The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  On the far side of the road in an entry next to the small row of shops, an ambling figure who had obviously not long left the bar on the square was throwing a tarpaulin over the back of a pick-up truck, which the light of his cigarette revealed to be filled with large round dark objects Marcus took to be watermelons. In a second Nazreem had crossed the road and was doing her best to communicate in an elementary Spanish that she had somehow acquired with her customary facility. Not that it seemed to be doing her any good.

  ‘Mañana,’ the man was insisting, waving his cigarette airily at the darkness.

  ‘Ya es mañana,’ Nazreem tried back.

  ‘Si, si,’ the man said, hiccupping good-humoredly, obviously amused at being accosted by a pretty young woman in the early hours of the morning. ‘Pero mañana en la mañana,’ he replied, smiling broadly but slightly wearily.

  ‘Donde?’ Nazreem was trying. Where was he going? Nowhere, thought Marcus, except to bed. At least if he’d any sense.

  ‘Donde? Cáceres. Mañana. En la mañana.’

  ‘Hoy, ahora. Now. Por favor.’

  ‘No, no es posible.’

  Then suddenly Marcus felt Nazreem reach for his wallet, and the next second she was holding two large green hundred-euro notes in her hand and the situation seemed to have subtly altered. The man was scratching his head and wavering, and then Nazreem was putting the money away again.

  ‘No, momento. Momento.’

  ‘Ahora,’ she said again. ‘Pero no Cáceres. Avila. Norte.’

  Marcus was doing his best to follow, reluctantly admiring her haggling skills in a language she barely knew, but then she had grown up in Cairo.

  ‘Avila?’ the man seemed more perplexed than ever and was shaking his head again, holding up his fingers, three of them. ‘Tres. Tres horas.’ Three hours, the same time it had taken them to get from Madrid?

  ‘Tres,’ Nazreem responded, and pulled out a third green note. Marcus realised it hadn’t been driving time the man was talking about.

  ‘Y media,’ the man said, smiling now, holding out his hand

  ‘No media, no más,’ Nazreem said, proferring the notes, but still holding them tight. ‘Ahora?’

  ‘Bueno,’ the man shrugged, threw his cigarette butt away shaking his head and holding out his hand. ‘Vamos. Let’s go,’ he said, suddenly discovering a bit of misplaced English as he shook Nazreem by the hand and pocketed Marcus’s money, throwing open the door of the pickup cab.

  ‘You do realise this is completely crazy,’ said Marcus, deliberately scrabbling up into the middle seat. It was bad enough being driven God knows where in the dead of the night by some drunk Spaniard without the man getting distracted and letting his hands wander over towards Nazreem. She piled in next, banging the door in after her. The man behind the wheel coughed, the engine spluttered into life and they were off, an improbable threesome in an old Toyota with a loosely wrapped cargo of watermelons bouncing behind them. The moon disappeared behind a cloud and Marcus wished he knew a prayer worth saying.

  For the first few kilometres their driver made a brave attempt at conversation, a torture Marcus was prepared to suffer if only to keep the man awake. But the limited amount of their common language gratefully restricted any actual exchange of information to a few brief semi-understood comments on watermelons, monasteries (both bueno) and what Marcus took to be a last-ditch attempt to persuade them to change their minds and go to Cáceres because it was nearer. This mostly consisted of Nazreem and the driver swapping the names of their preferred destinations, a bit of disconcerting hand gesturing during which the steering lurched alarmingly, and only ended definitively when they came to a main road and the driver one final time made a plea for left and Cáceres, only to be told a firm no and Avila. A resigned ‘Por qué Avila?’ brought the limited explanation. ‘Train? Ah, treno, bueno.’ And that was that.

  As far as the driver was concerned anyhow. For the first time Marcus realised that Nazreem’s intention went beyond simply getting away from Guadalupe and the black Madonna she had been so keen to see in the first place. He had been loath to ply her with too many questions in the cab of the pickup, both of them taking it in turns to grab a few minutes’ sleep while the other made sure the driver stayed on the road. But as they rattled over the last sierra down onto a long straight road that had obviously been laid out when the main traffic was the rhythmic slap of Roman legionaries’ sandals, he forced his reluctant brain back into gear.

