Hell's Gate

by Laurent Gaudé

  A new heaviness weighed down his limbs. At first it was only a little uncomfortable and did not slow his flight. He was just a little more out of breath. He made an effort and forced himself not to slow down.

  That was when he spotted the River of Tears. He flung himself into it without a moment’s hesitation, letting the successive waves of dead souls with their torments and stale smell lash his face. When he reached the other side he told himself that he had succeeded. He smiled to himself. All he had to do now was find the door and he would climb up out of the Underworld with his son by his side. His body was now strangely slow. His muscles were stiff and responded less speedily. He was seizing up. His mind was still clear but his limbs seemed numbed by cold. Soon his legs would carry him no further. He fell to the ground. He looked back worriedly, but was relieved to see that there were no spirits following him. They had not been able to cross the river and had stopped on the bank of the dead, envious of the man who had escaped them and frightened by the tumultuous waves that menaced them. He was alone and tried to pull himself together calmly. The ghost of Mazerotti the priest was still there. He came over to him and asked him gently, ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Something’s wrong with me, but I don’t know what it is,’ he replied.

  ‘Hurry!’ murmured Mazerotti. ‘Stand up! You mustn’t give up!’

  So Matteo gathered his failing strength and stood up. He staggered again, but managed to walk on. Running was impossible. He went forward bent double as if he were having an asthma attack. Mazerotti encouraged him to continue, to hurry – and so he walked, by sheer force of will.

  When they reached the bronze doors, Matteo was surprised to find them open.

  ‘Why did they not close behind us?’ he asked the priest in a feeble voice.

  ‘It’s for me,’ replied Mazerotti.

  And as Matteo looked at him round-eyed, he explained, ‘I’m not going to die today. The door is waiting for me to leave before closing again.’

  Matteo had thousands of questions he wanted to ask. He did not understand. Had the priest known this all along? By what miracle was he to be spared death? He would have liked to rejoice with him, to thank him for acting as guide but he knew he must hurry. The most important thing was to get out. So he tried to take the final steps that separated him from the door but he couldn’t move. His legs would no longer respond. He was overwhelmed by terror. He looked questioningly up at the priest. When his eyes met the priest’s he understood that it was useless to fight. Mazerotti looked at him with kindness and compassion.

  ‘So this is how it is to be?’ asked Matteo. He would have liked to say more, but he didn’t have the breath. He would have liked to yell, and beg, to cling on to the priest, to ask him to pull him but he wasn’t strong enough any more.

  Mazerotti said to him, regretfully, ‘Death will not let you leave again. You stole a spirit and it claims a life in exchange.’

  Matteo looked down at the ground. ‘There is no way out for me,’ he thought. ‘Very well. I am at the corner of Vicolo della Pace and Via Forcella, in Naples, on that wretched day. I’m holding my son by the hand and it’s me who takes the stray bullet. That’s how I must think of it. I longed to die in his place. And that is what has happened today. I am on the pavement of Vicolo della Pace and I die in his place, under the beating sun, surrounded by the frightened cries of the passers-by. It’s good. I curse that idiot death, but I bless fate for killing me and not my son.’

  And then in a sort of exhausted breath, he expelled his son’s ghost. For a moment they looked at each other with love. They were face to face, knowing that they would never have the pleasure of living and growing old together. There would always be one of them missing and the other would have to live with that absence. Father and son. They only ever had six years. Six years to enjoy each other, get to know each other, rub along together and to learn from each other. Six short years – and the rest, all the rest, stolen.

