Confessions

1

It wasn’t until last night, walking along the wet streets of Vallcarca, that I finally comprehended that being born into my family had been an unforgivable mistake. Suddenly I understood that I had always been alone, never able to count on parents or a God I could entrust to search for solutions though, as I grew up, I got in the habit of delegating the weight of thought and the responsibility for my actions into vague beliefs and very wide readings. Yesterday, Tuesday night, caught in the downpour on my way home from Dalmau’s house, I came to the conclusion that this burden was mine alone. And that my successes and my mistakes were my responsibility and only mine. It had taken me sixty years to see it. I hope you can understand me, understand that I feel abandoned, alone and absolutely bereft without you. Despite the distance that separates us, you are an example for me. Despite my panic, I refuse to cling to driftwood in order to stay afloat. Despite some insinuations, I remain without beliefs, without priests, without consensual codes that smooth out my road to who knows where. I feel old, and the hooded figure with the scythe calls me to follow him. I see that he has moved his black bishop and gestures politely for me to continue the game. He knows I have very few pawns left. Still, it is not tomorrow yet and I look for a piece to move. I am alone before this page, my last chance.

Don’t trust me blindly. Memoirs written for a single reader are prone to falsehoods and I know that I’ll tend to land on my feet, like cats do; but I’ll make an effort not to invent much. It was all like this and worse. I know that I should have talked to you about this long ago; but it’s difficult and right now I don’t know where to begin.

It all started, really, more than five hundred years ago, when a tormented man decided to request entry into the monastery of Sant Pere del Burgal. If he hadn’t, or if Father Prior Josep de Sant Bartomeu had held firm in his refusal, I wouldn’t be explaining all this now. But I can’t go back that far. I’ll begin later on. Much later on.

‘Your father … Look, Son. Father …’

No, no; I don’t want to start there either. It’s better to start with the study where I am writing now, in front of your impressive self-portrait. The study is my world, my life, my universe, where almost everything has a place, except love. I wasn’t usually allowed in here when I ran through the flat in shorts or with my hands covered in chilblains during autumns and winters. I had to sneak in. I knew every nook and corner, and for a few years I had a secret fortress behind the sofa, which I had to dismantle after each incursion so Little Lola wouldn’t discover it when she passed the floorcloth back there. But every time I entered lawfully I had to behave like a guest, with my hands behind my back as Father showed me the latest manuscript he’d found in a rundown shop in Berlin, look at this, and be careful with those hands, I don’t want to have to scold you. Adrià leaned over the manuscript, very curious.

‘It’s in German, right?’ — his hand reaching out as if by reflex.

‘Psst! Watch those fingers! You’re always touching everything …’ He smacked his hand. ‘What were you saying?’

‘It’s in German, right?’— rubbing his smarting hand.

‘Yes.’

‘I want to learn German.’

Fèlix Ardèvol looked proudly at his son and told him you can start studying it very soon, my boy.

In fact, it wasn’t a manuscript but a packet of brownish folios: on the first page, in an overly ornate hand, it read Der begrabene Leuchter. Eine Legende.

‘Who is Stefan Zweig?’

Father — a magnifying glass in his hand, distracted by a correction in the margin of the first paragraph — instead of answering a writer, my son, just said well, some guy who killed himself in Brazil ten or twelve years ago. For a long time the only thing I knew about Stefan Zweig was that he was a guy who killed himself in Brazil ten or twelve, or thirteen, fourteen or fifteen years ago, until I was able to read the manuscript and learn a little about who he was.

And then the visit ended and Adrià left the study with the recommendation that he keep quiet: you could never run or shout or chat inside the house because if Father wasn’t studying a manuscript under a magnifying glass, he was reviewing the inventory of medieval maps or thinking about where to acquire new objects that would make his fingers tremble. The only thing I was allowed to do that made noise, in my room, was studying the violin. But I couldn’t spend the entire day practising arpeggio exercise number XXIII in O livro dos exercícios da velocidade. That exercise made me hate Trullols so much, but it didn’t make me hate the violin. No, I didn’t hate Trullols. But she could be very annoying, especially when she insisted on exercise XXIII.

‘I’m just saying we could change it up a bit.’

