Objects of Desire

by Roberta Latow

  ‘He took me home, to Lakeside. But Lakeside wasn’t Alexandria or a holiday in France, and certainly not sex in Mersa Matruh. The holiday was over but we were not. For him I was the luscious depraved side of his life that he loved too much; he wanted to legitimatise his feelings but he couldn’t. I didn’t know it then but I do now – he was in love with someone else. I was an object of desire he still craved, and he was in too deep to get out. I became pregnant. He did the honourable thing. And I have been trying to live down who and what I am ever since he slipped that wedding band on my finger. Anything I was or did before I became Mrs Robert Rivers became null and void. That’s how he got control of my life.

  ‘Now that I have found myself again I know I made one great mistake with Robert, I told him about my past. He used it against me, manipulated me, almost to death, and that’s why I hate him. For that reason and because he deceived me, didn’t love me, or respect the love I had for him or all that I had given up to make him happy.’

  Anoushka’s story seemed to have tumbled out, almost as if she were relating someone else’s dark secret. When she finished she raised her glass and brought it to her lips. She drank the wine slowly and replaced the glass on the table. No one said anything. The women remained silent and listened to the night. The waiter arrived with a platter of grilled lamb chops, salad and a stack of white plates. The clatter and clang and bad service by the waiter broke the spell of Anoushka’s story and the night.

  Anoushka pronged a chop with her fork and, carrying it to her plate, addressed Page and Sally. ‘Robert is right about one thing, I never have had any friends. I had always been worried that I might give myself away, the real me, the one I tried to kill for his sake, for love. I wanted you both to know where I’m really coming from, not the pretend me you’ll see in Lakeside.’

  Again silence took hold until Sally said, ‘My goodness, Anoushka, when you play the truth game you really play the truth game.’ The three women burst into smiles. Someone laughed. It was Anoushka.

  Page wanted to ask what happened to Serge but thought better of it. Instead she reached across the table. Taking Anoushka’s hand in hers, she squeezed it and said, ‘Welcome home, Anoushka. It’s really nice to know you.’

  OSCAR KRONER

  Chapter 14

  Crisis Of Faith and the Roman Catholic Church Of Jesus Christ: there had been other books and countless essays by Oscar Kroner but none would be more damaging to the church he loved and the God he believed in, for whom he gave up Judaism and the woman he loved. To lock himself away in years of retreat to test his own faith, to steep himself in theology and its relation to man, had been his objective. Now he was going home. At last he was free.

  Oscar lifted the manuscript from his small leather suitcase and one more time fanned the pages with his thumb. A work that was the culmination of a lifetime of love and despair at the theological dilemmas that haunt the church and those scholars who follow it as devoutly as he had. Loss was the central theme; not only loss of love for Jesus but the loss of the church’s humanity in the twentieth century.

  He was forty-five years old and the church, theology, philosophy, had been the lodestars of his life. As a man, he understood the seriousness of loss: for one who had chosen God over the woman he loved, for a priest in danger of losing his faith not in God but in the church.

  A man of the cloth, he found the church seriously lacking in its central themes of God and humanity. The church did not condone his criticism but he had a powerful rhetoric, and as a priest he opened up questions that made the church look like progressive thinkers.

  Oscar had tried, studied and, during the years of his work since he left Page, tested himself and his own faith and that of his church. Now it was over. When he finished the manuscript in his case, he had finished with the church once and for all. He could make no more excuses for himself or for his church. They both had to change, return to their essential selves. He had. And that had meant giving up the priesthood and returning to a life and love that was more valid for him.

  The church was uneasy with his success but continued to put him on his artistic mettle. And there he had lived in mild unhappiness until he knew he could live there no longer. He missed love, intimacy, carnal life. He was a poorer man for giving up those things.

  The demands of the Catholic church: a life of abject subordination in which he had no power was unacceptable to him. He felt he had a moral responsibility to himself. He knew that there were people in this world who believed they didn’t exist unless the church told them otherwise. Oscar was not one of those people. Did that make him less a son of God?

  Once when he had been young and foolish he had been helpless to extricate himself from the thrall of love for the church. Now a mature, wiser man, it was no longer a problem. His dilemma had been solved by the realisation that it had not been the church but God that had enthralled him. Faith in a supreme being, whether it be for Jesus Christ or the lord Buddha.

  He had always known in his heart and had always made known to the clergy that he believed all heroic men must set out on a quest. His was to overcome the obstacles that clouded the mind and the heart, his own failings, and finally to be able to return home, whether it be to the church or elsewhere. In his case he knew now it meant Page.

  To give up his collar was no easy task. He was a leading figure in the theology of Roman Catholicism. Though his archbishop had always known that Oscar might defect from the church, he had tolerated that possibility because of Oscar’s writings.

  Had they ever thought that it would be over? Did he? When Oscar posed those questions to himself, he had had no answer. Thinking about them now, he realised Page had always known it would end. She had been more wise than him or the church, she knew him better than he did himself. She had a greater faith than he did. But then he had always known that about her. A quiet faith, solid as a rock.