  Matteo took Pippo’s face in his hands. He hugged him tightly. He wanted him there, close to him. To be able to breathe in his hair for hours, for eternity. His son whom he would never see grow up, who was going to become a man he would not know. Would he remember his father? Not from pieced-together memories, made up of what people said about him, but a real physical memory, precise like a smell or a sound? His son. He commended him to life. Matteo was filled with melancholy. How hard it was to leave Pippo. Life tore things away all the time. He breathed in the scent of the child’s hair one last time, then regretfully released him from his embrace. His strength left him. He could no longer stand. Mazerotti took Pippo by the hand and led him to the gate. They slipped out through the massive doors. Matteo watched them disappear. He did not move. There he was, drained and miserable, on his knees, emptied of life. He thought for a while that he had succeeded and that he should rejoice, but sadness overcame every part of his body and weighed him down. Would Giuliana know what he had done? Would she kiss him in her thoughts when she understood how far he had gone to fetch their son? ‘Tell her,’ he wanted to say to his son, but no sound came from his mouth.

  He was still on his knees. His face was turned towards the door. He thought of the eternity that was now going to pass like slow torture. Here he was, the only living man amongst the dead. How long would this last? The large empty chambers would be resonating with his footsteps, his shouts and his tormented solitude. He thought of all this but he was not frightened. He had succeeded. His son was alive again. He smiled with the pallor of the feverish. Incapable of moving his hands, and crushed by a weight that bent him over like an old man, he watched the doors solemnly close, condemning him for ever.

  In front of the heavy bronze door, Don Mazerotti’s corpse was shaken by spasms. The body that had lain inert – cooling down like a cadaver – now gave little starts. The warmth of life had brought the colour back to his cheeks. He suddenly opened his eyes and took a breath, like a diver surfacing. His heart started beating again. The cardiac arrest had, in fact, lasted only a few seconds, but time in the Underworld does not pass at the same speed and those few seconds had been enough for the two friends to undertake their journey.

  Don Mazerotti stood up straight away. He was still a little pale and his chest felt tight but he could recall perfectly what had happened on the other side of the door. He did not waste time looking for Matteo; he knew he would never see him again. But he did look around for the little boy. There he was by the bronze door. A child of six who looked terribly small compared to the height of the two sealed doors. The child had his back to him. He was kneeling down and knocking with all his might on the door so that it would open again.

  Mazerotti went quietly over. The child was sobbing. He was knocking and knocking, although he had no strength left. He knocked so that the door would open and let his father through. So that they could see each other again and again. He knocked, crying, wringing his hands and making terrible faces. He did not want to stay like this. His father was there, just there, in an unreachable world. His father. He wanted him. He wanted to be held in his father’s arms again. He wanted to hear his voice again. He wanted the door to open.

  The priest did not have the heart to do anything. He kept his distance, dismayed by the heart-rending sight of the child railing at death. He listened to the sound of the boy’s repeated knocking on the bronze, hypnotised by the obstinate plea. He heard the echo of the knocking reverberating and amplified in the labyrinths of the Hereafter. Mazerotti imagined Matteo, still kneeling there on the other side, listening out and hearing the noise. He would be in no doubt that it was his son. The muffled knocks were telling the father that his son was crying for him and would never give up on him. They were relaying his love and his desire for them to live together. Pippo was there, he was calling him. Until his knuckles bled. He was communicating the irrepressible love of a child. And the father, on the other side of the door, must be blessing each of the knocks as the most beautiful present he had ever been given.


  Mazerotti let the child knock until he couldn’t go on and fell backwards in the mud, drunk with fatigue. He let him knock so that Matteo would not be on his own. So that he might hear his son thanking him and crying. So that he could hear the noise of life – even though it was in pain and crying – so that he would not doubt that he had won.

  Then, when Pippo finally fainted with exhaustion, the old man took him carefully in his arms, as you would pick up a relic or a sacred being, and set off on the journey home.

