by Morris West
He fell silent. Roberta Saracini swung the car into a lay-by, from which the land dropped away into a vista of farmland, and scattered coverts and walls of weathered ashlar. She wound down the window and stared out on the tranquil scene. Not daring to look at Jean Marie, she asked with singular humility, “Do you want to tell me the rest of it? Where is Adèle now?”
“Dead. She left me before midnight. When she got home there were Germans in the house again. They were drunk on her wine. They raped her and nailed her to the table with a kitchen knife.… That was how I found her when, eager to renew the night’s loving, I broke all the rules and crept down the hill to see her at six in the morning!
“That was the day I decided I had a debt to pay. Later, much later, I decided that the exercise of the whole office of the priesthood was the best way to do it. The passion of Christ became very real to me as a drama of brutality, love, death and living again. I have never regretted the choice; nor, in spite of the horror that followed, have I been able to regret the wonder that Adèle and I shared. My confessor, who was a wise and gentle man, helped me to that. He said, ‘The real sin is to be niggardly in love. To give too much is a fault, easily forgiven. What you knew, your Adèle knew, too—that you had shared a moment of strange grace. I am sure she remembered it at the end.’… Look at me, Roberta!”
She shook her head. She was sitting, chin on hand, eyes averted, staring out at the sun-dappled countryside. He reached out and turned her tearstained face towards him. His eyes were tender, his voice full of compassion. He admonished her gently.
“I’m old enough to be your father—so you can adopt me as a Dutch uncle if you like! For the rest, remember what I told you at the beginning. On ne badine pas avec l’amour. One doesn’t trifle with love. It’s too wonderful and too terrible!…”
He handed her his pocket handkerchief to dry her eyes. She accepted it, but faced him with a last blunt question.
“After all that, how is it possible that your best friend, Carl Mendelius, is a German?”
“How is it possible,” asked Jean Marie, “that you and I are sitting here, because your father cheated the Vatican out of millions and was killed in a prison corridor?… The biggest mistake we’ve all made through the ages is to try to explain the ways of God to men. We shouldn’t do that. We should just announce Him. He explains Himself very well!”
The day before the function at the Carlton Club he went with Adrian Hennessy to deliver the manuscript of Last Letters from a Small Planet. He laid it on Waldo Pearson’s desk and said, “There you are. It’s done. Good or bad, it’s a heart-cry. I hope someone hears it.”
Waldo Pearson weighed the package in his hands and said that he was sure, yes, very sure, that someone would hear the heart-cry. Then he handed Jean Marie the typescript of the English version of his speech for the Carlton Club.
Jean Marie asked him, “What do you think of it? Does it make sense?”
“It makes frightening sense. It makes wonderful sense. I cannot say how the audience will take it.”
“I’ve read it,” said Adrian Hennessy. “I love it. I’m also scared. There’s still time to make changes if you will consent to them.”
He glanced at Jean Marie, who nodded agreement. “I know I am talking to new people in a new idiom. Be honest with me! I am your guest at your club. If I am overstepping the proprieties of the occasion, I must know.”
“There is no breach of the peace or the decencies,” said Waldo Pearson. “Hold to the text!”
“Will there be questions afterward?”
“There may be. We generally allow them.”
“Will you please make sure I understand them before I answer? I am fluent in English but sometimes, in moments of stress, I think in French or Italian.”
“I’ll see you through it. There’s a lot of interest.”
“Do you have a guest list?” Hennessy asked the question.
“Afraid not. When there’s a big attendance, as there will be this time, the members have to ballot for guest places. I have, however, invited the Soviet ambassador—and Sergei Petrov, if he should happen to be in London. If he appears it will be a sign that he is still viable politically. I have also invited Morrow, because I knew him when he was my opposite number in Washington. I suggested he might like to bring a colleague—which leaves it open for him to present Dolman if he chooses. For the rest, it’s an impressive list: members of Cabinet, diplomats, heads of industry, press barons. So you’ll have a wide sampling of religions, nationalities—and moralities as well.”
Hennessy added an ironic footnote. “Maybe the Holy Ghost will give you the gift of tongues.”
“I used to talk about that with Mendelius.” Jean Marie picked up the joke and embellished it. “He used to say that it was probably the least useful of all the gifts of the Spirit. If a man was a fool in one language, you’d never make him wise in twenty!”
They all got a laugh out of that. Waldo Pearson produced champagne. They drank a toast to Last Letters from a Small Planet and to a quondam Pope who was about to be tossed to the lions in the Carlton Club.
Jean Marie Barette gripped the edges of the table lectern and surveyed his audience, packed into the principal dining room at the Carlton Club. He had met only a few of them—a privileged group entertained by Waldo Pearson to sherry in the committee room. Waldo, he found, ruled the Conservative stronghold with an iron fist. He would not have his most exotic guest mauled and put upon in the vacuous preambles of cocktail time. He had professed himself delighted with Jean Marie’s choice of dress—a black jacket buttoned to the neck, with a minimal display of Roman collar and a simple silver pectoral cross. The dress expressed the import of his opening words.
