Shoba, Hemjit, Arundhaty
The novel’s opening line is: “It was his profession to prepare other men for death; it shocked him to be so unready for his own.” Blaise Meredith has only a year to live, and he senses his life thus far, spent in the dusty archives of the Vatican has been largely wasted, without human contact, or the achievement of doing good for others.
Geetha with an aitch, and one without
Cardinal Marotta sensing a crisis in the life of Monsignor Blaise (blaise = hardened clay) Meredith says: “What I have to say to you, Monsignor, is probably a presumption. I am not your confessor. I cannot look into your conscience; but I believe you have reached a crisis. You, like many of us here in Rome, are a professional priest — a career churchman. … Suddenly you have discovered it is not enough. … Part of the problem is that you and I and others like us have been removed too long from pastoral duty. We have lost touch with the people who keep us in touch with God.”
Priya serving coffee
Thommo, Priya, Pamela, Geetha, Geeta
Priya and the delicious chocolate cake
Priya beaming with joy on her birthday
Priya with flowers, Hemjit, Geetha, Geeta, Pamela, Thommo
Here is a pic of us at the end of the lively session, not a bit fatigued by the open-ended discussions, which were somewhat longer than usual.
Joe, Hemjit, Thommo (seated), Geeta, Shoba, Pamela, Geetha, Arundhaty, Priya (standing)
Devil's Advocate by Morris West - Full Account and Record
• Religion is like an itch in the crotch.
• I don’t believe in miracles, only in unexplained facts.
• We are ants on the carcass of the world, spawned out of nothing, going busily nowhere. One of us dies, the others crawl over us to the pickings.
• The man who does good in doubt must have so much more merit than one who does it in the bright certainty of belief.
• I am not made like that. God didn't make me like that. But do I need love the less? Do I need satisfaction less? Have I less right to live in contentment because somewhere along the line the Almighty slipped a cog in creation?
Future events:
Fri, Oct 25 at 5-30pm at CYC: KRG Reading ‘Poets in Translation.’ Pls announce your poet in advance asap. Original can be in any language, and you may recite in the original, but an English translation must be provided.
Sat, Oct 26 at 12 noon – Lunch for KRG readers and their partners at Devika’s place to observe the October birthdays of Devika, Kavita, and Joe. Lunch will be prepared by Devika, Kavita and Kumkum.
Fri, Nov 22 at 5-30pm at CYC: KRG Reading of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
On or before this date please announce your choice of novels for 2020 - the groups for selecting novels has been intimated before by KumKum.
Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 5-30pm at CYC: KRG Poetry session – Light or Humorous Verse with readers in costumes of their choice.
1. Hemjit
Hemjit
As one of the selectors of the novel he introduced the author, Morris West with this bio.
Morris West was one of Australia’s well-known authors, a novelist with sales topping 60m, which places him in the top rank of best-selling authors like Harold Robbins. West's novels combined suspense with personal explorations of believers and their faith and his deep but not always comfortable relationship with the Catholic Church and its teachings.
Morris West was the eldest of six children, born in a Melbourne suburb on 26 April 1916. He attended the Christian Brothers College in St Kilda before moving to Sydney at the age of thirteen to continue his studies with the order, in preparation for what he believed would be his eventual ordination into the priesthood. He left the order in 1941 without taking the final vows. He was a fluent speaker of both French and Italian, and he taught these languages in schools in New South Wales and Tasmania before marrying his first wife and enlisting in the Royal Australian Air Force. He served during WWII as a code-breaker.
West left the RAAF in 1945 and spent the next ten years working as a writer and producer of radio serials in Australia before quitting this job to pursue a risky new career as a full-time novelist. He had published a suspense novel, titled Moon in My Pocket, under the pseudonym 'Julian Morris'. This began a twenty-five year odyssey which saw West, his second wife Joy and their four children live in Austria, Italy (where he served for a time as Vatican correspondent for the Daily Mail); then England and the United States while he worked to establish his reputation as the author of non-fiction books like Children of the Sun (1957), which described the lives of street urchins in Naples, and later bestsellers like The Devil's Advocate (1959) and The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963). The books were openly critical of the Catholic Church and its unhealthy obsessions with power for its own sake. The latter novel was uncanny in predicting that an East European would be elected Pope; in 1978 Cardinal Wojtyła of Poland was elected, and reigned from 1978 to 2005 as Pope John Paul II. He was canonised in 2014 having achieved in death the requisite two miracles attributed to a person's intercession to be declared a saint.
West was ignored by the Australian literati and considered little more than ‘a middlebrow Graham Greene.’ However, his books were translated into over twenty languages and appeared regularly on international bestseller lists for more than forty years. He won several important literary prizes, including the James Tait Black Memorial Award for The Devil's Advocate, and he co-founded the Australian Society of Authors – dedicated to ensuring that authors’ rights were respected and they received fair financial compensation for their work. He also became an anti-war protester following a 1963 visit to Vietnam where he personally met with that country's outspoken Catholic President, Ngo Dinh Diem – a democratically-elected leader who was assassinated shortly afterwards by the CIA with the full endorsement of US President (and fellow Catholic) John F Kennedy. Diem made no secret of the fact that he wanted the Americans to leave Vietnam.
West received an MBE from the Queen in 1985 and was invested as a member of the Order of Australia in 1997. This was three years after his retirement. He remained a devout Catholic who, according to his widow, attended mass every Sunday, and never stopped hoping that he’d be granted the Papal annulment denied him for divorcing his first wife and remarrying another woman prior to his first wife’s death. His own death came on 10 October 1999, at home in his study, while working on what was to be his final novel. This unfinished book, his twenty-seventh, was published by HarperCollins under the title The Last Confession in 2000 with a foreword by his friend and fellow novelist Thomas Keneally (and an afterword by his wife). West was also the author of five plays, including a 1961 adaptation of The Devil's Advocate. Five of his novels, including The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968, starring Anthony Quinn and Laurence Olivier) and The Devil's Advocate (1977, starring John Mills and Daniel Massey), were adapted for the cinema with varying degrees of critical and commercial success.
The novel takes place in late 1950’s or pre-Vatican II era, in Calabria, in the very toe of the boot of Italy, separated from the island of Sicily by the few kilometres wide straits of Messina. It is the journey of someone who is facing death. The very first sentence is prescient:
It was his profession to prepare other men for death; it shocked him to be so unready for his own.
This Monsignor who has spent his life in the Roman bureaucracy of the Church, away from pastoral duties and human interaction, is appointed to look into the case for beatifying a man who has gained a following among the folk of southernmost Italy, in the region of Calabria in the very south of Italy.
He goes and spends time among the folk who knew the man, Giacomo Nerone, who had a son out of wedlock by a woman he met when he arrived blood-stained one night in the village and sought refuge. He gained strength and remained in the village, helping the folk organise to overcome food shortages and harsh winters. The Communist partisans who want to rule the region after the war give him notice to leave, or face summary trial and death for desertion. He chose to stay and paid the price – death by firing squad. He left behind a mess of writings which come into the hands of the agnostic Jewish doctor, Aldo Meyer. It is these writings and the debriefing of the woman who bore his son, Nina Sanduzzi, that provide the material for Blaise Meredith to report on his assignment.
