The surviving partisans and their hangers-on were conducted down the right aisle. They passed a series of paintings of scenes from Martine Raimondi’s life—recent works and, to Bad’s eye, more in the style of seventies fantasy book covers than religious art. The nun appeared with thrusting breasts and a tumorous light growing out of her forehead. Bad was disappointed by the paintings but not surprised. He and his girlfriend Gabrielle had found several similar in Padua, at the shrine of Saint Anthony, including a late-twentieth-century Last Judgment with a bodybuilder Christ posed against the fires of explosions, like the hero of an action movie.
The elderly nonbelievers and video-making non-Catholics were conducted through the door that led down into the crypt. They went in ahead of the last big group of communicants. Bad went with them. He offered an old man his arm. They filed down the stairs, two turns, into white-wine-colored candlelight and the murmur of orderly assembly. The crowd in the crypt had formed a single-file crocodile that wound back and forth in the aisles between tombs. A park ranger was directing the crocodile and urging everyone to put on their helmets. He looked like a flight attendant making the safety demonstration.
Father Octave was at the end of the crypt, by the door that opened onto the cave system, a door twice as wide as it was high. Father Octave was, Bad thought, dressed with no thought for the filth and variable temperatures in caves. Though, Bad recalled, Eve Moskelute had said that Martine Raimondi’s way was never close, that there were no climbs or small crawl spaces—only a steady, serpentine, uphill route. Daniel Octave looked the part of priest and stage manager; he was wearing a suit, black and well pressed, a white helmet, and a headset with a tiny black microphone positioned a centimeter from his lips. For a brief moment Bad held up the crocodile’s progress to help the old man beside him adjust the strap of his helmet. Bad said the helmet would fit better if the old man removed his cap. His advice was ignored. The man’s minder thanked Bad, and the old man pointed at Bad’s helmet and said something in a voice ruined by cigarette smoke. His minder translated, “Alberto says he’s envious of your headlamp.”
As Bad came to the low door Daniel Octave smiled at him, then gave an even warmer smile, and his hand, to the old man. “Alberto,” he said, and handed the old man through the low door to the crop-haired, casually dressed religious sister waiting on the other side of it. Bad paused to tell Daniel Octave that he had found a dry place to spend the night but had been diddled out of 25,000 lire by the man at the hotel desk just for the storage of his pack.
Father Octave answered him by a touch on the top of his helmet that seemed to both bless Bad and hurry him along through the doorway—minding his head—into the caves.
Bad had seen his own country’s famous tourist caves. In Ngarua Caverns and Waitomo some thought had been given to the light scheme. Both were beautiful, ancient, limestone composition caves, passages with stone-toothed valves and splendid chambers, their lighting designed to show off their architecture. Martine Raimondi’s pilgrims’ route was lit for safety, not dramatic effect. It didn’t have big, beautiful caverns or arresting sights. Electrical cables had been bolted to the rock at the top of the passage, and the passage was lit from above. Earlier pilgrims hadn’t been discouraged from touching the walls, so that the naturally goosefleshed translucent stone coating the passage had, at hand-height, been smoothed into a kind of dirty toffee texture. In several places, where the passage was wide enough for groups to gather, there were speakers and video monitors suspended from the cables. The pilgrims’ passage was not a mysterious place. Bad—to whom caves were so familiar that he sometimes felt a spurious safety on entering and sinking himself into them—was sorry for the pilgrims. The passage should either inspire or frighten them but had been too processed to perform either task.
Bad had been on solitary trips through caves of all kinds: spacious and splendid caves; tight pull-through caves; quiet, untouched caves where his careless feet might first mar the thousand-year falls of calcite snow; caves that glistened or were loud with water. These caves were ideal places for quiet contemplation of self and the limits of self. They were not distracting. The scenery was striking but seldom mobile or changeable, and they had no long perspectives or voyeurs’ views, no distant figures or dust trails on invisible roads—no distracting human narratives. To Bad, the Pilgrims’ Way wasn’t a cave proper. It was nasty—an invasion of an interior space for ulterior reasons. Bad was reminded of medical imaging technology, a light and camera on a probe, probing—a colonoscopy.
