by Simon Mawer
Remove the occasion and you remove the sin.
Leo Newman, awkward and withdrawn junior seminarian, stood aside and invited the occasion in, and it sat there prim and rapacious before him in the chintz armchair where his mother normally sat, its knees pressed together, its mouth (a dark red bud like the mouth of a Pre-Raphaelite Madonna) pursed in an expression of studied allure, its patent leather shoes settled on the carpet like tiny little coffins; while the crucified Christ watched from the wall above the piano on whose lucid surface the silver-framed relatives (dead father, deader grandparents) watched like a grim jury.
‘Tea?’ he asked. ‘Would you like tea?’
Yes, she told him, yes she would like tea.
Inviting Elise in and assuring her of his mother’s imminent return was also the only initiative that he took in the whole of the affair. Every other move – the artful, arch conversation they held over a cup of tea, the promise to meet in the Botanical Gardens the following afternoon, the hot, damp kisses which they finally exchanged two weekends later, all of those were Elise’s. Elise was practised and eager: he was hesitant and shy. ‘You do this, you silly,’ she said, and he found her tongue, as wet and warm as a tropical fish, flapping around inside his mouth. ‘And if you touch my bosom I will not mind, although you may not put your hand up my skirt, for that is vulgar so early on in our relationship.’ Her breast was a soft bud of a thing, live beneath his fingers. As he touched it she remained as still as a bird.
There followed a season of assignations without his mother’s knowledge, a random collection of walks along the canal, of nervous and distasteful gropings on discreet park benches (once they were moved on by a policeman, another time shouted at by a woman), all culminating in a climactic visit to a malodorous cinema during which Elise reversed her previous proscription. Her breath in Leo’s ear was a soft and sultry thing, more sensation than suggestion: ‘Touch me there,’ it whispered. And he did, twisting his hand upward and inward (an awkward trick that he could only improvise) over nylon and a curve of bare flesh, past elastic, past gusset, to find the sudden surprise of hair and a soft and malleable wetness, like something that one might discover, groping with blind hands, in a rock-pool: something bearded and molluscan.
Excitement? Tumescence? Of course. And revulsion. Elise stirred in her seat, as though in some kind of pain. Leo stopped and withdrew his hand. He felt stained with sin, and his fingers were glutinous with the material evidence of it.
‘Where are you going?’ she whispered.
Remove the occasion and you remove the sin. Remove the evidence and you remove the sin. He was going to wash, in the inadequate benison of cold water, amidst the familiar, comforting, ammoniac smell of the men’s lavatory. And when he returned she was sitting there in the shadows with her eyes on the screen – Elvis Presley? – and her skirt down to her knees and her mind on other matters. ‘Did you do it?’ she whispered as he resumed his seat.
‘Shhhh!’ a voice urged from behind.
‘Do what?’ Leo asked. He watched her profile in the light thrown back from the screen. She was smiling. ‘You know what I mean,’ she whispered. ‘If you’re good, I’ll do it for you next time. I’ve done it to boys before, you know. I know how.’
Sin and the occasion of sin. Remove the occasion and you remove the sin. The first and foremost rule of celibacy.
‘You have been walking out with Elise,’ his mother remarked unexpectedly the next day. It was often difficult to judge her tone. Anger? Impatience? Reproach? There was no point in denying the matter. Doubtless one of her friends had spied on them (that shouting woman?) and reported the matter to head office. She watched him coldly as he sat there blushing, and behind his blush was the remarkable thought that, beneath his mother’s skirt, between her bony thighs, couched in ample directoire knickers, she too was like that. Sin was always there, lurking in the shadows, watching and waiting like a rapist.
‘You must stop seeing her,’ she said flatly. ‘It would not be right if you should become too close, and it is impossible to see much of a young girl without becoming too close.’ And then she smiled. She smiled across the tea-table, the doors open behind her on the exiguous urban garden where sunlight came down in curtains amongst the glistening shrubs. Her smile was a small banner of triumph hung across her face. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘Elise Goodman is a Jewess.’
