Septimania

by Jonathan Levi

  “Whistler Abbey itself belongs to some distant foundation. But there is an inheritance for you—what it is, I haven’t a clue. Your grandmother gave me this envelope some time ago. To hand over to you on the event of her death.”

  The vicar reached into an obscure pocket and handed Malory a cream-colored envelope. The flap was embossed with the same S fenced in by the seven-sided box that graced the cover of the journal belonging to the seventeenth-century friend of Isaac Newton. On the front, a single name in purple ink: Hercule.

  “A train ticket, Mr. Malory. You are to go to Rome. Those were her instructions. You are to go to Rome and stay with the Dominicans”—the vicar couldn’t help his sneer—“and await instruction from a Signor Settimio. Name ring a bell?”

  “The Dominicans?” Malory asked.

  “Santa Maria sopra Minerva,” the vicar said. “I understand there is a monastery next to the basilica. You can walk from the train station.”

  “And then?”

  “You might inspect their organ,” the vicar smiled. “I’m certain it needs tuning.”

  Rix had offered, in a spirit of soldierly camaraderie, to pack up Malory’s books and store them in a corner of Trinity where they wouldn’t be bothered for a century or two. Antonella had wept and left Malory with a complex kiss and a simple tinfoil packet of biscuits that Malory packed into the rucksack along with three changes of clothing and a Tesco bag of toiletries. If Malory brought little with him it was not with the expectation that he would follow his grandmother’s instructions and then return to Cambridge in a few days. It was with no expectations whatsoever, or with the minimal expectations of the stunned.

  By train from Cambridge to London, London to Rome; by foot from the station. As Malory walked with only the dimmest directions from Termini towards Santa Maria sopra Minerva, sensation returned to his brain, and he wondered whether this journey was taking him nearer to or farther from the Louiza he had last seen on the same day he’d last seen his grandmother alive. There were a few late-night drinkers on the steps of the Pantheon. A pair of wistful buskers were scraping out “Limehouse Blues” on fiddle and guitar, leaning on an ancient brick wall beneath an even more ancient arch that once, in an even more ancient past, must have led through a grand opening to some palazzo, some temple, some somewhere full of hope. The façade of the church of Santa Maria was so uninviting, so graffiti-free, so plain that merely a single gypsy, hidden beneath sacks of muslin and crepe, had thought to camp out on its steps. Not even the music of the buskers penetrated the midnight air. Only Bernini’s statue of an elephant retained its sense of humor, standing quizzically with its half smile, a lonely ornament in the center of the piazza, an arbitrary pink obelisk balanced on its howdah. An act of vandalism or pity had decorated the animal—the elephant shone, even in the moonless night—a rich enamel blue as deep as Louiza’s eyes.

  Sì, Fra Mario said, answering Malory’s bell, they had received his grandmother’s letter. Sì, they had been expecting Malory. Sì, he knew Signor Settimio well and would alert him in the morning to Malory’s arrival. Sì, they were giving Malory a special cell at his grandmother’s request—la cella di Galileo! Galileo, lo conosce?—and Fra Mario wiggled his fingers next to his head in a way that made Malory wonder whether his entire journey were an act of madness. No, Fra Mario said, no one had said that the organ was broken. If indeed Malory could fix the organ—for which he, Fra Mario, being a fallen-away Neapolitan, had no real ear, although, come to think of it, the organ was clearly rotto—it might be a good thing. This, at least, was how Malory, with his little Italian, deciphered the stream of language that flowed from Fra Mario’s smile before he sank in exhaustion and incomprehension onto the bed that had once borne Galileo.

