by Morris West
‘…It may please you to know, my dear fellow, that your own dispatches have been very favourably noticed by His Holiness. I am told he is anxious to make more direct contact with the press. There is talk of a regular luncheon with senior correspondents, and your name is, of course, first on the list.’
‘I’m flattered,’ said Faber dryly. ‘One tries always to write honestly, but this man is an interesting subject in his own right.’
‘Leone too has a soft spot for you, and you are well regarded in the Secretariat of State…These are important sources and important voices, as you know.’
‘I’m well aware of it.’
‘Good,’ said Campeggio briskly. ‘Then you understand the importance of preserving a good relation without, shall we say, embarassing incidents.’
‘I’ve always understood that. I’m interested to know why you bring it up now.’
Campeggio pursed his thin lips and looked down the backs of his long, manicured hands. He said carefully, ‘I make the point to explain my next question. Do you propose setting up house with Chiara Calitri?’
Faber flushed and said testily, ‘We’ve discussed it. So far we haven’t made any decision.’
‘Then let me advise you very strongly not to do it at this moment…Don’t misunderstand me. Your private life is your own affair.’
‘I’d hardly call it private. Everyone in Rome knows the situation between Chiara and myself. I imagine the rumour has reached the Vatican long before this.’
Campeggio gave him a thin smile. ‘So long as it remains a rumour, they are content to suspend judgement and leave you in the hands of God. There is no question of public infamy which could damage your case with the Rota.’
‘At this point,’ Faber told him bluntly, ‘we have no case. The whole business is suspended until Chiara can get new evidence. So far she hasn’t been able to find any.’
Campeggio nodded slowly, and then began to trace an intricate pattern on the white tablecloth. ‘I am told by those who understand the thinking of the Rota that your best hope of a verdict rests on the plea of defective intention. In other words, if you can prove that Calitri entered into the marriage contract without the full intention of fulfilling all its terms – and that intention includes fidelity – then you have a good chance of a favourable decision.’
Faber shrugged unhappily. ‘How do you prove what’s in a man’s mind?’
‘Two ways: by his own sworn statement or by the evidence of those who heard him express the defective intention.’
‘We looked for people like that. We couldn’t find any, and I’m damn sure Calitri won’t give evidence against himself.’
‘Put enough pressure on him and I think he might.’
‘What kind of pressure?’
For the first time Campeggio seemed uncertain of himself. He was silent a while, tracing long flowing lines with the point of his fork. Finally he said deliberately, ‘A man like Calitri who holds a high position and who has, shall we say, an unusual private life, is very vulnerable. He is vulnerable to his party, and to public attack. He is vulnerable to those who have fallen out of his favour…I don’t have to tell you that this is an odd world he lives in – a world of strange loves and curious hates. Nothing in it is very permanent. Today’s favourite is rejected tomorrow. There are always bleeding hearts ready to tell their story to a good listener. I've heard some myself. Once you have enough stories you go to Calitri.’
‘I go to him?’
‘Who else? You report the news, don’t you?’
‘Not that sort of news.’
‘But you know plenty who do?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I don’t have to draw pictures for you.’
‘It’s blackmail,’ said George Faber flatly.
‘Or justice,’ said Orlando Campeggio. ‘It depends on the point of view.’
‘Even if we did frighten a testimony out of him, he could then allege undue pressure and the whole case would be thrown out of court for good.’
‘That’s the risk you have to take. If the stakes are high enough, I think you might be wise to take it …I should add that I may be able to give you a little help in your inquiry.’
‘Why?’ asked Faber sharply. ‘Why should you care a row of beans what happens to Chiara and me?’
‘You’ve become a Roman,’ said Campeggio with cool irony. ‘Still, it’s a fair question. I like you. I think you and your girl deserve better than you’re getting. I don’t like Calitri. Nothing would give me greater satisfaction than to see him destroyed. That’s almost impossible, but if your Chiara wins her case it will damage him a great deal.’