His final conclusion is: “[Nina Sanduzzi] has produced evidence of a cure that may well be miraculous, though I doubt seriously whether it will pass the assessors. The writings of Nerone which I shall send you with this letter are authentic and definitive, and, in my view, sound corroboration of his claim to heroic sanctity.” Monisgnor Meredith therefore does not quite endorse that the investigation should be carried forward towards beatification.
There is a secret buried in the novel which was spotted by a priest who reviewed the novel and Morris West wrote back in appreciation. What is this secret?
There are currently about 10,000 saints on the church's official roster. The process of canonisation is the method that the Catholic Church uses to formally declare that a soul is in heaven and worthy of veneration and emulation by the faithful.
Hemjit read the passage detailing the events of the night when Giacomo Nerone entered into Nina Sanduzzi’s life. ‘Because she liked him and because she was lonely for a man, she was willing to hide him and care for him until his wound was better.’
Shoba said there was some mystery about the earlier part of Nerone’s life. Thommo remarked how unusual a coincidence it was to find three English people in this remote corner of Italy: Blaise Meredith – the Vatican appointed Devil’s Advocate to inquire into he sainthood of Giacomo Nerone; Contessa Anne Louise de Sanctis – the widow of a rich Italian who had died in the war; and Nicholas Black – the artist looking for patronage from the Contessa. A bit contrived, what?
The conversation turned to celibacy and the Catholic priesthood. In the Orthodox churches only a bishop is required to be unmarried. Married men may be ordained to the priesthood, but even married priests whose wives pre-decease them are not allowed to enter marriage after ordination. The Council of Elvira (CE 306) is often seen as the first to institute a regulation requiring clergy to abstain from sexual intercourse. This was further strengthened by the Council of Nicaea in CE 325. You can read more about the history of clerical celibacy here.
St Peter was married (but abandoned the duties to his wife after he was chosen by Jesus). The Council of Elvira in the year 306, did not forbid marriage, mind you, but declared that priests and other elders of the church are to "abstain completely from sexual intercourse with their wives and from the procreation of children.” A hundred years later, the Council of Carthage decreed no “conjugal relations” of any type were allowed. The first Lateran Council in 1123 stated once for all that “we forbid priests, deacons, subdeacons, and monks to have concubines or enter into the contract of marriage.”
A thousand years later, Catholic clergy still struggle with the question of marriage. Successive Popes have maintained the discipline, but there are exceptions: Anglican priests who convert are allowed to keep their wives. The paucity of priests in many areas has necessitated married deacons, and in areas like the Amazon among the indigenous peoples where there is no tradition of celibacy and a highly communal style of living, it is thought exceptions will be made. In any event celibacy is a discipline, and does not impinge on any point of faith or doctrine.
The Vatican is considering ordaining older married men in remote parts of Amazon to serve as priests.
Thommo mentioned Emperor Constantine, the Christian emperor of Rome, who convened the Council of Nicaea, deciding to hold Christmas at the same time as a pagan holiday in order to unify the celebrations and avoid strife. Although he lived much of his life as a pagan, and later as a catechumen, he joined the Christian faith by being baptised only on his deathbed.
2. Shoba
Shoba reading
She chose to read the passage where Meredith begins to write his report. He judges by what flowed from the life of Giacomo Nerone:
‘He had seen the fruit of the tree: the wisdom and the love of Nina Sanduzzi, the struggling humanity of Aldo Meyer, the reluctant repentance of Father Anselmo. It was good fruit, and in the bloom of it he saw the mark of the nurturing finger of God.’
At this point Thommo mentioned the speed with which Mother Teresa’s canonisation went forward – thanks mainly to Pope John Paul II. Joe (and KumKum) who happened to be in Rome when Mother Teresa died on Friday Sept 5, 1997 said that by Sunday posters were outside the churches hailing her as ‘Sancta Madre Teresa.’ Thommo has seen the Mother Teresa memorial plaque, in Skopje, Macedonia, the place of her birth.
Mother Teresa Plaque in Skopje, Macedonia
One needs a miracle to establish sainthood; this could be a miraculous cure which takes place by the explicit invocation by someone of the potential saint’s intercession. Joe mentioned the musing of Aldo Meyer: ‘There are no miracles, only unexplained facts.’ Priya remarked that Bishop Aurelio tells Meredith he has no human warmth for people from his past life in the Church – and this warmth is one of the discoveries Meredith makes which surprises him. Geeta (without an ‘h’) wondered whether priests who have no experience of the demands of the family life of their parishioners can actually understand them. Perhaps it is possible if they are involved in pastoral work, for then the problems of their parishioners are always impinging on their work and they have to understand and resolve them to the best of their ability; but it is not easy for those who are remote from parish life, for those who work in the bureaucracy of the Church, to appreciate the concerns and problems of the flock.
One of the essential merits Meredith derives from his hunt for evidence of the heroic sanctity of Giacomo Nerone is stated toward the end. He died ‘not a desiccated pedant with the dust of libraries thick on his heart.’
3. Geetha
Geetha
There’s Geetha with an aitch
And one without,
Make no mistake
Whom you’re talking about!
– this is to clarify a binary anomaly of names that has appeared in our group. In the passage Geetha chose Aurelio, Bishop of Valenta, urges Meredith to pray for a miracle that he should be cured by the merits of Giacomo Nerone, whom people regard as a saintly figure. But Meredith refuses, saying he does not dare, and has not earned the right to a miracle.
Accounts of miracles took over the conversation. Joe talked of his visit to Lourdes, the town in S France where Saint Bernadette Soubirous claimed to have witnessed the Blessed Virgin Mary in a vision. She was a 14-year-old peasant girl of no particular education. Soubirous claimed she saw a petite damsel in white, with a golden rosary and blue belt fastened around her waist, and two golden roses at her feet. In subsequent visitations she heard the lady speak to her, saying Que soy Immaculada Concepcion (I am the Immaculate Conception), and asking that a chapel be built there. The apparition asked her to dig in the ground and drink from the spring she found there. When Joe visited he saw that scores of shops were selling bottles in sizes from 10ml to 1 gallon to collect this ‘holy’ water. He thought when he reached the site he too would collect from the spring. What was his astonishment when he reached to find an array of 25 or 30 municipal faucets in a semi-circular arc from which people were collecting the water! This he thought was a bit of a farce. But the spectacle of crowds of sick and infirm people coming to the site, wheeled by volunteers to pray there, was quite edifying. You can read more at the wiki site.
The next miraculous occurrence concerns the Vallarpadam Shrine to Our Lady of Ransom, which is only ten kilometres away. People of different creeds go there to seek the blessings of Mary, known locally as Vallarpadathamma. The history dates from 1524 when a picture Mary and Infant Jesus was installed there by the Portuguese. The particular miracle associated with the shrine which makes it a centre of pilgrimage dates from 1752 when a Nair lady called Meenakshi Amma drowned in a storm with her son. While they were in danger Meenakshi Amma promised Vallarpadathamma that if they were rescued by her, they would become her Adimas (servants) until their death and sweep the church yard. And so it happened; her family still lives near the church. Boats from as far as Tamil Nadu come to be blessed.