‘Here,’ and she would tap the score with the heel of the bow, ‘you will find all the difficulties summed up on one page. It is a simply genius exercise.’

‘But I …’

‘For Friday I want number XXIII perfect. Even bar 27.’

Sometimes Trullols was thick like that. But, overall, she was an acceptable woman. And sometimes, more than acceptable.

Bernat thought the same. I hadn’t yet met Bernat when I did O livro dos exercícios da velocidade. But we shared the same opinion about Trullols. She must have been a great teacher even though she doesn’t appear in the history books, as far as I know. I think I need to focus because I’m jumbling everything up. Yes, there are surely things you know, especially when they’re about you. But there are snippets of the soul that I don’t believe you do know because it’s impossible to know a person completely, no matter what.

Even though it was more spectacular, I didn’t like the shop as much as the study at home. Perhaps because those very few times when I went in there, I always felt I was being watched. The shop had one advantage, which was that I could gaze upon Cecília, who was gorgeous; I was deeply in love with her. She was a woman with galactic blonde hair, always well-coiffed, and with full lips of furious red. And she was always busy with her catalogues and her price lists, and writing labels, and helping the few customers that came in, with a smile that revealed her perfect teeth.

‘Do you have musical instruments?’

The man hadn’t even removed his hat. Standing in front of Cecília, he glanced around: lights, candelabra, cherry-wood chairs with very fine inlay work, canapés en confident from the early nineteenth century, vases of every size and period … He didn’t even see me.

‘Not many, but if you’ll follow me …’

The not many instruments at the shop were a couple of violins and a viola that didn’t sound very good but had gut strings that were miraculously unbroken. And a dented tuba, two magnificent flugelhorns and a trumpet, which the valley’s governor had sounded desperately to warn the people in the other valleys that the Paneveggio forest was burning. Those in Pardàc asked for help from Siròr, San Martino and even from Welschnofen, which had suffered its own flames not long before, and from Moena and Soraga, where they had perhaps already noticed the alarming odour of that disaster in the Year of Our Lord 1690, when the earth was round for almost everyone and — if unknown ailments, godless savages and beasts of sea and land, ice storms or excessive rains didn’t impede it — the boats that vanished to the west returned from the east, with their sailors more gaunt and haggard, their gazes lost out on the horizon and bad dreams gripping their nights. The summer of that Year of Our Lord 1690, every inhabitant of Pardàc, Moena, Siròr, and San Martino except the prostrate, ran to look with sleepy eyes at the disaster that was destroying their lives, some more than others. That dreadful fire they watched helplessly had already consumed loads of good wood. When the fire was put out with the help of some timely rains, Jachiam, the fourth and cleverest son of Mureda of Pardàc, travelled carefully through the devastated forest to search for serviceable logs in corners the flames hadn’t reached. Halfway down to the Ós ravine, he squatted to move his bowels beneath a young fir tree that was now coal. But what he saw took away all desire to relieve himself: resinous wood wrapped in a rag that gave off the scent of camphor and some other strange substance. He very carefully unravelled the rags that hadn’t been completely burned in the hellish fire that had demolished his future. What he discovered made him feel faint: the dirty green rag that hid the resinous kindling, with hems of an even dirtier yellow cord, was a piece of the doublet usually worn by Bulchanij Brocia, the fattest man in Moena. When he found two more piles of cloth, those ones well burned, he understood that Bulchanij — that monster — had followed through on his threat to ruin the Mureda family and, with them, the entire village of Pardàc.

‘Bulchanij.’

‘I don’t speak to dogs.’

‘Bulchanij.’

The sombre tone of voice made him turn reluctantly. Bulchanij of Moena had a prominent belly that, had he lived longer and eaten enough, would have been a very good spot to rest his arms.

‘What the hell do you want?’

‘Where’s your doublet?’

‘What the hell business is that of yours?’

‘Why aren’t you wearing it? Show it to me.’

‘Piss off. What do you think, just because you’re down on your luck everybody from Moena has to do what you say? Eh?’ He pointed to him with hatred in his eyes. ‘I’m not going to show it to you. Now get lost, you’re blocking the damn sun.’

