But he knew that would be impossible.
He walked out in the direction of the Circus Maximus. It was a splendid sight under the early autumn sun after the night’s rain. The sloping sides of what was once a gigantic racecourse, echoing with the screams of rapturous crowds, were empty and smelled like earth and grass, reminding him of the walks he used to take with his mother as a child. A fleeting memory.
Strange, whenever he thought of his mother it was a sound he remembered more than words, the sound of a little wooden music box playing an odd, indefinable tune. It had been a present from his father, on his fourteenth birthday. A little black-bereted soldier on the top, his uniform shining with gold braid, sprang up and down as if mounting guard.
A sad birthday. His father had been absent that day, far away doing research, and his mother had been taken ill for the first time.
He would play the music again and again, even after she until one day the box disappeared from his bedside table. It had died, been no use asking where it had gone, or who had it; he never got an answer.
One day his father had called him into his study and said, ‘I will not be able to see to your education for some time to come. You’ll be going to boarding school.’
Shortly after that Desmond left for the war, and he began to write to his son from the front, from a number of battle positions. He would always enquire as to how his studies were progressing. He would even send mathematical problems for Philip to solve, conundrums to puzzle out. He would write in Latin at times, or in Greek, and it was only when he used those languages that he would let himself go with an affectionate form of expression, as if only those dead, sterile words allowed him to let out emotion or feeling. Philip had hated his father for that.
And yet he realized that it was his father’s way of staying close, of taking an interest in his personal development and the growth of his mind.
Philip suddenly remembered that his birthday was only three days away, and the dedication that his father had written in the book flashed into his mind. The date: ‘Naples, 19 September 1915’. It was clear now! That was the clue, how could he not have realized it? In 1915, Philip had only been fourteen: how could he have read and understood that book? His father’s gift that year had been the music box.
Could his father’s message be in those notes, that music? Philip tried hard to remember it, but he just couldn’t pin it down. Although it seemed impossible, that brief tune that he had listened to hundreds of times had been snatched from his mind and he couldn’t call it back.
He returned to his pensione and sketched out a stave on a sheet of white paper so he could try to jot down the notes of the music-box tune, but it was no use. In the sitting room there was an old piano pushed up against the wall. He sat down and put his hands on the keys, hoping that a stray note might bring the lost melody back into his head. The notes rose incoherently up the stairwell and rained back down inert and meaningless onto the keys. All he could see in his mind’s eye was the little soldier with the black beret, blue jacket and gold frogging, with his jerky movements, mounting guard on his lost memories.
Philip picked up the book again and read the phrase that preceded the second chapter: ‘The brown friars can hear the sound by the volcano.’
He moved on to the third, imagining that the chapter numbers provided the sequence with which the notes were to be read: ‘The sound is beyond the gate of the dead.’
The last phrase was written in before the fourth chapter: ‘Find the entrance under the eye.’
Perhaps the ‘sound’ mentioned in the second phrase referred to the music box whose tune he had tried so hard to remember, but still there was no sense to be made out of the sequence.
Philip felt frustrated and irritated at being dragged into a stupid, infantile game, a ridiculous treasure hunt. A seasoned researcher like himself, trapped by such a childish puzzle! But then he thought of Colonel Jobert’s words when he gave him the volume . . . there must be a reason why his father had chosen such an apparently nonsensical approach to guiding him through this enigma, an approach that would take him back to his childhood . . . and he must surely have taken into account the possibility that Philip would be unable to decipher his messages, or meet with Father Antonelli.
That same afternoon Philip went to the Angelicum Library to look for a directory of the religious orders in Italy. It didn’t take him long to find a Franciscan monastery near the Church of the Madonna of Pompeii. ‘The brown friars can hear the sound by the volcano.’ All right, so he had Mount Vesuvius and the friars: what sound could they hear? Philip decided that he would leave for Naples the next day.
FATHER BONI OPENED THE SAFE and took out Father Antonelli’s diary. At the end, between the last page and the back cover, was an envelope with a single line, written in ink: ‘To be delivered into the hands of the Holy Father’. Boni had never dared either to deliver it to the addressee or to open it himself. He decided to open and read it.
I beg the forgiveness of God and of Your Holiness for what I have done, for the presumption that enticed me into seeking knowledge of evil, and swayed me from the true path of Infinite Good.
I have dedicated my life to deciphering ‘The Book of Amon’, only to discover a temptation within it which I have not been capable of resisting! A temptation that, were it known to man, would overwhelm the resistance of most human beings on this earth.
