The Last Western

by Thomas S. Klise

  The stone marker, erected in 50 b.c. during the reign of the great emperor Julius Caesar, said: Ite Lente.

  * * *

  When they came down into the oldest idea of the Western world, it was already past midnight and the great Rome airport was nearly deserted.

  Joto and Truman and Willie carried Herman Felder on a stretcher into the customs office, declaring him and their bodies as their only possessions.

  Felder had not been awake since the time he clung clownlike to the drape. His pulse was low, and on the long flight north, Joto said that he had never seen him that far under.

  The night shift of bored customs officials came forward to meet them, and in their midst Willie saw another figure, an old man emerging from a long time ago.

  The years in prison had withered and bent him, and he looked more than ever like the American poet who wrote Leaves of Grass, but it was the poet now who had suffered the second stroke and looked out the window all day long and tried to hear the songs Camden, New Jersey made.

  “Father Ben—” Willie began, but his voice went out.

  He and Father Benjamin embraced. Then Father Benjamin wordlessly and solemnly embraced Joto and Truman.

  They stood there for a little while warming themselves in their fraternal love, then gently, tenderly, they placed Herman Felder on a cushioned bench.

  Over him the four men held out their hands and chanted one of the well-loved songs of the Servants: Ubi Caritas et Amor Deus Ibi Est.

  The tableau of the strange men—the old man dressed like a ragpicker, the others like workmen from a road gang, the still figure on the bench and the sound of that ancient chant—brought a spell upon the airdrome.

  The police and the customs officials and the sleepy travelers waiting for early morning planes and the night workers in the restaurant stared at the scene in the way people linger before a curious figure in a museum, drawn toward it by memories that are engraved on the deepest places of the heart, so deep that they do not know they are there.

  There was an American reporter sitting at the counter of the restaurant. He was tired and very bored. When he heard the chanting, he turned to stare with the others and was caught in the spell for a moment before he recognized the red-haired slanty-eyed man among the others in the group. He had been waiting through most of the day for the arrival of this man, he and a thousand other reporters, and now he had him alone.

  Grabbing his camera, he rushed into the customs area and took a flash picture of Willie absorbed in the prayer chant, a picture that would appear on world telenews the next morning.

  The chief of customs stepped forward then and asked for papers.

  He looked at Willie’s passport a long time, then at his clothing. He searched for the ring Willie was not wearing and at last made a hesitant half bow.

  “Welcome to Rome, Monsignor. The Vatican has living arrangements prepared, I believe. We hope your stay in Rome will be pleasant.” He thought this over. “We are of course in mourning for our beloved Holy Father.”

  “We need to get this man to a hospital,” said Willie.

  “One moment, please,” the customs official said, for the first time noticing Felder’s camera riding in its holster on

  Willie’s back. “You have permit for the firearm, Monsignor?”

  “Not firearm,” Joto said. “Camera.”

  The official inspected the lens of the camera poking up from the holster.

  “Please—the man is so ill,” said Willie.

  At last the official quit his inspection of the camera.

  “Very well. Who is this man?”

  “Herman Felder.”

  A fat man in a white suit, standing at the edge of the customs area, stepped forward.

  “Prego,” he said. The customs officer turned to the man and handed him Felder’s passport.

  The fat man studied the passport with eyes that spoke no emotion.

  “Signor Felder,” he said to Willie, “Signor Felder is—how say?—nonwelcome. He is the man non grata. Capische?”

  “Where is the nearest hospital?” said Willie.

  The man in the white suit produced a card and handed it to Willie. The card identified him as Antonio Suggio of the National Internal Security Service.

  “Signor Felder is not a lawful man,” the fat man said.

  “He is very ill, my brother,” said Willie. “He is close to death.”

  “Even dying persons sometimes are unlawful. It is not a question of health. Great murderers often enjoy splendid health.”

  “He needs to get to a doctor,” Willie said imploringly.

  The fat man’s eyes came to life. “Men need many things. I for instance need money. Am I to steal for that reason? Think, Monsignor, of the law. We come into this world, we make our way badly or well, and there is always the law to guide us. We change, many things change, but the law is above us, outside us, immortal.”

  Father Benjamin left Herman Felder’s side then and came up to the fat man and handed him a letter.

  It was written on the stationery of the consulate of the United States and was signed by Lawson Thebes, the ex-brother-in-law of Herman Felder.

  The letter said that the legal charges brought by the Italian Court against Herman Felder eleven years earlier were no longer binding and that Mr. Felder was free to visit Italy. The letter was countersigned by the head of the Internal Security Service.

  The fat man awkwardly clicked his heels. “I am happy. There is much trouble in the world. It is good some of it is gone.”

  An ambulance was summoned. Joto and Truman boarded it with Felder while Willie and Father Benjamin followed in a taxi.

  “He is so ill,” said Willie.

  “I have seen him so in the past,” said Father Benjamin.

  “Why didn’t they want him in the country?”