  ‘We’re catching the train from Avila. Where to? And why?’

  ‘There was no point in going back to Madrid,’ she said. ‘Besides that’s what anyone would expect. I checked the timetables in the hotel. From Avila there’s a good connection to Valladolid, where we can pick up the international line north.’

  ‘North?’

  ‘Yes, of course north. To Paris, and then London. For you: home.’

  Part Four

  … NUNC, ET IN HORA MORTIS!

  … Now, and at the hour of our death!

  54

  ‘I don’t like it and I’m not going to pretend I like it.’

  The big Marine hushed the man next to him: ‘Operational necessity, reverend. You can’t always choose your short-term allies. Let me tell you: I’ve been there. Out in Saudi Arabia in the First Gulf War those goddamn ragheads wouldn’t even let us praise the Lord in our own camps, or give our boys a Christian funeral. Not even when our boys had died defending their goddamn country.’

  The reverend closed his eyes as if doing so would prevent him from hearing such infamy.

  ‘That’s right. It wasn’t nice, but we gritted our teeth, because that’s what we had orders to do. Now we have to work alongside some other shits, but we’re still under orders, orders from the Lord, ain’t that right, reverend?’

  The reverend nodded, acknowledging the trials that faith required of the godly. ‘It would indeed appear that that is the truth.’

  ‘Then we’ll see those orders are carried out. And then we’ll see what we do. Okay by you?’

  The reverend nodded again. It was okay by him. It was not as if he had a choice. The two men were sitting at a table in the Madrid apartment with a jug of coffee and a plate of half-eaten takeaway enchiladas which both of them had agreed were nothing like the stuff they got back home. The food had been fetched from a nearby restaurant by José, strictly accompanied by two of the Arabs, as both Americans referred to them. He had tried to persuade Freddie to eat some, and protested angrily that the injured man urgently needed a doctor. The protest, however, had been ignored; Freddie had been given a high dose of painkillers, the remains of his mutilated ear treated with proprietary antiseptics, bandaged up and he was now sleeping deeply on the same bed on which he had twenty-four hours earlier thrown the drugged Marcus. José sat slumped in the armchair next to him, alternately dozing and channel-surfing with the TV remote.

  The Islamists, their dark hoods now removed to reveal the typical sallow complexions of southern Mediterranean-Middle Easterners – based on a few overheard words of what he thought was French, the reverend was coming round to the opinion that they might actually be Algerians – stood outside in the hallway, their weapons prominently on display, more like armed jailers than allies. Their spiritual and military leader had disappeared, although the Americans doubted he was far distant. He had given them strict instructions – it was hard to interpret the terms of their relationship otherwise – that their role in their common enterprise was, for the moment at least, primarily technological.

  And although the Reverend Parker was less than happy with the colonel’s seeming rationalisation of their situation, he was the military man, and if he was content to bide his time then that was what they would do.

  The colonel pushed the half-finished enchiladas to one side, pulled out his iPhone, and touched the GPS icon.

  ‘Well now, look what we got here.’

  On the screen appeared a map of central Madrid. The app worked in conjunction with Google Maps
which allowed him to zoom in to a relatively high degree of accuracy. He reckoned it was probably possible even to work out exactly which building the phone was in. But thanks to the SIM card-sized transmitter he had slipped inside Marcus Frey’s phone, it also told him with the same degree of accuracy where the ‘professor’ was. It was, he liked to think, a reliable and, provided the other party was unaware of it, infinitely kinder way of keeping someone on a tight leash.

  The Reverend Parker did as he was told, watching the map of Madrid disappear as if seen from a soaring rocket ship, then the screen refocus on a flashing red spot to the southwest of the capital amid the dark greens of the Spanish Mesa pine forests and the russet browns where they gave way to barren rock.

