by Carmel Bird
In a gesture of obedience, resignation, hope, foolishness, faith – who knows what – Roland duly but surreptitiously placed his mother’s letter in a basket for that purpose, a basket already brimming with mail – some hand-delivered, much postmarked from places all over the world, some having spilled onto the floor in the confusion. In some envelopes there were banknotes, in some photographs, in some were locks of hair. A fingernail. Roland felt awkward, like a child fulfilling an embarrassing errand, for while he endorsed the sincere and even beautiful innocence of a devotion that expressed itself in letters written to a statue, he was personally troubled by the lack of sophistication implied in his own involvement at this moment, now that the statue was gone. He was delivering the letter to an absence, to a space.
But his mother believed in a beautiful world of loving possibilities. When Roland saw in the basket so many envelopes bearing so many foreign stamps, he experienced a cynical hope that some member of the community was charged with removing the interesting stamps before the letters, unopened, were burned. What became of the ashes, the ashes of all those hopes and prayers? In spite of his thoughts and feelings as he put the little envelope, marked in his mother’s copperplate hand in nice blue ink, ‘To the Bambinello, Santa Maria in Aracoeli, Rome’, in among the heap of others, a shiver of emotion went through him, and he felt the sudden and gentle pricking of hot tears. He identified such emotion as his ‘Eleena tug’. In a soft flash the image of his twin sister’s dandelion aureole of white hair floated across his inner eye, the echo of his father’s voice crying, ‘Eleena’ sounded on his inner ear, and the loss of the child who had floated with him in amniotic bliss sliced swiftly through his sane and sensible priestly adult heart. Eleena. Eleena. Eleena. Until the notes died out and all was silent.
A faithful pine copy of the statue was in due course quietly blessed and placed in the space where the Bambinello had been. The letter baskets which were regularly emptied were once again overflowing with an endless flurry of messages and prayers, hopes and fears, from everywhere in the world. The irony is that many of the letters addressed to the Bambinello expressed the hope that he would be restored to his rightful place in the Aracoeli church. Prayer can be a most peculiar mechanism. People are funny. These prayers to the statue will possibly be answered, but are these letters going to the right place? Can they be answered if the Baby is not there?
Rome was the home of Roland’s paternal ancestry, his family being spread across the globe, as his father Bernard would say, like the parachutes of dandelion seeds. His mother Callianthe, for all her Greek name and Italianate piety, was English, educated in California in the Sacred Heart convent where her mother (and mine) went to school. So the family dandelion seeds were indeed widespread.
Roland spent a year of study in Rome, living at the Irish College. To be witness to the kind of storm that blew up over the disappearance of the statue was naturally the last thing he had expected. There was an air of unreality about being in Rome at all, let alone being side by side with, almost mixed up in, such a crime. Was it a crime? Perhaps it was a miracle.
He put through a call to his mother – how to explain such a thing to her? ‘When I got here the statue, the Bambinello statue, had already gone, it had disappeared, it had apparently been stolen.’
‘I can’t hear you – what did you say? Speak up, Roland – what?’
She wept when he told her, a strange and helpless desolation sweeping through her heart.
‘I don’t know. Don’t understand. Nobody knows how it happened, what on earth happened. They’ll probably find it fairly soon. There’s the most incredible fuss about it, as you can probably imagine. It’s quite awful.’
There was a long silence during which neither Roland nor his mother spoke.
‘Did you deliver the letter, Roland?’
‘Of course. Oh yes. Of course I did. The letter, the prayers – they’re still the same. It really makes no difference. Makes no difference. At all. No difference.’
He heard his mother sob when he said that, so he stopped in mid-flight and left the thought unfinished. Did it make a difference? Well, yes, it did. But he, Roland the Good, could never tell such a truthful thought to his mother.
