The Shoes of the Fisherman

by Morris West

  ‘How does she occupy herself while you’re working?’

  Faber gave a small, rueful grin. ‘What does any young matron of fashion do in Rome?…Luncheon parties, mannequin shows, cocktails…’

  Campeggio laughed. ‘I know, I know. Our women make good lovers and good mothers. As wives, even as unofficial ones, they lack something. They resent their husbands, and spoil their sons.’

  For a moment Faber seemed to lose himself in a private contemplation. He said absently, ‘The loving is still good…But I have the feeling that we’re both starting to calculate. When Chiara came to me first she was almost broken. I seemed to be able to supply everything she needed. Now she’s back to normal and I am the one with the needs.”

  ‘Doesn’t she understand that?’

  ‘That’s the sixty-four-dollar question…By nature she’s impulsive and generous, but living with Calitri has changed her.

  It’s as if…’ He fumbled uneasily for the words. ‘As if she thinks men owe her a special kind of debt.’

  ‘And you’re not sure you can pay it all?’

  ‘No, I’m not sure.’

  ‘Then if I were you,’ said Campeggio emphatically, ‘I should cut loose now. Say goodbye, cry into your pillow, and forget the whole business.’

  ‘I’m in love with her,’ said Faber simply. ‘I’m ready to pay any price to hold her.’

  ‘Then we’re both in the same galley, aren’t we?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Campeggio balked a moment and then explained himself deliberately. ‘In the beginning – possession always seems the ultimate triumph of love. You have your Chiara now, but you cannot be wholly happy until you possess her by legal contract. Then, you feel, you will be safe. You pluck the rose and put it in a vase in the drawing-room, but after a while the bloom fades, and it is no longer so important that you own a wilting flower. When children come they are another kind of possession. They depend on you utterly. You hold them to you by their need of sustenance and security. As they grow, you find that the bond weakens, and that you no longer possess them as you once did…I want my son. I want him to be the image and the continuum of myself. I tell myself that what I do is for his good, but I know, deep in my heart, that it is also for my own satisfaction. I cannot bear that he should withdraw himself from me and give himself to another – man or woman – whom I consider less worthy…But in the end he will go, for better or for worse…Look at me now. I am a man of confidence at the Vatican. As editor of Osservatore I am the mouthpiece of the Church. I have a reputation for integrity and I believe I have earned it. Yet today I am beginning to compromise myself. Not for you! Don’t think I’m blaming you! It is for my son, whom I shall lose anyway, and for myself, because I have not yet begun to come to terms with age and loneliness…’

  George Faber heaved himself out of his chair and stood facing his colleague. For the first time he seemed to take on an unfamiliar strength and dignity. He said evenly, ‘I have no right to hold you to any bargains. You’re in a more delicate position than I am. You’re free to withdraw your offer.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Orlando Campeggio simply. ‘But I can’t withdraw. I’m committed…because of what I want, and what I am.’

  ‘And what are you? What am I?’

  ‘We should have been friends,’ said Orlando Campeggio with dry irony. ‘We’ve known each other a long time. But we missed the chance. So I’m afraid we’re just conspirators – and not very good ones at that!’

  Ten days before the feast of Saint Ignatius Loyola, Jean Télémond received a letter from His Eminence Cardinal Rinaldi:

  Dear Reverend Father,

  This is not an official communication, but a personal one. Just before your arrival in Rome, the Holy Father granted me permission to retire from office, and I am now living privately in the country. I am, however, invited to be present next week when you address the students and faculty at the Gregorian University. Before that day I should very much like to have the opportunity of meeting and talking with you.

  Already I know a great deal – more perhaps than you realize – about you and your work. I judge you to be a man favoured by God with what I can only call the grace of commitment.

  This grace is a rare gift. I myself have missed it, but for this reason, perhaps, I am the more aware of it in others. I am aware too that it comes to the recipient more often as a cross than as a consolation.

