Lazarus

by Morris West

  His wife Katrina had her own sources. She ran an elegant boutique on the Via Condotti and had a sharp ear for political and ecclesiastical gossip. She entertained constantly in their apartment – the top floor of a sixteenth-century palazzo in old Rome. The guest lists for her dinner parties were among the more exotic in the city. It was she who pointed out to her husband that, although the bulletin on the Pontiff’s admission to hospital was unusually frank and optimistic, there was a distinct atmosphere of unease, both inside and outside the walls of Vatican City.

  ‘Everybody’s saying the same thing, Nicki. The odds are all in favour of his recovery; but there’s grave doubt about how he’s going to function afterwards. It’s said that he’s already consented to abdicate if he comes out handicapped; but everyone says that he’d have to be pushed pretty hard to make him go. Two abdications in a row would cause a hell of a scandal.’

  ‘I doubt it, Kate. The Electoral College is already prepared for a short-notice conclave in case of the Pope’s death or incapacity. The ground rules are in place. Gadda wrote them himself when he was a cardinal … But you’re right. The whole place is on edge. Drexel talked to me this afternoon – off the record, not for attribution, the usual thing. He asked what is the quickest way to break an actor’s heart? Let him do Hamlet in an empty theatre. Then he gave me a neat little discourse on what he called the Age of Indifference and on the audience which has absented itself from the Church.’

  ‘And how did he explain the absent audience?’

  ‘He quoted St Paul. You know the text … “Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not charity …” Then he added his own gloss: “In short, Nicki, the people turn away because they believe we no longer understand or share their concerns. They are not serfs to be disciplined. They are free people, our brothers and sisters; they need the hand’s touch of compassion. When we elected this Pontiff we chose a law-and-order candidate, an old-fashioned papal imperialist to make us feel secure in a time of doubt and confusion. We didn’t trust the people. We called in the gendarmerie. Well, we got what we voted for: a cast-iron man, absolutely inflexible. But we lost the people. We lost ’em, Nicki, in a vain attempt to restore the mediaeval notion of a papal monarchy, bolster that strange catch-all authority, the magisterium. The big gong booms, but people stop their ears. They don’t want thunder. They want the saving voice that says, “Come to me, all ye who labour and are heavily burdened – and I will refresh you.” I tell you, Kate, he was quite emotional about it. So was I. That’s the piece I’m trying to write now.’

  ‘But it still doesn’t fully define this edginess we’re talking about. Not everybody thinks the way Drexel does. Lots of Romans like the present Pontiff. They understand him. They feel a need for his kind.’

  ‘Just as some of the old ones felt a need for Mussolini!’

  ‘If you like, sure! It’s the Führerprinzip, the illusion of the benevolent strongman, with the people marching behind him to death or glory. But without the people, the leader is a straw man, with the stuffing spilled out of him.’

  ‘That’s it, by God!’ Nicki Peters was suddenly excited. ‘That’s the theme I’ve been looking for. What happens to the Pontiff who alienates the Church? I don’t mean just historically, though that’s an essay in itself, a bloody and violent chronicle of pontiffs under siege, in exile, dogged by assassins. I’m talking about the man himself at the moment when he realises that he is a scarecrow, battered by the storms, with the crows pecking the straw out of his ears. Of course, if he doesn’t realise it, there’s no story; but if he does and if he’s looking down the barrel of a shotgun as Leo XIV is today, then what happens? His whole internal life must be a shambles.’

  ‘One way to find out, Nicki.’

  ‘Oh, and what’s that?’

  ‘Ask his surgeon to dinner.’

  ‘Would he come?’

  ‘How many turn-downs have I had in ten years? I’ll get him here; trust me.’

  ‘What do you know about him?’

  ‘I’m told he’s divorced, has no children, that he’s Jewish and an ardent Zionist.’

  ‘That’s news! Are you sure it’s true?’