  XVI

  Naples Trembles

  (November 1980)

  When Matteo and Don Mazerotti disappeared into the depths of the tower, they had left Grace, Garibaldo and the professor behind on the dirty central reservation that separated the two fast-flowing lanes of traffic. Silence settled over them. How much time went by? They could not have said. Time slowed down. Everything seemed to float in the calm of darkness. At first they waited as if they were at a station or in front of an apartment building. The professor sat down at the foot of the tower, his old satchel between his legs. Garibaldo smoked a cigarette, then another one, then a third. Grace, meanwhile, paced about, trying to imagine what Matteo and Mazerotti were going through. ‘Why did I not go down with them?’ she thought. ‘Am I not also dead inside?’ She thought of her precarious life, a life of loneliness and dissatisfaction. ‘We only have one life and I am a mess. A ridiculous failed monster.’ She thought of how she had been mocked for years in the street, and of the names she had been called with disgust and cruelty. Only one life. And hers had been one long succession of scorn and bullying. Yet, she had not gone down with them. Something in her had made her feel that the dead were not her business. ‘I like my life,’ she thought, smiling sadly. ‘It’s ugly and smells of sweat, but I like it.’ And she liked the city as well, with its long dark avenues and shadowy populace scavenging in bins. ‘I belong here,’ she thought and was surprised to realise that there was more life in her than she had thought. She had not gone down because, in spite of the muck which stuck to her cheeks on her nights of sin, she liked being here, a bit sad and fragile like a child made dirty by the ugliness of the world.

  Minutes or hours passed and gradually they were overcome with fatigue. Garibaldo sat down, his back against the stone wall, beside the professor, and Grace lay down in the grass. The passing cars no longer made them jump. They didn’t even hear them any more. A haggard man with trembling lips came up to them at one point and seemed to be about to ask them for something: money, a light, or maybe something else. But when he saw the three of them he sensed he would not get any joy, and he disappeared. Later – but when exactly? – an ambulance passed, wailing in the night, but even that did not rouse them from their torpor. They must have been asleep, although it felt more like an absence than slumber, and soon it was the middle of the night. There was silence and no cars passed any more. The city made no sound.

  Suddenly they were awoken by a thud. They sat up instantly and hurried over to the door of the tower and leant over, peering into the dark staircase down which the two men had disappeared. There was a figure, seemingly encumbered, coming up. His laborious breathing could clearly be heard.

  ‘Don Mazerotti?’ murmured Grace. And her voice betrayed fear as much as joy. In reality, deep down they had all thought they would never see their friends again. They thought that Matteo and Mazerotti had disappeared for ever. This sudden apparition was rather terrifying, like the return of a ghost.

  ‘Don Mazerotti,’ repeated Garibaldo, ‘is it you?’

  Soon they could make out the features of the man who was struggling to ascend. It was indeed the old priest. He was panting and his face had an unnatural pallor. When she saw him, Grace thought he must be dead, but, by some kind of trick, still walking. He had the waxy hue of a corpse, with white lips and eyes sunk into their sockets. He did not manage to walk up the last few steps and Grace didn’t understand what was hampering him. Don Mazerotti opened his mouth to ask something but no sound came out. He was too weak.

  ‘He won’t make it on his own,’ murmured Grace.

  Garibaldo leant forward, gripped the old man’s arm and pulled as hard as he could. The priest was strangely heavy. That was when the professor realised that he was carrying someone and that the weight prevented him from walking.

  ‘Take him,’ gasped the priest with his remaining strength. ‘Take him for the love of God!’

  Garibaldo took hold of the inert body Mazerotti held out, and went back up the stairs, making sure that Mazerotti was following him. When they were finally in the open air, he sank to the ground, exhausted. It was only then that he looked at the face of the person he was carrying. He was holding a child of about six, a little boy who seemed to be deeply asleep, but who, now that he was in the fresh air, opened his eyes – large frightened eyes. And as Garibaldo was looking at him, he let out a cry that rooted them to the spot. It was the cry of a newborn, as if air was making its way through the child’s throat and lungs for the first time.

  ‘You did it?’ asked the professor, stupefied. ‘I was right … A gate … it really was a gate!’ he repeated like an excited child.

  ‘Where’s Matteo?’ asked Grace anxiously.

  The old priest did not respond to any of their questions. He struggled to get up, and still with that corpse’s pallor, his hand over his heart because he had difficulty breathing and his ribcage was hurting, he said, ‘Take him. To the church. Quickly. I’ll tell you everything there. But, please, hurry!’ And as the little group didn’t move, trying to understand what was going on, who the child was and where Matteo had gone, he added threateningly, ‘It’s after us, and God knows what it’s going to do to catch us!’