  ‘That’s Guadalupe?’ he asked, uncertain of the degree of detail or magnification on an unfamiliar landscape.

  ‘No,’ the colonel said, ‘and slid thumb and forefinger apart across the touchscreen to magnify the image of the landscape until it was almost filled with an irregular sandstone-coloured geometric shape. ‘That’s Guadalupe. The monastery itself, in fact. Big, isn’t it?’

  The minister nodded. ‘But the point is,’ the colonel said, ‘our friends are no longer there. They’re on the move. Look.’

  He pulled thumb and forefinger together and the landscape grew again until now a red dot appeared in the centre of the screen, and almost immediately moved a few millimetres up it. ‘They’re heading north by northeast and from what I can make out,’ he performed a few more manipulations, running his finger across screen, ‘they’re in a vehicle of some sort, heading along this road.’ The map on the screen tilted and turned as if he were playing some sort of helicopter simulation, bringing the landscape itself into an approximation of relief contours, while road numbers flashed up and place names appeared: ‘They could be heading for Cáceres, although I doubt it, because there’s a more direct route from Guadalupe, or they could be making for Avila. Neither makes a whole heap of sense just at the moment. What I’d really like to know is: why? Have they cut some sort of deal with the abbot? Is he driving them? I wish to hell I had one of these little GPS bugs on that bastard too. Or have they cut and run?’

  ‘What do we do?’

  The Texan leaned back, his eyes resting on the little dot as it moved northwards, towards the edge of the laptop screen. He ran a finger over the trackpad and repositioned it in the centre. ‘Right now, we do nothing. I believe in giving a man a lot of rope, especially if I anticipate eventually having to hang him with it.’

  55

  The turreted walls of Avila stood sentry round the heart of the ancient city like a fantasy made from children’s sandcastles upended out of plastic buckets. As they had done for the better part of a thousand years.

  Despite his training as a historian, the colonial boy in Marcus Frey found certain parts of Europe’s flagrant flaunting of its incalculable heritage just a little too in-your-face. These crenellated walls, stretched in a perfect ring around a mediaeval city centre to create an ensemble as impressive as the great monastery they had just left in Guadalupe. The landscape in most of Europe had nothing on the South African Veldt, but the architecture sang of history. Maybe the abbot was right; the fusion of history and art was a religion in itself. If that’s what he had been saying. Marcus was still far from sure.

  Deep down there was something about a place like this that tugged at his soul. And no matter how uncomfortable he felt with it, the only word he could come up with was ‘Christendom’.

  ‘How long have we got to spend here?’

  ‘A couple of hours at most,’ said Nazreem. ‘Then we catch the train to Valladolid with a connection to Hendaye, on the French frontier, where we can pick up a train direct to Paris.’

  ‘I still think it would have been quicker and easier via Madrid.’

  ‘It would, but how sure are you that we would have got away with it? I mean at least here we’re away from the whole “Mary” thing.’

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘Aren’t we?’

  ‘It depends what you mean. I just had this feeling, as we drove into town, about how religion pervades our culture. And if the religion is corrupted …’

  ‘What is the problem with Avila?’

  ‘Its saint. The way the abbot talked about pagan deities and Christian saints. It’s been on my mind. Do you remember Saint Konrad, from Altötting, the one who had been sanctified despite not having done much more than been a doorman at the shrine all his life?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nazreem, with a sudden smile. She had found it hard not to laugh out loud when Marcus had told her what he found out about the man’s claim to sanctity.

  ‘Well, what if it was not so much the man as the job he was elevating to the “pantheon” of saints.’

  ‘A god of doormen?’

  ‘A parallel for Janus – the Roman god of entries and exits, beginnings and endings. Where we get the word “January” from.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  Marcus shrugged. ‘How would I know. My field is history not religion, though the lines are blurring fast here. It’s just that there was a sign back there welcoming us to Avila, city of Saint Teresa.’

  ‘There is a special saint for this town?’ Nazreem was no longer surprised by anything.

  ‘A patron saint. That’s the thing about Catholicism. It agglutinates.’