  ‘I heard it from a normally reliable source, the Principessa Borromini. Salviati is a Venetian name and apparently he was born into one of the old Sephardic families who traded out of the ghetto of Venice into the Adriatic dependencies of the Republic. There are Swiss and Friulan connections too, because Borromini met him first in St Moritz and he speaks Ladino and Venetian dialects as well as Italian. It’s also said he’s a Freemason, not one of the P2 brand, but old-fashioned square and compass style. If that’s true, it’s an interesting speculation as to who at the Vatican chose him and why. You know how stiff-necked and sensitive they are on the whole Zionist question, not to mention divorce and secret societies.’

  Nicol Peters took his wife in his arms, kissed her soundly and waltzed her round the tiled pavement of the salone.

  ‘Kate, sweet Kate! You never cease to amaze me. Divorced, Jewish, Zionist … what else?’

  ‘Fanatically devoted to his job and – again, I quote my principessa – to one of his senior women at the clinic.’

  ‘Do you have a name for her?’

  ‘No. I’m sure I can get one quickly enough. But you’re not going to write a scandal piece, are you?’

  ‘On the contrary. I’m following Drexel’s logic. Leo XIV has lost the people. Does he know it? If he does, what has it done to him? What will it do to him in the future? Why don’t you see if you can set up a dinner for Salviati – and his girlfriend, whoever she is?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘As soon as you like; but I wouldn’t make any calls or send out any invitations until we know the result of this operation. Even for Salviati, it’s no small thing to have the life of the Vicar of Christ in your hands!’

  It had been a day filled with minor humiliations. He had been pierced for blood samples, hooked up to a machine that spewed out his heart’s history in scrawls and squiggles. He had been sounded, prodded, dressed in a backless gown and stood baretailed in front of an X-ray machine. All his questions had been answered in monosyllables that told him nothing.

  As they wheeled him back to his room, he had a sudden, vivid recollection of those sessions at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where a luckless divine from Notre Dame or Tübingen or Amsterdam was quizzed obliquely on charges he had never heard, by men he had never met, and where his only defender was a cleric whose name was never revealed to him. As Sub-prefect and later Prefect of the Congregation, Ludovico Gadda had never admitted any need to change the procedures. The subject of the investigation, the central figure in the colloquy, was by definition less important than the subject of the discussion: the possible corruption of a truth, a morbidity of error which, being a disease, must be extirpated. Its old name was the Congregation of the Universal Inquisition, its later one the Holy Office and, last of all, the seemingly innocuous Doctrine of the Faith. But its competences were still the same, defined in the clearest terms: ‘all questions that have regard to the doctrine of the faith and of the customs and usages of the faith, examination of new teachings, the promotion of studies and conferences about these same teachings, the reprobation of those which turn out to be contrary to the principles of the faith, the examination and eventually the condemnation of books; the Privilege of the Faith, judgment of crimes against the faith.’

  Now he, the master of that ancient but still sinister machine, was himself under inquisition, by smiling nurses and blank-faced technicians and nodding note-takers. They were polite, as were the prelates of the Piazza del Sant’Ufficio. They were detached, impersonal. They cared not one whit for what he was or what he felt. They were interested only in the diseases that inhabited his carcass. They told him nothing of what they found. They were like his own inquisitors, dedicated to the Disciplina Arcani, the Discipline of the Secret, a cult of whispers and concealment.

  By early
evening he was frayed and ill-tempered. His supper pleased him no more than his luncheon. The walls of his room closed in on him like a monastic cell. He would have liked to walk out in the corridor with the other patients, but he was suddenly shy about his bulky body and the unfamiliar vestments of dressing-gown and pyjamas. Instead, he sat in a chair, picked up his breviary and began to read vespers and compline. The familiar cadences of the psalmody lulled him, as they always did, into a calm, not joyful, but close to the relief of tears which he could not remember to have shed since childhood.