Joe said that but for strict proscriptions, people in churches are ready to claim all sorts of miracles like weeping statues, blood issuing from the sacred bread consecrated at mass, and so on. Miracles magnify the popularity of a church and enormously raise its commercial potential.
Geeta had a couple of persistent questions. Are there saints only in Catholicism? Joe’s response to this was that there are saints in all religions, certainly in Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam. They might be called gurus, sants, pirs, walis, etc. Joe and Kumkum have visited numerous Muslim saints’ mausoleums, e.g. the dargah of Nizamuddin Aulia in New Delhi. He is considered a Sufi saint and his tomb attracts veneration from Muslims as well as Hindus. And who can visit Fatehpur Sikri without visiting the exquisite dargah of Salim Chisti, another Sufi saint from the 16th century? Most elevating of all is to visit Konya in Turkey and see the mausoleum of Jalal-ad-din Rumi, the beloved Sufi saint, best known of all Sufis across the world for his mystical verses. Here is a couplet from a verse On Death by him:
The grave is not the sum of a life complete
It is but the veil beyond which bride and groom retreat.
(Translated by Farrukh Dhondy)
You have the same sensation praying at his mazhar, as going to Assisi and spending time in the underground crypt where Saint Francis is buried.
Jalal-ud-din Rumi Mausoleum in Konya, Turkey
One could write with the same fervour about numerous Hindu saints, who have lived in the remote past (like Adi Sankara) or lived-in the recent past (like Sree Narayana Guru). One need not confuse the loose term ‘god-men’ with these genuine saints who changed the lives of people and inspired them.
Now to Geeta’s second question: do only Catholics have visions? It is true that a number of recent (last century) apparitions have occurred to young peasants like Bernadette Subirous in France; in Portugal to nine-year-old Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto who were herding sheep near their home village in the parish of Fátima, Portugal. Nearly all apparitions of Our Lady have led to sites of pilgrimage in various countries. The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., has about 80 chapels and niches in which are exhibited various national manifestations for Our Lady, I don’t know how many, at least 50, including one of our own Vailankanni Madhav.
But once again visions have been reported by people of different backgrounds. For instance, Adi Sankara’s mother had a vision of Shiva that foretold he would be incarnate in her firstborn son. To take the instance of Vaishnavite saints, Sri Chaitanya from the sixteenth century had many recorded visions. Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa in the nineteenth century had ecstasies and visions. One may go to the relevant references and learn about them.
Thommo recalled once again to the readers the film Guns for San Sebastian where Anthony Quinn, drunk, with a wineskin over his shoulder is shot with an arrow by invading Yaqui Indians when he is standing above a statue of the Blessed Virgin and red liquid starts flowing down the breast of Our Lady. The villagers gasp at the miracle … then the camera pans to Anthony Quinn, his wineskin pierced by the arrow, spilling wine onto the statue.
All this digression upon divagation reminded the readers that the Boss was not present this day (on account of her indisposition) – to keep the readers in line, and maintain a steady pace of reading.
4. Pamela
Pamela reading
In her passage the bishop and Meredith discuss what he has gathered about Giacomo Nerone.
“What did he try to do? That’s what interests me. Why did some folk cling to him as the holy one and others reject him and betray him to the executioners? Why were the Partisans against him in the first place?”
It becomes clear that the bishop too is anxious what will be found. He too is ‘afraid of the finger of God’ in this mater.Will they be held responsible for Nerone’s death?
The conversation moved to saints popular in Kerala to an even greater extent than they are abroad, e.g. Saint George. The red and white cross is well-known in England as a flag and he is the patron saint of England, but the name is exceedingly popular among Christians of all denominations in Kerala. Thommo explained the significance of George who saved the virgin daughter of a king from the dragon. You can read about the George traditions among Muslims, hundreds of whom come to seek the intercession of Saint George in a grubby little shrine at Beit Jala in Jerusalem, rather than go to the church of the Holy Sepulchre (erected over the place of death of Jesus) or the Church of the Nativity (erected over the place of birth of Jesus); see the wiki entry.
5. Thommo
Thommo discusses his reading
The passage is a conversation in which the painter Nicholas Black invites the village doctor Aldo Meyer to the Contessa’s house. Aldo Meyer tells Nina Sanduzzi, the live-in wife of Giacomo Nerone, to lay out the truth about him to the Vatican inquisitor, Blaise Meredith. It is clear the local community would like the prestige and commercial benefits of having a local saint, but they are ashamed of their own past behaviour in abandoning him to the Communist Partisans. Nerone was a threat to these partisans and he was executed by firing squad and then nailed to the tree, in a Christ-like symbolism. Thommo characterised it as one of the earliest mainstream books that treated homosexuality, a bit cosmetic as to action, but there is an intellectual argument of substance that Joe took up later in his reading.
Thommo said Nina Sanduzzi was afraid the painter Black would corrupt her son. The Partisans you must remember were the Communist underground who tried to defeat the Fascists, their sworn enemies. Joe mentioned that after WWII the Americans poured in a lot of money to wean away Italy from electing a Communist government. In the first general elections of 1948, the Italian Communist Party formed a united front with the socialists called Popular Democratic Front (FDP), but it was defeated by the Christian Democracy party. The United States spent over $10 million to support anti-Communist groups in that election.
To a question about saints in other denominations of Christianity, Joe said virtually all the saints of the Church before the Reformation continue to be acknowledged as saints by the Protestant churches, as witness the names of Episcopalian or Anglican churches: Saint Francis, Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint John, Saint James, Saint Bartholomew’s, St Anne’s, St Mary’s, etc. Regarding the Protestant Reformation Thommo mentioned it was the outcome of a protest by Martin Luther against the corrupt practice by which people got remission of the temporal punishment due to sin by buying ‘indulgences.’ Thommo gave the instance of indulgences sold to pay for the construction of St. Peter’s in Rome. This was the topic of the reforms written about in Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five theses in 1517; he was a professor at the University of Wittenberg, Germany and nailed his theses to the door of various churches there. What happened further is told in the story of the Diet of Worms in 1521 where Martin Luther was indicted, but refused to recant. His famous words were
Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir.
that is to say, Here I stand and can do no other. God help me.
Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, Germany 1521
The English Reformation had no such principled origin in a desire to reform; it was simply based on King Henry VIII’s desire to put away his wife, Catherine of Arragon who gave him a daughter, but no son (there goes misogyny!). Meanwhile he had a glad eye for Anne Boleyn whom he wanted to marry. It’s a long story, but ultimately this king who had been bestowed the title Defensor Fidei (Defender of the Faith) broke away from Rome when he could not secure an annulment of his first marriage from Pope Clement VII. This led to a chain of events by which Henry VIII defied the Pope and assumed supremacy over religious matters. That was 1533, and thus was born the Church of England.
