Hell's Gate

by Laurent Gaudé

He retraced his route to be sure of finding him. A few minutes later he saw him disappearing at the end of the road into a little recess. Matteo parked the car to follow him on foot.

  When he reached the spot he had seen the large flabby figure of the professor disappearing into, he heard voices. He immediately felt that something was wrong and quickened his pace. Laughter could be heard in the dark. When he was close enough, he could make out three young boys laughing and kicking a form on the ground. It could only be the professor. The three thugs were hitting him with an innocence that was almost joyful, as if they were kicking a cardboard carton or an old wooden box. Matteo heard groans coming from the body. Suddenly one of the youths undid his fly and pissed on his victim, looking triumphant.

  Matteo shouted and ran straight at the attackers. The boys did not seem afraid. The one who had urinated did himself up slowly and asked insolently, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ replied Matteo, putting up his fists in case they attacked him.

  The three young people looked at each other, amused. ‘You want your turn too?’ one of them asked.

  ‘We won’t charge you,’ said the third, laughing.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ repeated Matteo through gritted teeth.

  The youngsters seemed to hesitate, as if wondering if it would be worth taking him on. They were weighing their desire to fight against the fatigue or amusement that would result. Finally, one of the boys said, ‘Take him and bugger off, or we’ll piss on you too!’

  The little group laughed cruelly. ‘Eh, professore! We’ll carry on whenever you like!’ cried the biggest boy. They bumped shoulders and gave the body on the ground a last kick. Then they turned and left. As they were going, Matteo heard them laughing like kids after a football game. They shouted and gesticulated with arrogance and pride.

  ‘Professore?’ said Matteo, hurrying over to him.

  Provolone was lying on his side. His flaccid penis hung out of his open fly. His shirt was stained with urine and his face was beaten up. His mouth was bleeding and his upper lip swollen. When Matteo leant over him and said his name softly, he was surprised to see that he seemed to be laughing.

  ‘Professore? Professore? Are you all right?’

  The professor did not reply. He continued to smile and murmur as if in a fever.

  ‘Professore? Stand up. I’ll help you.’

  The man gripped Matteo’s arm and got up, saying, ‘I tell you, angels in the sky … if they exist … could not be more beautiful than those three hooligans! …’

  Matteo found this strange but did not reply. He thought the man was delirious and confused by the shock of the attack.

  ‘I have my car nearby,’ he said, helping the injured man to walk. ‘Lean on me.’

  All the time they were hobbling along, Provolone was laughing and murmuring, ‘Bless them! The rascals, bless them! For kicking me like that! Beasts! That’s what they were: ravishing beasts!’

  Matteo opened the door of the café with one hand. With the other, he made sure that the professor was able to follow him. As soon as he entered he was greeted with a joyous ‘There he is! It’s my driver!’

  Grace was there, like the last time, sipping a cocktail and pouting like an American starlet.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Garibaldo as soon as he saw Provolone’s bleeding face.

  ‘He was attacked,’ replied Matteo, helping Provolone to sit at a table. ‘I brought him here so that he could have a restorative drink.’

  ‘And I thank you …’ stammered the professor, ‘really … Thank you … but you mustn’t … in any way … I’ve been a terrible nuisance …’

  Garibaldo had brought over an ice bucket, a clean cloth and a bottle of grappa that he put on the table.

  ‘Did they steal anything from you?’ asked Matteo.

  Strangely, he heard Grace choking with laughter behind him, as if it was a stupid question. The professor blushed and replied, ‘I’m very grateful for your concern … I really am … But everything is fine … I’m sorry to have involved you in all this …’

  Grace winked mockingly at Matteo and, when he seemed not to understand, said, ‘What the professore means is that it wasn’t a fight you interrupted but a form of flirting!’

  Matteo was astounded. He looked at the man he had just brought in to see whether he would confirm or deny this and the professor said with an embarrassed little shrug, ‘I understand why you were mistaken … I really do …’

  ‘But …’ Matteo was having trouble believing it.