  MALORY SAT UP. IN PAIN. WITH A BURN IN HIS RIGHT SHOULDER AND AN ache in his left thigh, his neck bent like an over-tuned crumhorn, and the back of his skull throbbing as if some Old Testament barber had taken vengeance on the wilderness of his scalp. Had the Dominicans slept any better? Did these monks, whose bowels and prostates sang their flatulent matins as they passed Malory’s cell, did these outdated old men, great-grandsons of the Inquisitors, vestiges of a time when the one true God inspired a singular terror through the hearts and across the shoulders of the religiously nervous, did these pious men really sleep on beds made of rope and straw? Did torture focus the mind? It had been 350 years since the Inquisition had invited Galileo to Rome, invited him here to the monastery of Santa Maria sopra Minerva for his trial. Malory couldn’t quite remember if it was dropping balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa or inventing the telescope that got the Florentine into trouble. With his eyes half-conscious, Malory could only conjure a fuzzy image of Galileo in stringy beard and long robe and a kind of squinty velvet hat that reminded him of Jethro Tull. Legend had it that it only took a few days for the Inquisition to persuade Galileo that he wasn’t 100 percent certain that the Earth revolved around the Sun. It wasn’t the days that changed Galileo’s mind. Legend had it wrong. Legend hadn’t spent a night in Galileo’s bed.

  “Forse oggi,” Fra Mario said, returning to Malory. Malory stood. There was no need to dress as he had fallen asleep in the jeans and corduroy jacket that had borne him from Cambridge the day before. He had no idea whether Fra Mario was taking him to Signor Settimio or the organ or, more hope against hope, to breakfast. Leaving his rucksack on Galileo’s bed of inquisition, Malory slung his Kit Bag over his right shoulder and followed Fra Mario into the corridor. “Forse oggi,” Fra Mario said again. And Malory gradually understood that the Dominican activity around him was the vague optimism of a New Era in Rome. Fra Mario and the dozen Dominican monks of Santa Maria, and indeed all of Rome and much of the rest of Italy and, for all Malory knew, much of the world were expecting the College of Cardinals to announce a successor to poor John Paul I, who had just died after barely a month in office.

  “Forse oggi,” Antonella had smiled at him through tears and biscuits, “you will arrive in Rome and there will be a new pope. You will see the white smoke up the spout of the Sistine Chapel. They say he was poisoned,” she’d whispered to Malory, biting her soggy bottom lip to stop the flow of tears. “I have a cousin who works at the Banco Ambrosiano in the Vaticano. Nobody talks very loud there, but these days, he says, they are talking faster and softer. They say John Paul I was the wrong pope. A mistake was made. The way Aldo Moro was the wrong politician. Malory,”—Antonella had grabbed his corduroy arm in a fistful of painted nails—“you are a scientist. Tell me, if the pope is chosen by God, how can there be a mistake?”

  Kit Bag across his shoulder, Malory followed the outline of Fra Mario’s muscular brush cut through the sacristy into the church. A vague glow from the windows high in the apse and at the piazza end of the long nave met at a Christ the Savior that stood to the left of the altar, carved by Michelangelo but dressed much later by some nineteenth-century critic frightened by naked marble. Next to Jesus and below the altar, illuminated by her own electricity, a sarcophagus held the complete remains of Santa Caterina of Siena—minus head and right thumb, which had found their ways to Siena, and a foot, which wandered occasionally around Venice. Off to the side in the chapel of the Torquemada family, a colossal cousin of the more famous Spanish Inquisitor sat on his cardinal throne judging these abused ancients. High above them all, golden stars filled the blue firmament of the ceiling of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, but failed to give off any light of their own.

  Fra Mario turned a key. A door opened across from Michelangelo’s Savior. A staircase appeared, next to it a pegboard holding the business end of the bell ropes. Malory followed Fra Mario—one flight of steps, two flights, back and forth up the shaft of the campanile. The tower smelled of damp and the droppings of small things that scurried just out of sight through the cracks and holes and nests in the walls at their approach. The corkscrewed spire of San Ivo appeared through one slit of the tower, the saucepan lid of the Pantheon through another. The more Malory climbed, the more he began t
o wake up, and both were torture. He wondered what he was doing following Fra Mario, who kept murmuring forse oggi and climbing like William Tell. He wondered, as he turned a corner up the narrowing staircase, whether some Inquisitor, or perhaps the ghost of Galileo himself, was waiting to push him and Fra Mario off the top of the campanile in a scientific auto-da-fé, and which one of them would hit the gypsies first.

  But as he turned the corner, the sun shot a ray through the window and fractioned the morning into the seven colors of the rainbow. The full spectrum spread across the wall of the staircase in front of Malory, a sign as powerful as the vision of St. Michael with his sword that converted the Roman Constantine to Christianity.

  Light, Malory thought. Prism. Newton.