It has taken a relentless disease to save me from damnation. Or so I hope, at least, in these last days that remain of my life. I am resigned to the illness that is destroying my body. I accept it as a sign from the Almighty and hope that it may serve for the remission of my sins and atone for at least a small part of the punishment I deserve. The only other person who knows the secret of reading this text has disappeared into the desert and will never return.
As for me, I shall take the secret which I was driven to learn with such arrogance into the tomb. I implore Your Holiness to absolve my sins and to intercede on my behalf with the Most High, before whose presence I shall soon appear.
Father Hogan was awakened not long after that, in the middle of the night, by a soft but insistent knocking at the door of his room. He felt his way to the light and put on the robe lying on a chair. When he opened the door he found Father Boni standing there. He was wearing a dark overcoat and a homburg hat.
‘I think I know where the translation of “The Book of Amon” is hidden. Hurry and get dressed.’
PHILIP GARRETT FOUND a room at the Ausonia hotel, not far from the Franciscan monastery. The next morning, he introduced himself as a specialist in art history and asked to visit the monastery. He was received by a quite elderly and very loquacious friar who apparently had not had much occasion to entertain guests. He showed Philip his own studies regarding the monastery, which had risen on the foundations of an ancient Benedictine cenoby built, in turn, over the remains of an ancient Roman domus. This extraordinary stratification of events and cultures found only in Italy never ceased to amaze Philip, who did his best to gratify his host, complimenting him on the insight and diligence of his studies.
The visit then began. They saw the church with its frescoes and paintings by Pontormo and Baciccia in the side chapels, they visited the small antiquarium with its early Christian tombstones and fragments of Roman floor mosaics and then, finally, the crypt. It was situated at a depth of five or six metres below ground level and it contained the remains of all the monks who had lived and died between those walls over the previous four centuries. It was quite a disturbing sight, and as his host chattered on at length about the history of the monastery and its occupants, Philip couldn’t help but stare at those stacks of time-yellowed skulls and shin bones, those empty eye sockets, those grotesque, dusty smiles.
‘What’s the purpose of all this, Father? To remind ourselves that all men must die?’ he asked suddenly.
The friar’s tongue stopped suddenly, as if someone had shattered the entire scholarly exposition that he had so painstakingly constructed under those ancient vaults.
‘A monk lives for the hereafter,’ he replied. ‘You who live in the outside world cannot understand, because too many things distract you, but we monks know very well that life is but an instant, and that what awaits us will guide us to the eternal light. I realize,’ he continued, inclining his head towards the skull-cluttered shelves, ‘that all of this appears grotesque, macabre even, but only for one who refuses to consider the truth. Even a fruit, when it has lost its fresh juicy pulp, is reduced to a stone, to a dry, hard stone, but we know that it is from that stone that new life is born.’
‘Inside the stone is a seed,’ agreed Philip, ‘but here,’ he added then, taking a skull from the pile and turning it upside down to reveal the internal cavity, ‘here I see nothing . . . no trace of the veins and nerves that once throbbed under this dried-up face and conveyed the thoughts and emotions, the knowledge and the hopes of a human being . . . The truth is, Father, that we are enveloped by mystery, and we’ve not been given a light to explore it, apart from this mind of ours. A mind perpetually aware of the relentless passage of time and terrified by it.’
‘We believe that we have been given a light,’ replied the friar. ‘ “Light from light, true God from true God”. We firmly believe that God entered history to speak with us. Once and for always.’
‘I know that’s what a true believer will tell you. But you tell me, my friend, how you can see the hand of God in this world of ours, in this obsessive, monotonous alternation of births and deaths. In this throng of bodies in heat who, in seeking a few moments of pleasure, perpetuate the curse of pain, of illness and old age, the raging of war, hunger and epidemics . . . You monks, you who refuse to couple with females, aren’t you saying that the way to reach perfection in life is to refuse to perpetuate it, to rebel against the mechanism that drives us to reproduce ourselves before we die?
‘Do you know what the world is, Father, for those of us who have not renounced it, as you have? A desolate land beaten by the hooves of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse . . . Our world is pain, above all, and we who live in it are completely responsible for that.’
‘We are no different from other men,’ replied the friar, ‘as strange as that may seem to you. If you could share our experience, you would realize the truth of my words. You could say that we have gambled our entire existence on a single number in the roulette of life. We have accepted the word of the Son of Man. Although, as you remember, He himself trembled and cried and shouted, sweating blood, at the thought of losing His life.’ The friar lowered his bald head and his beard touched the worn cowl. ‘But this is not the reason you’ve come, and nor have you come to see the art treasures this monastery holds. I feel as though I’ve met you before. A long, long time ago.’
Philip started. ‘Why? Why do you say that?’
‘I have the feeling that I’ve seen you before . . . but if it had been you, you’d be much older by now.’
