The Shoes of the Fisherman

by Morris West

It is well, I think, that the Papacy has been slowly stripped of its temporal power. It gives the Church the opportunity to speak more freely, and with less suspicion of material interest, than in other ages. I must continue to build this moral authority, which has its analogies in the political influence of small nations like Sweden and Switzerland and even Israel.

  I have given instructions to the Secretariat of State to encourage the visit of representatives of all nations and all faiths to the Vatican. At the lowest they constitute a useful diplomatic courtesy; at their best they may be the beginning of a fruitful friendship and understanding…

  This week I had Cardinal Rinaldi to lunch. I like this man. I talked with him about the possible reform of the Roman Rota, and he gave me valuable information about its methods and its personalities. In his quiet fashion, he administered a reproof as well. He told me that Cardinal Leone felt that I did not repose enough trust in him. He pointed out that, for all his vigour, he was an old man who had deserved well of the Church, and that I should perhaps bestow on him a mark of favour and acknowledgement. I find it hard to like Leone; he is so very much a Roman. But I agree with Rinaldi. I have written a gentle letter to Leone thanking him for his work and asking him to wait on me as soon as I return to Rome. I have also asked for his private advice on the appointment of a new Cardinal to take the place of the Englishman, Brandon, who died two days ago. Brandon was one of those who voted against me in the conclave, and our relations were always rather formal and distant. Yet he was an apostolic man, and one always regrets deeply the passing of a labourer from the vineyard. I said a special Mass yesterday morning for the repose of his soul…

  News from Hungary and Poland is bad. The new taxation laws have already put several more schools and seminaries out of existence. Potocki is ill in Warsaw. My information is that he will recover. But the illness is serious, and we shall have to think of appointing a new man to help him and later to take over his office as Primate of Poland. Potocki is a man of political genius and deep spiritual life. We shall not easily find another to match him…

  Jean Télémond’s first volume, The Progress of Man, is now ready for publication. This is the crucial part of his work, upon which all the rest depends. He is anxious to have it assessed by the Holy Office as soon as possible. For his sake I am anxious too. I have asked Cardinal Leone to appoint commissioners to scrutinize it and report to me as quickly as may be. I have suggested that these commissioners be different men from those who made the first examination. We shall then have two sets of opinions and there will be no question of a carry-over from earlier, and far less complete, works. I am glad to say that Jean is very calm about it. He seems to be well, although I notice that he tires easily and is sometimes out of breath after a small exertion. I have ordered him to submit to an examination by the Vatican physician as soon as we go back to Rome…

  I want to keep him by me, but he is afraid of doing me a disservice. The hierarchy and the Curia are suspicious and uncomfortable about a Grey Eminence in the Vatican. Cardinal Rinaldi repeated his invitation to let Jean work at his villa. Jean likes the idea, so I suppose I shall have to let him go. At least we shall not be far from each other, and I shall have the pleasure of his company at dinner on Sundays. Now that I have found him, I am loath to let him go…

  I learned so much with him during our journeys through the Italian countryside. The thing that impressed me most vividly was the contrast between entrenched wealth and the grinding poverty in which so many of the people still live. This is the reason for the strength and attraction of communism in Italy. It will take a long time – longer than I have at my disposal – to redress the balance. However, I have thought of a gesture which may become a symbol of what is needed.

  The Congregation of Rites has informed me that they are ready to proceed to the beatification of two new servants of God. Beatification is a long and expensive process, and the ceremonies which conclude it are also very expensive. I am informed that the total cost may well be as much as fifty thousand American dollars. It could be that I shall be accused of diminishing the splendour of the liturgical life of the Church; but I have decided to reduce the ceremony to a simple formality and to devote whatever funds are available to the establishment of local works of charity. I shall take steps to see that my reasons are published as widely as possible so that people will understand that the service of the servants of God is much more important than their glorification.