  ‘Yes,’ Provolone went on. ‘What can I say … I love those little street urchins … I really do … I just can’t help myself …’

  Grace burst out laughing. She raised her glass and said, ‘To Professore Provolone!’

  Matteo remained stunned for some time. He didn’t know whether to laugh or to be annoyed. There was something going on here that he did not understand. ‘The world is upside down,’ he thought and he drank the glass of grappa Garibaldo was holding out to him with a smile.

  ‘If there’s anything I can do …’ replied Provolone. ‘Really … I’m so embarrassed.’

  Matteo looked at him in amazement. He just could not understand how anyone could choose to be attacked for pleasure. He did not ask the question but his confusion must have been obvious because the professor lowered his eyes and tried to explain. ‘You’re wondering why I do it, aren’t you? … I imagine that’s what you’re thinking … You remember the conversation we had last time? About death living in us … The feeling of being a ghost sometimes … Yes, exactly that … A ghost … Without life … In those moments, you see, when they hit me and laugh so savagely, when I feel their glorious muscles on me … I come alive. Strange to relate. But I assure you. I feel, yes, there’s no other way of saying it … vividly alive …’

  Matteo said nothing. He thought back to the conversation they had had when they first met. ‘Why did you say that life and death were more entwined than people think?’

  The professor passed his hand over his face, smiled gently and replied, ‘Because it’s true … People today are rational and unimaginative and they believe that there is an absolute barrier between the two, but nothing could be further from the truth. We are not either alive or dead. Not in any way … It is much more complicated than that. Everything is muddled up and layered. The Ancients knew that. The world of the living and that of the dead overlap. There are bridges, intersections, grey areas. We have simply stopped knowing how to see them and feel them.’

  Grace and Garibaldo were listening intently, and, seeing that the conversation was becoming serious, the owner of the café decided to lay a table and invited his guests to make themselves at home. He brought four glasses, a bottle and two fine mozzarelle di bufala. Then he went to close the door to indicate that he did not want to be disturbed by any more customers who might come and interrupt the intimacy of their little gathering.

  Grace smiled. The night was going to belong to them. They were all united in their desire just to listen to each other, not to have to worry about the present and to have a break from the outside world.

  ‘And why do you believe the frontier between life and death is so porous?’ demanded Garibaldo, biting into a tramezzino with ham and artichokes. Before opening the bar and enjoying the camaraderie of the café, he had been active in movements of the extreme left, and he approached everything concerning the afterlife with profound suspicion.

  ‘Have you lost someone close to you?’ asked Provolone.

  Garibaldo said nothing but he was thinking about his girlfriend who had died ten years earlier of a galloping cancer.

  ‘Don’t you ever have the feeling that they live on in you? Honestly … That they have left behind something in you that will not disappear until you yourself die? Gestures, maybe, or a way of speaking or thinking. A loyalty to certain things and places, perhaps. Believe me. The dead live. They make us do certain things. They influence our decisions and behaviour. They shape
us.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Grace bitterly. ‘That’s when there is still something to shape.’

  ‘Exactly!’ exclaimed the professor jubilantly. ‘That’s the other side of the porosity between the two worlds. Sometimes we are barely alive ourselves. When the dead leave, they take away a little piece of us too. Each bereavement progressively kills us. We’ve all had experience of that. Our joy and light diminish with each bereavement … We die a little bit more each time as we lose those around us.’

  Matteo said nothing and gritted his teeth.

  ‘Really, that is why …’ the professor went on, ‘I say that the two states overlap. Look around Naples, on certain evenings; wouldn’t you say it feels as if it’s full of shadows?’

  Matteo smiled. How many times had he felt that as he drove around the deserted streets of the city? How many times had it seemed as if he were in a strange suspended world?

