The children, being poets in a vacuum, adept at metaphor, had no trouble in transferring a similar infection to any of God’s representatives the priests. Not all priests; but one, parishless, an alien—Sliema was like another country—and having already a bad reputation, was fit vehicle for their skepticism.
Reports of him were confused. Fausto would hear—through the children or Father Avalanche—that the Bad Priest “was converting by the shores of Marsamuscetto” or “had been active in Xaghriet Mewwija.” Sinister uncertainty surrounded the priest. Elena showed no concern: did not feel that she herself had encountered any evil that day in the street, was not worried about Paola coming under any evil influence, though the Bad Priest had been known to gather about him a small knot of children in the street and give them sermons. He taught no consistent philosophy that anyone could piece together from the fragments borne back to us by the children. The girls he advised to become nuns, avoid the sensual extremes—pleasure of intercourse, pain of childbirth. The boys he told to find strength in—and be like—the rock of their island. He returned, curiously like the Generation of ’37, often to the rock: preaching that the object of male existence was to be like a crystal: beautiful and soulless. “God is soulless?” speculated Father Avalanche. “Having created souls, He Himself has none? So that to be like God we must allow to be eroded the soul in ourselves. Seek mineral symmetry, for here is eternal life: the immortality of rock. Plausible. But apostasy.”
The children were not, of course, having any. Knowing full well that if every girl became a sister there would be no more Maltese: and that rock, however fine as an object of contemplation, does no work: labors not and thus displeases God, who is favorably disposed towards human labor. So they stayed passive, letting him talk, hanging like shadows at his heels, keeping a watchful eye. Surveillance in various forms continued for three years. With an apparent abating of the Siege—begun perhaps the day of Fausto and Elena’s walk—the stalking only intensified because there was more time for it.
Intensified too—beginning, one suspects, the same day—was a friction between Fausto and Elena—the same unceasing, wearying friction of the leaves in the park that afternoon. The smaller arguments were centered, unhappily, around you, Paola. As if the pair had both rediscovered a parental duty. With more time on their hands they belatedly took up providing for their child moral guidance, mother love, comfort in moments of fear. Both were inept at it and each time their energies inevitably turned away from the child and on one another. During such times the child would more often than not slip away quietly to trail the Bad Priest.
Until one evening Elena told the rest of her meeting with the Bad Priest. The argument itself isn’t recorded in any detail; only:
Our words became more and more agitated, higher in pitch, more bitter until finally she cried, “Oh the child. I should have done what he told me . . .” Then realizing what she’d said, silence. She moved away, I caught her.
“Told you.” I shook her until she spoke. I would have killed her, I think.
“The Bad Priest,” finally, “told me not to have the child. Told me he knew of a way. I would have. But I met Father Avalanche. By accident.”
And as she had begun to pray in the park, had then apparently let the old habits reassert themselves. By accident.
I would never be telling you this had you been brought up under any illusion you were “wanted.” But having been abandoned so early to a common underworld, questions of want or possession never occurred to you. So at least I assume; not, I hope, falsely.
The day after Elena’s revelation the Luftwaffe came in thirteen times. Elena was killed early in the morning, the ambulance in which she was riding having apparently suffered a direct hit.
Word got to me at Ta Kali in the afternoon, during a lull. I don’t remember the messenger’s face. I do remember sliding the shovel into a pile of dirt and walking away. And then a blank space.
The next I knew I was in the street, in a part of the city I did not recognize. The all-clear had sounded so I must have walked through a raid. I stood at the top of a slope of debris. I heard cries: hostile shouting. Children. A hundred yards away they swarmed among the ruins, closing in on a broken structure I recognized as the cellar of a house. Curious, I lurched down the slope after them. For some reason, I felt like a spy. Circling the ruin I went up another small bank to the roof. There were holes: I could look through. The children inside were clustered round a figure in black. The Bad Priest. Wedged under a fallen beam. Face—what could be seen—impassive.
“Is he dead?” one asked. Others were picking already at the black rags.
“Speak to us, Father,” they called, mocking. “What is your sermon for today?”
“Funny hat,” giggled a little girl. She reached out and tugged off the hat. A long coil of white hair came loose and fell into the plaster dust. One beam of sunlight cut across the space and the dust now turned it white.
“It’s a lady,” said the girl.
“Ladies can’t be priests,” replied a boy scornfully. He began to examine the hair. Soon he had pulled out an ivory comb and handed it to the little girl. She smiled. Other girls gathered round her to look at the prize. “It’s not real hair,” the boy announced. “See.” He removed the long white wig from the priest’s head.
“That’s Jesus,” cried a tall boy. Tattooed on the bare scalp was a two-color Crucifixion. It was to be only the first of many surprises.
Two children had been busy at the victim’s feet, unlacing the shoes. Shoes were a welcome windfall in Malta at this time.
“Please,” the priest said suddenly.
“He’s alive.”
“She’s alive, stupid.”
“Please what, Father.”
“Sister. May sisters dress up as priests, sister?”
