by Carmel Bird
‘We could do a great deal of good with the lottery money, could we not? Aaah. Think of the poor of Rome, Roland, think of the poor of Rome. The poor of Rome get honeycomb. Imagine the lip-smacking and unsteady drooling and fooling when the poor of Rome get stuck into the lolly. Honeycomb moneycomb. Would they use it wisely? Or do you imagine they would simply spend it on drink and drugs and wild sex and fantastic shopping sprees? Is it possible to use such melting golden honey-money wisely? I wonder about that. If the poor really were to get their hands on the treasure of the hive, how might they behave?
‘Once when I was in Cambridge a small girl, with the unforgettable name of Viola Vinnicombe, went missing. Viola Vinnicombe. There were pictures, fuzzy black-and-white and shades of grey, of her here and there. Have You Seen Viola Vinnicombe? I confess I have no recollection of the poor child’s appearance, apart from a giant ribbon tied in a bow on the top of her lost little head, but I do recall the name. Viola Vinnicombe swallowed the honeycomb, all on a summer’s day. I fancy we should put up pictures too – Have You Seen this Bambinello? Would that be vulgar? I don’t think it would, do you? Coloured pictures – he is after all a kind of star, not unlike in some ways a movie star or rock star. Ah, but I fancy she was never recovered, Viola. I sometimes muse that one day I may visit a vineyard or a dark wine cellar in the wilds of Sicily, and there will be a strange and magical sweet wine bottled under her name, and I will discover that she has been there all these years, stolen by pirates, raised by gipsies, and put to work among the grapes until she rose to perfect her own mysterious vintage. Do you think so? Let us get up early to the vineyard. Let us see if the vines flourish. Or has she drifted into a convent somewhere, into a silent order where she to this very day prays for the souls of all the wrongdoers on the earth’s lovely face? And they are legion, are they not? Viola is in her cosy convent, Roland, busily praying away for you and for me, surrounded by fading frescoes of thoughtful saints, their rust-green cloaks tinged with verdigris. Praying quietly over the centuries. Viola and her verdigris, singing with the saints. Have you ever noticed that so many statues of saints are gazing upwards? Their saintly eyes rolling up to heaven. But the Blessed Virgin now, she so often looks down, down, smiling sadly upon us sinners. And the Child – well, he has cultivated a steady gaze, straight ahead and clean and clear into your heart. The dear sulky Bambinello has often stared me down, I have to tell you that. And now, that’s how I think of Viola Vinnicombe – an innocent who has been given the gift of looking straight.’
The story was so mad that Roland held his breath and blinked his eyes. As he breathed in he thought the aroma of Father Cosimo was Versus by Versace. Could that be the case? One of Roland’s cousins drenched himself in such perfumes so Roland was familiar with it, he smelt it every Christmas when the family gathered to celebrate – could it be that Cosimo was really wearing Versus? It hardly seemed likely, but then, Cosimo was himself so very unexpected.
‘No, you don’t think so. You don’t credit Viola with the gift of looking straight. Poor Viola Vinnicombe. There was a wee girl named Viola Vinnicombe. Poor child. I expect she was in truth the victim of one of those crazed Cambridge homicidal paedophiles in well-cut tweed suits with silver-topped walking sticks and walrus whiskers in their ears. Sprouting. Do you suppose that? Once when I was visiting Devon in the company of my aforementioned friends Antonio and Ulisse, Antonio bought a loaf of bread from Vinnicombe’s Bakery. I checked the place out in some excitement and trepidation, but those Vinnicombes were no relation, as it turned out. You will meet my friends later on, next week. They travel about a lot, and if you ever have the urge to visit the sights of Italy, they are your men. What do you think about Vinnicombe’s Bakery? Was it a blatant hiding place for the elusive child, Viola? Had they perhaps put her in a pie?’
Still Roland could not reply. What was he supposed to say or think? Did his silence mark him as just some dull young priest from the end of the earth? Possibly. Yet in a strange way Cosimo seemed to be quite fond of Roland, his voice was often tender. But Roland was irritated by the way Cosimo insisted on asking for his opinion on strange little matters of no real importance. Strange mad little matters. When Cosimo said ‘walrus whiskers’ he waggled his fingers behind his own ears and smiled broadly. His teeth were straight and fine and very white and somehow quite alarming.