  “Once he did something to the golden mosaic of a great church—or was accused of such a crime. He was ejected from the country. Later, there were papers found in his hotel room linking him with other activities.”

  “Oh, Father Benjamin, we have all had such trouble. But then so have you. All these years in prison.”

  Benjamin turned his blue-white face to Willie.

  “The hardest time of all is just beginning,” he said.

  Ahead of them in the ambulance, in the brain of Herman Felder, a great blizzard stormed across vast unknown fields.

  A ragged group of men, weary from a long journey, huddled about a fire for warmth.

  The snows were thickening and the winds driving them on had all but extinguished the fire.

  The men were starving.

  Felder knew there was food just ahead, but no one believed him.

  “We’ll all freeze then!” he shouted.

  “No,” a voice answered, “we’ll starve before that.”

  “Cold! Freezing cold!” he shouted in the ambulance rushing through the darkened streets with its mournful wee-waa, wee-waa.

  One of the attendants, knowing a little English, said to the driver: “A crazy one. It is eighty-nine degrees at this moment.”

  “Did you see the others? All crazy,” said the driver, and he turned sharply onto the Via di San Gregorio where, straight ahead, the lighted Colosseum blazed on in the night.

  Chapter seven

  It was a very large church; it was the largest church in the world, and for nine days its main business was to serve as a funeral parlor.

  The people came from all over Rome and Italy, and there were many tourists who had come to Italy for other reasons and they all streamed into the great church that had been named after the first pope to look at the body of the dead pope, and for the tourists who had come from Michigan and Scotland and Lebanon it was a great stroke of good fortune that this extra sideshow had been included in the itinerary and it cost nothing except a wait in line.

  The city of Rome slowed a little. It had seen many popes die and Caesars too, and all over the city there were the reminders of the greatne
ss of those who had died. Rome loved to slow down a little and play the sad music on the radio, and the mourning was almost a sexual feeling when the girls came into the sunshine on the Via Veneto wearing bright yellow dresses and there was a fever in the air, and the men looked at the girls and everyone felt death and the sheer brevity of life speeded up the inner emotions even while, on the outside, everything was slower.

  At night the television cameras, set high among the arches and the columns of the great church, stared fixedly at the stiff doll-like body of the pope, and the commentators said whatever they could think up, and people all over the world watched and listened and derived the secret thrill from it.

  The commentators on the third day were running out of material after they had told the people of the pope’s accomplishments, after they had told the people that this pope would go down in history as the computer pope because he had held an ecumenical council of the church and had run the council entirely by computer, with the bishops of the world submitting their ideas on special punch cards which were even now being processed by the Vatican RevCon office. The commentators were running out of material, but it made no difference since the message that interested the world was the doll lying there among the columns and the marble statuary and the people filing past the bier and the mournful music.

  The commentators sometimes spoke of the great art masterpieces of Saint Peter’s basilica, and they sometimes showed films of cardinals and other electors arriving at the airport for the burial of the dead pope and the election of the new one, and sometimes they held interviews with individuals who were said to be experts on the subject of who the next pope would be, but there were many long stretches of silence and the music played on, and in the United States the fourth night of the telecast brought the largest viewing audience in the history of television.

  The sun beat down on the piazza of Saint Peter and made it a cobbled grill, like the basin of an oven, and people fainted in the six-hour line and when they revived, they rejoined it because it was important to them to see the doll and tell others about it since the opportunity might never come again.

  The body of the pope was like one of the statues and they regarded the body with awe and fear and delicious gratitude.

  On his fifth night in Rome Willie went to the Vatican to register his arrival with the officials of the conclave.

  An Italian monsignor, a worried-looking man, with large brown eyes and thinning hair, met him and introduced himself as Monsignor Taroni and said that he would be Willie’s guide.

  The monsignor, touched by Willie’s sadness, gently steered him to the papal bier.

  Willie wept a little, not for the doll-body of Pope Felix, but for the death-struck men and women coming forward in their numb procession.

  The monsignor gestured towards a priedieu, but Willie did not notice; his eyes roved the arches and the columns. The shadowy figures of angels and saints and prophets and dead churchmen were grotesque illustrations, and the statues he saw were not masterpieces of art but only stick figures of the ancient lesson.

  “A tomb,” he said softly. “A tomb after all.”

  Monsignor Taroni, thinking the red-haired bishop wished to see the crypt that had been prepared for Pope Felix, took the sleeve of his jacket.

  “This way, Excellency.”

  But Willie could not move. His eyes were on the people and beyond the people, on those others he had left behind in the darkened streets, that other procession that did not stop to gaze at bodies costumed in gold cloth.

  Suddenly over the shuffling sound of the crowd and the steady buzz of their whisperings came a soft, sweet, unexpected call—the cry of a child.

  Willie turned around. Directly across from him, on the other side of the bier, a man was holding up a three-or four-year-old girl, holding her high in the air so that she might see the body of the dead man.

  The father seemed to be saying, Isn’t it special? Isn’t it extraordinary?