  A sudden noise interrupted Matteo’s thoughts and caused them all to jump at the same time. Then they looked around. At first they thought someone was knocking at the door but that was not it. The hammerings grew louder and Matteo was about to get up and go and see whether a drunkard had decided to try to beat the wall down with his fists, when Garibaldo cried, ‘It’s Mazerotti, the priest!’ He immediately sprang out of his chair and hurried over to the window. Matteo watched his agitation in amazement. He didn’t understand what was going on. Garibaldo was closing the shutters, exactly as if he needed to hide urgently. Why was he barricading himself in like that? Was he on such bad terms with the priest that he wanted to keep him out of his establishment? Matteo was turning this over in his mind, still not understanding, when he saw Garibaldo leaning over a trapdoor in the floor that led to the stockroom. He opened it, murmuring, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’ That’s when Matteo realised that the priest was in the cellar and had been knocking on the trapdoor.

  ‘But …’ he asked, taken aback, ‘you leave him down there?’

  ‘No!’ replied Grace, laughing. ‘Mazerotti dug a passage from the crypt of the church to the café cellar. That way, he doesn’t have to cross the road.’

  ‘But why?’ asked Matteo, more and more confused by what was happening around him.

  Grace didn’t have time to reply. The trapdoor opened completely and the head of an emaciated old man appeared.

  ‘You took your time about it,’ he said sounding like an old woman.

  When the priest was on his feet, and in the middle of the room, Garibaldo closed the trapdoor, again stirring up a cloud of dust. Matteo was able to watch the old man closely. He must have been in his seventies, dried up and so wrinkled he looked as gnarled as the wooden stick he carried over his arm. He was as toothless as a beggar and his eyes were ruined – the left one squinted wildly, the right was veiled by a cataract, which gave him the look of an ancient tortoise.

  ‘Sit down, Don Mazerotti,’ said Grace, gently. She was, of all of them there, the one who knew the old man best. Truth to tell, she would have given her life for this old scrap of humanity, who for years had listened to her, counselled her, sometimes reprimanded her, but had always been in her life without ever heaping opprobrium on her, even when she talked of the nights she prostituted herself at the port, the bodies she sucked on filthy summer nights, or the boorish men who took her so roughly she cried and then left her distraught, on her knees, on the ground in an alley picking up two ten-thousand-lire notes before blowing her nose and putting her stockings back on. She told him everything: the sadness that sometimes overwhelmed her, feeling like a freak when local children followed her, calling out, ‘Poofter! Poofter!’, not knowing exactly what they were saying but happy to see that the word chased her away.

  ‘Why does he come here in secret?’ Matteo asked Garibaldo.

  ‘He’s afraid that Vatican envoys will take advantage of a moment when he’s not there to take over his church.’

  ‘They would do that?’

  ‘Yes,’ murmured Garibaldo with a conspiratorial air, and he explained to Matteo that, as the years had gone by, the church of Santa Maria del Purgatorio had attracted all the misfits of the night. Tramps, prostitutes and the mentally ill came to pray at the church. Don Mazerotti welcomed them all and celebrated mass with them in the usual way. The clergy had come to see this as a provocation. They thought Don Mazerotti was teaching them a lesson. In opening his doors to these broken, dirty, stinking souls, he was underlining the behaviour of the well-off in other churches, and declaring loud and clear that he was the only one to tend to the common people of Naples. Relations had become antagonistic. No one wanted a communist priest right in the middle of Spaccanapoli. One day, the clerical authorities had demanded that Mazerotti give up his church and go and join the nearby monastery. He refused. Tensions worsened. The authorities sent a second letter, then a third. They threatened him with excommunication if he refused. Mazerotti did not give in. That was why he barricaded himself in. He no longer went out, he locked the door and only agreed to receive the few regulars who wanted to have their confession heard. He came to Garibaldo to eat, always passing through the tunnel so that no one saw him. The locals had nicknamed him ‘il matto’ and there was not a day that went by without women leaving baskets of food or a few bottles on the steps of the church, which the old man would fetch in after nightfall, like a wary cat.

  Don Mazerotti sat down and looked at the men around him.

  ‘I’ve interrupted you,’ he said with a courtesy that appeared at odds with his scrawny appearance.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Grace.

  ‘The professore was explaining that we are all more dead than we think,’ added Matteo.

  ‘That is so true,’ replied the priest.