Anne Boleyn, we all know, came to a bad end, but Catherine of Arragon was held in high regard by the people. Most tender is her letter on her deathbed to Henry VIII (still on display in the magnificent Peterborough Cathedral where she is buried):
…. I pardon you everything, and I wish to devoutly pray God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. …. Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.
6. Priya
Priya reading
The passage Priya read was about Giacomo Nerone promising that his newborn son’s eyesight (clouded over by a cataract at birth) would be restored in three weeks. And so it happened, after he prayed, ‘his arms [stretched out] like the arms of Gesü on the cross.’ This is taken as a miracle, or in Aldo Meyer’s terms, an ‘unexplained fact.’
The name he asked Nina to give his son, Paolo, is symbolic. Remember Saul the persecutor of Christians, became Paul the apostle after he was struck down by a bolt and blinded on his way to Damascus to arrest some Christians. A voice told him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4). A Christian called Ananias was sent to restore his vision. Scales fell from his eyes and Saul was filled with the Holy Spirit and he changed his name to Paul, and became the great apostle of the early church. This was the reason Nerone chose Paolo for the name of his son.
7. Joe
Joe reading
The painter Nicholas Black’s defence of homosexuality was the passage Joe chose. It has a powerful defence of his sexual nature:
“What about my nature? I was born the way I am. I was a twin. See my brother before he died and you'd have seen the perfect male — the excessive male, if you want. Me? . . It wasn't quite clear what I was to be. But I knew soon enough. It was my nature to be drawn more to men than to women. I wasn't seduced in the shower-room or blackmailed in the bar. This is what I am. I can't change it. I didn't ask to be born. I didn't ask to be born like this — God knows I've suffered enough because of it. But who made me? According to you — God! What I want and what I do is according to the nature He gave me … ”
It is useless to try to change nature, which in the case of some 8% or so of humans, ends up in attraction for the same sex. When this knowledge exists (and it has been so from antiquity) it is perverse to try and modify it through therapy, or force people to be ashamed of it. What is natural and what is unnatural was very well brought out in a poem Vikram Seth wrote. A ruling of the Delhi High Court in July 2009 stated that certain provisions of Sec 377 of the IPC had to be read down because they violated the fundamental rights to life, liberty, and equality as enshrined in the Indian constitution by characterising certain sexual acts and proclivities as ‘unnatural.’ Then a 2-judge bench of the Supreme Court in Dec 2013 reversed that ruling and maintained the legality of Sec 377 in its entirety. That was when Vikram Seth who was attending a session of the Kolkata Lit Meet (Kalam) heard the news, and next day he returned to the literary meeting and circulated, copy-right free, this wonderful poem:
Through Love’s Great Power
by Vikram Seth
Through love’s great power to be made whole
In mind and body, heart and soul—
Through freedom to find joy, or be
By dint of joy itself set free
In love and in companionhood:
This is the true and natural good.
To undo justice, and to seek
To quash the rights that guard the weak—
To sneer at love, and wrench apart
The bonds of body, mind and heart
With specious reason and no rhyme:
This is the true unnatural crime.
Joe too was filled with disgust at judicial readiness in the twenty-first century to attribute criminality to a natural state of humans. But his response to the two judges was a scatological poem and can’t be printed.
In the Bible Thommo said there are eunuchs appointed to protect women. Arundhaty mentioned a Tagore dance drama in which a woman who is a warrior becomes a man. Is that Chitrangada, the Warrior Princess?
There was a discussion on gender-change, and the government in countries with a National Health Service not being required to bear the cost of the procedure. Priya said there is a surge in sex-change. Joe said that sex-change is a quite different case from homosexuality, and in any event, nobody undertakes gender change lightly, for it involves tremendous trauma and extended hormone treatment for life.
Mention was made of the academic Jordan Peterson, but in what connection and to what effect was not clear after the session.
8. Arundhaty
Arundhaty reading
Arundhaty took up the passage dealing with Meyer's logical reasoning of the inevitable end of Giacomo Nerone, once he had decided to stay on in the village and not run away. This is his last conversation before his execution. He was assured the Communist partisans would not hurt Nina and her son, but only take him away and discredit him for desertion before executing him.
Nerone says he’s lucky to have time to prepare for his death. He bids good-bye to Meyer and promises to remember him in eternity – echoing the words of Christ on the cross to the good thief who was crucified along with him. There is a parallel with the life of Christ, an almost explicit desire to imitate him. Christ too could have gone away and escaped the wrath of the high priests, and even at his trial he could have been active in his own defence instead of accepting his destiny, when Pontius Pilate, the reluctant executioner, challenged him.
Arundhaty asked why Nerone could not have cleared out of Calabria and done the same good deeds elsewhere, since he was given time to decamp. Cardinal Marotta says early in the book: ‘Everything the Church does is designed to give a spiritual character to a material development.’
Passages Selected by Readers
1. Thommo
The painter Black invites Aldo Meyer to the Contessa’s house and Aldo Meyer tells Nina, to lay out the truth about Giacomo Nerone to Blaise Meredith
Aldo Meyer looked down at the backs of his hands, studying the brown liver spots and the rough slack skin that told him more clearly than words how old he was getting. Without lifting his eyes, he said quietly:
"I think you are a very unhappy man, Nicholas Black. You are looking for something you will never find. I think you should go away immediately. Leave the Contessa. Leave Paolo Sanduzzi. Leave us all to deal with our problems in our own way. You don't belong here. You speak our language, but you don't understand us."
"But I do, Doctor!" The handsome, epicene face was lit with malice. "I do indeed. I know that you've all been hiding something for fifteen years, and now it's going to be dug up. The Church wants a saint and you want to keep a secret that discredits you. That's true, isn't it?"
"It's half a truth; which is always more than half a lie."
"You knew Giacomo Nerone, didn't you?"
"I knew him, yes."
"Was he a saint?"
"I know nothing about saints," said Aldo Meyer gravely. "I only know men."
"And Nerone ... ?"
" ... was a man.
"What about his miracles?"
"I have never seen a miracle."
"Do you believe in them?"
"No."
The bright sardonic eyes were fixed on his drawn face.
"Then why, my dear Doctor, are you afraid of this investigation?" Aldo Meyer pushed back his chair and stood up. The shadow of the fig tree fell across his face, deepening the hollows of his cheeks, hiding the stark pain in his eyes. After a moment he answered:
"Have you ever been ashamed of yourself, my friend?"
"Never," said the painter cheerfully. "Never in my life."
"That's what I mean," said the doctor softly. "You will never understand. But I tell you again, you should go — and go quickly."
His only answer was a smile of rueful mockery as Black stood up to take his leave. They did not shake hands and Meyer made no attempt to accompany him out of the garden. Halfway to the house, the painter stopped and turned back.
"I'd almost forgotten. There's a message for you from the Contessa. She would like you to dine with her tomorrow evening."
"My thanks to the Contessa," said Meyer dryly. "I'll be happy to come. Good day, my friend."
"Ci vedremo," said Nicholas Black casually. "We'll see each other again — quite soon."
