The Shoes of the Fisherman

by Morris West

  They are all jealous of their new identity, and they must be led to see that they can grow in, and with, the Faith towards a legitimate social and economic betterment. We are not yet one world, and we shall not be for a long time, but God is one, and the Gospel is one, and it should be spoken in every tongue under heaven…This was the mode of the primitive Church. This was the vision which Télémond renewed for me: the unity of the spirit in the bond of Faith in the diversity of all knowledge and all tongues

  Today I held the last series of audiences before the summer holidays. Among those whom I received privately was a certain Corrado Calitri, Minister of the Republic. I had already received most of the Italian Cabinet, but I had never met this man. The circumstance was sufficiently unusual for me to comment on it to the Maestro di Camera.

  He told me that Calitri was a man of unusual talent, who had had a meteoric rise in the Christian Democratic Party. There was even talk that he might lead the country after the next elections.

  He told me also that Calitri’s private life had been somewhat notorious for a long time, and that he was involved in a marital case presently under consideration by the Holy Roman Rota. Now, however, it seemed that Calitri was making serious efforts to reform himself and that he had put himself and his spiritual affairs into the hands of a confessor.

  There was, of course, no discussion of these matters between myself and Calitri. An audience is an affair of state and has nothing to do with the spiritual relationship of Pastor and people.

  None the less, I was curious about the man, and I was tempted for a moment to call for the file on his case. In the end I decided against it. If he comes to power, we shall have diplomatic connections, and it is better that it should not be complicated by a private knowledge on my part. It is better too that I do not interfere too minutely in the varied functions of the tribunals and the congregations. My time is very limited. My energies are limited, too, and presently they are so depleted that I shall be glad to pack and go from this place, into the comparative serenity of the countryside.

  I see very clearly the shape of a great personal problem for every man who holds this office : how the press of business and the demands of so many people can so impoverish him that he has neither time nor will left to regulate the affairs of his own soul. I long for solitude and the leisure for contemplation. ‘Consider the lilies of the field…They labour not, neither do they spin!’ Lucky the ones who have time to smell the flowers, and doze at noonday under the orange trees…!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  GEORGE FABER left Rome early on a Sunday morning. He headed out through the Lateran Gate and down the new Appian Way towards the Southern autostrada. He had a five-hour drive ahead of him, Terracina, Formio, Naples, and then out along the winding peninsular road to Castellamare, Sorrento, Amalfi, and Positano. He was in no hurry. The morning air was still fresh, and the traffic was heavy, and he had no intention of risking his neck as well as his reputation.

  At Terracina he was hailed by a pair of English girls who were hitch-hiking down the coast. For an hour he was glad of their company, but by the time they reached Naples he was happy to be rid of them. Their cheerful certainty about the world and all its ways made him feel like a grandfather.

  The heat of the day was upon him now – a dry, dusty oppression which made the air dance and filled the nostrils with the ammoniac stink of a crowded and ancient city. He turned into the Via Carocciolo and sat for a while in a waterfront café, sipping iced coffee and pondering the moves he should make when he reached Positano. He had two people to see: Sylvio Pellico, artist, and Theo Respighi, sometime actor – both of them, according to the record, unhappy associates of Corrndo Calitri.

  For weeks now he had been puzzling over the best method to approach them. He had lived long enough in Italy to know the Italian love of drama and intrigue. But his Nordic temper revolted from the spectacle of an American correspondent playing a Latin detective in raincoat and black fedora. Finally he had decided on a simple, blunt approach:

  ‘I understand you knew Corrado Calitri…I’m in love with his wife. I want to marry her. I think you can give me some evidence against him. I’m prepared to pay well for it…’

  For a long time he had refused to reason beyond this point. Yet now, three hours from Rome, and a long way farther from Chiara, he was prepared to come to grips with the if. If all failed he would have proved himself to himself. He would have proved to Chiara that he was prepared to risk his career for her sake. He would be able to demand a two-way traffic in love. If that failed, too…? At long last he was beginning to believe that he would survive it. The best cure for love was to cool it down a little, and leave a man free to measure woman against woman, the torment of a one-sided loving against the bleak peace of no loving at all.