Roland would meet Antonio and Ulisse in due course, and he was surprised to find they were rather ordinary citizens, Sicilian ex-priests. They ran a bus service for tourists, and had a courier business that went all over Italy.
‘You seem to get a lot of children disappearing down there in Australia, don’t you?’ Cosimo went on. ‘It must be a wonderful dangerous place. Children and tourists all getting swallowed up by the crocodiles and the bunyips and so forth.’
‘Dingoes,’ Roland said.
‘Those, yes. Dingoes. It’s a funny word, isn’t it? Dingo. It would be Aboriginal. I heard of a child in Tasmania swallowed up by the forest itself. It seems the forest is horizontal. Is that right?’
‘Yes,’ Roland said, ‘it’s horizontal.’
‘Ah, I thought so. The child as I recall was Lovelygod Mean. Was the case ever solved?’
‘Not that I know of,’ Roland said. He had never heard of Lovelygod Mean.
Father Cosimo went on with his rambling story.
‘He’s our resident storyteller,’ the friars told Roland. ‘He has a story for everything. It certainly passes the time, but he often misses the point.’
It could be, Roland sometimes thought, that Cosimo never misses the point. The sharp glint in his fully repaired eye could be flinty and terrible, as an arrow that never misses the mark. Ever. And sends shivers up your spine. Or is it down your spine? One of those, or both. Butterflies in your belly for sure.
Cosimo took Roland to a bar to meet Antonio and Ulisse. They turned out to be small smiling gentle fellows who spent most of their time, as far as Roland could tell, drinking in bars and cafés and telling childish in-jokes in dialect.
‘No,’ Cosimo would say with his own kind of sly grin, ‘no, I can’t explain what he said in English. It’s a very Sicilian joke that one, very southern.’
Roland was none the wiser.
Cosimo’s story of the Aracoeli and the coming of the Bambinello continued over several days.
‘So, if you move on to the last years of the century before the birth of Our Lord – Augustus Caesar is about to be declared a god. He consults the sibyl at the temple of Juno Moneta for guidance at this tremendous moment, and what does he learn? He learns that the King of all the Ages is imminent, about to be born. It’s all happening in Bethlehem, even, you might say, as the sibyl speaks. The old sibyl utters to Augustus in a thundering great voice. She makes no bones about it, bellows it out at him. “The King of all the Ages, Augustus, do you hear me?” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”. That is my very favourite carol as a matter of fact – but of no consequence here in the present discussion. I would dearly love to hear the herald angels singing, wouldn’t you? They are supposed to have sung in Latin – it’s possible. When I was a child I had a kind of club, a secret society, which I called the Herald Angels. The main idea was to be secretive and to do mischief – I think I did not really grasp the significance of the name. I was only about eight.’
The thought of an eight-year-old Cosimo was very unsettling. Mischief, yes, he would have been up to mischief. Was he still playing at his mischief? It was possible.
‘Well, Augustus, so the story goes, now has a fabulous vision. He sees a woman standing on an altar surrounded by the light of a blazing sun, and holding a child. It was a pure virgin mother, you see. I am never quite sure how Augustus knew this was a virgin mother, but he knew. There is no need for us to become too technical and gynaecological, is there? This has all been written down, documented, a kind of history. But we know what history is, don’t we – matters that never quite took place recorded by fellows who were not present at the time. Anyway, t
here was Augustus having a marvellous vision of a virgin mother. That’s quite radical, isn’t it? Think of the shock. He must surely have been amazed by that. Nymphs and garlanded goddesses – he would have been familiar with those, I suppose. They were used to being taken by swans and bulls – geese of course – and so forth, indecently impregnated, but a birth without a visible masculine agent is another matter altogether. Altogether mysterious and wonderful. Well, so it was in those far-off lost and bygone days beyond recall. Days beyond recall.