‘Why do you dislike him so much?’
‘I’d rather not answer that question.’
‘We have common interests. We should at least be honest with each other.’
The Roman hesitated a moment, and then threw out his hands in a gesture of defeat. ‘What does it matter anyway? There are no secrets in Rome. I have three sons. One of them works in Calitri’s department and has, shall we say, fallen under his influence. I don’t blame the boy. Calitri has great charm, and he doesn’t scruple to use it.’
‘A dirty business!’
‘It’s a dirty town,’ said Orlando Campeggio. ‘I’m the last man who should say it, but I often wonder why they call it the City of Saints.’
While George Faber was still chewing unhappily over his luncheon dialogue, Chiara Calitri was sunning herself on the beach, at Fregene.
She was a small dark girl, lithe as a cat; and the youths who passed, idling along the beach, whistled and preened themselves for her attention. Safe behind her sunglasses, she watched them come and go, and stretched herself more decoratively on the coloured towel.
A sense of comfort and well-being pervaded her. She was young, the admiration of the youths told her she was beautiful. She was loved, Faber in his uneasy fashion was committed to fight her battles. She was freer than she had ever been in her life.
It was the freedom which intrigued her most of all, and each day she became more conscious of it, more curious about it, and more eager for its enlargement. This morning she had wept and shouted like a market woman at poor George because he had seemed unwilling to risk a talk with Campeggio. If he wavered again she would fight him again because from now on she could not love without the liberty to be herself.
With Corrado Calitri she had felt herself torn apart, blown this way and that like paper shredded on the wind. For a time – a terrifying time – it was as if she had ceased to exist as a woman. Now at last she had put herself together again – not the same Chiara but a new one, and no one ever again must have the power to destroy her.
Deliberately she had chosen an older man because they were more tolerant and less demanding. They asked a more placid life. They offered affection as well as passion. They moved with authority in a wider world. They made a woman feel less vulnerable…
She sat up and began to toy with the warm sand, filtering it between her fingers so that it spilled out and made a small mound at her feet. Inconsequently she thought of an hourglass in which time measured itself inexorably in a spilth of golden grains. Even as a child she had been obsessed with time, reaching out for it as she now reached for freedom, spending it recklessly as if, by so doing, she could bring the future into today. When she was at home she had cried to go to school. At school she had wanted always to grow up. Grown up at last, she had wanted to be married. In marriage – the bitter fiasco of her marriage to Corrado Calitri – time had suddenly and dreadfully stood still, so that it seemed she must be anchored eternally to this union with a man who despised her womanhood and debased it at every opportunity.
It was from this terror of static time that she had fled finally into hysteria and illness. The future towards which she had reached so eagerly was now intolerable to her. She no longer wanted to advance but only to retreat into the dark womb of dependence.
Even here time was still her enemy. Life was
time; an unendurable extension of loveless years. The only ways to end it were to die or to stay for ever in retreat. But in the hospital the vigilant nurses held death away from her, while the physicians drew her slowly and patiently back to another meeting with life. She had fought against them, but they too were inexorable. They stripped her illusions away one by one like layers of skin until the naked nerves were exposed, and she screamed in protest against their cruelty.
Then they had begun to show her a strange alchemy: how pain might transmute itself into a mercy. Endure it long enough and it began to diminish. Run from it, and it followed, always more monstrous like a pursuer in a nightmare. Fight it and in the end you could come to terms with it – not always the best terms, not always the wisest, but a treaty that was at least bearable.
She had made her own treaty with life now, and she was living better than she had hoped under the terms of it. Her family disapproved of the bargain, but they were generous enough to give her love and a measure of affection. She could not marry, but she had a man to care for her. The Church condemned her, but so long as she preserved a public discretion, it would withhold a public censure.