  One could not bounce a middle-aged heart, like a rubber ball, from one affair to another; but there was a crumb of comfort in the thought of Ruth Lewin and her refusal to commit his heart or her own to a new affliction without any promise of security.

  She was wiser than Chiara. He knew that. She had been tested further and survived better. But love was a rainbow word that might or might not point to a crock of gold. He paid for his drink, stepped out into the raw sunshine, and began the last leg of his journey into uncertainty.

  The Gulf of Naples was a flat and oily mirror, broken only by the wake of the pleasure steamers and the spume of the aliscafe, which bounced their loads of tourists at fifty miles an hour towards the siren islands of Capri and Ischia. The summit of Vesuvius was vague in a mist of heat and dust. The painted stucco of the village houses was peeling in the sun. The grey tufa soil of the farm plots was parched, and the peasants plodded up and down the rows of tomato plants like figures in a medieval landscape. There was a smell of dust and dung, and rotting tomatoes and fresh oranges. Horns bleated at every curve, wooden carts rolled noisily over cobblestones. Snatches of music swept by, mixed with the shouts of children and the occasional curse of a farmer caught in the press of summer traffic.

  George Faber found himself driving fast and free, and chanting a tuneless song. On the steep spiral of the Amalfi drive he was nearly forced off the road by a careering sports car, and he cursed loud and cheerfully in Roman dialect. By the time he reached Positano, the shabby, spectacular little town that ran in a steep escalade from the water to the hilltop, he was his own man, and the experience was as heady as the raw wine of the Sorrentine mountains.

  He lodged his car in a garage, hefted his bag, and strolled down a steep, narrow alley to the city square. Half an hour later, bathed and changed into cotton slacks and a striped sailor shirt, he was sitting under an awning, drinking a Carpano, and preparing for his encounter with Sylvio Pellico.

  The artist’s gallery was a long, cool tunnel that ran from the street into a courtyard littered with junk and fragments of old marbles. His pictures were hung along the walls of the tunnel – gawdy abstracts, a few portraits in the manner of Modigliani, and a scattering of catchpenny landscapes to inveigle the sentimental tourist. It was easy to see why Corrado Calitri had dropped him so quickly. It was less easy to see why he had taken him up in the first place.

  He was a tall, narrow-faced youth with a straggly beard, dressed in cotton sweatshirt, faded blue denims, and shoes of scuffed canvas. He was propped between two chairs at the entrance to the tunnel, dozing in the sun, with a straw hat tipped over his eyes.

  When George Faber stopped to examine the pictures he came to life immediately and presented himself and his work with a flourish. ‘Sylvio Pellico, sir, at your service. My pictures please you? Some of them have already been exhibited in Rome.’

  ‘I know,’ said George Faber. ‘I was at the show.’

  ‘Ah! Then you’re a connoisseur. I will not try to tempt you with this rubbish!’ He dismissed the landscapes with a wave of his skinny hand. ‘Those are just eating money.’

  ‘I know, I know. We all have to eat. Are you having a good season?’

  �
��Eh!…You know how it goes. Everyone looks, nobody wants to buy. Yesterday I sold two little pieces to an American woman. The day before, nothing. The day before that…’ He broke off and cocked a huckster’s eye at George Faber. ‘You are not an Italian, Signore?’

  ‘No. I’m an American.’

  ‘But you speak beautiful Italian.’

  ‘Thank you…Tell me, who sponsored your exhibition in Rome?’

  ‘A very eminent man. A Minister of the Republic. A very good critic, too. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. His name is Calitri.’

  ‘I’ve heard of him,’ said George Faber. ‘I’d like to talk to you about him.’

  ‘Why?’ He leaned his shaggy head on one side like an amiable parrot. ‘Did he send you to see me?’

  ‘No. It’s a private matter. I thought you might be able to help me. I’d be happy to pay for your help. Does that interest you?’

  ‘Who isn’t interested in money? Sit down, let me get you a cup of coffee.’