“Please lift this beam,” said the sister/priest.
“Look, look,” came cries at the woman’s feet. They held up one of the black shoes. It was high-topped and impossible to wear. The cavity of the shoe was the exact imprint of a woman’s high-heeled slipper. I could now see one of the slippers, dull gold, protruding from under the black robes. Girls whispered excitedly about how pretty the slippers were. One began to undo the buckles.
“If you can’t lift the beam,” the woman said (with perhaps a hint of panic), “please get help.”
“Ah.” From the other end. Up came one of the slippers and a foot—an artificial foot—the two sliding out as a unit, lug-and-slot.
“She comes apart.”
The woman did not seem to notice. Perhaps she could no longer feel. But when they brought the feet to her head to show her, I saw two tears grow and slip from the outside corners of her eyes. She remained quiet while the children removed her robes and the shirt; and the gold cufflinks in the shape of a claw, and the black trousers which fit close to her skin. One of the boys had stolen a Commando’s bayonet. There were rust-spots. They had to use it twice to get the trousers off.
The nude body was surprisingly young. The skin healthy-looking. Somehow we’d all thought of the Bad Priest as an older person. At her navel was a star sapphire. The boy with the knife picked at the stone. It would not come away. He dug in with the point of the bayonet, working for a few minutes before he was able to bring out the sapphire. Blood had begun to well in its place.
Other children crowded round her head. One pried her jaws apart while another removed a set of false teeth. She did not struggle: only closed her eyes and waited.
But she could not even keep them closed. For the children peeled back one eyelid to reveal a glass eye with the iris in the shape of a clock. This, too, they removed.
I wondered if the disassembly of the Bad Priest might not go on, and on, into evening. Surely her arms and breasts could be detached; the skin of her legs be peeled away to reveal some intricate understructure of
silver openwork. Perhaps the trunk itself contained other wonders: intestines of parti-colored silk, gay balloon-lungs, a rococo heart. But the sirens started up then. The children dispersed bearing away their new-found treasures, and the abdominal wound made by the bayonet was doing its work. I lay prone under a hostile sky looking down for moments more at what the children had left; suffering Christ foreshortened on the bare skull, one eye and one socket, staring up at me: a dark hole for the mouth, stumps at the bottoms of the legs. And the blood which had formed a black sash across the waist, flowing down both sides from the navel.
I went down into the cellar to kneel by her.
“Are you alive.”
At the first bomb-bursts, she moaned.
“I will pray for you.” Night was coming in.
She began to cry. Tearless, half-nasal; more a curious succession of drawn-out wails, originating far back in the mouth cavity. All through the raid she cried.
I gave her what I remembered of the sacrament of Extreme Unction. I could not hear her confession: her teeth were gone and she must have been past speech. But in those cries—so unlike human or even animal sound that they might have been only the wind blowing past any dead reed—I detected a sincere hatred for all her sins which must have been countless; a profound sorrow at having hurt God by sinning; a fear of losing Him which was worse than the fear of death. The interior darkness was lit by flares over Valletta, incendiary bombs in the Dockyard. Often both our voices were drowned in the explosions or the chattering of the ground artillery.
I did not hear only what I wanted to hear in these sounds that issued unceasing from the poor woman. I have been over it, Paola, and over it. I have since attacked myself more scathingly than any of your doubts could. You will say I had forgotten my understanding with God in administering a sacrament only a priest can give. That after losing Elena I’d “regressed” to the priesthood I would have joined had I not married her.
At the time I only knew that a dying human must be prepared. I had no oil to anoint her organs of sense—so mutilated now—and so used her own blood, dipping it from the navel as from a chalice. Her lips were cold. Though I saw and handled many corpses in the course of the siege, to this day I cannot live with that cold. Often, when I fall asleep at my desk, the blood supply to an arm is cut off. I wake and touch it and am no further from nightmare, for it is night’s cold, object’s cold, nothing human, nothing of me about it at all.
Now touching her lips my fingers recoiled and I returned from wherever I’d been. The all-clear sounded. She cried once or twice more and fell silent. I knelt by her and began to pray for myself. For her I’d done all I could. How long did I pray? No way of knowing.
But soon the cold of the wind—shared now with what had been a quick body—began to chill me. Kneeling grew uncomfortable. Only saints and lunatics can remain “devoted” for extended periods of time. I did feel for a pulse or heartbeat. None. I arose, limped about the cellar aimlessly, and finally emerged into Valletta without looking back.
I returned to Ta Kali, on foot. My shovel was still where I had left it.
Of Fausto III’s return to life, little can be said. It happened. What inner resources were there to give it nourishment are still unknown to the present Fausto. This is a confession and in that return from the rock was nothing to confess. There are no records of Fausto III except for indecipherable entries.
And sketches of an azalea blossom, a carob tree.
There remained two unanswered questions. If he had truly broken his covenant with God in administering the sacrament why did he survive the raid?
And why did he not stop the children: or lift the beam?
In answer to the first one can only suggest that he was now Fausto III, with no further need for God.