But—Bad conceded—perhaps for people who never went into caves this tramp through a stone passage stinking of carbon dioxide and electricity was enough of a unique sensory experience to strike them as mystical.
The pilgrims were asked, in French, over the sound system—its intimate, disembodied voice—to stand to one side of the passage to let the bishop’s party go by. Bad settled the old man in a hollow in the wall and inclined back himself, switched off his lamp when he saw how it flashed white in the squinting eyes of the bishop—who was the only person in the cave not wearing a helmet. The bishop went by in his white lace surplice, his gold vestments and mitre. He was followed by several of the sisters and priests, including Daniel Octave. In passing, Father Octave again touched Alberto’s hands.
The pilgrims waited for another few minutes and then shuffled on, until the ranger who seemed to be assigned to the group of old people told them to stop in a slightly larger cavern where there were canvas-covered fiberglass camp chairs set up. The old people sat, and the cavern filled, the crowd facing a video monitor that showed another crowded cavern. The old man, Alberto, looked up at Bad and said something, then swung his head toward his minder, waiting for a translation. The minder asked Bad if he had been on the pilgrimage before. Bad said no, this was his first time. Bad looked at the old man as he rasped at him, and tried to make sense of Alberto’s Italian—then realized that it wasn’t Italian, exactly, but was some kind of dialect. The minder translated. Alberto wanted Bad to know that what they were looking at, on the television, was the place where they all stopped. That bald man they could see at the top left of the screen was there—was there then, 1944. Soon the lights would be switched off. Alberto hoped that the young people with the camera would also turn out their lights. He was pleased to see that Bad had already.
And, indeed, with some warning in French and Italian, that temperate, bodiless voice told the pilgrims that the lights would now be switched out. They were to stand still, please.
The cave went dark. Around Bad the pilgrims sighed. Bad could still see the red running light on the Americans’ video camera. And he could see thready gray-white flashes of static on the monitor. Then, on the monitor, an image appeared. A circle of faces in the light of a single struck match. The flame was reflected and magnified in the bishop’s cloth-of-gold.
The first match went out. The crowd was being led in a prayer by that calm flight attendant’s voice. Bad finally recognized it as Father Octave’s. On the monitor, faces and flame appeared again. Those faces, the heart of the crowd, leaned into the tiny light as, in Christmas pictures, the faces of the faithful bend to the lit crib.
Darkness. Another match, like a faltering heartbeat.
Between each struck match the cave was a cave—closed lightlessness, as caves are—as Bad knew them to be. But it was a cave that murmured and breathed and whose sour air bit at Bad’s throat.
The pizza-box bomb had cracked Bad’s cervical vertebrae and broken his left leg. He had also received a mild concussion—mild because he hadn’t lost consciousness. Although the concussion hadn’t lingered like his other injuries, it had troubled him more while it was with him. He could cope with the pain in his leg and his neck and with his bruises. But for two weeks the concussion had colonized his vitality, choking him up, as exotic waterweeds—introduced species—choked some lakes at home. Bad had slept, but even his dreams had suffered from impaired concentration. He’d felt as if his whole potential dream life
had pressed in on him, a crowd of phantoms like a corridor full of petitioners, each one asking for his attention, all standing in the dark, as the pilgrims stood in Dardo’s hot, overpopulated cave.
The crowd followed Daniel Octave in prayer. An organized murmur filled the air in its stiff casing of rock. Then the lights came back on. People sighed or giggled, nervous, and there was sporadic applause. The line faced front again and, after a time, began to move. Alberto’s minder helped the old man to his feet and they walked on. Alberto was shaky, still warming up his joints.
Bad waited against the wall behind the folding chairs. He let others go by, watched each person who passed, as if looking for someone he’d lost in the crowd. Only the rangers were interested in the fact that he’d stopped. They asked him why he wanted to linger. And Bad asked them whether it was farther to go on than to go back. Bad said he’d had enough of the stuffy cave. He’d like to go back—since that was simpler. Was it permitted?