Jachiam, the fourth Mureda boy, with cold rage, unsheathed the bark-stripping knife he always carried in his belt. He rammed it into the belly of Bulchanij Brocia, the fattest man in Moena, as if he were the trunk of a maple tree. Bulchanij opened his mouth and his eyes widened as big as oranges, surprised less by the pain than by the fact that a piece of shit from Pardàc dared to touch him. When Jachiam Mureda pulled out his knife, which made a disgusting bloop gloop and was red with blood, Bulchanij collapsed into a chair as if deflating from the wound.

Jachiam looked up and down the deserted road. Naively, he set off running towards Pardàc. When he had passed the last house in Moena, he realised that the hunchbacked woman from the mill, who was loaded down with wet clothes and looked at him mouth agape, might have seen everything. Instead of lashing out at her gaze, he just increased his pace. Even though he was the best at finding tonewoods, even though he was not yet twenty, his life had just abruptly changed course.

His family reacted well, because they quickly sent people to San Martino and Siròr, to explain with evidence that Bulchanij was an arsonist who had burned the forest down maliciously, but the people of Moena thought that there was no need to come to any arrangement with the law and they prepared, without any arbitrators, to hunt down villainous Jachiam Mureda.

‘Son,’ said old man Mureda, his gaze even sadder than usual. ‘You must flee.’ And he held out a bag with half of the gold he’d saved over thirty years of working the Paneveggio wood. And none of Jachiam’s siblings said a word about that decision. And, somewhat ceremoniously, he said even though you are the best tree tracker and the best at locating tonewood, Jachiam, my dear son, the fourth of this ill-fated house, your life is worth more than the best maple trunk we could ever sell. And this way you will save yourself from the ruin that surely awaits us, because Bulchanij of Moena has left us without wood.

‘Father, I …’

‘Run, flee, be quick about it, go through Welschnofen, because they will surely be looking for you in Siròr. We will spread the word that you are hiding in Siròr or Tonadich. It’s too dangerous for you to stay in the valleys. You’ll have to make a very, very long trip, far from Pardàc. Run, Son, and may God keep you and protect you.’

‘But Father, I don’t want to leave. I want to work in the forest.’

‘They’ve burned it down. What could you work with, Son?’

‘I don’t know; but if I leave the valleys I’ll die!’

‘If you don’t run away this very night, I’ll kill you myself. Do you understand me now?’

‘Father …’

‘No one from Moena will lay a hand on any son of mine.’

And Jachiam of the Muredas from Pardàc said goodbye to his father and kissed each of his siblings one by one: Agno, Jenn, Max and their wives. Hermes, Josef, Theodor and Micurà. Ilse, Eria and their husbands; and then, Katharina, Matilde, Gretchen and Bettina. They had all gathered to say goodbye to him in silence, and when he was already at the door, little Bettina said Jachiam, and he turned and saw how the girl held out her hand, and from it hung the medallion of Saint Maria dai Ciüf of Pardàc, the medallion that Mum had entrusted her with on her deathbed. Jachiam, in silence, looked at his brothers and sisters, and fixed his gaze on his father, who made a wordless gesture with his head. Then he went over to little Bettina and took the medallion and said Bettina, my sweet little one, I will wear this treasure until the day I die; and he didn’t know how true what he was saying would be. And Bettina touched both of her hands to his cheeks, refusing to cry. Jachiam left the house with his eyes flooded; he murmured a brief prayer at his mother’s grave and disappeared into the night, towards the endless snow, to change his life, change his history and his memories.

‘Is that all you have?’

‘This is an antiques shop,’ responded Cecília with that stern attitude that made men feel ashamed. And with a hint of sarcasm, ‘Why don’t you try a luthier?’

I liked Cecília when she got mad. She was even prettier. Prettier than Mother even. Than Mother in that period.

From where I was I could see Mr Berenguer’s office. I heard Cecília escorting the disappointed customer, who still wore his hat, to the door. As I heard the little bell ring and Cecília wish him well, Mr Berenguer looked up and winked at me.

‘Adrià.’

‘Yes.’

‘When are they coming to pick you up?’ he said, raising his voice.