  I believe that your recall to Rome may be an event of great importance to the Church. I know that it is a decisive one for you. I should like therefore to offer you my friendship, my support, and perhaps my advice in your future activities.

  If it is convenient, perhaps you would be good enough to visit me next Monday and spend the afternoon with me. You will be doing me a favour, and I hope sincerely I may be of some service to you.

  Yours fraternally in Christ Jesus,

  Valerio Rinaldi

  Cardinal Priest

  For a man in crisis, it was a princely encouragement and it touched Télémond deeply. It reminded him – when he needed the reminder most – that, for all its monolithic faith, the Church was a habitation of diverse spirits among whom still dwelt a virtue of fraternity and compassion.

  In the clattering, gregarious, clerical society of Rome, he felt like an alien. Its conventions irked him. Its brusque orthodoxy troubled him as if he were being reproached for his twenty-year solitude among the mysteries of Creation. The melancholy of the climacteric weighed upon his soul. On the one hand he found himself dreading the moment when he must present the speculation of a lifetime to the public view. On the other he found himself approaching the moment with a kind of calculation which made the risks he had sustained, in flesh and spirit, seem futile and even guilty.

  Now suddenly there was a hand stretched out to welcome him, and a voice that spoke with an accent of rare understanding and gentleness. He had not lacked friendship in his life. His work had not wanted patronage and encouragement. Yet no one had ever seen it so clearly for what it was. A gamble, a commitment to living and knowing and believing, with a complete conviction that every moment of existence, every extension of knowledge, every act of faith was a step in the same direction, towards God-made-man, and man made in the image of God.

  What had troubled him most in Rome was the feeling that certain people in the Church regarded his work as an arrogance. Yet an arrogant man could not have embarked upon such a journey, nor risked so much in a single-minded search for truth.

  He had never been afraid of error since all his experience had shown him that knowledge was self-corrective and that a search honestly pursued must bring a man closer to the shores of revelation, even though their outline remained for ever hidden from his view.

  There was an attitude of orthodoxy which was itself a heresy: that to state the truth, as it had been stated and restated in every century of the Church, was to display it for ever in all its fullness. Yet the history of the Church was the history of an immutable revelation unfolding itself into greater and greater complexity as men’s minds opened to receive it more fully. The history of spiritual progress for an individual was the history of his preparation of himself to co-operate more willingly, more consciously, and more gratefully with the grace of God.

  For Jean Télémond the letter of Valerio Rinaldi wore the aspect of such a grace. He accepted it thankfully, and made an appointment to visit the Cardinal in his country retreat.

  They were instantly at ease with each other. Rinaldi walked his guest round the pleasances of the villa and rehearsed its history from the first Etruscan tomb in the orchard to the Orphic temple whose pavement lay uncovered in the sunken garden.

  Télémond was charmed by the urbanity and kindness of his host, and he opened himself more freely than he had done for a long time, so that the old man looked out through his visitor’s eyes on exotic landscapes and a cavalcade of histories, new and strange to him.

  When they had finished the circuit, they sat beside
a marble pond and drank English tea, and watched the fat carp browse languidly among the lily pads. Then, amiably but shrewdly, Rinaldi began to probe the mind of Jean Télémond.

  ‘Rome is a chameleon city. It wears a different colour for every visitor. How does it look to you, Father?’

  Jean Télémond toyed with the question for a moment and then answered it frankly. ‘I am uneasy. The idiom is strange to me. I am a Gaul among the Romans, a provincial among the metropolitans. I came back sure that I had learned so much in twenty years. Now I feel that I have forgotten something – some essential mode of speech, perhaps. I don’t know what it is, but the lack of it troubles me.’

  Rinaldi put down his teacup and wiped his fastidious hands with a linen napkin. His lined, patrician face softened. ‘I think you rate yourself too humbly, Father. It’s a long time since Gaul was a province of Rome, and I think it is we who have lost the art of communication…I don’t deny that you have a problem, but I am inclined to read it differently.’