The second has caused his successor to write this confession. Fausto Maijstral is guilty of murder: a sin of omission if you will. He will answer to no tribunal but God. And God at this moment is far away.
May He be closer to you.
Valletta: 27 August 1956
Stencil let the last thin scribbled sheet flutter to bare linoleum. Had his coincidence, the accident to shatter the surface of this stagnant pool and send all the mosquitoes of hope zinging away to the exterior night; had it happened?
“An Englishman; a mysterious being named Stencil.”
Valletta. As if Paola’s silence since—God, eight months. Had she, by her refusal to tell him anything, been all this time forcing him closer to the day when he’d have to admit Valletta as a possibility? Why?
Stencil would have liked to go on believing the death and V. had been separate for his father. This he still could choose to do (couldn’t he?), and continue on in calm weather. He could go to Malta and possibly end it. He had stayed off Malta. He was afraid of ending it; but, damn it all, staying here would end it too. Funking out; finding V.; he didn’t know which he was most afraid of, V. or sleep. Or whether they were two versions of the same thing.
Was there nothing for it but Valletta?
chapter twelve
In which things are not
so amusing
V
I
The party had begun late, with a core of only a dozen Sick. Evening was hot and not likely to get any cooler. They all sweated. The loft itself was part of an old warehouse and not a legal residence; buildings in this area of the city had been condemned years ago. Someday there would be cranes, dump trucks, payloaders, bulldozers to come and level the neighborhood; but in the meantime, nobody—city or landlords—saw any objection in turning a minor profit.
There hung therefore about Raoul, Slab and Melvin’s pad a climate of impermanence, as if the sand-sculptures, unfinished canvases, thousands of paperback books suspended in tiers of cement blocks and warped planks, even the great marble toilet stolen from a mansion in the East Seventies (since replaced by a glass and aluminum apartment building) were all part of the set to an experimental play which its cabal of faceless angels could cause to be struck at any moment without having to give their reasons.
People would arrive, come the late hours. Raoul, Slab and Melvin’s refrigerator was already half filled with a ruby construction of wine bottles; gallon of Vino Paisano slightly above center, left, off-balancing two 25-cent bottles of Gallo Grenache Rosé, and one of Chilean Riesling, lower right, and so on. The icebox door was left open so people could admire, could dig. Why not? Accidental art had great vogue that year.
Winsome wasn’t there when the party began and didn’t show up at all that night. Nor any night after that. He’d had another fight with Mafia in the afternoon, over playing tapes of McClintic Sphere’s group in the parlor while she was trying to create in the bedroom.
“If you ever tried to create,” she yelled, “instead of live off what other people create, you’d understand.”
“Who creates,” Winsome said. “Your editor, publisher? Without them, girl, you would be nowhere.”
“Anywhere you are, old sweet, is nowhere.” Winsome gave it up and left her to scream at Fang. He had to step over three sleeping bodies on the way out. Which one was Pig Bodine? They were all covered by blankets. Like the old pea-and-nutshell dodge. Did it make any difference? She’d have company.
He headed downtown and after a while had wandered by the V-Note. Inside were stacked tables and the bartender watching a ball game on TV. Two fat Siamese kittens played on the piano, one outside chasing up and down the keyboard, one inside, clawing at the strings. It didn’t sound like much.
“Roon.”
“Man, I need a change of luck, no racial slur intended.”
“Get a divorce.” McClintic appeared in a foul mood. “Roon, let’s go to Lenox. I can’t last the weekend. Don’t tell me any woman trouble. I got enough for both of us.”
“Why not. Out to the boondocks. Green
hills. Well people.”
“Come on. There is a little girl I have to get out of this town before she flips from the heat. Or whatever it is.”
It took them a while. They drank beer till sunset and then headed up to Winsome’s where they swapped the Triumph for a black Buick. “It looks like a staff car for the Mafia,” said McClintic. “Whoops.”
“Ha, ha,” replied Winsome. They continued uptown along the nighttime Hudson, veering finally right into Harlem. And there began working their way in to Matilda Winthrop’s, bar by bar.
Not long after they were arguing like undergraduates over who was the most juiced, gathering hostile stares which had less to do with color than with an inherent quality of conservatism which neighborhood bars possess and bars where how much you can drink is a test of manhood do not.
They arrived at Matilda’s well past midnight. The old lady, hearing Winsome’s rebel accent, talked only to McClintic. Ruby came downstairs and McClintic introduced them.
Crash, shrieks, deep-chested laughter from topside. Matilda ran out of the room screaming.
“Sylvia, Ruby’s friend, is busy tonight,” McClintic said.
Winsome was charming. “You young folks just take it easy,” he said. “Old Uncle Roony will drive you anywhere you want, won’t look in the rearview mirror, won’t be anything but the kindly old chauffeur he is.”
Which cheered McClintic up. There being a certain strained politeness in the way Ruby held his arm. Winsome could see how McClintic was daft to get out in the country.
More noise from upstairs, louder this time. “McClintic,” Matilda yelled.
V. Page 39