‘We all of us suffer from temptations of the flesh. Of one kind or another.’ Thus one of young Leo’s instructors in the seminary, facing up to the troubling issue of Elise and her like, pacing around his study as though he might surprise wanton lust hiding among the bookshelves and the armchairs and the prie-dieu. A crucified Christ hung reproachfully on the wall in front of the student’s gaze. ‘Remember that in canon law only a complete man may be ordained priest. Neither eunuch, nor homosexual. So you mustn’t worry about such desires, and nor must you dwell on them. My advice is …’ the priest lowered his voice lest the heresy be overheard ‘… to find relief for yourself if it becomes too much to support.’ He rubbed his hands briskly, almost as though to show the way. ‘It is – was – my experience that such feelings are transient and superficial and once you have found relief they disappear. Rather like quenching one’s thirst. Once you have had a glass of water the matter is closed. Of course, this is only a … ah … stopgap method. An emergency. A lesser sin in order to assuage a greater. It must not become habit. With discipline and prayer, you should be able to obviate the need for such emergency measures. Remove the occasion and you remove the sin. Sublimation is what the psychologists call it’ – he was a self-confessed liberal, this paternal father – ‘but it is really no more than directing our energies to the service of the Lord.’ He smiled and patted Leo on the knee encouragingly.
Thus Elise and her kind were banished to hidden parts of Leo’s mind. Thus he was reconciled with his mother. Thus he was reconciled with his vocation. The ritual of the liturgy and the demands of faith re-established their equilibrium. All the answers you may wish for lie within faith, but it demands a complete and incontinent surrender, an immersion as total as any baptism. Indeed baptism is a kind of enactment of the surrender: you bathe in faith, you swim in it, you live by it, surrounded by it, buoyed up by it, engulfed by it. You drown in it, for at times it takes your breath away as entirely as any lungful of water. The sheer outrage of it, the boldness of it, the incomparable drama of the fact that the universe, the whole universe, condensed itself into the form of one single man and that he walked this earth and walks it still.
‘The word faith, pistis, and its derived verb pisteuo, occurs more than 240 times in the New Testament. John employs the verb ninety-eight times. Often it is qualified with the preposition eis, with the significance into. This is the significance given to saving faith, the need to commit body and soul to a union with Christ. Elsewhere it is qualified by epi, upon …’ Thus Leo Newman, a new man, lecturing to a group of young seminarians, and feeling like a soldier who has been to the front line and heard the shells coming down, and is now passing the experience on to raw recruits. Soldiers of Christ, they look back at him with earnest faces, hoping that he will teach them the tricks of survival. It was interesting to find the same military metaphor employed by a former pupil, now a priest running a parish in Liverpool:
I remember your lectures in the seminary, he wrote. We looked to you as one of the examples to follow, one of the leaders who would show us the way forward into battle, and now see what you have done. How many souls have you dragged down to the flames with you? How many innocent lives are lost?
All the answers lie in faith; and when you lose your faith you have no choice but to substitute for it a philosophy that deliberately and coldly offers no answers at all.
4
Take a family group out on a picnic. To Sutri and the Etruscan country to the north of Rome. To woods and sudden gorges, to brown cliffs punctuated with tombs, and hidden, bramble-ridden staircases. Jack was driving the first car, with friends
(Howard and Gemma from London, staying the weekend) in the next. Newman was in the back of the leading car, an extra, something sterile but vaguely interesting, like an artefact from some remote archaeological period. There were also the two daughters, newly back from boarding school, seated on either side of him and on either side of the great divide of self-consciousness, the older one, Katz, consumed with blushes and silence whenever he spoke, the other, Claire, stark in her observation of his condition. ‘You don’t look like a priest,’ she said.
‘What do priests look like?’
‘Priests are just ordinary people,’ Madeleine put in, glancing over the front seat at the girls.
‘No they’re not. Priests are boring.’
There was laughter from the adults.
‘Father Leo’s not boring. He’s quite famous, really. He writes about the Bible in the newspapers.’