  ‘It what?’

  ‘It builds upon itself. Like a cancer.’

  ‘So who is the saint of Avila?’

  ‘I’d forgotten,’ he said. ‘Until now: Saint Teresa. Or at least that’s what they call her. But you could argue Aphrodite would be a better name.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘There’s not much to explain. She was a local girl who ran away from home, had a mystical experience, came back and reformed the Carmelite order of nuns. But the reason for her fame is a statue. A quite extraordinary statue. Not here, though. It’s in Rome.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a postcard.’

  There was. In fact picture postcards of the statue followed only views of the city walls, its cathedral and little yellow egg-yolk sweets named for St Teresa as the most popular image. He picked one up from a revolving stand outside a tourist shop on the street and handed it to her.

  ‘It’s by Bernini. Around 1600, I think. Not long after she had died.’

  Marcus could not suppress the smile playing on his lips as he waited for her reaction.

  ‘This,’ she said at length, ‘is a saint!’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she was laughing and blushing at the same time. It was, Marcus suddenly remembered, one of her most endearing characteristics.

  He looked over her shoulder at the picture, just to remind himself not just of the image, but of his own scarcely believing amazement the first – and only – time he had seen it ‘in the flesh’, in the radiant chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria

  There was no doubt it was Bernini’s masterpiece, so vivid and achingly lifelike that it seemed the stone had indeed the quality of flesh, a moment frozen in time, its essence captured forever in the expressions on the faces of the two figures. And what expressions!

  ‘It’s pure pornography!’ Nazreem said at last. And it was. The critics and art historians had argued otherwise, preached the sculptor’s skill in summoning up the spirit of divine spiritual ecstasy unknown to ordinary mortals, but to the casual observer far from being exotic and unknowable it was all too familiar, ecstatic for sure but far from purely spiritual. The angel standing erect above the supine woman was more of a satyr, the smile on his face a smirk of unconcealed lechery while the saint at his feet was writhing beneath her flowing robes, her expression one of the purest, satisfied, carnal lust.

  ‘It is, isn’t it,’ agreed Marcus. ‘Either the angel of the Lord touched Saint Teresa in a way that took her seriously by surprise or she’d accidentally discovered masturbation, aided and abetted by a very vivid imagination.’ He took the card from her ha
nd and turned it over to find, as he had hoped, the relevant quotation from the saint’s own autobiography. ‘Here’s the bit that inspired Bernini,’ he said, handing it back to Nazreem.

  The verse was printed in Spanish with translations into English and Italian. Nazreem started to read it aloud, but soon let her voice fade away in amazement: ‘“I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.”’

  ‘It’s quite incredible,’ she said at the end.

  ‘Yes. That’s the trouble. It starts to seem like the whole Roman Catholic …’ he struggled for a word, and then, when the only one that seemed applicable came to mind, could not avoid an ironic twist of the lips, ‘pantheon …’

  ‘Is what?’

  ‘Just that, quite literally, a pantheon. Not saints at all, not human beings who have come close to God, but a collection of pagan gods in disguise.

  ‘You know, Nazreem, before all of this I was an agnostic, but a happy agnostic. Happy to treat Christianity as just something we lived with, dogma you could ignore happily as long as you subscribed to what we loosely called “Christian values”, and believed the world would be a better place if we imposed them on everyone.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know what you mean. I think. But so often the values and the men of religion don’t seem to go hand in hand. Like in Palestine, Iraq, the whole of what your people call the Middle East.’

  ‘The thing is,’ said Marcus, ‘that maybe we were wrong all along. Those values, maybe they were never Christian. I mean, if you asked someone to list Western Christian values today, top of the list would probably be democracy. But that wasn’t Christian at all: it had been invented in Athens, more than three hundred years before Jesus Christ was born. The same goes for Platonic love. And the ancient Greeks, including all their great humanist philosophers, got along fine with pagan gods. Christianity conquered the world via the Roman Empire, a dictatorship which had come into its own by overthrowing a republic.’