by Edward Docx
Under Cedric’s watchful eye, we signed in with the surly attendant, deposited our bags, picked up our passes from the vice-prefect and followed the priest’s hulking figure into an elevator.
Olfactorily, the short ride was exquisitely unpleasant. But the library made it all worth it: pure celestial Renaissance beauty, long arcades through which pellucid light streamed (as if straight from heaven) to play upon the marble and alabaster and bring deeper colours to the master frescos on the vaulted ceilings. And the books … the open shelf books everywhere thrumming with learning and imagination and intelligence.
Father Cedric led us – dumbfounded, awestruck – into the manuscript room beyond. Though the reading bays were empty, he spoke in a hushed but clear voice, the trademark of the professional librarian: ‘Here are the forms where you must fill in the titles of manuscripts that you wish to read. Give them to the man at the desk that we passed before – in the main room. No more than three at a time, I’m afraid. There are some others – over there – already on display and on the shelves – here – which may be of some use.’ He indicated along a wall of shelves, then looked at me with a concerned frown. ‘But I think, Jasper, that there are some things that you specifically want to see – so Mrs Jackson said?’
‘Yes – I do. I have the catalogue numbers here in my notebook.’
‘You are lucky that she has so detailed a memory. It will save you a lot of time searching.’
‘I know.’
He touched the bridge of his glasses again. ‘Mrs Jackson tells me that you are quite a calligrapher these days – a professional – working on John Donne for the Americans. The Holy Sonnets by any chance?’
‘No. I’m doing the love stuff –’
‘His family were famous Catholics, you know – steeped in the Faith.’ His manner became even more confidential. ‘And at a time when it cost you your life. His uncle was the leader of the secret Jesuit mission. And, of course, his brother died in prison where he had been sent’ – Father Cedric allowed himself to dwell on the words – ‘for sheltering priests.’
‘Yes, I have been reading about –’
‘Which is of course why he is – was – and shall forever be – so unhappy, so angry with himself, because he never really forgave himself for renouncing his beliefs and entering the Protestant Church, just to get on – to win position – eventually, of course, to become Dean of St Paul’s. It must have been difficult. Very difficult.’ He sighed lightly. ‘I read a few lines when your grandmother told me you were coming … now, how does it go? “Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one: / Inconstancy hath unnaturally begot / A constant habit.”’ He nodded wisely to himself. ‘That’s my favourite of the Holy Sonnets. And perhaps the key to it all … Well now, I shall leave you both here for half an hour – I’m afraid it will take at least that long for them to fetch your requests. Then I’ll come back and see how you are getting on …’ – he twinkled like a fairy godmother ‘… and if you would like, perhaps I could show Madeleine around a little … while you make your sketches and your notes, Jasper.’
‘Oh, that would be so good,’ Madeleine whispered too loudly. ‘A private tour of the Vatican. Jasper said that they have all sorts of secret documents here – like Henry VIII’s deathbed conversion and lots of torture things from the Inquisition.’
Father Cedric nodded chivalrously. ‘Well, we can’t go everywhere but I will do my best to show you some of our little treasures.’
‘Thank you, Father,’ I said. ‘I won’t need much more than an hour and a half – so we should be out of your hair by lunchtime.’ I cleared my throat to distract from the infelicity of the phrase.
‘It’s no trouble at all.’ He rubbed his hands vigorously and with a smile somehow both beaming and wistful, he took his leave.