I shrugged. I never knew exactly when I had to be one place or the other. My parents didn’t want me home alone so they brought me to the shop whenever they were both out. Which was fine for me because I entertained myself looking at the most unimaginable objects, things that had already lived and now rested patiently waiting for a second or third or fourth opportunity. And I imagined their lives in different homes and it was very amusing.

Little Lola always ended up coming for me, rushing because she had to make dinner and hadn’t even started. That was why I shrugged when Mr Berenguer asked me when they were picking me up.

‘Come,’ he told me, lifting up a blank piece of paper. ‘Sit at the Tudor desk and draw for a bit.’

I’ve never liked drawing because I don’t know how; I haven’t a clue. That’s why I’ve always admired your skill, which I find miraculous. Mr Berenguer told me to draw for a bit because it bothered him to see me there doing nothing, which wasn’t true, because I spent the time thinking. But you can’t say no to Mr Berenguer. Seated there at the Tudor desk, I did whatever I could to keep him quiet. I pulled Black Eagle out of my pocket and tried to draw him. Poor Black Eagle, if he could see himself on that paper … That was before Black Eagle had had a chance to meet Sheriff Carson, because I’d acquired him that very morning in a swap with Ramon Coll for a Weiss harmonica. If my father finds out, he’ll kill me.

Mr Berenguer was very special; when he smiled he scared me a little and he treated Cecília like an inept maid, something I’ve never forgiven him for. But he was the one who knew the most about Father, my great mystery.

2

The Santa Maria reached Ostia on the foggy early morning of Thursday, September 2nd. His voyage from Barcelona was worse than any of the trips Aeneas took in search of his destiny and eternal glory. Neptune did not smile on him aboard the Santa Maria and he spent much of the journey feeding the fish. By the time he arrived, his skin colour had changed from the healthy tan typical of a peasant from the Plain of Vic to pale as a mystical apparition.

That seminarian had such excellent qualifications — he was studious, pious and polished, learned despite his age — that Monsignor Josep Torras i Bages had personally decided that he would be squandering his God-given gift of bountiful natural intelligence in Vic. They had a precious flower on their hands and it would wither in the humble vegetable patch that was Vic’s seminary; it needed a lush garden in which to thrive.

‘I don’t want to go to Rome, Monsignor. I want to devote myself to study bec

‘That’s precisely why I’m sending you to Rome, dear boy. I know our seminary well enough to know that an intelligence like yours is wasting its time here.’

‘But, Monsignor …’

‘God has great designs for you. Your instructors have been insisting,’ he said, shaking the document in his hands a bit theatrically.

Born at Can Ges in the village of Tona, into the bosom of an exemplary family, son of Andreu and Rosalia, at six years old he already possessed the academic preparation and the accordant resolve to commence his ecclesiastical studies, beginning with the first course in Latinity under the direction of Pater Jacint Garrigós. His academic progress was so noteworthy and immediate that when he began to study Rhetoric, he had to lecture on the celebrated ‘Oratio Latina’. The Monsignor knows from personal experience, since we have had the immense pleasure of having you as a student in this seminary, that this is one of the first literary acts with which the instructors honour their most distinguished and proven student orators. But that distinction exceeded his eleven years and, above all, his still slight frame. While the audience could hear the solemn rhetorician Fèlix Ardèvol lecturing conscientiously in the language of Virgil, a not small stool was required to allow the tiny and circumspect speaker to be seen by the spectators who included his thrilled parents and brother. Thus Fèlix Ardèvol y Guiteres set off on the path of great academic triumphs in Mathematics, Philosophy, Theology, reaching the height of illustrious students of this seminary such as the distinguished fathers Jaume Balmes y Urpià, Antoni Maria Claret y Clarà, Jacint Verdaguer y Santaló, Jaume Collell y Bancells, Professor Andreu Duran and Your Grace, who honours us as bishop of our beloved diocese.

May our virtue of gratitude extend to our predecessors as well. The Lord Our God calls on us to do so: ‘Laudemos viors gloriosos et parentes nostros in generatione sua’ (Eccles. 44:1) It is for this reason that we are convinced we are correct in enthusiastically requesting that seminary student Fèlix Ardèvol y Guiteres continue his Theology studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University.