  In the end he had been no more than a writer who got lost in his subject. It had been months now since he had decided to leave the church and had asked to be relieved of his vows. Now at last the final papers had been signed, the formalities were over, and he had said good bye to his greatest mentor in the church.

  Cardinal O’Malley bid Oscar farewell saying, ‘Oscar, you’ve been good and you’ve been bad. Mostly you’ve been good, and always brilliant. Your greatest attraction for us was your forthright honesty. You were always more a literary man who was a believer than you were a priest. Your love of women and life was always greater than your love for God. We all prayed that you would see the error of your ways.

  ‘We’ve heard your confession and know who you are and yet we held on to you in the hope that you would honour your commitments to the church. But, for you, God always came after literature. Literature is your vanity, you love words more than the church.

  ‘For you, Oscar, to live properly is to live for literature and philosophical thought. That’s how you lost your way as a priest and why you cannot obey or accept the church as it is. You want the church to justify itself in contemporary cultural terms. It doesn’t have to, it doesn’t want to. The church regrets losing you. But you’ve made your choice, and may God forgive you and bless you.’

  Oscar went to the mirror and adjusted his tie. He was not used to it. He ran his fingers through his blond hair and noticed that it was peppered with silver. He had never been a man to deceive himself. He knew the man in the mirror very well, what he would be once he walked from that room, both a star and an embarrassment to the Holy Roman Catholic Church. He had not been the first in the long history of the Catholic church and would not be the last, and he took heart from that. He had wrestled hard and long with himself and his love for the church, and now his fight was over, his work complete.

  He took one last long look around this room that had been his home for so many years. The magnificent huge chamber, the most perfect of rooms, a double cube with a thirty-foot ceiling, carved and painted and gilded. Seven arched windows whose glass doors opened on
to a terrace that overlooked the formal gardens and fountains and the Tuscan Hills, and nothing more for as far as the eye could see. The peace and tranquillity had a special feel, as crystal clear as the clean fresh air.

  To have lived and slept in this room, this library, famed for one of the finest collections of theological books and manuscripts that scholars for centuries had come to study, that had been the real gift he had received from God and the church and for that he would be ever grateful. His eyes rested for some minutes on the faded terracotta silk damask draperies tied back with elaborate seventeenth-century silk ropes and tassels in what had once been luscious jewel-like colours. The sun and time had done their work on them but still they hung in faded grandeur, the odd streak of their original brightness showing through. The walls from floor to ceiling were lined with leatherbound books, there was dark rich honey-coloured cherrywood for shelves and panelling, and on easels stood Renaissance religious paintings rich with love and passion, trying to evoke the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

  The opulent and beautiful seventeenth- and eighteenth-century furniture; Chinese vases from the Han and Ming and Tang dynasties; carpets over the dark wood-planked floor, impressive for the quality of colour and design; sofas and chairs and library tables where for the last hundred years the brightest of minds, men of many denominations, teachers, writers, and great spiritual leaders, had come in retreat to sit and learn from this library.

  Others came to meet and speak with Father Kroner, to discuss his work and exchange theological thought. It was here that he met for the second time the Dali Lama, who had accepted Oscar’s reciprocated invitation. Here too that he met His Holiness the Pope when he had come to stay in the palazzo. And it was here where often he would sit with the ghost of his friend Primo Levi and speak not of theology but man’s inhumanity to man, and of forgiveness and redemption.

  This room was not for the church but for men and women and life. A life that included love, passion and laughter. It was this room with all its knowledge and all its secrets, all its questions both answered and unanswered, that he would walk away from with a lighter heart than he had ever known. He had not left it physically, yet mentally, emotionally, he found himself already distanced from it. It was as if he were no more involved with this library than just another transient visitor.

  He looked at his robes lying across the seventeenth-century fourposter bed heavily draped in its original hangings of silk-embroidered white flowers on a dark plum-coloured silk velvet, placed to one end of the room. The crisp white bed linen trimmed in heavy cream-coloured lace was covered by a blanket of Russian wolf skins and large embroidered cushions of hunting scenes, a wood of many shades of green and dusky blues, unicorns hiding in the leaves and ladies and noblemen of the seventeenth century riding voluptuous white stallions.

  Once he was out of that door they would remove the bed from the library, wipe all trace of him from this room that had been his home and his world for so many years. His vanity was piqued. Every man likes to leave his mark. How unpriestly of you, Oscar, he chided himself.

  He walked to the bed and, taking up a robe, folded it neatly and placed it down again. From the pocket of his Armani jacket he took his silver cross and laid it on top of the robe. Oscar walked round his bed for the last time, picking up each of his items of priestly clothing and doing the same thing. His rosary of amber beads felt warm in his hands. He raised them to his lips to kiss them and then laid them too on another folded robe. Brushing his biretta with the palm of his hand, he placed it back on the bed along with his shoes. He would take nothing with him.

  He walked from the room with nothing but his worn and battered leather case, the manuscript, several Armani shirts, boxer shorts and pairs of socks, all bought in Milan several weeks before for his return into the main stream of life. He left the church and all its trappings behind as he closed the library door.