I sat down at a desk to copy out the references I had made back in London on to the requisition slips. After I had handed them in, we wandered together around the library, looking at everything – books, the ceiling, the high clear windows, more manuscripts, illuminations, taking care not to talk too loudly. Though the story about having to come to Rome to look at manuscripts was in one sense a fabrication – the British Museum contains everything a calligrapher could ever want or ask for – I could not help now but be excited to be surrounded by so many great examples of my art. Whenever I see close-up – hold in my hands – the work of the true masters, hundreds and in some cases thousands of years old, I feel as though I can almost talk to them, as though the scribe has just put down his quill and popped next door for his bread and cheese and will be back any minute. All the intervening centuries just dissolve away. There’s a quality in the movement of the ink – breathtakingly beautiful, yes, but effortlessly so when in the hands of men whose lifelong, day-to-day work it was and lacking the self-conscious cramp of all but a handful of modern artists – a quality which makes the words seem forever freshly written. More than in any other artistic form, I think, you can see and feel the intimate making of the constituent parts even as you behold the magnificent impact of the completed whole. The experience is both acutely humbling and at the same time uplifting.
‘My God, what is that?’ Madeleine was pointing at a single sheet, which was pressed and bound between two thin panes of plastic glass. ‘Who could read that?’
I walked to where she was standing. ‘That’s called Ravenna Chancery script. I know, it looks like a spider crawled across the page.’
‘When’s it from?’ She picked up the glass tablet with care. ‘It looks very precious.’
‘I don’t know exactly – you’d have to ask Cedric. But it’s called a sub-Roman hand because it is one of those that emerged with the new kingdoms after the Roman Empire began to fall apart. So my guess would be between 500 and 700– or something like that.’
‘Can you read it?’
‘I can make out the words – yes. But my Latin isn’t very –’
‘What does it say?’
‘I think it is some kind of list.’ I pointed. ‘You can see that the scribe is using loads of what we call abbreviation bars – those long thin swirls under the words. Something about a register of witnesses. I don’t think the document itself is that special – what it actually records, I mean – but it’s important as an example.’
‘But why is it so hard to read?’
‘It wasn’t. Not to the people in the Ravenna Chancery because it’s in their own particular hand – and they liked it that way, nice and distinctive and individual.’
‘It looks mad.’
‘It’s meant to look idiosyncratic. Each place developed their own particular style and took great pride in it. They’re like different dialects or different regional forms of architecture, all with their own oddities, although, of course, everybody travelled around and different features got mixed up, so you do get lots of hybrids and cross-referencing and variations and so on – like you get people speaking French with a German accent in Alsace or whatever.’
I had started talking in the librarian’s whisper. ‘Ravenna is famous because it’s a very attenuated script – fine-nibbed – as well as being full of contractions and abbreviations. It’s really a development of an earlier cursive, more Roman ha—’
‘Cursive? What does that mean?’
‘Cursive is what we call a script designed for speed – so you’ll get fewer pen lifts and more devices called ligatures – joined letters like the ‘A’ and the ‘E’ there – and lots of loops. And yet Ravenna is also very elegant and formalized – like with the high ‘L’s, or that descender on the ‘R’, or the way that all the line ends have flourishes. Which is what makes it so distinctive – the combination of momentum with sophistication.’
‘Can you write like this?’ She looked at me quizzically.
‘No. Not straightaway. I’ve never learned Ravenna, but I could – with practice and time. It’s like studying a new piece of music. You have to break it down and learn bit by bit and it takes ages – but a sound underl
ying technique will be a massive help.’
‘Show me a script that you can do then.’
‘Here –’ I leant over a leather-bound book that was lying open on the desk. ‘This is a Book of Hours, a kind of prayer guide, which a noblewoman might have owned – there are lots of these – and this is called Carolingian Minuscule. It’s one of the first that professional calligraphers have to learn because it became like a model hand. In the late 700s, from Charlemagne onwards, it was the script that got disseminated throughout Europe because – look, you can see – it was a more disciplined and clearer alternative to all the others that were flying about. You could say that it was an early effort at standardization – the answer to your problems with Ravenna, if you like.’
‘It’s beautiful. I can even read it a bit – “admirabile est nomen”. And look at these pictures.’ She ran her finger gently over the vellum. ‘They’re still so bright – they must have taken weeks to do.’