Society, in its paradoxical fashion, registered a mild protest and then accepted her with good enough grace…She was not wholly free, nor wholly loved, nor wholly protected, but she had enough of each to make life bearable, and time endurable, because each now held a promise of betterment.
Yet it was not the whole answer, and she knew it. The treaty was not half as favourable as it looked. There was a catch in it – a dragnet clause which, once invoked, could cancel all the rest.
She looked out at the empty water of the Tyrrhenian Sea and remembered her father’s tales of all the strange life that inhabited its deeps: corals like trees, whales as big as a ship, fish that flapped their wings like birds, jewels that grew in oyster slime, and weeds like the hair of drowned princesses. Under the sunlit surface was a whole mysterious world, and sometimes the waters opened and swallowed down the voyager who risked them too boldly. Sometimes, but not always…The most unlikely sailormen survived and came to safe harbour.
Here precisely was the risk of her own contract with life. She believed in God. She believed in the Church’s teaching about Him. She knew the penalty of eternal ruin that hung over the heads of those who rashly dared the divine displeasure. Every step, every hour, was a tightrope venture of damnation. At any moment the contract might be called in. And then…?
Yet even this was not the whole mystery. There were others and deeper ones. Why she and not another had been submitted to the first injustice of a false marriage contract. Why she and not another had been forced into the suicidal confusion of a breakdown. And this precipitate grasping at any straw for survival. Why? Why?
It was not enough to say, like the parish confessor, that this was God’s dispensation for her. It was Corrado’s dispensation first. Did God compound injustice, and then hold damnation over the heads of those who wilted under its weight? It was as if the sea rose up and swirled her back into the confusion of her illness.
There was no cure for the untimely thought, that came in night-time or daytime, prickling along the flesh like a cold wind. One could not surrender to it for fear of a new madness. One could not blot it out except by the exercise of love and passion, which in a strange way seemed to affirm what the preachers said they denied: the reality of love and mercy, and the hand that helped the most hapless sailormen out of the damnation of the deep…
She shivered in the warm air and stood up, wrapping the towel about her. A brown youth with the figure of a Greek god whistled and called to her, but she ignored him and hurried up the beach towards the car. What did he know of life who vaunted it like a phallic emblem in the sun? George knew better – dear middle-aged, uneasy George, who shared her risk and was at least working to rid her of it. She longed for the comfort of his arms and the sleep that came after the act of love…
Rudolf Semmering, Father General of the Society of Jesus, sat in the airport at Fiumicino and waited for his man from Djakarta. To those who knew him well, his vigil was of singular significance. Rudolf Semmering was an efficient man, adapted by nature and ascetic exercise to the military spirit of Ignatius Loyola. Time to him was a precious commodity because only in time could one prepare for eternity. A waste of time was therefore a waste of the currency of salvation. The affairs of his order were complex and pressing, and he might easily have sent a deputy to meet this obscure member who was already thirty minutes late.
Yet the occasion seemed to demand a more than normal courtesy. The newcomer was a Frenchman, a stranger to Rome. He had spent more than twenty years in exile – in China, in Africa, in India, and the scattered islands of Indonesia. He was a simple priest, and a distinguished scholar, whom Rudolf Semmering had held in silence under his vow of obedience.
For a scholar the silence was worse than exile. He was free to work, to correspond with his colleagues all over the world, but he was prevented by a formal obedience from publishing the results of his research or teaching on any public rostrum. Many times in the last decade, Rudolf Semmering had questioned his own conscience about this prohibition laid on so brilliant a mind. Yet always he had come to rest on his first conviction that this was a chosen spirit which discipline could only refine, and whose bold speculations needed a term of silence to found themselves firmly.
A man with a sense of history, Semmering was convinced that the effectiveness of an idea depended on the temper of the time into which it was first introduced. It was too late in history to risk another Galileo affair or the burning of a new Giordono Bruno. The Church was still suffering from the sad debates over the Chinese rites. He was less afraid of heresy than of a climate of thought which could make heresy out of a new aspect of truth. He lacked neither compassion nor understanding of the sacrifices he demanded of a noble mind such as this one, but Jean Télémond, like every other member of the Society, had vowed himself to obedience, and when it had been exacted of him, he had submitted himself.