‘Nowadays it’s a very different story, isn’t it, Roland? Children are being marvellously made to order in Petri dishes. And I believe there is a lizard – a gecko, is it? – in Australia and possibly South America that reproduces without a male agent. What a wonderful country you live in, Roland. All those geckoes and bunyips and sunshine and wild white wine. Dingoes, as you say, and coral reefs and forests full of angels – I have heard that. There was a photograph in a magazine. I have sometimes been tempted to go to Australia and see these things for myself. But no matter, I travel quite cheerfully in my imagination. Have you ever had any sort of vision yourself? A veritable vermilion vision? Cinnabar waves on the seashore? Malachite mystery? Star of the Sea? I have dreams – but they cannot be classed as visions. And I should not ask you, should I – I do not ask. Forgive me – I was carried away by the thought of the old emperor and his astonishing apparition of the virgin mother here in our very own precinct.
‘In any case, a terrific and compelling voice says to Augustus: “This is the altar of the Son of God.” Heaven only knows what he makes of that part either – since he’s about to be a god himself. In any case, following the strange vision of the beautiful Virgin Mother, he goes and has an altar to her built in the temple. I like that, don’t you? Augustus building an altar to Mary without even knowing who she is – in response to his dream vision. A beautiful thing to do. Beautiful. Simple and absolutely correct. And here we are today. At the Aracoeli, the Altar of Heaven. You and me. It’s a humbling thought, Roland, a humbling mumbling thought.’
Cosimo fell silent for a moment, his glittery eyes half closed, as if digesting or contemplating the magnitude of all that he had said. Roland felt like laughing, fancying the old priest resembled a kind of gecko.
‘Don’t take any notice of him,’ the others said, ‘or he’ll have you rhyming and punning and singing and dancing and carrying on like an idiot before you know what has happened, before you know what has hit you.’
Roland could sense this happening already, and he was also getting very tired of the way Cosimo was reducing him to the status of an ignorant child, as he rambled on and on, telling stories that Roland already knew, at least in essence. The way Cosimo told the stories was diverting, but after a while it grated. Who was the more arrogant of the two of them, Roland wondered, and concluded that it was no doubt himself. This was a humbling thought. But that was how Roland was, Roland the Good – easily humbled, and in many ways childlike.
‘Of course it’s our very own Altar of Heaven, and it’s close by the well that reaches through the adamantine surface of the earth and has its source in the next world. Such water, eh! You realise it’s the water we drink in the refectory? Heavenly drops, Roland, heavenly drops. You never hear of digestive problems at this house, no, you don’t. We imbibe here the heavenly drops which come to us – paradoxically of course – from the centre of the next world. The very heart of the heart of the next world.’
Cosimo smiled broadly and drew a deep breath and sang a few bars of a melody whose lyrics consisted only of the words ‘heavenly drops’. He played the tune on an imaginary keyboard in mid-air.
Roland’s concentration was beginning to fade.
‘Now we can jump forward to another time upon which it was once – now we are in the sixth century after the birth of Christ, and much sweet water, not to say much crimson blood, has flowed under many bridges. Don’t you love the way we can do that – we talk of one time and then we go jumpitty-jump like that old cow jumping over the moon – and there we are six centuries ahead of ourselves. Roland, I believe you are ahead of your time, you know, ahead of your tick-tock time. Jumpitty-jump. You are a man of the future.’
Cosimo executed a couple of nimble hops to illustrate his point. Roland was silent. He did not question the older man’s description of him as a man of the future, but he certainly did not feel like anything but a naïve visitor from not just another place, but maybe another planet altogether.
‘People in Rome build a church on the site of the vision of Augustus, the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli. Different custodians of this church come and go – first some rather colourful Byzantine monks, then some solemn Benedictine friars, then some very nice Franciscans. Us, Roland, Team Francisco. Did you know that when Edward Gibbon heard us singing in choir he was inspired to begin writing his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? Just imagine that. On the fifteenth of October in the gloom of the evening twilight, as he sat musing on the Capitol while what he described as “the barefoot friars” were chanting their litanies, he conceived his first idea of the book.
‘Who’s to say what some fine scrivener might not be writing at this very moment, uplifted and inspired by our singing this very heyday? Some clever young American or mystic old Armenian may be conceiving and noting and putting us all on their blogs. Now on we go swiftly and purposefully to the fifteenth century, wheee, time- travelling – shifting location to the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem. I love so very much that name – the Garden of Geth-se-man-e. The gossamer geckoes of the Garden of Gethsemane glow gladly in the gloaming. Naturally you know this part of the story, but don’t stop me now. This is like a bedtime story that you can hear over and over again because it chases away the dark and all its scary monsters. There you are under your pitty-patty patchwork quilt with your teddy bear, safe and sound in Melbourne town, listening to the story by the light of the upsy-downy moon.’