  He heard the click of his heels on the marble floors echo as he walked swiftly through the corridors and down the grand staircase to the ground floor. He felt light-headed, as if a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders. His work was done, his faith was stronger than ever, unfettered by dogma, any formal doctrine or tenets of the church. Love soared from his soul for every little bird, leaf on a tree, for every man, woman and child, for the sound of the sea, for Page. It had all been there always, he had never let it go, this love for the world and his fellow man, his love for Page and the life they’d had together. At night, alone in his bed, he would speak to her. He would tell her, ‘Page, I see you all the days, all the nights. I see your every breath, every glance of your eyes, every movement of your lips. You are a part of my soul.’ That love for her, so sensual and deep, had become a part of his heart, his soul, his very being. But he had somehow let it recede into the mist of other forces pulling at his soul, but only recede. He had never lost complete sight of it, never let it go.

  He had already been committed to Jesus Christ, was already a man of the cloth who had taken his vows, when she had come into his life. He had not toyed with his love for her, the carnal attraction that drew them together. They had known their love was shadowed by his mortal sin, that his loyalties were divided by church and Page. That had never been good enough for this love triangle. They gave each other a long lead, and time to get on with their lives, to test themselves and their commitment, and now each knew where their loyalties lay. The triangle was broken.

  Oscar had many successes to his credit; he had won his many battles with the demons of the soul, with his work, and loved the church again even more now, but in a different way. He understood it in relation to Jesus Christ and man, life and death.

  The sixteenth-century palazzo of a hundred rooms was one of extraordinary beauty, filled with treasures owned by the Vatican. Palazzo Goldolfo Navarone was a favoured summer retreat, a luxurious prize for the church’s hierarchy. A jewel in the Vatican’s crown. There were always dignitaries there on a visit or in residence, wined and dined by an archbishop and his numerous staff of priests and nuns who were in charge of all that went on in the palazzo. They, plus the house staff who worked there, had seen to it in the years Oscar had been there that he had privacy, total freedom, and control of his domain, the library. They had cared for him and his every need.

  Today, from the moment he awoke, he had seen no one. Now, walking through the rooms for the last time, the palazzo’s other inhabitants might have been invisible. And another thing: there were usually fresh flowers, huge arrangements of them in marble vases. Now the peonies, delphiniums and roses were all gone. Not a sound but that of his own footsteps could be heard in the house. Were they mourning his death?

  The sun cast wide swathes of light through the windows on either side of the massive carved and metal-studded wooden doors. He pushed them open and the creaking sound splitting the silence was like thunder. Oscar stood on the threshold for several minutes, not hesitating but so as to breathe in deeply the fresh mountain air, then he took his first step towards Page. She was right there with him in his thoughts and in spirit, taking that first step with him.

  The big black Mercedes, the several Fiats, the black BMWs, not even a pick-up truck or an estate car belonging to the palazzo was parked outside at the foot of the stairs. Gone, all gone, like his brother priests and sister nuns, the maids and cooks and cleaners. Just the sound of many birds, the warmth of the sun, the scent of things growing: tall and elegant the cypress trees, needles of pine, and blossoms more pungent still for having the early-morning dew still on their petals. Only they were there to bid him farewell. A smile crossed Oscar’s lips.

  In a crunch of gravel a taxi swept round the fountain and screeched to a halt at the bottom of the stairs. The driver leapt out. He had been summoned from Perugia. Was Oscar his customer? Oscar walked down the stone steps and shook hands with the driver. He got into the front passenger seat, his precious case balanced on his lap. The taxi swept round the fountain. Oscar caught a glimpse of the formal gardens rolling a
way from the house. The fountains were playing and the stone sculptures in the morning light looked as fresh and impressive, as powerful and mysterious, as they always did at that hour. They had a habit of taking on different aspects as the light changed throughout the day. At night the human figures were brooding hulks locked in stone, the animals dead beasts turned to marble. On the nearly mile-long drive now, an avenue of cypress trees, tall as five-storey buildings, Oscar caught other glimpses of the estate. A rough wood where he had often ridden on one of the mounts from the stables, the artificial lake where he had done his swimming and boating and even some fishing, and finally just a brief glimpse of the maze, designed, planted, and kept in perfect order for more than a hundred years. There he had wandered and thought of and sometimes spoken to God.

  These last years of privilege in such luxurious surroundings were a reward from the church for the years spent in remote parishes in Africa and South and Central America before the world and its theological scholars, a clever publisher and readers the world over, gave him the success he so richly deserved.

  It was a strange sensation to see all that at one glance and have it recede from his mind in very nearly the same instant, consigned to the past. Oscar felt himself stepping out of his skin and observing himself. He liked what he saw, loved himself for who and what he was. He was centred on life and in this moment of truth was content and at peace with himself and the world.

  The car sped away from the palazzo. At the end of the drive massive ornamental iron gates hung from stone pilasters topped by charging lions carved from shiny black marble. Each lion held a cross in one paw, standing guard as if keeping the world out and the church in. Unusually, not one of the thirty gardeners who tended the grounds was to be seen. Unbelievably, the gates had been left open and unattended by the gatekeeper.