  Oddly enough I am reminded at this moment of the woman, Ruth Lewin, and the work which she and others like her are doing, without encouragement and without apparent spiritual help in various places in the world. I am reminded too of the saying of the Master that even a cup of water given in His name is a gift made to Him. A thousand candles in St Peter’s mean nothing beside a poor man grateful to God because he is grateful to one of his fellows…

  Wherever I turn, I find myself being drawn irresistibly to the primitive thought of the Church, and I cannot believe that I am being drawn into error. I have no private inspiration. I am in the Church and of the Church, and if my heart beats in tune with its pulse, I cannot be too far wrong. ‘Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from that of the unholy.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  SUMMER WAS in decline. The first colours of autumn were showing across the land. There was a pinch in the air, and soon the cold winds would begin to blow from the steppes down along the Alpine ridges. But the Sunday crowds in the Villa Borghese were still jealous of the warmth, and they paraded themselves cheerfully among the sellers of sweetmeats and the pedlars of novelties, while their children stood gaping at the antics of Pulcinella.

  Ruth Lewin was among them, playing nursemaid to a child – a tiny spastic creature with bobbing head and slobbering mouth – whom she had brought out from the slums for an airing. They were sitting on a bench, watching a fiddler with a dancing monkey while the child crammed himself with candy and bobbed a grotesque balloon in happy ignorance of his misfortune.

  For all the pathos of her mission, Ruth Lewin felt calm and content. Her illness was over. She had come back from her holiday refreshed. She had made, at long last, a landfall. After the years of confusion her mind was clear. She knew what she was and what she had a right to be. It was not a conversion but an arrival. If she was not fulfilled, at least she was no longer in flight. If she was not satisfied, at least she could rest in hope of a betterment.

  She was a Jew. She had inherited a race and a history. She was prepared to accept them both, not as a burden, but as an enrichment. She understood now that she had never really rejected them, but had been forced into flight from them by the circumstance of childhood. The flight was not a guilt, but an affliction, and she had survived it, as her ancestors had survived the captivities and the dispersions and the obloquy of the European ghettoes. By the simple fact of this survival, by the half-conscious act of accepting, she had earned the right to be what she wanted to be, to believe what she needed to believe, to grow to whatever shape her nature dictated.

  She understood something else: that joy was a gift which one accepted gratefully and should not try to pay for, any more than one tried to pay for sunlight and birdsong. One held out grateful hands to take the gift, and then held up the gift for a sharing. Payment was too gross a word to describe a disbursal like this. Flowers grew out of the eyes of the dead, but because one picked the flowers one should not carry a corpse on one’s back for all the days of living. Children were born maimed and misshapen, but to deny them beauty and love by way of personal penance was a monstrous paradox. Doubt was a burden on all questing spirits, but when the doubt was resolved one should not cling to it in the luxury of self-torment.

  She had no doubts now. She had entered into the Christian faith in childhood. She had made it a refuge and then launched herself out of it into terror and confusion. Now it was no longer a refuge but an ambience in which she wanted to live and to grow. Like the sunlight, the birdsong and the flower, it was free. She had no right
to it but she had no cause to refuse it either. Everyone had a claim to sleep on his own pillow, hard or soft, because without sleep one died; and dying paid no debts but only cancelled them.

  So, quite simply, on this Sunday morning she found herself at home.

  To the traveller tossing on a windy ocean, homecoming always presented itself as a drama, a moment of revelation or of conquest. But the moment, when it came, was usually very trite. There were no banners and no trumpets. One was there, walking down a familiar street, seeing familiar faces in the doorways, wondering if the passage of time, the cavalcade of events, were not an illusion after all.

  The child tugged at her arm with sticky fingers, begging to be taken to a toilet. She laughed aloud at the irony. This was the true shape of life at last – a succession of simplicities, snotty noses and soiled linen, bacon and eggs for breakfast, some laughter, some tears, and, hanging over it all, the majesty of mere existence. She took the child’s hand and led him stumbling and crowing across the grass to unbutton his breeches . . .