‘You have no choice, my child.’

Fèlix Ardèvol didn’t dare to say that he hated boats, he who had been born on terra firma and had always lived far from the sea. Since he hadn’t known how to face up to the bishop, he’d had to undertake that arduous voyage. In a corner of the Ostia port, beside some half-rotted boxes infested with huge rats, he vomited up his impotence and almost all his memories of the past. For a few seconds, he breathed heavily as he stood up again, wiped his mouth with a handkerchief, briskly smoothed the cassock he’d worn on the trip and looked towards his splendid future. Despite the circumstances, like Aeneas, he had arrived in Rome.

‘This is the best room in the residency.’

Surprised, Fèlix Ardèvol turned. In the doorway a short, somewhat plump student, who was sweating like a pig inside a Dominican habit, smiled kindly.

‘Félix Morlin, from Liège,’ said the stranger, taking a step into the cell.

‘Fèlix Ardèvol. From Vic.’

‘Oh! A namesake!’ he shouted, laughing as he extended a hand.

They were fast friends. Morlin told him that he’d been given the most coveted room in the residence hall and asked him what his inside connection was. Ardèvol had to confess that he had none; that at reception, the fat, bald concierge had looked at his papers and said Ardevole? cinquantaquattro, and he’d given him the key without even looking him in the eye. Morlin didn’t believe him, but he laughed heartily.

Exactly a week later, before the school year began, Morlin introduced him to eight or ten students he knew in the second year; he advised him not to waste his time befriending students outside of the Gregorian or the Istituto Biblico; he showed him how to slip out unnoticed by the guard, urging him to have lay clothes prepared in case they had to stroll incognito. He was the guide for the new first-year students, showing them the unique buildings along the shortest route from the residence hall to the Pontifical Gregorian University. His Italian was tinged with a French accent but totally understandable. And he gave them a speech about the importance of knowing how to keep your distance from the Jesuits at the Gregorian, because, if you weren’t careful, they would turn your brain on its ear. Just like that, plof!

The day before classes began, all the new and old students, who came from a thousand different places, gathered in the huge auditorium of the Palazzo Gabrielli-Borromeo at the Gregorian’s headquarters, and the Pater Decanus of the Pontifical Gregorian University of the Collegio Romano, Daniele D’Angelo, S.J., in perfect Latin, urged us to be aware of our great luck, of the great privilege you have to be able to study in any of the faculties of the Pontifical Gregorian University, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Here we have had the honour of welcoming illustrious students, and among them there have been a few holy fathers, the last of which was our sorely missed Pope Leo XIII. We will demand nothing more of you than effort, effort and effort. You come here to study, study, study and learn from the best specialists in Theology, Canonical Law, Spirituality, Church History, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

‘Pater D’Angelo is called D’Angelodangelodangelo,’ Morlin whispered in his ear, as if he were communicating worrisome news.

And when you have finished your studies, you will scatter all over the world, you will return to your countries, to your seminaries, to the institutes of your orders; those who are not yet will be ordained priests and will bear the fruit of what you were taught here. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera and then fifteen minutes more of practical advice, perhaps not as practical as Morlin’s, but necessary for everyday life. Fèlix Ardèvol thought that it could have been worse; sometimes the Orationes Latinae in Vic were more boring than that pragmatic instruction manual he was reciting for them.

The first months of the school year, until after Christmas, passed without incident. Fèlix Ardèvol particularly admired the brilliance of Pater Faluba, a half-Slovak, half-Hungarian Jesuit with infinite knowledge of the Bible, and the mental rigour of Pater Pierre Blanc, who was very haughty and taught the revelation and its transmission to the Church, and who, despite also having been born in Liège, had failed Morlin on the final exam in which his friend wrote about the approximations to Marian theology. Since he sat next to him in three subjects, he began to make friends with Drago Gradnik, a red-faced Slovenian giant who had come from the Ljubljana seminary and had a wide, powerful bull’s neck that looked as if it was about to burst out of his clerical collar. They talked little, although his Latin was fluent. But both were shy and tried to channel their energies in getting through the numerous doors their studies opened for them. While Morlin complained and widened his circle of contacts and friends, Ardèvol locked himself up in cinquantaquattro, the best cell in the residence hall, and he discovered new worlds in the paleographic study of papyri and other biblical documents that Pater Faluba brought them, written in Demotic, Coptic, Greek or Aramaic. He taught them the art of loving objects. A destroyed manuscript, he would repeat, is of no use to science. If it must be restored, it must be restored no matter the cost. And the role of the restorer is as important as the role of the scientist who will interpret it. And he didn’t say etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, because he always knew what he was talking about.