‘They used proper colours for their illuminations in those days. That blue is made from ground lapis lazuli – they had to hike it in from Persia – the most prized pigment of all: the colour of heaven and the Virgin’s clothes. And yes – it takes a long time to do. But illumination was a separate job back then.’
‘Have you got to illuminate all the poems?’
‘No,’ I smiled. ‘Not anything like this. I’m just going to style and flourish the initials of the first verses. Illumination would probably take me another two years at least – if I were going to do all thirty poems. Anyway, it wouldn’t look right on Donne. He needs to be spare and black and white and stark and unwavering. But the last thing I did was a single sonnet – Shakespeare – and that was fully illustrated – cupids and everything.’
‘And what’s the script that you’re doing at the moment? Bastard Gothic or something, you said?’
‘Bâtarde. It’s called Bâtarde.’ I walked along a shelf and pulled down some of the books. This was a calligrapher’s paradise: Rustic Roman Capitals, Half Uncial, Cursive Half Uncial, New Roman Cursive; something that looked like Ravenna again – maybe a Merovingian Chancery; some crazy stuff I had never even seen before; lots of Littera Documentaria Pontificalis; and so on and so on. ‘I can’t see any Bâtarde,’ I said, after a while. ‘But I’m going to order some up anyway. So I’ll show you when you come back, if Father Cedric doesn’t kidnap you and lock you in a cell somewhere for his eternal pleasure. Or worse, make you confess.’
Later, sometime after two, as we joined the surprisingly short queue to enter the Coliseum – or rather, as I stood in line while Madeleine went off to fetch some more bottles of water (a task which somehow managed to take her the precise number of minutes it took me to reach the kiosk), I asked her idly what Cedric and she had talked about.
‘It’s getting even hotter,’ she said, ignoring my question as I handed over the entrance fee.
‘We’ll catch a taxi up one of the hills after this,’ I suggested, ‘and do nothing all afternoon.’
‘What about Moses with Horns?’ She asked, adjusting her headscarf. ‘I want to see him now he’s become such a talking point.’
‘OK, we’ll say hello to Moses. He’s only just up the road. Then we can relax.’
We walked together beneath the imposing entrance, imagining, on Madeleine’s suggestion, that we had come to see a gang of Christians die. A few steps beneath the arch and we stood on the threshold of the arena and the great tiers of grey- and sand-coloured travertine stone rose up on all sides to greet us – grimy, ruined, but still mighty – with the blue sky framed through each of the uppermost arches. We stood by the rail at the edge of the great oval and looked down at the deep and narrow maze of passageways where the animals and slaves had been kept beneath a wooden floor.
‘We talked about all sorts,’ Madeleine said, lighting a cigarette. ‘Actually Father Cedric told me quite a bit about you and your grandmother.’
‘He doesn’t know anything about me.’
‘He knows what your grandmother has told him.’
‘Which I doubt is very much.’
‘They see each other every day. And apparently they worked together before – in Oxford. He did some sort of librarian’s exams there one summer.’
‘Did he?’
‘He knows, for instance, that you used to do portraits of people.’
‘I was never any good.’
‘That’s not what Cedric seemed to think. He said that you used to sit in libraries and draw pencil sketches and that you won some kind of competition.’
I looked sideways at her. ‘Really not. I won this minor thing advertised in the local newspaper when I was six.’
‘And another prize when you were at Cambridge – a scholarship to be funded for a year and –’
‘Jesus Christ. Again, minor. Madeleine – seriously – there were fewer than twenty entries. It was a university scam they ran for the poor students who were on full grants.’
‘Yeah – but you entered, right? And you won?’
She stood back from the railings and we filed along until we reached the gangplank that ran the length of the arena to the glorious gate of death on the far side. We stopped as near as we could judge to the centre and spun ourselves around three hundred and sixty degrees, looking up.
When we were back to back, she said: ‘And he told me about your mother.’
‘What about my mother?’