Philip could not hide his agitation. ‘Perhaps you saw my father, Desmond Garrett, ten years ago. Could that be?’
The friar’s face lit up. ‘Yes, of course! But his eyes were black, weren’t they?’
Philip nodded. ‘What was my father looking for? I must know. He disappeared in the Sahara desert ten years ago, shortly after he left here. I’m trying to find him, but my search is going nowhere.’
The friar pondered his words for a while before answering. ‘The first time he came to the monastery was much longer than ten years ago. I think it was chance that brought him here, if I remember well. Just as he was about to leave for Africa. Back then, you see, there were rumours that the usual tomb robbers had found a certain something here, in the area. Your father did everything he could to find out more about the discovery; I don’t know why. He went down time and time again, underground. There are countless galleries under the city, dug into the tuff that was deposited by the eruptions of Vesuvius in ancient times. There were some things he told me, but others, I’m sure, that he kept to himself. He ended up here at the monastery and convinced me to help him. I suggested a route that he could follow. He stayed for a while. Then, one day, he had to leave quite suddenly. His wife – that is, your mother – had been taken ill . . . or perhaps her already precarious condition had taken a turn for the worse.’
Philip lowered his head in silence and in his mind’s eye saw his mother lying among hundreds of white flowers, his father kneeling next to her with his face hidden in his hands.
‘Years went by before we heard from him again,’ continued the friar. ‘But he did come back and he stayed with us for a brief time. That was about ten years ago. I don’t know if he ever found what he was looking for.’
‘Thank you, Father,’ Philip said, ‘for your kindness. I regret what I said before. In reality, I admire your faith. Actually, I envy it, in a certain sense. Let me ask you this: in looking for my father, I’ve found a . . . a clue, I suppose you could say, a phrase that he wrote, which seems to be devoid of meaning, but perhaps it might mean something to you. This place just brought it to mind.’
‘Speak freely, son,’ said the friar.
‘The phrase is: “The sound is beyond the gate of the dead.” Does that mean anything to you? Could there be a door beyond all these shelves full of bones?’
The friar smiled, nodding. ‘Do you know the legend of the earthquake bells?’
‘No. I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Well, it seems that every time an earthquake is about to take place, a bell can be heard ringing in the underground passages of this monastery. A soft, silvery sound of just a few notes. They say that the sound has always protected these walls, which, in truth, have never given way. But that may be because they stand on the formidable structure of a Roman villa.’
‘Have you ever heard the sound?’
‘No. But your father told me that he had heard it. There was a tremor here in the area just when he was visiting. But it might have been the power of suggestion. Your father was a very emotional man, was he not?’
Philip did not answer. ‘Please, could you tell me exactly what my father said about the sound he had heard?’
‘I don’t remember well, I’m afraid. What I do remember is that he was dead set on finding out where it came from.’
‘Before . . . you said you suggested a route my father could
follow . . .’
‘Come with me,’ said the friar, walking towards the end of the crypt. ‘You surely don’t believe that a monastery as ancient as ours has no secret passageways?’
‘I’d be surprised if there weren’t any,’ admitted Philip.
‘To tell you the truth, it’s no great secret. Look. Behind here,’ he said, pointing at a shelf full of bones that covered most of the wall, ‘is the passage to the lower levels, a true labyrinth of tunnels. Mostly catacombs; their location corresponds to what may have been the south-eastern quarter of ancient Pompeii. You know how little of the old city has been explored.’
The friar stretched out his hand and unhooked a bracket that held up a shelf, which rotated on a hinge fixed to the floor. He swung it out, revealing the little iron door behind it, which was bolted shut.
‘As you can see,’ continued the friar, ‘no mysterious mechanisms. An unsophisticated secret, worthy of the poor friars of St Francis.’
‘ “The sound is beyond the gate of the dead . . .” Fantastic! Can I get official permission to go down?’ asked Philip with a certain apprehension, indicating the door.
The friar shook his bald head. ‘No. Your father wasn’t able to either. My superiors don’t want anyone venturing down there. Not because there’s anything particularly exciting apart from our mysterious bell, but someone could easily get hurt down below and we don’t want trouble if anything should happen. As far as I’m concerned, you can start as soon as you like, but you’ll need an acetylene lamp, a miner’s hat and a haversack for your gear. Keep me informed, if you will. Your father always did. Somewhere I think I still have the map he drew up, with a partial layout of the tunnels, at the end of his first week of exploration. I’ll find it for you. Officially, you’ll have permission to study the structure of the Roman domus. Mind you, be careful and don’t do anything foolish: it really is dangerous down there.’
The Tower Page 6