  ‘No coffee. This won’t take long.’

  Pellico dusted off one of the chairs, and they sat facing each other under the narrow archway.

  Crisply Faber explained himself and his mission, and then laid down his offer. ‘…Five hundred dollars, American money, for a sworn statement about Calitri’s marriage, written in the terms I shall dictate to you.’

  He sat back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and waited while the artist cupped his brown face in his hands and thought for a long time. Then he lifted his head and said, ‘I’d appreciate an American cigarette.’

  Faber handed him the pack and then leaned forward with a light.

  Pellico smoked for a few moments, and then began to talk. ‘I am a poor man, sir. Also I am not a very good painter, so I am likely to remain poor for a long time. For one like me, five hundred dollars is a fortune, but I am afraid I cannot do what you ask.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Several reasons.’

  ‘Are you afraid of Calitri?’

  ‘A little. You’ve lived in this country, you know the way things run. When one is poor, one is always a little outside the law and it never pays to tangle with important people. But that’s not the only reason.’

  ‘Name me another.’

  His thin face wrinkled, and his head seemed to shrink lower between his shoulders. He explained himself with an odd simplicity. ‘I know what this means to you, sir. When a man is in love, eh?…It is ice in the heart and fire in the gut…One loses for a while all pride. When one is out of love the pride comes back. Often it is the only thing left…I am not like you…I am, if you want, more like Calitri. He was kind to me once…I was very fond of him. I do not think I could betray him for money.’

  ‘He betrayed you, didn’t he? He gave you one exhibition and then dropped you.’

  ‘No!’ The thin hands became suddenly eloquent. ‘No. You must not read it like that. On the contrary, he was very honest with me. He said every man has the right to one trial of his talent. If the talent was not there, he had best forget it…Well, he gave me the trial. I failed. I do not blame him for that.’

  ‘How much would you charge to blame him? A thousand dollars?’

  Pellico stood up and dusted off his hands. For all his shabbiness, he seemed clothed in a curious kind of dignity. He pointed at the grey walls of the tunnel. ‘For twenty dollars, sir, you can buy my visions. They are not great visions, I know. They are the best I have. Myself I do not sell. Not for a thousand dollars, not for ten thousand. I am sorry.’

  As he walked away down the cobbled street, George Faber, the Nordic Puritan, had the grace to be ashamed of himself. His face was burning, his palms were sweating. He felt a swift, unreasonable resentment towards Chiara, sunning herself in Venice five hundred miles away. He turned into a bar, ordered a double whisky, and began to read through the dossier of his next contact, Theo Respighi.

  He was an Italo-American, born in Naples and transported to New York in his childhood. He was a middling bad actor who had played small parts in television, small parts in Hollywood, and then returned to Italy to play small parts in Biblical epics and pseudo-classic nonsense. In Hollywood there had been minor scandals – drunken driving, a couple of divorces, a brief and turbulent romance with a rising star. In Rome he had joined the roistering bunch who kept themselves alive on hope and runaway productions and the patronage of Roman playboys. All in all, Faber summed him up as a seedy character who should be very amenable to the rustle of a dollar bill.

  He ran Respighi to earth that same evening in a cliff-side bar, where he was drinking with three very gay boys and a faded Frenchwoman who spoke Italian with a Genoese accent. It took an hour to prise him away from the company, and another to sober him up with dinner and black coffee. Even when he had done it, he was left with a hollow, muscular hulk who, when he was not combing his long, blond hair, was reaching nervously for the brandy bottle. Faber stifled the wavering voice of his own conscience and once again displayed his proposition:

  ‘…A thousand dollars for a signed statement. No strings, no problems. Everything that goes before the Roman Rota is kept secret. No one, least of all Calitri, will ever know who gave the testimony.’

  ‘Balls!’ said the blond one flatly. ‘Don’t try to con me, Faber. There’s no such thing as a secret in Rome. I don’t care whether it’s in the Church or Cinecittà. Sooner or later Calitri has to know. What happens to me then?’