To Roland’s inner eye and to his heart came the sorrowful vision and sensation of the night after the death of Eleena, the first time he was alone, separate, a boy with no girl, a small child suddenly severed from one reality and thrust into another. He was not listening to Cosimo’s story, he was engulfed in his own ancient anguish.
‘So in the Garden of Gethsemane we meet a nameless friar who has somehow or other, in the manner of these things, don’t ask me how, secured a piece of olive wood from the Garden of Gethsemane in order to carve, somewhat in the manner of Pinocchio’s Geppetto, a little statue of a boy, a baby boy, the Baby Boy. C’era una volta un pezzo di legno. This anonymous artist runs out of paint to decorate his carving, and lo and behold, while he sleeps, the angels come and complete the task with heavenly paints.’
Cosimo mimed an impression of angels busy with paintbrushes, knocking over pots of paint, humming little tunes, absorbed in their work. His song this time rested on the words ‘heavenly paints’.
Roland did not even smile, for he was hearing none of this. If he appeared to be watching Cosimo’s antics, he could not really see because his eyes were veiled in a familiar mist.
‘With their pots and their pans of their heavenly paints, red and blue and gold, they paint and they picture with their heavenly paints, red and blue and gold. And this is only the beginning for the Little Boy statue. The friar sets out for Italy where he waits in Livorno for the statue to arrive by ship. I have never really understood why they didn’t travel together, the precious statue and the friar. Do you think it was like families of today who wisely split up and travel on separate planes in the event there’s a hijack or a crash? Did this unknown friar decide to put the Baby on a different boat in fear and dread of shipwreck or pirates? Or mermaids? Perhaps he was afraid of falling victim to the siren sound of the mermaid. Or did he fear the wiles of the great white whales? You have a lot of sharks too, don’t you, in Australia? Crocodiles and sharks and those stingrays. Well, in any case, a terrible storm blows up and the ultra-umptious thing is
that the ship the Baby is travelling on is wrecked. Wrecked. If only the friar had taken the Baby with him! Some helpful fellow on the wreck heaves the little statue with its angel paint overboard into the raging ultra ultramarine of the sobbing surging sea.
‘Up and over! Child overboard! Rockabye my baby, to that gipsy melodee.’
Cosimo made a vigorous gesture as if throwing the statue into the waves, paused to sing a few bars, and then continued with his story. Roland was watching and listening again. The skin stretched on Cosimo’s prominent cheekbones was flushed, Roland thought suddenly and fancifully, like the skin of a pomegranate ripe upon the branch. Exactly like a pomegranate in the autumn sun.
‘The friar stands on the shore at Livorno, looking out to the pale froth of the horizon. He doesn’t actually know the ship carrying the Baby is lost, lost lost, foundering on the bottom of the deep deep ocean. He believes it is late, very late. He hopes, he weeps, he prays. He is tireless in his vigilance. He closes his eyes, folds his hands, falls to his knees in fervent prayer. Mmmmmm, then what should come washing in on the tide – yes, you guessed it – you guessed it – it’s the statue he carved from the olive wood, the statue painted by angels while the good friar slept his honest friar sleep. Fan-francisco-tastic! The waves carry the baby in, in, in on the slap and curl of their moonshine rhythm. The friar’s anonymous mouth opens wide in astonishment, and he falls again to his knees in an apoplexy of thanks, he falls to his anonymous bony old knees.’
Cosimo stood up and mimed the amazement of the unknown friar, like a character in a pantomime gazing out to sea, spotting the statue bobbing on the water, wading in, embracing it, doing a little dance of joy on the seashore. Then he fell trembling to his knees, giving thanks, the statue safe in his hugging friar’s arms. The mimes were very funny and affectionate, but Roland couldn’t help thinking they were oddly disrespectful. Roland was after all a well-bred middle-class boy from an affluent Australian home, a boy with self-restraint and manners and deference to his superiors. It is quite clear that Roland the Good, ‘man of the future’, will not go far in this world. But Cosimo sails onward, caught up in the drama and pleasure of his own storytelling.