‘That she was an actress. That you have copies of her films but you never watch them. Is that why you don’t have a video recorder, so you –’
‘No. It’s not. And how the fuck would Cedric know whether or not I watched my mother’s films?’
‘She was going to be quite a star, wasn’t she – just before she died?’
‘Yes. She was.’
In silence, we followed a thousand American sports shoes up the interior stairs that led to the gallery and emerged into the hot sun, halfway up the steep terraced sides. We circled halfway around, found an empty ruined-stone alcove and sat down with our backs to the iron railings. I opened up my bag and handed out the sandwiches, provisions from the morning’s foray: fresh bread, tomatoes from the vine, fresh basil and chopped olives, and the sacred prosciutto di montagna. We sat and ate for a while, trying to imagine watching death live. The distance from our seat to the sandy floor of the arena seemed much further looking down than it had when looking up from below.
‘To unknown mothers,’ she said.
I touched my water bottle with hers. ‘To unknown mothers.’
My grandmother’s latest local was a low-key, family run, gingham-clothed restaurant, occupying one side of a small piazza near the Teatro Marcello. Twin rosemary bushes squatted in huge pots on either side of the entrance and every table leg was bedevilled by Italian cobbles. Although it was only around the corner from her apartment, and although we were exactly on time, there was no sign of Grandmother or Professor Williams when we arrived.
I said my grandmother’s name to the woman who came out and she smiled broadly as though I were telling her a funny joke that she did not quite understand. Mrs Jackson, she declared, always has the table on the corner, nearest to the fountain.
We sat down and she brought bread, olives and a plate of pickled chillies. Madeleine set about the chillies as though they were the most delicious things she had ever tasted, while I picked up the handwritten wine list and tried to remember which was my grandmother’s favourite.
‘Do you think there are as many types of olives as there are grapes?’ she asked.
‘Without a doubt.’
She picked up another chilli and began to more or less drink it. ‘Do you ever think about coming to live here instead of London?’
‘All the time.’
‘How old is your grandmother?’
‘Seventy-eight. Go on, have the last one – they’ll bring us some more.’
Ever since we had set off from Trastevere, Madeleine had been unusually chatty, noticing the names of
streets, talking about what she called ‘my music and your music’ and pulling me into shops to look at shoes or clothes that she was never going to buy. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I sensed that she was nervous. And perhaps I too was apprehensive.
‘Let’s have white wine while we wait,’ I said, ‘I fancy something really light and –’
‘Hello there!’ A reedy voice hailed us from the fountain steps. ‘Sorry I’m late. Hello. Oh wonderful – wonderful, the best table.’ Grandmother was coming across the square at double speed. Along with her pair of rather stylish charcoal-coloured cashmere trousers, she sported brand-new whiter-than-white trainers and what looked like a woollen cloche hat. ‘Sorry we’re late. There was a terrible incident outside my flat – two men bickering about a parking place and the whole square gathered around to watch. We couldn’t get through. It’s the bloody bella figura is what it is.’
I stood and hugged her. She felt light and small, but irreducible. Her eyes were alight and alive with obvious delight. And it struck me then that in all her life she had never before used the first person plural when talking to me, despite the fact that good old Professor Williams had been her ‘brave escort’ for at least twenty-five years.
The man himself had caught up and was standing right beside her, beaming away and waiting patiently for us to finish our embrace.
‘Hello, Jasper,’ he said, clasping my hand warmly, ‘it’s been a year or two – Grace tells me that you’re flourishing.’
I laughed. A bad calligraphy joke. But the professor’s good nature was irresistible.
Madeleine was also standing. I turned.
‘Grandma, Professor Williams, this is Madeleine, she’s –’
‘Hello, Madeleine, how nice to meet you at last.’ My grandmother leaned over and kissed her three times, Italian style. ‘I’m afraid Jasper has been keeping you a secret but I’m glad he’s letting us share you now – if only for tonight. Us oldies like to be reminded of how good we looked when we were your age.’