  Télémond’s lean, disciplined features relaxed into a smile. ‘I should be grateful to hear Your Eminence’s interpretation.’ The old Cardinal waved an eloquent hand, so that the sunlight gleamed on the emerald ring of his office.

  ‘There are some, my friend, who wear the Church like a glove. Myself, for instance. I am a man who was made to grow comfortably within an established order. I understand the organization. I know where it is rigid and where it can be made flexible…There is no merit in this, no special virtue. It is at bottom a matter of temperament and aptitude. It has nothing to do with faith, hope, or charity. There are those who are born to be good servants of the State. There are those who have an aptitude for the goverment of the Church…It is a talent if you want, but a talent which has its own temptations, and I have succumbed to some of them during my life…’

  He broke off and stared down at the lily pond, where the fish swam gold and crimson, and the flowers spread their creamy petals under the afternoon sun. Télémond waited while the old prince gathered the rest of his thoughts.

  ‘…There are others, my friend, who wear the Church like a hair-shirt. They believe no less. They love perhaps more richly and more daringly; but they move, as you do, uneasily inside the discipline. For them obedience is a daily sacrifice, whereas for me and those like me, it is an accommodation – often a rewarding accommodation – to circumstance. Do you understand what I mean?’

  ‘I understand it; but I think that Your Eminence underrates himself to be kind to me.’

  ‘No! No! ‘Rinaldi’s answer was swift and emphatic. ‘I am too old to pay idle compliments. I have entered into judgement with myself and I know how much I am found wanting…At this moment you are a troubled man…’

  ‘So very troubled, Eminence,’ said Télémond softly. ‘I came to Rome under obedience; but there is no peace for me here. I know that.’

  ‘You are not born to peace, my friend. This is the first thing you must accept. You will not come to it, perhaps, till the day you die. Each of us has his own cross, you know, made and fitted to his reluctant shoulders. Do you know what mine is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘To be rich and content and fulfilled, and to know in this twilight of living that I have deserved none of it and that, when I am called to judgement, I must depend utterly upon the mercy of God and upon the merits of others more worthy.’

  Télémond was silent a long time, touched and humbled by this glimpse of an intimate and private agony. Finally he asked quietly, ‘And my cross, Eminence?’

  ‘Your cross, my son…’ The old man’s voice took on a new warmth and compassion. ‘Your cross is to be always divided between the faith which you possess, the obedience which you have vowed, and your personal search for a deeper knowledge of God through the universe which He has made. You believe that there is no conflict between the two, and yet you are involved in conflict every day. You cannot recant the Act of Faith without a personal catastrophe. You cannot abandon the search without a ruinous disloyalty to yourself and to your own integrity. Am I right, Father?’

  ‘Yes, Eminence, you’re right; but it isn’t enough. You show me the cross, but you do not show me how to carry it.’

  ‘You have carried it for twenty years without me.’

  ‘And now I am staggering under its weight. Believe me, I am staggering…And now there is a new burden – Rome!’

  ‘Do you want to go away?’

  ‘Yes. And yet I should be ashamed to go.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I hope that this may be the time of resolution for me. I feel I have been silent long enough for my thought to take shape. I feel that I have a duty to expose it to debate and dialectic. This exposure seems as much a duty as all my years of study and exploration.’

  ‘Then you must do your duty,’ said Rinaldi mildly.

  ‘That makes another problem, Eminence,’ said Télémond with a flash of humour. ‘I am not a publicist. I do not present myself very well. I do not know how to accommodate myself to the climate of this place.’

  ‘Then ignore it,’ said Rinaldi bluntly. ‘You come armed with a right heart and a private vision of the truth. That is armour enough for any man.’

  Télémond frowned and shook his head. ‘I mistrust my courage, Eminence.’

  ‘I could tell you to trust in God.’

  ‘I do, and yet…’ He broke off and stared unseeing across the reaches of the classic garden.

  Rinaldi prompted him gently. ‘Go on, my son.’