“… I stand before you a private man. I am a cleric ordained to the ministry of the Word in the Roman Catholic Church. I have, however, no canonical mission; so that what I say to you in this assembly is my private opinion and must not be construed as either the official teaching of the Church or as a statement of Vatican policy.”
He gave them a grin and a Gallic gesture to take the weight off the words.
“I am sure you will need no elaboration of this point. You are all political men, and—how do you say it in English?—a wink tells as much as a nod to a blind mule.”
They gave him a small chuckle to warm him—and to tempt him, too. If he were fool enough to trust this audience, he would not be worth anyone’s attention in the morning. His next words jolted them out of their complacency.
“Because I am a man, I have experience of fear, love and death. Because I have been, like you, a political man, I understand the usages of power and its limitations, too! Because I am a minister of the Word, I know that I am peddling a folly in the marketplace and that I risk to be stoned for it.… You, too, my friends, are peddling follies—monstrous insanities!—and all of us risk to perish by them!”
There was a deadly quiet in the room. For this single moment he held them hypnotized. They understood the arts of the forum. They knew that this man was a master; but if his thought proved unworthy of his orator’s talent, they would shout him down as a mountebank. Jean Marie thrust forward with his argument.
“Your folly is to promise a possible perfection in the affairs of men—an equitable distribution of resources, an equal access to seaways, airways and strategic land routes, a world, in short, where every problem can be solved by an honest broker, an inspired leader, a party apparat. You make the promise as a necessary step to power. You choose to ignore that you are playing with dynamite.
“You raise illusory hopes. You excite expectations you cannot fulfil. Then, when you see that the deluded people are turning against you—presto!—there is a new solution: a cleansing war! Now, suddenly, you are not givers of gifts. You are janissaries imposing the edicts of the sultan. If the people will not obey the dictate, then you will make them do it! You will lop them, limb by limb, like Procrustes, until they fit the bed on which they writhe tormented. But they will n
ever fit it. The golden age you have promised will never come.…
“You know it! In a most terrible act of despair you are resigned to it! Already you have counted the cost: so many millions in New York, in Moscow, in Tokyo, in China, in Europe. The aftermath, the desert which will be called peace, you have elected to ignore, because who will be left to care? Let the bandits subdue the populace. Let the casualties die. There will be a new dark age—a new Black Death. In some far-distant future there will, perhaps, be a renaissance; but who cares, because we shall never see the wonder of it.
“Do you think I exaggerate? You know I do not. If the embargo on grain is not lifted, the Soviet Union will come near to starvation this winter—and her armies will march at the first thaw. Even if they do not, a movement by any power towards the oil fields in the Middle East or the Far East will precipitate a global conflict. I do not know the battle order, as some of you do; but you will recognize that I touch close to the core of the matter.… I make no plea to you. If your own good sense, the promptings of your own heart when you look at your children and your grandchildren, do not move you to action to avert the holocaust, then—amen! So be it! Ruat coelum—let the heavens fall!
“I have sought only to define your folly; which is to believe that man can construct for himself a perfect habitat, and that every time he fails, he can destroy what he has done like a sand castle and begin again.… In the end the constructive impulse is overmastered by the destructive one. And all the time the tide creeps in relentlessly, to obliterate the small beach-head on which we play!…”
He could not tell whether they approved or disapproved. All he knew was that the silence held and their ears, if not their hearts, were still open to him. He went on, more quietly and persuasively.
“Now let me tell you of my folly, which is the reverse of yours, but which served only to compound it. When I was elected Pope, I was both humbled and elated. I believed that power had been placed in my hands, the power to change the lives of the faithful, to reform the Church, to mediate perhaps in the quarrels of nations and help to maintain the precarious peace we enjoy. All of you know the feeling. You experienced it when you were first elected to office, given your first embassy, your first cabinet post, or when you bought your first newspaper or television station. A heady moment, is it not? And the headaches are all in the future!”
There was a small chuckle of assent. They were glad of the relief. The man was more than a rhetorician. He had a saving grace of humour.
“There is a catch of course—a trap into which we all step. What we have is not power but authority—which is a horse of a different colour! Power implies that we can accomplish what we plan. Authority signifies only that we may order it to be accomplished. We pronounce—Fiat! Let it be done! But by the time the ordinance filters down to the peasant in the rice paddy, the miner at the coal face, the slum priest in the favela, it has lost most of its force and meaning. The definitions in which we enshrine our dogmas and our moralities are touchstones of orthodoxy. Whether we be Popes, ayatollahs or party preceptors, we dare not abrogate them; but their relevance to man in his extremity is minimal. What theology can I teach to a girl who is dying with a septic abortion? All I can give her is pity, comfort and absolution. What do I say to the boy revolutionary in Salvador whose family has been shot by the soldiers in the village square? I can offer nothing but love, compassion and an unprovable proposition that there is a Creator who will turn all this madness into sanity, all this sorrow into eternal joy.… So you see, my folly was to believe that somehow I could exercise at once the authority which I had accepted, and the beneficence to which my heart prompted me. It was an impossibility, of course—just as it is impossible for a foreign minister to denounce the obscenities of a dictator who supplies his essential raw materials.