Then he was gone, a slim, faintly clownish figure, too jaunty for the years that were beginning to show themselves in his intelligent, unhappy face. Aldo Meyer sat down again at the table and stared unseeingly at the broken crusts and the brown, muddy dregs in the coffee cups. After a while the woman came out of the house and stood looking down at him, with gentleness and pity in her calm eyes. When he looked up and saw her standing there, he said curtly:
"You can clear the table, Nina."
She made no move to obey him, but asked:
"What did he want, that one who looks like a goat?"
"He brought me news," said Meyer, lapsing into dialect to match the woman's. "They are starting a new investigation into the life of Giacomo Nerone. A priest has come down from Rome to assist the Bishop's court. He will be coming here shortly."
"He will ask questions, like the others?"
"More than the others, Nina."
"Then he will get the same answer — nothing!"
Meyer shook his head slowly.
"Not this time, Nina It has gone too far. Rome is interested. The press will be interested. Better they get the truth this time."
She stared at him in shocked surprise.
"You say that? You!"
Meyer shrugged defeatedly and quoted an old country proverb.
"Who can fight the wind? Who can drown the shouting they make on the other side of the valley? Even in Rome they have heard it — and this is the result. Let's tell them what they want and be done with it. Maybe then they will leave us in peace."
But why do they want it?" There was anger now in her eyes and in her voice. "What difference does it make? They called him all sorts of names in his life — now they want to call him a beato.
2. KumKum
Blaise Meredith ponders his dry past life as he anticipates being blown dust on the desert of the centuries.
Now he was sitting on a park bench in the sun, with the air full of spring and the future abrief, empty prospect spilling over into eternity. Once, in his student days, he had heard an old missioner preach on the raising of Lazarus from the dead: how Christ had stood before the sealed vault and ordered it to be opened, so that the smell of corruption issued on the still, dry air of summer; how Lazarus at the summons had come out, stumbling in the cerecloths, to stand blinking in the sun. What had he felt at that moment, the old man asked? What price had he paid for this return to the world of the living? Did he go maimed ever afterwards, so that every rose smelled of decay and every golden girl was a shambling skeleton? Or did he walk in a dazzle of wonder at the newness of things, his heart tender with pity and love for the human family?
The speculation had interested Meredith for years. Once he had toyed with the idea of writing a novel about it. Now, at last, he had the answer. Nothing was so sweet to man as life; nothing was more precious than time; nothing more reassuring than the touch of earth and grass, the whisper of moving air, the smell of new blossoms, the sound of voices and traffic and high bird-songs.
This was the thing that troubled him. He had been twenty years a priest, vowed to the affirmation that life was a transient imperfection, the earth a pale symbol of its maker, the soul an immortal in mortal clay, beating itself weary for release into the ambient arms of the Almighty. Now that his own release was promised, the date of it set, why could he not accept it — if not with joy, at least with confidence?
What did he cling to that he had not long since rejected? A woman? A child? A family? There was no one living who belonged to him. Possessions? They were few enough — a small apartment near the Porta Angelica, a few ornaments, a roomful of books, a modest stipend from the Congregation of Rites, an annuity left to him by his mother. Nothing there to tempt a man back from the threshold of the great revelation. Career? Something in that maybe — Auditor to the Sacred Congregation of Rites, personal assistant to the Prefect himself, Eugenio Cardinal Marotta. It was a position of influence, of flattering confidence. One sat in the shadow of the Pontiff. One watched the intricate, subtle workings of a great theocracy. One lived in simple comfort. One had time to study, liberty to act freely within the limits of policy and discretion. Something in that . . . but not enough — not half enough for a man who hungered for the Perfect Union which he preached.
Perhaps that was the core of it. He had never been hungry for anything. He had always had everything he wanted, and he had never wanted more than was available to him. He had accepted the discipline of the Church, and the Church had given him security, comfort and scope for his talents. More than most men he had achieved contentment — and if he had never asked for happiness it was because he had never been unhappy. Until now . . until this bleak moment in the sun, the first of spring, the last spring ever for Blaise Meredith.
The last spring, the last summer. The butt end of life chewed and sucked dry like a sugar stick, then tossed on to the rubbish heap. There was the bitterness, the sour taste of failure and disillusion. What of merit could he tally and take with him to the judgment? What would he leave behind for which men would want to remember him?
He had never fathered a child nor planted a tree, nor set one stone on another for house or monument. He had spent no anger, dispensed no charity. His work would moulder anonymously in the archives of the Vatican. Whatever virtue had flowered out of his ministry was sacramental and not personal. No poor would bless him for their bread, no sick for their courage, no sinners for their salvation. He had done everything that was demanded of him, yet he would die empty and within a month his name would be a blown dust on the desert of the centuries.
Suddenly he was terrified. A cold sweat broke out on his body. His hands began to tremble and a group of children bouncing a ball near a bench edged away from the gaunt, grey-faced cleric who sat staring with blind eyes across the shimmering water of the pond. The rigors passed slowly. The terror abated and he was calm again. Reason took hold of him and he began to think how he should order his life for the time left to him
3. Joe
The painter Nicholas Black’s defence of homosexuality
“Charming boy. A classic David. Pity to think he'll go to seed in a village like this. I wonder the Church doesn't do something for him. You can't have the son of a beato chasing the girls and getting into trouble with the police like any other youth, can you?"
The bland effrontery of the man was too much for Meredith. He put down his knife and fork with a clatter, and said, with cold precision:
"If the boy is corrupted, Mr. Black, you will be the one to do it. Why don't you go away and leave him alone?"
To his surprise the painter threw back his head and laughed.
"Meyer must have been a very good witness indeed, Monsignor. What else did he tell you about me?"
"Isn't that enough?" asked Meredith quietly. "You are doing a detestable thing. Your private vices are a matter between you and the Almighty. But when you are set out to corrupt this boy, you are committing a crime against nature... ."
The words were hardly out of his mouth before Black cut him short.
"You've judged me already, haven't you, Meredith? You've picked up every shred of filthy gossip round the village and damned me with it, before you've heard a word in my defence."
Meredith flushed. The accusation was uncomfortably close to the truth. He said quietly:
"If I've misjudged you, Mr. Black, I'm deeply sorry. I'd be more than happy to hear you deny these — these rumours."
The painter laughed bitterly.
"You want me to defend myself to you? Damned if I'll do it, Monsignor. I'll take you on your own ground instead. Let's say I am what everybody calls me — an unnatural man, a corrupter of youth. What does the Church offer me by way of faith, hope or charity?" He stabbed a lean, accusing finger at the priest. "Let's understand each other, Meredith. You can bluff your penitents and charm your Sunday congregations, but you can't fool me! I've been a Catholic myself and I know the whole shoddy routine. You know why I left the Church? Because it answers every damn question in the book — except the one you need answering.... 'Why?' You tell me I'm committing a sin against nature because you think I'm fond of this boy and intend to get him. Let's examine that. If you can give me a satisfactory answer, I'll make you a promise. I'll pack my bags and leave here on the first available transport. Do you agree to that?"