He had a sense that his mother imagined he could dedicate himself to finding the statue. The theft was briefly reported in newspapers across the world. The Australian papers Roland’s mother read reported it but gave almost no detail, no hint of the sacrilegious catastrophe that had befallen the many faithful and dedicated followers of the Bambinello. Groups of women in deepest black gathered in prayer in the Aracoeli, intoning the rosary in low and insistent hypnotic chant over and over, the note sometimes rising to a wail and then dying back into a dark rope of heartbroken flowing words.
The theft of the Bambinello was not as interesting and exciting a theft as others might be, not concerned with a great ‘work of art’ in the ordinary sense of the words, but small-scale, domestic, eccentric even, to many people comic or absurd. Was it even ‘art theft’? Was it part of the fourth biggest illicit trade on the planet – after the traffic in drugs and arms and people – art theft? This was different; it was sacred art, it was treasure. It was holy and miraculous. In years to come it would appear on Internet registers of lost and stolen objects, alongside El Niño plucked from his glass case in a little church outside Mexico City one sunny afternoon. How did these holy babies compare with Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man that disappeared apparently forever from the Czartoryski Museum in Cracow in 1945? It would be exciting to find the Bambinello in a railway locker, or in the sports bag of a schoolboy aspiring to make the London Olympics. Where are the miracles when you need them?
These days you can go on and on discovering art theft on the Internet, you can chat and blog – but when the Bambinello slipped from view, news was only available through TV, radio and papers. 1994 is now so long ago. He’s just one disappearance among many, like a child who vanishes, never to be seen again, always and forever a poignant presence in cyberspace and in memory and home-video, and nowhere else at all. Oh, sometimes such lost little ones reappear in fiction.
What on earth can have happened in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli between the moment when the last candle was lit, the last letter posted, the last prayer whispered, and the arrival of Roland the Good and the Italian friar? It was such a short space of twilight time, such a blink, such a twink of an eye.
The statue of the Bambinello was described in a rather dismissive English Protestant way by Charles Dickens in his Pictures from Italy as being a ‘little wooden doll’. A little wooden doll! He commented that this doll was dressed in satin and gold lace, and was ‘blazing’ with precious stones. This little wooden doll occupies a deep, powerful and mystical place in the hearts of millions of loving and hopeful and dedicated followers. Where oh where has that dear little doll gone?
My mother is, like Roland’s mother, devoted to the Bambinello, and they belong to a confraternity. I’m connected in this way to Roland, since our mothers are sisters in some vast holy ring of prayer. In fact, it is not only Roland who can trace his birth back to his mother’s prayers to the Boy, but so can I – my birth being possibly more miraculous than Roland’s. Who’s to say? My connection with the Bamb is intimate. I realise I might owe my very existence to him. Was he the scavenger who plucked me from nowhere? Did he select the oocyte and personally choose the spermatozoon that ended up in a glass dish and were finally conveyed to the warm and receptive body of Avila Kent?
Roland bought his mother a medal with a coloured image of the Baby on it, and posted it to her in a little parcel. The irony of this gesture was that the parcel never arrived at its destination.
‘But did you put enough stamps on it, Roland?’
The loss of the medal in the post might possibly have cast a doubt on the safety of the small envelope of prayers that Roland the Good put in the basket in the church of the Aracoeli, but people like Avila Kent and Callianthe Bruccoli don
’t necessarily think like that.
Chapter Two
Holy Mother
Once upon a time – back in the summer of 1892 – Rome was suffering from an epidemic of typhoid. Bells were ringing, shutters were closed, curtains drawn. Candles flickered on the side altars of churches across the city. Doors were locked and barred, and streets were deserted. A grey fear hung heavy in the threatening air.