“It is in this context that I want to explain my abdication, which, painful as it was at the time, I now neither mourn nor protest. In an experience which came unbidden and unexpected, I was given a revelation of the Last Things. I was given a command to announce them as imminent. I myself was and am absolutely convinced of the authenticity of this experience; but I neither had nor have any means of proving it. So, my brother bishops decided that I could not legitimately hold the office of Pontiff and, at the same time, assume the role of a prophet and proclaim an unauthenticated private revelation. I say nothing of the means they took to procure my abdication. These are at most a footnote to a history that may never be written.
“I do, however, say this. I am glad, now, to have no authority; I am glad to be no longer obliged to defend the formulae of definition; because the authority is too limited, the formulae too narrow to encompass the agony of mankind in the last days and the magnitude of the Parousia—the promised Coming.
“It may be that there are those among you who, like me, have become conscious of the limitations of power and the folly of mass murder. It is to these that I m—”
Suddenly he was aware that the words he was saying were not words at all, but a single childish sound, repeated over and over: “ma… ma… ma… ma.” He felt something tugging at his trouser leg. He looked down and saw his left hand flapping helplessly against his thigh. His vision was blurred. He could not see the audience. Then the room canted and he lurched forward across the table. After a certain confusion of motion and time he heard two voices very close to him. One of them was Waldo Pearson’s.
That was quite eerie. It sounded like glossolalia. Only yesterday we’d been talking about the gift of tongues.”
“It’s a typical symptom of C.V.A.”
“What’s C.V.A.?”
“Cerebro-vascular accident. The poor devil’s had a stroke!… That ambulance is taking a hell of a time!”
“Midday traffic,” said Waldo Pearson. “What are his chances?”
“Ask me in three days.”
The words reminded Jean Marie of resurrection. Instead he lapsed into darkness.
BOOK THREE
Believe not in every spirit, but test the
spirits to know if they be of God; for
many false prophets are about in the world.
—First Epistle of St. John 4:1
XIII
Now he was another man in a strange country. The country was very small. It had four white walls, two doors and a window. There was a bed, on which he lay, a small table beside it, a chair, a chest of drawers with a mirror above it in which the man in the bed was reflected. He had a curiously lopsided look, like a before-and-after advertisement for liver salts. One side of his face was mobile and upturned, the other dragged slightly downward into an expression of dolour or distaste. One hand lay motionless on the white counterpane. The other roved restlessly, exploring contours and textures and distances.
There was at least one other inhabitant of this new country: a rather plain young woman in a nurse’s uniform who appeared often to take his pulse and his blood pressure and listen to his chest. She asked him always the same simple questions: “How do you feel? What is your name? Would you like a drink?” The strange thing was that while he understood her perfectly, she did not seem to comprehend a word he said—although she did give him a drink, holding him up so that he could suck the liquid through a plastic straw. And she held a bottle to his penis so that he could make water. When he did so, she smiled and said, “Good, very good,” as if he were a baby learning the act of peeing. She always used the same exit line: “Doctor will be back to see you soon.” He tried to remember who the doctor was and what he looked like; but the effort was too great, so he closed his eyes and tried to rest.
He was too disturbed to sleep; not disturbed about anything in particular, but anxious, as though he had lost something precious and were groping for it in a fog. Every so often he would feel that he was close to it and close to knowing what it was; but the moment of discovery never came. Then he would feel like a man in a cellar with the trapdoor locked above his head. Finally, the doctor arrived, a lean grey-haired fellow who disp
layed a kind of offhand concern.
“My name is Dr. Raven. Can you repeat it for me? Raven.”
Jean Marie tried several times but succeeded only in saying, “Ra… Ra… Ra…”
The doctor said, “Never mind. You will do better soon. Just nod if you understand me. I am speaking English. Do you know what I am saying?”
Jean Marie nodded.
“Can you see me?”
A nod.
“Smile at me. Let me see you smile.”
Jean Marie tried. He was glad he could not see the result. The doctor looked into his eyes with an ophthalmoscope, tested his reflexes with a little rubber mallet, checked his blood pressure and auscultated his chest. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and delivered himself of a small lecture. Jean Marie was reminded of the discourse with which the rector of his seminary used to greet each batch of newcomers.
“… You are a lucky man. You are alive. You are rational and you have some of your faculties intact. It is too early to know what damage has been done inside your skull. We have to wait two or three days before we know whether this is one episode or whether others may follow. You have to trust us and try to accept that for a little while you are helpless. This is the Charing Cross Hospital. Your friends and relatives know where you are. But they know you must have no visitors and no disturbance at all until we get you stabilized. Have you understood that?”
“Ma… ma… ma… most,” said Jean Marie, and was absurdly pleased with himself.
The doctor, too, gave him a smile and a pat of approbation. “Good! That’s promising. I’ll be back to see you in the morning. Tonight they’ll give you something to help you sleep.”
Jean Marie tried to say thank you. He found he had forgotten the words in English. In French he could only get as far as “Mer…” He struggled with it until he wept in frustration and the nurse came in to pump an opiate into his arm.