  The child cried out louder, either in delight at the giant flickering candles or the colors of the Swiss Guard, or in fright at the sight of the dead pope.

  Willie quickly crossed the bier area and held out his arms to the child. She looked at him hesitantly, then smiled, returning his grin.

  “Beautiful one,” he said, “did you say hello to Mr. Moon tonight?” He held out his arms for the little girl to come to him.

  The father looked at him doubtfully, but now the child was holding out her arms. Willie took her.

  Holding her in his arms, circling slowly in a little dance, he said some nonsense words and the child laughed.

  The father attempted a smile, nodding his head, and then ‘ held out his arms for the return of his baby.

  Monsignor Taroni, nonplused, spoke solemnly to the father.

  “He is an American bishop.”

  “Ah,” said the father.

  Willie, jogging with the child now, held out his hand. The man took it. “Part of the program,” said Willie, nodding to the bier. “We have to accept it—but to pay it tribute!”

  In nervous, very fast Italian the man said to the monsignor, “What’s he talking about?”

  “He is an American bishop,” Monsignor Taroni repeated.

  Still dancing with the child, Willie introduced himself. “I’m Willie.”

  “Giovanni,” said the man, and then shyly indicating his daughter, “Felicita.”

  “Felicita, Felicita, Felicita,” said Willie. “Such a pretty name. Felicita,” And he spun around very fast and the little girl shrieked with laughter.

  The deathbound crowd had been watching the stir, and now the sound of Willie’s name went pulsing backward through the basilica.

  “Giovanni,” said Willie, handing Felicita back to her father, “there is an ice cream store down the street. They have good ice cream I am sure. Maybe even moon-flavored ice cream. You and Felicita have some ice cream as a present from someone who is your friend.” Then Willie gave Giovanni all the money he had in his pocket, which was four dollars and thirty-six cents.

  Monsignor Taroni, wearing a pained smile, led Willie away from the bier area to the Confessio before the high altar with its thick serpentine columns, which were considered wonderful works of art by all who saw them and which Willie found ugly at a glance.

  They stood at a balustrade before the snake-works in the glow of eighty-nine burning lamps.

  “It is here,” the monsignor said pointing down a flight of marble steps, “that the Apostle is buried.”

  Willie could see the doors of gilded bronze and a statue of a holy-looking pope.

  “It’s good they found a place to bury him,” he said.

  The monsignor said, “You desire to inspect?”

  Willie shook his head.

  The crowds were streaming into the great vault, and the individual men and women were immediately small as they came into the presence of the alabaster and the porphyry and the bronze and the gold, into the place where Michelangelo and Raphael and Bernini had executed their paintings and statues and mosaics, which depicted important matters of consequence to everybody and which had the effect of making everybody use the words masterpiece and genius whenever they looked upon them, and it seemed to Willie that the people’s faces were like the faces of unhappy children being led to school after a long vacation.

  Then Monsignor Taroni took Willie out of Saint Peter’s basilica, into the howling night of Rome. Going down the steps of the church, they passed under a great angry statue of Paul and they crossed the piazza of Saint Peter and entered a marble corridor where there were many other statues and paintings and a gloom that seemed designed.

  They came to a great hall full of still more paintings and statues and full also of red-robed churchmen speaking in many languages and looking like they had stepped out of the paintings.

  “Bishop Brother!” someone called, and Willie, glancing around, saw Cardinal Goldenblade coming toward him over a rug that looked like a tapestry.

  “H
ow good to see you again, dear Bishop Brother!”

  “In Etherea, the people are starving!” Willie said. “We—”

  “The conclave begins just after the funeral Mass. We gather in the Sistine. You are allowed two assistants—I would suggest Bishop Jim Casey and Bishop Phil Lee, both young fellows, grand golfers. Where are you staying?”

  “In an apartment near the hospital.”

  “You’re not sick, boy?”

  “It’s Mr. Felder—he’s very ill. And in Angola, they gave us a promise—”

  “We’re at the Excelsior, and if there is anything, anything you need, will you call me? I’ll offer my rosary for Mr. Felder tonight.”

  “The officials in Angola—” Willie said, but Cardinal Goldenblade had walked away and struck up a conversation with Cardinal Tisch, a computer expert and the most powerful churchman in all of Germany.

  A notary of the cardinal prefect, holding a clipboard, came up to Willie.

  “The name of your conclavists?”

  “Father Benjamin Victor.”

  “Only one?”

  Willie nodded, trying to get Cardinal Goldenblade’s attention but seeing now that he was moving into another room.

  Monsignor Taroni showed Willie out of the palace and Willie found a cab and the cab took him past the old Forum where Julius Caesar had once walked and thought up many arrangements for the people he ruled, and as the cab raced nervously through the streets, Willie heard Death humming as he counted the take.

  “You can have the tuition,” said Willie to Death. “We’ll take the students.”

  Death went on humming and counting.

  * * *

  Later that same night in a small room of the second floor of the hospital of Saint Pius X, Herman Felder’s heart stopped beating.