The gilt coach that was lent out on special occasions for the use of the Bambinello belonged to Prince Alessandro Torlonia. It was small and exquisite, elegant and graceful as it rolled away from the steps of the church, drawn by a pair of neat chestnut ponies with docked tails and cropped manes, driven by a coachman in blue livery with silver braid. The baroque surface of the coach was knobbed, embossed, curlicued, feathered, fanned, flowered all over. High on its topknot was a golden cross on a gleaming globe. Seated inside the coach were two solemn priests wearing large white velvet gloves, and a doctor with his serious little black bag. In their care they had the precious statue of the Bambinello. It stood upright, stiff but regal, between the priests, in the centre of the carriage. From the shadows a small crowd emerged and stood silent as the carriage sailed away into the street, jolted by the stones on the uneven surface of the road.
A child is dying of the fever in the Villa Francesca. The Bambinello is to visit the villa in the hope the boy can be saved. And he is saved. Little Leonardo Cabassi, heir to a modest fortune, only son of the house, opens his eyes and smiles in the presence of the Bambinello. His fever breaks, now his temperature is normal, and he asks for strawberries.
It was a miracle. His mother wept, his father handed the priests a satchel filled with gold and silver plate, and the Bambinello returned to his carriage to make the joyful journey back to his home in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli on the Capitoline Hill. A task well done. The news of the miracle had already travelled to the church, and the people on the long, steep staircase leading up to the church greeted the return of the little miracle-worker with cries of joy and also with silent and reverent prayers of thanks in their hearts. The Bambinello had answered their prayers.
The Holy Child’s expeditions were not always characterised by a miraculous cure, but often by a good death, or a safe and joyful birth. Yet he was thought by some to frighten sick people, to frighten them to death, even though one of his tasks was to cure disease. Time and again he was called out to women in childbed, his face pressed to the forehead of the woman in labour, his foot offered for a kiss. Many Roman children owed their birth to the Bambinello who was duly decorated with glittering and valuable gifts from grateful supplicants, gifts which were copied and kept in a safe in the monastery.
In the spring of 1952 a crafty thief concealed himself near the statue and was locked in the church during the afternoon. At just on four when the doors were opened, he walked coolly out, the Holy Child’s imitation jewellery concealed in his pockets. Some of the gold and silver was real, but the emeralds and diamonds would prove a sorry disappointment to the thief. Within a week the Bambinello was again thickly covered in a fresh rain of gems, for he was beloved and he was indulged, and people needed to show their love for him.
But for Roland Bruccoli on that wet February evening in 1994, the Bambinello was an absence, and Callianthe’s letter would lie in the basket before that blank and sorrowful space as the police and the fathers each followed their trade, investigation for the one, prayer for the other. The Baby Boy did not declare himself.
Years passed and years passed, and, like a child abducted in the desert or lured into the forest or snatched from the bustle of the busy city street, the Bambinello drifted once again into legend. Have You Seen this Child? He became the Holy Child forever lost, and the loss was associated in time, in the minds of some, with the arrival of the young Australian priest.
Roland himself, in some irrational, deep strange way, felt that he was at least in part to blame. A guest may be complimented on bringing mild and sunny weather, or castigated for bringing storms. His superiors, and indeed his own intelligence, told him this guilty feeling was irrational and misplaced, but the feeling persisted, like an invisible infection that moved swiftly and silently through the church. Something in Roland would never be the same again.
It nestled there, the guilt, a reflection of the other dark persistent shadow that filled Roland’s heart, sometimes to bursting, the knowledge that he had lived while his twin sister had died. But it wasn’t even as simple as that – when Eleena was hit by the car at the cricket match, Roland had lost, it seemed to him when he tried to explain it to himself as an adult, the light from his own eyes, the electricity from his own heart. He would try to recall what she had really looked like – photographs of the two of them seemed to have been, if not destroyed, then at least hidden deeply away. He became one where he had been two – or he became half where he had been whole. What had she been wearing that afternoon, he wondered. There was nobody he dared ask, he was so fearful of opening up the wound. So when he gave in to reveries about her he would dress her in a pink dress, or a white dress, or a leaf-green silky dress. He thought he remembered she was wearing pink socks and pink sneakers with pompoms on the laces. Her dandelion nimbus of golden hair would bob into his mind. To his dismay he could truly recall only one thing she ever said. Only one. At least there was one.