Newman tried to change the subject. ‘The Pope’s a priest,’ he suggested.
‘The Pope’s boring,’ the younger child asserted, and Catherine blushed for shame.
‘The Pope loves every one of us,’ Madeleine said. ‘That’s what makes him just a teeny bit dull.’
Outside the town there was the ancient amphitheatre, and rows of tombs in the cliff. They parked the car and went to look. ‘Where are the dead people now?’ Claire asked, peering in the open doorways at damp, bare floors. ‘Did they go to heaven?’
It was an intriguing theological point. ‘Where did they go,’ Madeleine asked, ‘all those millions who could never have known about Christ for the simple fact that they lived before he was even born?’
‘We don’t know,’ Leo said.
‘Well, we can’t just dismiss them, can we? They were, in their time, as real as you and me. Even now, if death has no dimension of time, they remain as real as, say, your dead mother or my dead father.’
‘Limbo,’ suggested Jack. ‘Isn’t that the special place you’ve dreamt up for that kind of problem?’
‘Limbo’s for babies, silly,’ answered the older of the two girls.
The little theological debate spluttered on as the group looked round the tombs. The path led along the foot of a cliff and then climbed a moss-shrouded ramp to where a sign announced the chapel of the Madonna del Parto, Our Lady of Birth – once, so the guidebook said, a mithraeum. The place was entirely excavated from the rock: pillars, aisles, a narrow apse, everything. It smelt of damp and age, a sour, claustrophobic smell. ‘Leo knows all about mithraeums,’ Madeleine said to her husband. ‘Or should that be mithraea? He took us to one underneath San Clemente.’
Leo found that he wanted her to look at him, that was what was so disturbing. He even talked volubly so that she would. As they poked around the shadows of the cave he expounded on the subject of Mithras, of bulls and sacrifice and the secret rites of initiation into the mysteries, of the bull’s seminal fluid impregnating the whole world; and she did look, watching him with a secretive smile that may have been amusement, may have been imbued with something like sympathy. ‘The way that Christianity won,’ he told them, ‘was by abjuring the exclusive, by welcoming anyone, by having nothing to hide.’
‘What’s abjuring?’ the elder of the girls asked. ‘Why do you use big words all the time?’ And Jack laughed, and asked, ‘Why do you use big words all the time?’
‘Because small ones won’t do,’ Leo said.
They went back to the car and into the town. Leo held the younger child’s hand as they walked through the narrow, shabby alleys. ‘Shall I show you something?’ he said to her. ‘Do you know a man called Pontius Pilate?’
‘Of course,’ Claire said immediately. ‘He killed Jesus.’
‘The Jews killed Jesus,’ Catherine corrected her. ‘It says that in the Bible. The Jews killed Jesus.’
‘The Romans killed Jesus.’
‘The Jews.’ It threatened to become one of those ridiculous childish arguments – did, didn’t, did, didn’t, did.
‘Leo’s Jewish,’ said Madeleine.
Jack seemed startled. ‘Are you?’
Leo tried to shrug the matter away: ‘Newman, Neumann. There was a conversion in my family early this century. My grandmother.’ He knew what Jack was thinking. Jack had a sharp diplomat’s mind and wouldn’t miss a thing like that. As they walked through the town towards the main square, past alimentari and bar, Leo felt the cold wind of jealousy blowing through his mind. Why had Madeleine betrayed that fragile, insignificant confidence?
‘Did you kill Jesus, then?’ Claire asked.
‘How could a priest kill Jesus, silly?’
‘What about Pontius Pilate?’
‘He wasn’t a priest.’
‘He was a Roman. And Father Leo’s a Roman Catholic.’
‘So are you.’
‘I’m not …’
‘You are, so.’
‘I think the children should shut up,’ Jack decided.