  When she reached home it was already dusk and the chill autumn was settling down on the city. She bathed and changed, and then, because her maid was out, she made her own supper, put a stack of records on the radio-player, and settled down to a comfortable evening.

  Time was, not so long ago, when the prospect of a solitary night would have driven her to desperation. Now, at peace with herself, she was glad of it. She was not sufficient to herself, but life, with its small services and its occasional piquant encounters, might now be sufficient to her. She was no longer an alien. She had her domain of giving and sooner or later there might be a time of receiving too. She could commune with herself because she had discovered herself. She was one, she was real. She was Ruth Lewin, widow, Jew by birth, Christian by adoption. She was old enough to understand, and still young enough to love if love were offered. For one day and one new woman it was more than enough.

  Then the bell rang, and when she opened the door she found George Faber, drunk and mumbling, at the top of the stairs. His shirt was limp. His clothes were stained, his hair was in disorder, and he had not shaved for days.

  It took her nearly an hour to sober him with black coffee and make sense out of his story. Ever since Chiara had left him he had been drinking steadily. He had done no work at all. His bureau was being kept open by a stringer and by the kindness of his colleagues, who filed stories for him, answered his cables, and kept him out of trouble with New York.

  For a man so urbane and precise, it was a sorry downfall. For one so prominent in Rome, the tragedy could quickly develop beyond remedy. Yet George Faber seemed to have no heart left to help himself. He despised himself utterly. He poured out the story of his affronted manhood. He abandoned himself to maudlin tears. Ambition had deserted him, and he seemed to have no foothold left from which to grope his way back to dignity.

  He submitted like a child when she ordered him to take a bath and then tucked him into her bed to sleep off the rest of the drink. While he slept, muttering and restless, she emptied his pockets, bundled up his soiled clothes, and then set off to his apartment to find a new suit, clean linen, and a razor. He was still sleeping when she returned, and she settled down to another vigil and a critical examination of her own role in the drama of George Faber.

  It would be all too easy now to present herself as Our Lady of Succour, ready with salve and sticking-plaster to patch up his wounded pride. It would be dangerously simple to wrap up her love in a candy-box and offer it as a solace for the lost one. For her own sake and for his, she must not do it. Love was less than half the answer when the pillars of a man’s self-respect were shaken and the rooftrees came tumbling round his ears. Sooner or later he had to walk out of the wreckage on his own two feet, and the truest recipe of love was to let him do it.

  When he came down to breakfast, haggard but tidy, she told him so, bluntly:

  ‘This has got to stop, George – here and now! You’ve made a fool of yourself over a woman. You’re not the first. You won’t be the last. But you can’t destroy yourself for Chiara or for anyone else.’

  ‘Destroy myself!’ He made a gesture of defeat. ‘Don’t you understand? That’s what I found out! There’s nothing to destroy. There’s no me at all. There’s just a bundle of good manners and journalist’s habits . . . Chiara was shrewd enough to see it. That’s why she got out.’

  ‘For my money, Chiara is a selfish little bitch. You’re lucky to be rid of her.’

  He was still stubborn in self-pity. He shook his head. ‘Campeggio was right. I’m too soft. One push and I fell apart.’

  ‘Comes a time when we all fall apart, George. The real test is when we have to put ourselves together again.’

  ‘And what do you expect me to do? Dust myself off, stick a flower in my buttonhole, and walk back into business as if nothing happened?’

  ‘Just that, George!’

  ‘Schmalz!’ He threw the word at her in angry derision. ‘Yiddisher schmalz! Straight out of Brooklyn and Marjorie Morningstar! Rome is laughing its head off about Chiara and me. You think I can sit up and let them throw coconuts at me just for laughs!’

  ‘I think you must.’

  ‘I won’t do it.’

  ‘Fine! So what’s the alternative? Drink yourself silly every day? On money that other men are earning for you?’