They had been taken to visit an ancient uncle in his house where there was a cherry tree and a grapevine, and they were sitting together on a low stone wall in the sun, each with a glass of red fizzy drink. Eleena turned to Roland and she said: ‘This is nice, Rolly, this is nice.’ Over and over in his mind’s echo-chamber her little voice says to him clear and soft: ‘This is nice, Rolly.’ He felt she meant everything – not just the drink, everything – the sun, the stone wall, the cherry tree, the grapevine, the sky – everything. Life. Life, she said to him, was nice. ‘This is nice, Rolly.’ Life is nice.
When she was gone, there was only one teddy bear – there had of course been two. Once, in an old suitcase in the storeroom of the house, Roland found a small plush elephant, pale pink, a forgotten relic of his sister. Secretly he took the elephant and kept it forever in a tin which had once contained chocolates. The tin remained on the top shelf in the cupboard of his bedroom in the old home in Melbourne.
And Roland kept buried in his wallet, and never ever viewed, Eleena’s funeral card which was poignant and yet strangely distant from the reality of Eleena’s short life and sudden awful death. The card was his talisman of a secret love. On one side of the card, the image of the Infant Jesus of Prague in a dark red dress, on the other the name in heavy formal capitals:
ELEENA FRANCES BRUCCOLI
Of your charity pray for the repose of her soul. May she rest in peace.
Her name would bob up – probably forever? – in the prayers for the dead at the parish church on the anniversary of her death. Sometimes Roland was there, but sometimes he was not. When he was, the listing of Eleena Bruccoli as second on an alphabetical list that also contained a whole family of Woolfs, who had died in a level-crossing smash at some distant time, seemed somehow only to emphasise the ephemeral nature of Eleena’s brief existence. Always Roland began quietly to weep when he heard the name. His mother, if she wept at all, did so in dignified privacy.
Callianthe and Bernard Bruccoli had two more children, Martin and Chantal, and life went on, and the family dandelion clocks of Bernard’s imagination would puff their airy parachutes here and there about the world, occasionally resulting in the appearance of little girls who looked a lot like long-lost Eleena.
This is nice, Rolly, this is nice. Oh yes, yes, it is nice.
After the disappearance of the Bambinello Roland took to following art thefts in the news, tearing items out of the papers and putting them in a file. The same year the Bambinello went, The Scream was stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo, taken by thieves who climbed a ladder and hopped in through a window. But The Scream was found and returned to the
museum. Ten years later it was stolen again. To steal this painting is to steal the opposite of the Bambinello since The Scream is an iconic modern painting by a known painter, a work that expresses the despair and alienation of mankind, whereas the Bambinello is a work of miraculous origin, painted by angels, the focus of prayer and hope and love. Is it so different? The miraculous Bambinello could and did journey alone by sea, a portrait of the Holy Child, the Only Son of God, the expression of the hope of the world. The statue was a miracle in itself, apart from all the miracles it has performed. It still performs miracles, even though it has disappeared. There’s an interesting conundrum. The letters pile up in the baskets and prayers are answered, eggs are fertilised and babies with all kinds of provenance are brought to term and deposited in the world to bring a measure of joy and a measure of grief.
Shortly after the disappearance of the Bambinello in 1994, the church archivist, Father Cosimo, said, as he and Roland were walking in the early morning: ‘A most mysterious crime has been committed, Roland.’
Roland felt a chill at the back of his neck. Father Cosimo’s thick black eyebrows cast a shade across his eyes. He went on: ‘And your innocent presence at its raw discovery can only call a blessing on us all. A blessing.’ This statement puzzled Roland, and he wrote it in his journal, coming back to it from time to time, never finding any enlightenment. Surely it meant the opposite of what it said? Surely Cosimo was somehow holding him responsible? But Roland was too timid, too afraid to ask.