  At that moment Garibaldo raised his hands to stop the conversation and prevent his guests from embarking on a lengthy discussion.

  ‘Wait. Wait,’ he said hospitably. He felt as if he had gone back in time to the days when, with a few friends, he prepared for the revolution in smoke-filled cellars. ‘I’ll make us something to eat, and then we’ll resume. What would you like?’

  It was decided that they would have a lovely onion frittata and pappardelle with porcini. Garibaldo felt the circumstances were exceptional and warranted a meal on the house. Very soon, the delicious smell of frying mushrooms rose from the kitchens.

  For the first time in a long while Matteo felt happy. He looked at his strange companions: a disgraced professor, a transvestite, a mad priest and the easy-going owner of a café. He wanted to share a meal with these men, to listen to what they had to say, to stay with them in the dim light of the little room, far from the world and his grief.

  ‘So you also think we are more dead than alive?’

  Garibaldo asked the priest the question between two mouthfuls. He was looking at him with the curiosity of a child.

  ‘After forty years of hearing confession, I’m certain of it,’ replied the old man mischievously. ‘You wouldn’t believe the number of parishioners I have listened to for whom life really is nothing any more. They don’t even realise it, but all they talk about are their little fears and habits. Nothing is meaningful for them. Nothing moves them or stirs them up. Their days just follow on from each other. There is no life in all that. They are shadows. Nothing but shadows. For forty years, I have seen them pass through my confessional. Most don’t have very much to say. They feel weighed down by problems but have none to recount. No violent desire, no crime, no internal turmoil. Just some dirty little acts. Luckily the body grows old!’

  Matteo looked at Grace. She was smiling sadly. Something in her face had changed. It had become a mask of terrifying sadness. What kind of life does she lead? wondered Matteo. Was she really as happy as she seemed when she was talking excitedly and gesticulating, or were her days an endless succession of disappointments? In fact, were any of them round the table fully alive?

  ‘I absolutely agree,’ said the professor, smiling at the priest. ‘Without having your experience of co
nfession, of course, I can speak … it’s true … only for me … If we are a little bit honest with ourselves … isn’t it … an obvious fact …’

  ‘And there was I thinking you were going to try to sell me the idea of eternal paradise and peace for our souls,’ said Garibaldo, drinking a glass of grappa. ‘I think I would actually have preferred that, because what you are saying is so sad and depressing!’

  ‘Do you know the hypogeum of Ħal Saflieni? In Malta?’ asked the professor suddenly, of no one in particular, as if Garibaldo had not spoken. ‘No? It’s a magnificent example of the porosity of the two worlds. In Valletta, you can visit the immense underground chambers dating back to around 3000 bc. There is a succession of caves and cellars. No one knows much about the people who built the catacombs. But I found an interesting document on the subject. There was a Polish researcher at the beginning of the twentieth century who had a fascinating theory: according to him, the building of the catacombs was the first mass rebellion against death.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ demanded Grace, lighting a cigarette.

  ‘According to the Pole, the giant underground chambers were built so that people could live closer to their dead,’ replied the professor. ‘Everyone including women and children went to live underground. In a labyrinth of underground caves, to be closer to their lost loved ones. The people of Malta rejected mourning.’

  ‘Where are these caves?’ Garibaldo was amazed by what he was hearing.

  ‘On the outskirts of Valletta. But Malta is full of underground caverns from different eras. Near Mdina there are the catacombs of St Paul and of St Agatha. It’s as if people on Malta have always wanted to live close to their dead.’

  ‘Incredible!’ exclaimed the old priest.

  Garibaldo got up to open the trapdoor the priest had come up through a few hours earlier, and went down to the cellar. He could be heard breathing heavily. There was the sound of objects being dragged across the floor, then two arms reappeared and deposited a box on the stone floor, creating a cloud of dust. The large man then extricated himself fully from the trapdoor and put the box down by the table. He opened it with a knife and took all the bottles out at once – three in each hand – and deposited them on the table, like trophies, saying triumphantly, ‘They’re not as old as the subterranean caves of Malta, but they have lived longer than any of us.’