  ‘Why the hell should you care what I do?’

  It was on the tip of her tongue to say, ‘I love you’, but she bit back the words and gave him a more brutal answer. ‘I don’t care, George! You came to me! I didn’t go to you! I’ve cleaned you up and made you look like a man again! But if you don’t want to be a man, then it’s your own affair!’

  ‘But I’m not a man, sweetheart! Chiara proved it to me. Two weeks away and she’s playing kiss-me-quick on the Lido with someone else. I risked everything for her and then she put the horns on me. So I’m a man already?’

  ‘Are you more of a man because you drink like a pig?’

  She had silenced him at last, and now she began to plead with him. ‘Look, George, a man’s life is his own business. I’d like to make you my business, but I’m not going to unless you tell me clearly and soberly that you want it like that. I’m not going to pity you, because I can’t afford it. You’ve made a fool of yourself. Admit it! At least you’ll wear it with more dignity than the horns. You think I haven’t felt the way you do? I have, and for much longer. In the end I grew up. I’m grown up now, George. It’s late in the day but I’m grown up. You’ve got to grow up too.’

  ‘I’m so damn lonely,’ said George Faber pathetically.

  ‘So am I. I’ve made the round of the bars, too, George. If I didn’t have a weak stomach I’d be a lush three times over. It’s no answer, believe me.’

  ‘What is the answer?’

  ‘A clean shirt and a flower in the buttonhole.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Oh yes! But that’s for afterwards. Please give it a try.’

  ‘Will you help me?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t quite know. Maybe’ – for the first time he smiled ruefully – ‘maybe, let me wear you in my buttonhole.’

  ‘If it’s for pride, George. Yes.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m half a Roman too, you know. You lose one woman, you have to find another. It’s the only way to get rid of the horns.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘I know you didn’t, darling; but I do. The moment you can tell yourself that I’m trying to mother you, or make myself another Chiara, then I’m no good to you. You’re up and away, and on the bottle again. So, let’s make me a buttonhole. Wear me to show the town that George Faber is back on the job. Is it a bargain?’

  ‘It’s a bargain . . . Thanks, Ruth.’

  ‘Prego, Signore.’ She poured him a fresh cup of coffee and then asked him quietly, ‘What else is on your mind, George?’

  He hesitated a moment and then told
her. ‘I’m afraid of Calitri.’

  ‘You think he knows what you did?’

  ‘I think he could know. There was a man at Positano who threatened to tell him. If there were money in it he would have told him by now.’

  ‘But you haven’t heard from Calitri.’

  ‘No. But he could be biding his time.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Revenge.’

  ‘What sort of revenge?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I’m in a ticklish position. I’ve committed a criminal act. If Calitri wanted to, he could bring me to law.’

  She answered him resolutely. ‘You’ll wear that too, George, if it happens.’

  ‘I’ll have to . . . Meantime I think I should tell Campeggio.’

  ‘Is he involved in this?’

  ‘Not openly, but he lent me money. He makes no secret of his enmity for Calitri. And Calitri could easily guess at a connexion between us. As a servant of the Vatican, Campeggio is even more vulnerable than I am.’

  ‘Then you must tell him . . . But, George . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Whatever happens, remember the clean shirt and the flower in the buttonhole!’

  He gave her a long searching look and then said softly, ‘You do care, don’t you?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Ask me in a month and I’ll tell you . . . Now you get yourself down to the bureau and start work . . . Leave me your key and I’ll clean up your apartment. The place is like a barnyard.’

  When they parted he kissed her on the cheek, and she watched him striding down the street to his first encounter with reality. It was too early to tell whether he would be able to restore his own dignity, but she had kept hers, and the knowledge was a strength. She went upstairs, dressed herself in a new frock, and half an hour later was kneeling in the confessional in the apse of St Peter’s Basilica.

  ‘He has beaten us,’ said Orlando Campeggio. ‘At our own game – and with nothing but profit to himself.’