  Create in me a clean heart O God

  And renew a right spirit within me

  Cast me not away from thy presence

  And take not thy holy spirit from me

  Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation …

  The strophe hypnotised him. His eyes could not see past it. His lips refused to form the antistrophe …

  Joy was the missed experience in his life. He had known happiness, satisfaction, triumph; but joy, that strange upswelling of delight, that tingling near-ecstasy in which every sense was like a fiddle-string, making music under the master’s bow, joy had always eluded him. He had never had the chance to fall in love. He had deprived himself by a lifetime vow of the experience of bodily union with a woman. Even in his spiritual life, the agonies and exaltations of the mystics were beyond his reach. Catherine of Siena, Little Brother Francis, St John of the Cross, St Theresa of Avila, were alien to his mindset. The role models he chose were the great pragmatists, the orderers of events – Benedict, Ignatius of Loyola, Gregory the Great, Basil of Caesarea. His earliest spiritual director explained to him the degrees of meditative communion with God: the purgative, the illuminative, the unitive. Afterwards, he shook his head and patted his young disciple on the back and dismissed him: ‘But for you, Ludovico my boy, it’ll be the purgative way from beginning to end. Don’t fret yourself about it. You’re born to the plough. Just keep plodding, left right, left right, until God decides to lift you out of the furrow Himself. If He doesn’t, be grateful still. The joy of illumination, the wonder of the mystical marriage with God, bring pain as well as ecstasy. You can’t have one without the other …’ It was strange that now, at sixty-eight, he felt suddenly so deprived and cheated. The remainder of the psalm echoed his sadness:

  Uphold me with the presence of thy spirit

  For thou desirest not sacrifice, else I would give it thee.

  Thou hast no delight in burnt offerings

  The Godly sacrifice is a troubled spirit

  A broken and contrite heart thou wilt not despise …

  He had just finished the last prayer when Salviati walked in with a lean, shambling fellow in his late fifties, whom he introduced as Mr James Morrison of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Morrison had a rumpled, comfortable look about him and a humorous, faintly mocking twinkle in his brown eyes. To the Pontiff’s surprise, he spoke passable Italian. He explained with a grin.

  ‘I have what you might call Italian connections. One of my ancestors led a train-band of Scots mercenaries in the service of Pius II. The Morrisons, who now call themselves Morrissone, manufacture expensive shoes in Varese.’

  Leo XIV gave a short, barking laugh and shrugged off the joke with a Latin tag: ‘Tempora mutantur … times change, and we with them. Thank you for coming, Mr Morrison. May I ask your opinion on my case?’

  ‘It differs not at all from that offered by Dr Salviati. In fact, I have to say I have nothing new to offer. I am expensive and redundant.’

  ‘On the contrary, James, you’re my insurance policy – medical and political.’

  Morrison picked up the little comic book from the bedside table and asked: ‘Have you read this, Holiness?’

  ‘Yes. I can’t say I found it amusing.’

  Morrison laughed. ‘I agree. It’s a good try; but heart disease is not exactly a laughing matter. Is there anything you’d like to ask me?’

  ‘How long will I be in hospital?’

  ‘That’s up to Dr Salviati. The average time is about two weeks.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘Six to eight weeks of convalescence while the bones in your ribcage knit. We have to cut the sternum, you see, then stitch it back with wire. There’s quite a bit of discomfort attached to that part of the convalescence, but it’s still pretty controllable. Also it takes time to recover from the anaesthetic. The physical and psychic traumas are great, but the procedures, thank God, are almost fail-safe. How do you feel in yourself?’

  ‘Afraid.’

  ‘That’s normal. What else?’ ‘Troubled.’

  ‘By what in particular?’ ‘Things done, things undone.’ ‘That’s normal too.’

  ‘Your counsellor came to see me this afternoon.’ This to Salviati.

  ‘Tove Lundberg? I know. I read her first report this evening.’

  ‘Report?’

  Salviati laughed. ‘Why are you shocked? Tove Lundberg is a highly trained professional. She holds doctorates in Behavioural Sciences and Psychiatric Medicine. Her information is vital in our post-operative care.’

  ‘And what does she say about me?’