  Then, without further questions, the professor led the way. Grace helped the old man to walk and Garibaldo took the child in his arms again. He had stopped shrieking and was looking about him like a frightened animal.

  They ran as fast as they could, like thieves after a heist or slaves making a bid for freedom, terrified at the thought of what was pursuing them, but giddy with their sudden freedom.

  The first tremor took them by surprise as they reached Piazza Gesù Nuovo. Suddenly, the earth began to growl. The tarmac cracked. The houses shook. Things flew pell-mell off balconies – laundry, flowerpots, neon signs. It was as if a beast of monstrous proportions – a blind whale or a giant worm – were sliding under the earth and making the ground undulate. Soon the streets of Naples were filled with shouting. People woken in the middle of the night were wondering what was happening and why the walls of their bedroom were shaking. The whole city was in a panic and desperately calling out. Houses collapsed, with those inside them engulfed in falling concrete.

  The little group was thrown to the ground. A few feet away, a lamp post came down on two cars, causing their windscreens to shatter. In spite of his age, it was Mazerotti who was first back up on his feet. He was fired up by the urge to fight. Nothing seemed to frighten him. He shouted at his companions still on the ground, with the calm of a captain in a storm, ‘Hurry up! We have to get back to the church.’

  The three friends picked themselves up and followed the old man, who was marching along at a furious pace. Their progress was difficult. Only a few streets remained for them to walk through, and, all the way, there were crowds of women yelling like Vestal Virgins after the ravages of the barbarians, and mounds of rubble blocking the way. They had to give up on Via Sebastiano, which was entirely blocked by a collapsed palazzo, and make a large detour. All the way, they were amazed by Mazerotti’s energy and determination.

  When they arrived, the priest made them go straight down into the crypt, just as there was another tremor. It was like being in the hold of a ship in a storm. They couldn’t see anything, and all they could hear was the muffled noise of falling masonry, shouts and cracking. Outside chaos reigned, and they did not know if they would ever be able to venture from their refuge. The house opposite had collapsed, blocking the entrance to the church. They hoped
the church itself would hold up so that they would not be buried under several feet of rubble.

  ‘Whatever will be will be,’ said Don Mazerotti with astonishing calm. ‘But if we are to die tonight, I hope at least I will have been able to tell you what I saw.’

  He fetched several candles, which he lit and placed around them. First he waited for the child, who was as tired as a newborn baby after his first feed, to be properly asleep, and then, by the light of the candles, he began his tale. He told them everything. Naples continued to be shaken by spasms and he talked for hours. When the walls of the crypt shook with another aftershock, he did not stop speaking, but instead speeded up his account to ensure they would know everything before they were buried.

  They felt more than thirty aftershocks that night, short, sharp and muffled like the far-off anger of the gods. Each time, the ground shook, the walls trembled and a little plaster or marble dust fell down. Fissures zigzagged across the ceiling. Each time, they wondered if they were going to be able to hear the priest’s story right to the end or whether they would be snatched away, having first been crushed by falling masonry.

  Eventually Don Mazerotti fell silent. He had finished. The earth around them seemed to have found its equilibrium. Grace and Garibaldo looked grave. They thought of Matteo and the child. The professor was entranced. He looked as if he were having hallucinations. He was overjoyed at the thought that he had been right all these years. The priest’s account had just washed away twenty years of mockery and insults.

  Slowly they stood up, left the crypt and pushed open the heavy church door to see what remained of Naples.

  They went down the steps to the square like sleepwalkers, staring wide-eyed at the world. The spectacle that greeted them was unimaginable. In a few hours, Naples had been plunged into total chaos. People had taken everything they wanted to keep out of their apartments. Fearing their houses would collapse and bury their most precious possessions, they had installed themselves on the pavements, huddled together around an old family chest, some suitcases, their pots and pans or an old armchair.