"I can't bargain with you," said Meredith sharply. "I'll listen and I'll try to answer. That's all."
Nicholas Black laughed harshly.
"You're hedging already, you see. But I'll take you all the same. I know your whole argument on the question of the use and misuse of the body. God made it first for the procreation of children and then for the commerce of love between man and woman. That's the end. All its acts must conform to the end and all else is sin. The sin according to nature is an act in excess of the natural instinct . . . like sleeping with a girl before you marry her, or lusting after another man's wife. To want a boy, in the same fashion, is a sin against nature... ." He grinned sardonically at the pale, intent face of the priest. "Do I surprise you, Meredith? I was stuffed full of Aquinas, too. But there's a catch, and here's what I want you to tell me. What about my nature? I was born the way I am. I was a twin. See my brother before he died and you'd have seen the perfect male — the excessive male, if you want. Me? . . It wasn't quite clear what I was to be. But I knew soon enough. It was my nature to be drawn more to men than to women. I wasn't seduced in the shower-room or blackmailed in the bar. This is what I am. I can't change it. I didn't ask to be born. I didn't ask to be born like this — God knows I've suffered enough because of it. But who made me? According to you — God! What I want and what I do is according to the nature He gave me …
In the passion of the argument his attitude had changed from a sardonic insult to a plea for understanding.
4. Hemjit
How Giacomo Nerone entered into Nina Sanduzzi’s life one night.
Tonight she was at peace. She could see the beginning of fulfilment to the promise of Giacomo Nerone, that even after his death there would be care of herself and the boy. They were poor, but poverty was their natural state and Giacomo had never let them want too much or too long. Now in their greater need there was Aldo Meyer, ready to pay, out of his own need, a debt to a dead man.
There was harmony in her life, too — a slow concordance building between her and the villagers. They needed her. They were grateful, like Martino's wife, for her help in their troubles; and, when they called her the old crude names — 'the whore', 'the woman who slept with a saint' — there was no longer much malice in it; only a dim memory of old jealousies. They were a harsh people and they used harsh words, because they had few others. Their symbols were vulgar, because their life was brutish — and belly hunger cannot be satisfied with dreams.
So tonight as she walked home to the small hut among the ilex trees she was grateful, and all her gratitude centred on Giacomo Nerone, dead long since and buried in the Grotto of the Faun, where folk came to pray and went away cured of their infirmities of body and spirit.
Everything else in her life was blotted out by the memory of this man: her parents, who had died of malaria when she was sixteen and left her the hut, a few sticks of furniture and a small dowry chest; her husband, a brown, turbulent boy who had married her in the Church and slept with her for a month and then been taken by the Army to die in the first Libyan campaign. After his death she had lived, as the other women did, alone in her small hut, hiring herself out for farm labour and occasional house service when one of the maids fell sick in the Contessa's villa.
Then, Giacomo Nerone had come ...
It was a summer's night, hot and heavy with thunder. She was lying naked on the big brass bed, tossing restlessly with the heat and the mosquitoes and the need that woke often in her strong body for a man's arms and the feel of him in the bed beside her. It was long past midnight, and even after a gruelling day on the vine-terraces sleep would not come.
Then she heard the knocking — weak and furtive on the barred door. She sat up in sudden terror, drawing the bedclothes about her breasts. The knocking came again, and she called out:
"Who is it?"
A man's voice answered her in Italian.
"A friend. I'm sick. Let me in, for the love of God!"
The weak urgency of the voice touched her. She got out of bed, pulled on her dress and went to the door. When she unbarred it and opened it cautiously, he tumbled forward on to the earthen floor — a big, dark man with blood on his face and a glutinous stain seeping into the shoulder of his ragged shirt. His hands were bramble-scratched and his boots were broken and gaping, and when he tried to get up, he crawled two paces and then pitched forward on his face.
It took all her peasant strength to drag him and lever him on to the bed. While he was still unconscious she bathed the cuts on his face and cut his shirt away from the wound in his shoulder and washed that too. Then she took off his boots and drew the bedclothes over him and let him sleep until the first dawn brightened the eastern sky. He woke in the sudden panic of the hunted, staring about him with wide, scared eyes; but when he saw her he smiled and relaxed again, grimacing ruefully at the pain of his shoulder wound.
She brought him wine and black bread and cheese, and marvelled that he wolfed it so greedily. He drank three cups of wine, but would take no more food because, he said, folk were hungry and he had a right only to the traveller's share. He smiled again, as he said it, a wide, boyish smile that charmed the last fears out of her and brought her to sit on the edge Of the bed and ask who he was and what had brought him to Gemello Minore and how he had come by the wound in his shoulder.
His accent was strange to her and he had difficulty in understanding her thick Calabrese dialect, but the lines of his story were clear enough. He was a soldier, he said, a garrison gunner based at Reggio at the tip of the boot of Italy. The Allies had taken Sicily and the British Army had crossed the Straits of Messina and was working its way up the peninsula. Reggio had fallen. His unit had broken and he was on the run. If he rejoined his own army they would patch him up and send him back into the line. If the British got him they would make him a prisoner of war. So he was trying to make his way back to Rome, to his own family. He had been hiding by day and travelling by night, living on what he could steal. Last night he had been flushed by a British patrol and then they had fired at him. The bullet was still in his shoulder. It would have to be taken out, or he would die.
Because she was a simple peasant, she accepted his story at face value. Because she liked him and because she was lonely for a man, she was willing to hide him and care for him until his wound was better. Her hut was away from the village and no one ever came there. That was the beginning of it: simple and unimportant as a hundred other war-time tales of lonely widows and soldiers on the run. But the richness that grew out of it and the tragedy that ended it, and the peace that followed it, were her daily wonder and her nightly remembrance ...
5. Priya
Giacomo Nerone promises his son’s eyesight will be restored in 3 weeks.
The midwife and the women stood in a small group by the bed, and Nina hoisted herself up on to the pillows to ask fearfully:
"What's the matter with him? What are you looking for?"
"Tell her," said Aldo Meyer.
"He's blind, cara," said Giacomo Nerone gently. "He was born with cataracts growing on his eyes. It was the fever you had, the illness with the spots, which is called rubella. A woman who gets it the second or third month sometimes bears a blind child or a deaf one."
It was perhaps half a minute before his meaning reached her. Then she screamed like an animal and buried her face in the pillow while the women huddled about her like hens, clucking to comfort her. After a time, Giacomo came to her and put the child in her arms and tried to talk to her, but she turned her face away from him, because she was ashamed to have given a maimed child to the man she loved so much.
Then a long while later the women went away and Giacomo came back to her with Aldo Meyer. She was calmer now and Meyer talked to her soberly.
"This is a sad thing, Nina; but it has happened and, for the present, it cannot be altered. If things were different, I could take you down to the hospital at Valenta and then, maybe, to Naples to see a specialist and find out if anything can be done. But the war is not over yet. … So, for the present, there is nothing to do but wait. When there is peace again, we shall see what can be done."
"But the boy is blind!" It was all she could think or say.
"The maimed ones need much love," said Aldo Meyer.