  Salviati considered the question for a moment and then delivered a cool, judicial answer.

  ‘She points to two problems. The first is that a man like yourself, vested with enormous authority, resigns himself with difficulty to the dependence of illness. That’s not new. We have had Arab princes in here whose tribal power is as absolute as yours. They have exactly the same problem. But they do not repress it. They rage, they protest, they make scenes. Bene! We can deal with that. But you, the report tells me – and my own contacts with you confirm it – have a second problem. You will repress, hold back, brood in silence, because this is both your training in clerical discipline and your notion of the comportment of the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Church. You will also, consciously or unconsciously, react against ministration by women. This will not help your recovery, but rather delay it. To use a figure of speech, you are not made of spring steel, forged and tempered and flexible. You are iron, cast in a mould. You are strong, yes; but you are not supple. You are rigid, vulnerable to shocks. But,’ he shrugged and spread his hands in a dismissive gesture, ‘we are used to that too. We shall cope with you.’

  ‘Why,’ asked Leo the Pontiff flatly, ‘why should you care? You fix the plumbing. You pack your tools. You turn to another job.’

  James Morrison gave a pawky Scots smile and said: ‘Never tangle with the Church, Sergio! They’ve been playing the dialectic game for centuries!’

  ‘I know,’ said Salviati tartly. ‘Ever since Isidore wrote his first forgeries and Gratian turned them neatly into a Code!’ To the Pontiff he gave a softer answer. ‘Why do I care? Because I’m more than a plumber. I’m a healer. After the operation, another job begins. We have not only to retrain you to cope with what has happened. We have to educate you to ensure it doesn’t happen again. We also hope to learn from your case lessons we can apply to others. This is a research and teaching institution. You, too, can learn much here, about yourself and about other people.’

  At that moment, Salviati’s beeper sounded, a series of sharp, fast signals. He frowned and turned to Morrison.

  We have an emergency. Cardiac arrest. Come with me, James. Excuse us, Holiness!’

  They were gone in an instant, leaving the Pontiff with one more ironic comment on his own impotence and irrelevance in the life and death situations of common folk.

  It was this irony which had troubled him more and more in the last months, as he tried first to explain away and then to comprehend the growing rift between himself and the Christian Assembly. The reasons were various and complex; but most had to do with the spread of popular education and the speed and potency of modern communications: press, radio, television and satellite dissemination of information.

  History was no longer the domain of scholars, ferreting in dusty libraries. It was relived every day, in fiction or in documentary for
m on television screens. It was invoked in panel discussions as a paradigm of the present, a warning for the future. It stirred in the dark pools of tribal memory, raising old ghosts and the stink of ancient battlefields.

  It was no longer possible to rewrite history – the facts showed through the overwritten fiction. It was not possible to plaster over the graffiti scratched into ancient stone. The plaster flaked off or fell away under the tapping hammers of the archaeologists.

  He himself had written two encyclicals: the one on abortion, the other on in vitro fertilisation. In each, the words were his own; in each, he had insisted with absolute sincerity and unaccustomed eloquence on the sanctity and the value of human life. Even as he was writing them, the prancing demons of the past mocked his noble rhetoric.

  Innocent III had claimed sovereign dominion of life and death over all Christians. He had decreed that the mere refusal to take an oath was a crime worthy of death. Innocent IV had prescribed the use of torture by his inquisitors. Benedict XI had declared the inquisitors who used it absolved from blame and penalty …. What respect for life was there in the madness of the witchcraft trials, the carnage of the Crusades against the Cathars, the persecution of the Jews down the centuries? The massacres of Montsegur and Constantinople were still remembered, like Belsen and Auschwitz. The unpaid debts were still on the books, piling up interest.

  It was no longer enough to say baldly that these horrors belonged to other times, were committed by primitive or barbarous men. The acts were ordered under the same magisterium which he exercised. They were justified by the same logic in which he himself had been schooled. He could not establish his own probity without admitting that the logic was flawed, that the men who preceded him had been in error.