The main square of the town was like a stage set, with fountain and café and Municipal building, and a host of extras hanging around as though waiting for the orchestra to strike up and the overture to begin. Leo led the way across to the palazzo on the far side. A stone plaque beside the entrance proclaimed the Municipio, the council offices. The building was plastered in rust-red stucco and the entrance archway was decorated with marble fragments that had been turned up in the fields round about the town, a litter of bits and pieces hung on the walls at random, like dandruff clinging to a flushed scalp.
‘It’s here,’ he said, nervous that it would not strike the girls, for really it was not much, a mere plaque, a mere inscription, a trivial witness from the past. He couldn’t judge children, their mixture of innocence and sophistication, their honesty and their mendacity.
The group shuffled round and looked up to where he pointed. And the word Pontii stood out from the epigraphic muddle, some reference to a local family, the gens Pontii.
‘So what?’
What, indeed? The only evidence, if evidence it be, for the Italian existence of a lesser colonial administrator with a chip on his shoulder and a pushy wife: Pontius Pilate. The most famous Roman there has ever been. There’s no competition really, is there? Forget Julius Caesar or Tiberius. How many Christians are there in the world? A thousand million? Apart from the Virgin Mary, Pontius Pilate is the only human being mentioned in the creed. So his name is on the lips of every single one of those thousand million Christians, every time he or she goes to church. That’s fame for you.
‘This is where he came from. This was his home town.’ And added ‘possibly’, sotto voce, lest it ruin his paltry story.
So Leo told the Brewer family and their friends about Pilate on that early spring day at Sutri, when the wind was colder than it ought to have been and he was eager for Madeleine’s attention. He talked of Pontius Pilate to the girls, to Madeleine, to Jack if he was listening, to Howard and Gemma if they cared. He gave him some kind of appearance – hair cut short, chin shaved clean: a sharp contrast to his bearded subjects – and sketched out a character of sorts – the kind of man who believed in the Republican virtues, in the rule of law, in duty to the state and honour to the ancestors. A man who had made a useful marriage and had now stepped on to the first rung in the ladder of imperial ambition. Pontius Pilatus, a knight of the equestrian class, who might now aspire to one of the greatest prizes of all – Egypt. Pontius Pilate, who gained the favour of the Emperor’s adviser Sejanus and was sent to Judaea in the summer of the twelfth year of the reign of Tiberius.
‘Rather like British India,’ said Jack, who had been listening.
‘Exactly like British India,’ Leo agreed. ‘The same fat, idle princelings sending their children to Rome or London for education – Herod’s children all went there. There were the same strange religions, the same holy men with mad expressions and a dangerous role in politics, the same local politicians with their eye on the main chance. And the same kind of blundering colonial administration.’
‘You could use
it as a case study at the FCO,’ said Howard.
‘Poor Pilate,’ said Catherine.
‘Why poor?’
‘Because he had no choice,’ she said, with the sudden insight of the young. ‘Jesus had to die, so Pilate had no choice. Neither did Judas.’
‘And what about Mrs Pilate?’ asked Madeleine.
They walked back to the car, back to the tombs and the amphitheatre. ‘The tradition is that she was called Claudia. Claudia Procula. According to Origen she became a Christian and the Greek Orthodox Church even canonised her. Saint Claudia. But legend also has it that she was Sejanus’ mistress and that’s how Pilate got the job.’
‘What’s a mistress?’ asked Claire. ‘I thought it was a teacher.’
The adults laughed. Sisterly duty overcame Catherine’s embarrassment. ‘A mistress is a lady friend,’ she said firmly.
‘Is Mummy Father Leo’s mistress, then?’ the younger girl asked. She wondered, no doubt, why her words brought more laughter. Maybe she wondered why Father Leo reddened. Maybe in later years she would remember that incident, and see in its small moments of awkwardness and amusement a strange foreboding.
They had returned to the amphitheatre. Jack and the girls and the two guests from London had gone ahead into the centre of the circle of rock. The tiers of seats rose up around them. Madeleine and Leo stood at the entrance looking across the grass to where the others posed like figures on a stage.
‘Why did you tell Jack about my being Jewish?’ Leo asked her.
She seemed surprised at his tone. ‘Is it a secret?’