  The pot of gold at the end of Malory’s rainbow, however, was merely a door into the dusty choir room. The hall was broad and high-ceilinged, lit through a rank of dusty and leaded windows, furnished with a pair of upright pianos and an opened trunk of water-stained surplices, a room that had clearly not been used in some time or, if used, set aside as storage for rancid hymnals guarded by poorly painted and forgotten bishops. At the far end, Fra Mario held open a tiny Wonderland door. Malory stepped through the opening.

  “Forse oggi,” Fra Mario said, “ma adesso l’organo.” With the finality of real hope, he retreated into the choir room, pulling the door shut.

  The case was a fluffy bit of baroque panna cotta, a gift from a Borghese prince who was more aesthete than musician. The organ itself, like the one Malory had advised Trinity College to purchase, was a Metzler, built by a Swiss burgher who believed organs were created to play Bach and not Iron Butterfly. Swiss organs, like Swiss watches, trains, knives, and, for all Malory knew, fondue burners, ran fine as long as they were tended by fastidious Swiss organ tuners or confused British organ scholars. Leave them for a few years in the variable humidity and smog and waxy perfume of a Roman church and, well, they would need work.

  Still, without playing the organ, without backing it out of the garage, driving it around the corner, and listening to its particular purr as it ran the preludes and fugues, it was impossible to know the soul of the organ and prescribe the appropriate therapy. A faded cinquecento case with its birthmarks long dissolved by years of damp and pigeon shit might disguise an instrument of genius, as well-tuned now as it was the century it was installed. A sparkling canary and forest-green façade, on the other hand, could mask a scrapyard of rusted pipe and moldy wood fit more for a Duchamp fountain than a Dominican church. Malory had a fondness for these mismatches, the puzzles, the illegitimate offspring of budget and architecture. It was time to tune his attention and speak to this particular bastard.

  He emptied his Kit Bag one weight at a time onto the music stand. First the Book of Organs, next the Universal Tuner. Finally, Malory pulled out a 35-millimeter reliquary that had no mass, but which still contained the weight of Malory’s hope. Malory flipped one switch, and the light over his keyboard warmed the neglected ivory. He flipped another, and the electric motor twenty feet away behind the pipes began to wheeze air into the lungs of the instrument. The hum of power vibrated confidence through the organ bench up Malory’s body and into his fingers. The organ of Santa Maria sopra Minerva might be broken, but chances were it was playable. There was no point in gentling up to the keyboard, testing it with a tentative finger, one note at a time. Not when the stops, the manuals, the pedals, the pipes, the very bellows themselves were crying out for release. It was time for music. It was time for improvisation. i = u. Malory = Louiza. Malory raised his left hand six inches above the keyboard and brought it firmly down on the first letter of Louiza’s name.

  “Fututi pizda matii!”

  Malory pulled his hand off the keyboard. The note faded to silence. He raised his left hand and brought it down on the B-flat once again.

  “Fututi pizda matii!” The noise came from the organ case. The bottom rank of pipes, the sixteen-footers. Right register, wrong language.

  “Scusi?” One of about twelve words Malory knew in Italian. But there was no response. He looked over the parapet of the organ loft. The church was empty. Malory turned back to the bottom manual and pressed the B-flat again.

  “Cazzo!” No doubt about it. A human voice. Not a voice or vocabulary he associated with Fra Mario or the aged Dominicans.

  “Chi è?” Malory slid down the bench, his eye on the door to the choir room and the spiral stairs. “Hello?” No answer, just the muffled sound of movements behind the pipes.

  And then Malory saw the handle on the door to the pipe case turn, the door open. A figure stepped out of the pipe case and around the corner of the 16-footers. There was such a stoop to the man’s appearance that Malory at first imagined he was one of those Victorian creatures from Dante’s Inferno, damned for some sin Malory could hardly remember, swinging his head by the hair like a lantern at waist height. The man’s hair itself was medievally long, bog dark, and streaked with darker still, matted, nicotined, uncombed, and tangled past the shoulders, circling like a wet dog into a beard that seeped into the vague middle of his chest. He was dressed entirely in black—black t-shirt, black jeans, black jean jacket, black boots, all as wrinkled as the hair and as menacing as the hobnails of the bovver boys who hung around the clove-scented exit of the Taboo Disco Club on St. Andrew’s Road back in Cambridge and threw uncomprehending foreign students into oncoming traffic. Exhausted by Galileo’s bed, confused by Fra Mario’s Italian, Malory’s brain was without the oxygen to register fear, surprise or much of anything.