They told him to take care, all the while eyeing his caving helmet. They said that if he was thinking of cutting down into the other cave off the Grotto of the Hermit he should tell them. He should always let someone official know his intentions.
“I know the drill,” said Bad. “As you can see, I don’t have my pack. I didn’t plan on any trips.”
The rangers nodded and went briskly on. As soon as they had passed around the bend and out of Bad’s sight he could no longer hear them. But their disappearance left none of a cave’s customary silence. The monitor hummed faintly. And, now and then, Daniel Octave could be heard, speaking in his serene, calming voice, about the cave’s few obstacles. Bad knew that the priest, the other clergy, their flock, and the camera-carrying tourists were all moving away from him, but the sound system faithfully delivered Daniel Octave’s words into the deserted overlit chamber and Bad’s expectant silence.
What was he waiting for? Bad believed he was waiting for the passage to clear. He wanted to inspect it on his own, wanted to appreciate its unpeopled artifice. He was thinking how he’d describe it in postcards home.
Bad sat down in Alberto’s chair. He didn’t get up again until he was sure that the pilgrims’ party was at the very end of its route. He heard Daniel Octave making a muster like a tour guide. He heard the oxygen, the happiness in Octave’s voice. In that voice Bad heard a person who didn’t like close, dark places coming into the light and the open air. Bad imagined he heard a channel close when the sound system was switched off.
After another forty minutes the lights went out. Bad sat in the blackness and tasted breath, sweat, cosmetics, textiles, electricity, holy oils, and the candle smoke conducted through the caverns from the church—the air was flowing that way.
He got up and switched his headlamp back on. It gave him the cave in correct perspective, the visible world in a cone of light. Bad began to walk, watching his feet and his hands, habitually careful of the stone surfaces. The cables along the cave roof were even stranger now in the light of Bad’s lamp. It was as though the stone were a patient on life support, who had only just died and was still covered in tubes, cables, and clips anchored to silent monitors.
Bad came to the place where they had all stopped. He knew it by the thin pall of incense smoke against its roof and the patch of seven spent matches on its floor. Bad noticed a plastic wrapper from a chocolate bar had been poked into a crack on the cave’s wall. He supposed that someone would come to clean, that, in the days following the pilgrimage, the video and sound equipment would be dismantled and removed until next year’s ceremony. Bad fished the crumpled packet out of the crack and stuffed it into a pocket. He raised his hand into the cone of light to stir the smoke; he saw it part and eddy.
Someone was coming, was close already, because the rock muffled any approach. Bad scarcely had time to register that he wasn’t alone before she came into sight. She came at a run, carrying a long-barreled flashlight. Bad caught only a glimpse before she vanished behind her light. Her flashlight had a stronger beam than Bad’s headlamp. His light could not penetrate hers.
She stopped and shone her light straight at him. Bad saw an arm emerge from the circle of radiance, into the gauzy darkness around the circle. He saw her put one hand behind her back.
He was never sure why he did what he did next—why he unclipped his chin strap, pulled his helmet off, and set it on the floor at his feet, headlamp facing the wall. Perhaps he meant to let her get a good look at him. Perhaps he expected her to recognize him, as he had recognized her. But he wasn’t thinking, as such. He considered making an excuse but could only think of the old one, I don’t like the way it feels. Bad had walked backward off the platform at Dart Ridge—now he found that, in removing his helmet, he was stepping up to something, putting himself forward. He moved out from the wall and set himself in her path. She drew back, still blinding him, but he could see she meant to skirt around him. She said, friendly, “Pil-grim”—breaking the word in two, she drawled, doing John Wayne.
Bad reached for her.
She struck his arm with her flashlight, then dropped it. The flashlight rolled, swept in a half circle as neat as a compass. Bad saw that it was her. He saw her pale roots, the light shining out of her head.
She’d dropped what she held in her other hand, too, an object that made a pure metallic clink on the cave floor. Bad’s attention was momentarily diverted. He made out a smooth gold box with a glass face, like a very expensive clock.