… Giacomo poured wine for them all and then set about preparing a meal. The two men ate it at the table, while Nina held the bowl on her lap and talked to them from the bed. When the child whimpered, she put it to the breast, and when the small, blind bundle nuzzled against her, she found herself weeping silently.
Meyer left before midnight to sleep in his own house, safe at last from the threat of the concentration camp. When Giacomo took him to the door, Nina was dozing, but she heard Giacomo's voice say sharply:
"You're a friend of mine, Meyer, and I understand, even if I don't agree. But keep Lupo away from the village. Keep him away from me."
… A few minutes later Giacomo came back and bolted the door behind him. He said quietly:
"You can't be alone tonight, cara. I'll stay with you."
Then all the disappointment welled up like a spring inside her and she clung to him, sobbing as if her heart were broken, as indeed it nearly was.
Then, when she was calm again, Giacomo settled her on the pillows and turned the lamp low, and through half closed eyes she saw him do a strange thing. Quite un-selfconsciously, he knelt down on the earthen floor, closed his eyes and stretched out his arms like the arms of Gesü on the cross, while his lips moved in soundless prayer. There was a moment when his whole body seemed to become rigid, like a tree, and when she called out in fright he did not hear her. She lay back watching him until exhaustion overcame her, and she slid into sleep.
When she woke, the room was full of sunlight and the baby was bawling lustily …
"I want to tell you something, Nina mia."
"Tell me."
"We will name the boy Paolo." "He's your son, Giacomo. You must name him — but why Paolo?"
"Because Paolo, the Apostle, was a stranger to God, and, like me, found Him on the road to Damascus. Because, like this boy, Paolo was blinded but saw again, through the mercy of God."
She stared at him in disbelief.
"But the doctor said .
"I am telling you, cara." His voice was strong and deep as a bell. "The boy will see. The cataracts will disappear in three weeks; when a baby should begin to see the light, our Paolo will see too. You will hold the lamp in front of his eyes and watch how he blinks and begins to follow it. I promise you, in the name of God."
"Don't tell me that just to comfort me, cara. I could not bear to hope and be cheated at the end." There was agony in her voice, but he only smiled at her.
"It's not a hope, Nina mia. It's a promise. Believe it."
6. Shoba
Meredith has come to a conclusion about Giacomo Nerone’s saintliness and sits down to write his verdict.
Blaise Meredith laid down the yellowed sheet on the counterpane, leaned back on the pillows and closed his eyes. He knew now with certainty that he had come to the end of his search. He had looked into the life of a man and seen the pattern of it — a long river winding slowly, but with certainty, homeward to the sea. He had looked into the soul of a man and seen it grow, like a tree, from the darkness of the earth, upward into the sun.
He had seen the fruit of the tree: the wisdom and the love of Nina Sanduzzi, the struggling humanity of Aldo Meyer, the reluctant repentance of Father Anselmo. It was good fruit, and in the bloom of it he saw the mark of the nurturing finger of God. But all the fruit was not yet mature. Some of it might wither on the branch, some of it might fall unripe and rot into extinction, because the gardener was careless. And he, Blaise Meredith, was the gardener.
He began to pray, slowly and desperately, for Anne de Sanctis and Paolo Sanduzzi and Nicholas Black, who had chosen the same desert to walk in as Giacomo Nerone. But before the prayer was finished, the old sickness took him, griping and wrenching so that he cried out in the agony of it, till the blood welled up, hot and choking in his throat.
A long time later, weak and dizzy, he dragged himself to the writing desk and, in a shaky hand, began to write....
7. Geetha
Aurelio, Bishop of Valenta asks Meredith to pray for a miracle that he should be cured by the putative saintly merits of Giacomo Nerone.
"I have thought much these last days, Meredith. I have prayed too. You have come into my life at a moment of crisis. I am a Bishop of the Church, yet I find myself in opposition to much that is currently being said and done by my colleagues in Rome, not in matters of faith, but in discipline, policy, attitude. I believe that I am right, but I know there is danger that in following my own path I may tumble into pride and ruin all I hope to do. You were right when you told me that I am afraid of the finger of God. I am . . . I sit on a high pinnacle. I am subject only to the Pontiff. I am lonely and often puzzled ... as I am by this matter of Giacomo Nerone. I told you I do not want a saint. But what if God wants him? This is only one thing. There are many others. Now you come, a man in the shadow of death. You too are puzzled and afraid of the finger of God. I find in you a brother, whom I have come to love and trust with my heart. Both of us at this moment are looking for a sign a light in the darkness that besets us."
"I lie awake at night," said Meredith. "I feel the life slipping out of me. When the pain comes, I cry out, but there is no prayer in it, only fear. I kneel and recite my Office and the Rosary but the words are empty — dry gourds rattling in the silence. The dark is terrible and I feel so alone. I see no signs but the symbols of contradiction. I try to dispose myself to faith, hope and charity, but my will is a blown reed in the winds of despair ... I am glad that Your Lordship prays for me."
"I pray for both of us," said Aurelio, Bishop of Valenta. "And, out of the prayer, I have come to a decision. We should ask for a sign."
"What sign?"
The Bishop paused, and then, very solemnly, he told him.
"We should make this prayer, both of us. 'If it is your will, O God, to show the virtue of your servant Giacomo Nerone, show it in the body of Blaise Meredith. Restore him to health and hold him longer from the hands of death, through Jesus Christ our Lord!' "
"No!" The word was wrung from Meredith like a cry. "I can't do it! I daren't!"
"If not for yourself, then for me!"
"No! No! No!" The desperation of the man was pitiful, but the Bishop pressed him brutally.
"Why not? Do you deny omnipotence?"
"I believe in it!"
"And mercy?"
"That too!"
"But not for yourself?"
"I've done nothing to earn it."
"Mercy is given, not earned! Bestowed on beggars, not bought with virtue!"
"I dare not ask for it." His voice rose higher in fear. "I dare not!"
"You will ask for it," the Bishop told him gently. "Not for yourself, but for me and all poor devils like me. You will say the words even if they mean nothing, because I, your friend, ask you."
"And if they fail... ." Meredith lifted a ravaged face at last. "If they fail, I am in greater darkness yet, not knowing whether I have presumed too much or believed too little. Your lordship lays a new cross on my back.“
"It is a strong back, my friend — stronger than you know. And you may yet carry Christ on it across the river."
But Meredith stood like a stone man, staring out across the sunlit land, and after a while the Bishop left him, to talk with the gardeners who were spraying the orange trees.
It was the moment he had long dreaded, but never quite understood: the moment when the harsh consequences of belief became finally clear.
8. Pamela
Bishop Aurelio discusses a partial progress report about Nerone’s saintliness with Meredith
"Stop there a moment. What do you see, so far?"
"Ignotus!" said Meredith calmly. "The unknown. The man from nowhere. The lost one, who suddenly becomes the godly one. He has a sense of gratitude, a touch of compassion, a talent, and perhaps a taste for leadership. But who is he? Where does he come from, or why does he act as he does?"
"You see no saint in him?"
Meredith shook his head.