  ‘You’re a thousand dollars richer, and he can’t touch you.’

  ‘You think so? Look, lover boy, you know how films are made in this country. The money comes from everywhere. The list of angels stretches from Napoli to Milano, and back again. There’s a black list here, too, just like in Hollywood. You get on it, you’re dead. For a thousand crummy bucks, I don’t want to be dead.’

  ‘You haven’t earned that much in six months,’ Faber told him. ‘I know, I checked up.’

  ‘So what? That’s the way the cookie crumbles in this business. You starve for a while, and then you eat, and eat good. I want to go on eating. Now if you were to make it ten thousand, I might begin to think about it. With that much I could get myself back Stateside, and wait long enough to get a decent start again…Come on, lover! What are you playing for? The big romance or a bag of popcorn?’

  ‘Two thousand,’ said George Faber.

  ‘No deal.’

  ‘It’s the best I can do.’

  ‘Peanuts! I can get that much by lifting a phone and telling Calitri that you’re gunning for him…Tell you what. Give me a thousand and I won’t make the call.’

  ‘Go to hell!’ He pushed back his chair, and walked out. The laughter of the blond one followed him like a mockery into the darkened street.

  ‘The longer I live,’ said Jean Télémond musingly, ‘the more clearly I understand the deep vein of pessimism that runs through so much of modern thought, even the thought of many in the Church…Birth, growth, and decay. The cyclic pattern of life is so vividly apparent that it obscures the pattern that underlies it, the pattern of constant growth, and – let me say it bluntly – the pattern of human progress. For many people, the wheel of life simply turns on its own axis, it does not seem to be going anywhere.’

  ‘And you, Jean, believe it is going somewhere?’

  ‘More than that, Holiness. I believe it must go somewhere.’

  They had taken off their cassocks, and they were sitting relaxed in the shade of a small copse, with a bank of wild strawberries at their backs and, in front, the flat bright water of Lake Nemi. Jean Télémond was sucking contentedly on his pipe, and was tossing pebbles into the water. The air vibrated with the strident cry of cicadas, and the little brown lizards sunned themselves on rock and tree-trunk.

  They had long since surrendered themselves to bucolic ease and the comfort of one another’s company. In the mornings they worked privately – Kiril at his desk, keeping track of the daily dispatches from Rome; Télémond in the garden, setting his papers in order for the scrutin
y of the Holy Office. In the afternoons they drove out into the country, Télémond at the wheel, exploring the valleys and the uplands and the tiny towns that had clung to the ridges for five hundred years and more. In the evenings they dined together, then read or talked or played cards until it was time for Compline and the last prayer of the day.

  It was a good time for both: for Kiril, a respite from the burden of office; for Télémond, a true return from exile into the companionship of an understanding and truly loving spirit. He did not have to measure his words. He felt no risk in exposing his deepest thoughts. Kiril, for his part, confided himself fully to the Jesuit, and found a peculiar solace in this sharing of his private burden.

  He tossed another pebble into the water and watched the ripples fan out towards the farther shore, until they were lost in the shimmer of sunlight. Then he asked another question:

  ‘Have you never been a pessimist yourself, Jean? Have you never felt caught up in this endless turning of the wheel of life?’

  ‘Sometimes, Holiness. When I was in China, for instance, far to the north-west, in the barren valley of the great rivers. There were monasteries up there. Enormous places that could only have been built by great men – men with a great vision – to challenge the emptiness in which they lived…In one fashion or another, I thought God must have been with them. Yet, when I went in and saw the men who live there now – dull, uninspired, almost doltish at times – I was afflicted by melancholy…When I came back to the West and read the newspapers and talked with my brother scientists, I was staggered by the blindness with which we seem to be courting our own destruction. Sometimes it seemed impossible to believe that man was really growing out of the slime towards a divine destiny…’

  Kiril nodded thoughtfully. He picked up a stick and teased a sleeping lizard, so that it skitted away into the leaves. ‘I know the feeling, Jean. I have it sometimes even in the Church. I wait and pray for the great movement, the great man, who will startle us into life again…’