The woman jumped at him, speedy and abrupt, then came to a halt before him. He had no time to flinch back. He saw it all happening, like an accident, but she moved too fast for his reflexes. Her hair, under its own momentum, flicked the front of his jacket. She had her fingers inside his jacket collar and wrenched its zipper open. Bad felt the top of his T-shirt cut into the back of his neck, heard its stitches pop and the fabric part. She yanked the torn neck down to trap Bad’s arms against his sides. He reeled, and he felt her leg cross behind his calf. She tripped him, and he sprawled on the floor. His head didn’t connect with the rock but with her hand, its spread fingers cushioning his skull. Bad felt her breath moisten the skin of his chest; then her mouth, lips, blunt instrument of chin, her hard teeth, touched him. Something sharp pierced him. The pierced place went numb. The light was drawn out of him. Bad saw stars and swarming colors, as though his blood pressure had plummeted. He lay back, shocked—then intoxicated, weak, amorous. He touched her hair. It felt silky, unspoiled by color treatments or cosmetic preparations. He was dizzy, but he didn’t lose consciousness. Instead, he lost his self-consciousness. He was not ashamed of himself, his submission, or of his gradually stiffening imposition into the space between their bodies. He was hard and moaned when she moved—moved her mouth and climbed his body to look into his face.
Her eyes had changed. He’d remembered them as clear and light brown. They were clear still, but one was the color of unwhipped honey, and its eyelashes were pale. She stared at him, her mismatched eyes warm, assessing, and sane—while her mouth dripped blood, his blood, onto his mouth. Bad saw the moment in which she recognized him.
She apologized, “You frightened me.”
“You bit my tongue,” Bad said.
She studied him, and as she did she slipped her hand out from under his head and hitched his torn T-shirt up again to free his arms.
Bad put his arms around her.
She smiled. “I remember its taste—your own taste, and chicken noodles. It was a smooth, pink, succulent tongue.” She moved one hand to cup his groin. She said, “Would you like me to deal with this?” Kneading him through two thicknesses of cotton. “It’s the least I can do.” She laughed softly.
Bad said he would rather she did the most she could do. He craned up to set his mouth against hers. The blood, tacky already, was quickly diluted and liquefied by his saliva. Bad put his tongue into her mouth. He gave her his tongue.
He was falling. Finally, he was falling.
On the roof of her mouth Bad felt a patch of short s
pines bristling. Some snagged him. Again he had the sensation of being drawn up and of amorous intoxication. She was trying to move away but couldn’t; he had trapped his tongue in her mouth. He was hooked on her barbs. She tried to push against him to get some slack, to release him, but he pulled back and stayed caught. He felt his tongue strain at its root and salty saliva mix with coppery blood.
She gave in and sucked at him. He heard her swallowing, felt her growing pliant and sleepy in his arms. Their hands tangled trying to find each other in their clothes. She unzipped him, arched her back, set her pelvis against his, and put him inside her. Only then did he press forward to release his tongue from the barbs on the roof of her mouth. She sat straight and his blood ran down her chin and neck and dripped onto her shirt. She moved against him, her face blank. She seemed to be listening, trying to gauge something. Perhaps it was his strength she meant to get the measure of. But when he rose in a surge to hold her and push and push, she took his hand and slipped his wrist into her mouth. Bad again felt the barbs bristle and pierce and a local numbness, then a blast through his body of some narcotic toxin. She sucked, and they moved, and Bad came—and then dropped back gasping against the rock and the small litter of spent matches.
He stroked her hair while she continued to suckle, playing now, the spines loose in the small holes they had made, her tongue scooped to make a trough for the trickle of blood. Bad was still inside her, and attached to her. They were connected, together, a closed system, and he wanted to stay that way forever. But she released his wrist, then began grooming him with her tongue, clearing the blood from the other tight patch of thorn wounds beside his right nipple.
“You didn’t die.” Bad’s voice was thick.
“I broke my leg and my pelvis, and this eye”—she touched the eye with the paler iris and lashes—“this eye popped out, and I had to put it back in.”
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