  ‘I’m afraid – desperately afraid!’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘That there may come a moment when this conflict in myself splits me in two, and destroys me utterly. I can’t put it any other way. I lack the words. I can only hope that Your Eminence understands.’

  Valerio Cardinal Rinaldi stood up and laid his hands on the bowed shoulders of the Jesuit. ‘I do, my son, believe me! I feel for you as I have felt for few men in my lifetime. Whatever happens after your address next week, I want you to count me your friend. I told you you would be doing me a favour if you allowed me to help you. I put it more strongly. You may give me the opportunity of winning some small merit for myself…’ His habitual humour asserted itself again, and he laughed. ‘It’s a tradition in Rome, Father. Painters, poets, and philosophers all need a patron to protect them from the Inquisition. And I may be the last real one left!’

  EXTRACT FROM THE SECRET MEMORIALS OF KIRIL I PONT. MAX

  …All this week I have been besieged by what I can only call a temptation of darkness. Never since my time in the bunker have I been so oppressed by the wild absurdity of the world, by the wastefulness of man’s struggle for survival, by the apparent idiocy of any attempt to change human nature or bring about a corporate betterment in the human condition.

  To reason with the temptation was simply to create another absurdity. To reason with myself was to invite a new confusion. A spirit of mockery seemed to inhabit me. Whenever I looked at myself I saw a jester in cap and bells, perched on a mountain-top, waving his silly wand at the hurricanes. When I prayed, my spirit was arid. The words were like an incantation from some ancient witchcraft – without virtue and without reward. It was a kind of agony which I thought would never come my way again; yet this time I was more deeply wounded by it than ever before.

  In my confusion, I addressed myself to a meditation on the passion and death of the Master. I began to understand dimly the meaning of the agony in Gethsemane garden, when the trouble of His human spirit communicated itself so poignantly to His body that its mechanism began to break down and He suffered, as a leukaemia patient does, the bloody sweat which is a foretaste of dying.

  For a moment also I glimpsed the meaning of His final desolate cry from the Cross: ‘My God, my God. Why hast Thou forsaken me?’ In that moment, I think He must have seen – as I see now – the wild folly of a world gone mad, bursting itself asunder in a tangential flight from its centre.

  At that moment His own li
fe and death must have seemed a vast futility, just as my life and all my effort as His Vicar seem to me. Yet He endured it, and so must I. If He, God-man, could suffer, uncomforted by the Godhead, shall I refuse the cup which He hands on to me?

  I held to the thought with a kind of terror, lest it should slip away from me, and leave me for ever a prey to blackness and despair. Then, slowly, the darkness dissipated itself and I found myself shaken, almost physically ill, but confirmed once again in the essential sanity of belief. I did, however, see something very clearly: the plight of those who have no God to infuse a meaning into the monstrous nonsense of the whole human effort.

  For a believer, life is at best a painful mystery made acceptable by a partial revelation of a divine design. To an unbeliever and there are hundreds of millions from whom the grace of belief has been withheld – it must present itself at times as a kind of madness, always threatening, at times almost unendurable. Perhaps this is the meaning of what I am, and what has happened to me: that being poor in all else, I can offer to the world the love of an understanding heart…

  Today a second letter arrived from Kamenev. It was delivered in Paris to the Cardinal Archbishop and forwarded to me by special messenger. It is more cryptic than the first, but I sense a greater urgency in it:

  I have your message and I am grateful for it. The sunflowers are blooming now in Mother Russia, but before they come to flower again, we may have need of each other.

  Your message tells me that you trust me, but I have to be honest and say that you must not trust what I do or what I am reported to say. We live in different climates, as you know. You command an obedience and a loyalty impossible in my sphere of action. I can only survive by understanding what is possible, by yielding to one pressure in order to avoid a greater one.

  Within twelve months, even sooner, we may come to the brink of war. I want peace. I know that we cannot have it with a one-sided bargain. On the other hand, I cannot dictate its terms even to my own people. I am caught in the current of history. I can tack across it but I cannot change the direction of the flow.