For Semmering this was the final test of the mettle of a religious man, the final evidence of his capacity for a godly work in a position of trust. Now the test was over, and he wanted to explain himself to Télémond and to offer him the affection that every son had a right to expect from his father in the spirit. Soon he would be asking Télémond to walk a new road, no longer solitary, no longer inhibited, but exposed, as he had never been exposed before, to the temptations of influence and the attacks of jealous interests. This time he would need support more than discipline, and Semmering wanted to offer them with warmth and generosity.
Diplomacy was involved as well. Since the time of Pacelli, the Cardinals of the Curia and the Bishops of the Church had been afraid of any attempt to introduce a Grey Eminence into the counsels of the Pontiff. They wanted, and so far they had had, a return to the natural order of the Church where the Curia were the counsellors of the Pontiff and the bishops were his coworkers, acknowledging his primacy as the successor of Peter, but holding equally to their own apostolic autonomy. If the Society of Jesus gave any appearance of attempting to push a favourite into the Papal Court, it would inevitably meet suspicion and hostility.
Yet the Pontiff had called for men, and the question was now how to offer this one without appearing to canvass for him…The voice of the traffic-caller crackled over the amplifiers announcing the arrival of a BOAC flight from Djakarta, Rangoon, New Delhi, Karachi, Beirut. Rudolf Semmering stood up, smoothed down his cassock and walked towards the customs entrance to meet the exile.
Jean Télémond would have been a striking man in any company. Six feet tall, straight as a ramrod, lean of visage, with grey hair and cool, humorous blue eyes, he wore his clerical black like a military uniform, while the yellow malarial tinge of his skin and the furrows about his upturned mouth told the story of his campaigns in exotic places. He greeted his superior with respectful reserve, and then turned to the porter who was struggling with three heavy suitc
ases.
‘Be careful with those. There’s half a lifetime of work in them.’
To Semmering he said with a shrug, ‘I presumed I was being transferred. I brought all my papers with me.’
The Father General gave him one of his rare smiles. ‘You were right, Father. You’ve been away too long. Now we need you here.’
A spark of mischief twinkled in Télémond’s blue eyes. ‘I was afraid I was to be hauled before the Inquisition.’
Semmering laughed. ‘Not yet…You’re very, very welcome, Father.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Télémond with curious simplicity. ‘These have been difficult years for me.’
Rudolf Semmering was startled. He had not expected a man so brusque and aware. At the same time he felt a small glow of satisfaction. This was no vague savant, but a man with a clear mind and a stout heart. Silence had not broken him, nor exile subdued him. An obedient spirit was one thing, but a man with a broken will was no use to himself or to the Church.
Semmering answered him gravely. ‘I know what you’ve done. I know what you’ve suffered. I have, perhaps, made your life more difficult than it needed to be. I ask only that you believe I acted in good faith.’
‘I’ve never doubted that,’ said Jean Télémond absently. ‘But twenty years is a long time.’ He was silent a while, watching the green meadows of Ostia, dotted with old ruins and new excavations, where red poppies grew between the cracks of ancient stones. Suddenly he said, ‘Am I still under suspicion, Father?’
‘Suspicion of what?’
Télémond shrugged. ‘Heresy, rebellion, a secret modemism, I don’t know. You were never very clear with me.’
‘I tried to be,’ said Semmering mildly. ‘I tried to explain that prudence was involved, and not orthodoxy. Some of your early papers and lectures came under the notice of the Holy Office. You were neither condemned nor censured. They felt, and I agreed with them, that you needed more time, and more study. You have great authority, you see. We wanted it used to the best advantage of the Faith.’