  “Che cazzo fai?” The man pushed himself off the organ case and cracked his back, sending a rifle shot of an echo through the arches of the church. Erect, the man stood at least six feet tall, Malory thought, maybe double that. “Che cazzo fai qui?” and the apparition stumbled away from the pipes and towards Malory on the organ bench.

  The only exits available to Malory were between the giant’s legs or over the balustrade of the organ loft, fifty feet to the stone nave of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Malory slid carefully down the organ bench as the man approached. But the closer the man came and the more Malory slid, the further he put himself from any reasonable solution. At the end of his options, Malory grabbed his Kit Bag and his Universal Organ Tuner and stood.

  He hadn’t meant to hold the Universal Tuner, a piece of metal nine inches long—pointed and ridged of course—in a threatening pose, as if he were, in fact, one of those very bovver boys in front of the Taboo Disco Club. And he hadn’t meant to tread with his own boot on the low C pedal of the organ. But in one movement, Malory’s theatrical gesture and the low C of the organ, which let forth a roar like the unleashed menagerie of Noah’s Ark, so surprised and so overwhelmed the giant, that he fell against the balustrade of the organ loft and began to pivot backwards over the edge. And that equal and opposite reaction so surprised Malory that it wasn’t until the last rumble of the low C died away in the fissures of the church that Malory realized he had somehow lunged forward and caught the giant by the belt with the Universal Organ Tuner. He was stretched out at full length, the toes of his own boots caught painfully, if securely, by the bench. His two hands gripped in agony the rough metal that had served all sorts of other purposes in the twenty years since he had found it in a field near Narbonne, but never to hold two men away from certain death on the floor of a Dominican church in Rome. Forse oggi, Malory thought. Forse oggi, gravity will have its way. And the sadness that he would die without seeing Louiza again was unimaginable. But just as Malory felt the last of the Universal Organ Tuner begin to slip through his hands, the giant pivoted his torso up with another echoing crack, and fell onto the floor of the organ loft, with Malory somehow on top of him.

  “Sorry,” Malory apologized, worming his body off the stranger’s and fiddling uncomfortably to disentangle the Universal Organ Tuner from the man’s waistband. “Mi dispiace, ma …”

  “American?” The man was breathing heavily.

  “Sorry,” Malory apo
logized again, wishing he wouldn’t. “No. British. English.”

  “So—” The man pulled himself into a sitting position on the floor, back against the balustrade. “You British come all the way to Rome to play organs and wake me up at … what the fuck is the time?”

  “Not exactly,” Malory said.

  “Not exactly?” the man said. “Fututi pizda matii!” The man laughed and wiped his eyes with thumb and forefinger.

  “Sorry,” Malory said, “I don’t speak much Italian yet.”

  “Not Italian,” the man said. “Rumanian. It means ‘fuck the …’” He stopped and turned to Malory. “Do you have a mother?”

  “Actually,” Malory said, “she died some years ago.”

  “In that case,” the man said, “I won’t waste the explanation, or curse the private parts of a dead woman.”

  “You are Rumanian?” Malory asked.

  “Not exactly,” the man said with an actor’s attempt at sobriety that quickly gave way to more laughter. He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pair of rimless glasses. “What are you not exactly doing up here?” He tweezed the glasses over the back of his ears and onto his helpless eyes. Malory realized that the apparition breathing heavily and laughing lightly next to him on the organ loft floor was essentially harmless.

  “I was planning on tuning the organ, actually.”

  “Actually?”

  “This piece of metal”—and Malory held up the Universal Organ Tuner—“is what I use to scrape and bend the pipes. Put them in tune.”

  “Not to rescue Rumanians?” The man took the tuner from Malory and scratched the end of his nose.

  “Not exactly,” Malory laughed. And he thought that it had been a while since he had laughed and a long while since he had laughed at himself. “What does it mean to be not exactly Rumanian?”

  “So,” the man began, “you have heard of Dracula?”