"Not yet. Godliness perhaps, but not sanctity. I have not yet examined the evidence for the alleged miracles, so I leave this out of consideration. But I make one point. There is a pattern in sanctity, a great reasonableness. As yet I see no reason here, only secrecy and mystery."
"Perhaps there is no mystery — just ignorance and misunderstanding. Tell me, my friend, what do you know of conditions here in the South at that time?"
"Little enough," Meredith admitted frankly. "For all of the war I was locked inside Vatican City. I only knew what I heard and read — and that was garbled enough, God knows."
"Then let me explain them to you." He got up and walked to the window, to stand looking out on the garden, where the wind stirred faintly through the shrubbery and the shadows were deep because there was still no moon over the hill-tops. When he spoke his voice was tinged with an old sadness. "I am an Italian, and I understand this story better than most though I do not yet understand the people in it. First you must realise that a defeated people has no loyalties. Their leaders have failed them. Their sons have died in a lost cause. They believe in no one — not even in themselves. When our conquerors came in, shouting democracy and freedom we did not believe them either. We looked only at the loaf of bread in their hands and calculated exactly the price they would ask us to pay for it. Hungry people don't even believe in the loaf until it is safely swallowed and they can feel it aching in their unaccustomed stomachs. That's the way it was here in the South. The people were defeated, leaderless, hungry. Worse than that, they were forgotten; and they knew it."
"But Nerone hadn't forgotten them," Meredith objected. "He was still with them. He was still a leader."
"Not any more. There were new barons in the land. Men with new guns and full bandoliers and a rough rescript of authority from the conquerors to clean out the mountains and hold them tidy until a new and amenable Government was established. Their names and their faces were familiar — Michele, Gabriele, Luigi, Beppi. They had bread to bargain with and meat in tin cans and bars of chocolate, and old scores to settle as well: political scores and personal ones. They saluted with the clenched fist of comradeship, and with the same fist beat the faces of those who dared to differ from them. They were many and they were strong, because your Mr. Churchill had said that he would do business with anybody who could help him to clean up the mess in Italy and let him get on with the invasion of France. What could Giacomo Nerone do against them — your Ignotus from nowhere?"
"What did he try to do? That’s what interests me. Why did some folk cling to him as the holy one and others reject him and betray him to the executioners? Why were the Partisans against him in the first place?"
"It's in the record," said His Lordship with a tired smile. "They called him a collaborator. They accused him of profitable commerce with the Germans."
Meredith rejected the suggestion emphatically.
"It's not enough! It’s not enough to explain the hate and the violence and the division and why one village prospers and the other lapses deeper into depression. It's not enough for us either. The people claim a martyrdom — death in defence of the Faith and moral principles. All you've shown me is a political execution — unjust and cruel maybe — but still only that. We're not concerned with politics, but with sanctity, the direct relationship of a man with the God who made him."
"Perhaps that’s all it was — a good man caught up in politics."
"Does Your Lordship believe that?"
"Does it matter what I believe, Monsignor?"
The shrewd patrician face was turned towards him. The thin lips smiled in irony.
Then, quite suddenly, the truth hit him, cold water in the face. This man too had a cross to bear. Bishop he might be, but there were still doubts to plague him and fears to harry him on the high peak of temptation. A rare compassion stirred in the dry heart of Blaise Meredith and he answered quietly:
"Does it matter? I think it matters much."
"Why, Monsignor?" The deep, wise eyes challenged him.
"Because I think that you, like me, are afraid of the finger of God."
9. Arundhaty
Meyer's logical reasoning of the inevitable and his last conversation with Giacomo Nerone before execution
shortened version:
Blaise Meredith lay back on the bed, relaxed in body but active in mind, listening to the cool, clinical narration of the doctor.
…
"What did Nerone say?"
"He pointed out that he, too, had his own logic. He believed that God was perfect and man, since the fall, was imperfect, and that there would always be disorder and evil and injustice in the world. You couldn't create a system that would destroy these things, because the men who ran it would be imperfect, too. The only thing that dignified man and held him back from self-destruction was his sonship with God and his brotherhood in the human family. Giacomo's own service was an expression of this relationship. Between him and II Lupo conflict was inevitable, because their beliefs were opposed and contradictory."
"And II Lupo, being the man with the guns, must destroy him?"
"That’s right." "Why didn't he go away?"
"I put that to him, too," said Meyer wearily. "I suggested he take Nina and the boy and move out to another place. He refused. He said Nina would come to no harm — and he himself had stopped running long ago."
"So he stayed in Gemello?"
"Yes. I returned to the mountains. … Il Lupo came down with his men. There was no argument between them. Nerone was firm in his refusal to quit, and Meyer's words were a flat recitation of the inevitable.
"Il Lupo's quite clear on what will be done. You're to be discredited first and then executed."
"How does he propose to discredit me?"
"Their arrival is timed for sunrise. You'll be arrested round about nine and brought here for summary trial."
"On what charges?"
"Desertion from the Allied cause and co-operation with the Germans."
Nerone smiled thinly.
"He shouldn't have much difficulty proving those. What then?" "You'll be sentenced and taken out for immediate and public execution."
"How?"
"The firing squad. This will be a military court. II Lupo is careful about the formalities."
"And Nina and the boy?"
"Nothing will be done to them at all. Lupo was quite definite on that. He sees no benefit in raising sympathy by punishing a woman and a child."
"He's a clever man. I admire him."
"He asks me to point out that this leaves you nearly eighteen hours to clear out, if you want to. I'm carrying enough money to keep you and Nina and the baby for two months. I'm authorised to give it to you on your assurance that you'll be clear of the area by sunrise."
"I'm staying. Nothing will change that."
"Then there's nothing more to be said, is there?"
….
Then, because everything was said that needed to be put into words and because neither quite knew how to say goodbye, they walked in silence up and down the flagged path under the fig tree until Meyer said, awkwardly;
"I'm sorry it's ending like this. It's not my business any more, but what are you going to do now?"
Nerone answered him quietly and frankly:
"I'm going down to have Father Anselmo hear my confession. I'll call at the hut to collect a few things and hand them to Nina. Then, I'll walk up to the villa to ask the Contessa if she'll have Nina and the boy there till it's all over. She's British by birth and II Lupo's too clever to fall foul of the people who are giving him his guns. Then His dark, hollow face broke into a smile. "Then I'm going to say my prayers. I'm lucky to have time to prepare. It isn't every man who knows the time and place of his death." He stopped pacing and held out his hand. "Good-bye, Meyer. Don't blame yourself too much. I'll remember you in eternity."
"Good-bye, Nerone. I'll have a care for Nina and the boy." He wanted to use the old, familiar formula and say "God keep you". But he remembered in time that, in II Lupo's new world, which was now his own, there would be no God any more. The farewell was therefore pointless, and he did not say it....
Super write up Joe
ReplyDeleteEnjoyed your account of the Session on Sept 20th. Sorry I missed the session. I enjoyed the book. Though the author is not one of those very popular one, especially in the West. I like his prose, it has a lyrical tone in it.
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