‘Balderdash,’ declared Morlin when he mentioned it to him. ‘Those people are happy with just a magnifying glass in their hand and some tattered, mouldy papers on the table.’

‘Me too.’

‘What good are dead languages?’ he now said in his pompous Latin.

‘Pater Faluba told us that men don’t inhabit a country; we inhabit a language. And that by rescuing ancient languages …’

‘Sciocchezze. Stupiditates. The only dead language that’s truly alive is Latin.’

They were on Via di Sant’Ignazio. Ardèvol was protected by his cassock, and Morlin by his habit. For the first time, Ardèvol looked at his friend strangely. He stopped and asked him, perplexed, what he believed in. Morlin stopped as well and told him that he had become a Dominican friar because he had a deep yearning to help others and serve the church. And that nothing would dissuade him from his path; but that you had to serve the church in a practical way, not by studying rotting papers, but by influencing people who influence the life of … He stopped and then added: etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, and the two friends both burst out laughing. Just then, Carolina passed them by for the first time, but neither noticed her. And when I reached the house with Little Lola, I had to study the violin while she prepared supper and the rest of the flat grew dark. I didn’t like that at all because some villain could always come out from behind some door and that was why I carried Black Eagle in my pocket, since at home, as Father had decided years ago, there were no medallions, scapulars, engravings or missals, and Adrià Ardèvol, poor boy, had need of invisible help. And one day, instead of studying the violin, I stayed in the dining room, fascinated, watching how the sun fled to the west, along Trespui, in the painting above the dining room sideboard, lighting up the Santa Maria de Gerri abbot with magical colour. Always the same light, which drew me in and made me think of impossible stories, and I didn’t hear the door to the street open and I didn’t hear anything until my father’s deep voice frightened me out of my skin.

‘What are you doing here, wasting time? Don’t you have homework? Don’t you have violin? Don’t you have anything? Eh?’

And Adrià went to his room, with his heart still going boom-boom. He didn’t envy children with parents who kissed them because he didn’t think such a thing existed.

‘Carson: let me introduce you to Black Eagle. Of the brave tribe of the Arapaho.’

‘Hello.’

‘How.’

Black Eagle gave Sheriff Carson a kiss, like the one Father hadn’t given him, and Adrià put both of them, with their horses, on the bedside table so they could get to know each other.

‘You seem down.’

‘After three years of studying theology,’ Ardèvol said, pensively, ‘I still have yet to work out what really interests you. The doctrine of grace?’

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ insisted Morlin.

‘It wasn’t a question. The credibility of the Christian revelation?’

Morlin didn’t answer and Fèlix Ardèvol insisted, ‘Why do you study at the Gregorian if theology doesn’t …’

They were both far from the stream of students making the trip back from the university to the residence hall. In two years of Christology and Soteriology, Metaphysics I, Metaphysics II and Divine Revelation, and diatribes from the most demanding professors, especially Levinski in Divine Revelation, who thought that Fèlix Ardèvol wasn’t progressing in that discipline according to expectations, Rome hadn’t changed much. Despite the war that had thrown Europe into upheaval, the city wasn’t an open wound; it had just got a bit poorer. Meanwhile, the students at the Pontifical University continued their studies, oblivious to the conflict and its dramas. Almost all of them. And growing in wisdom and virtue. Almost all of them.

‘And you?’

‘Theodicy and original sin no longer interest me. I don’t want more justifications. It’s hard for me to think that God allows evil.’

‘I’ve been suspecting it for months.’

‘You too?’

‘No: I suspected that you’re getting yourself in a muddle. Observe the world, like I do. I have a lot of fun in the Canonical Law Faculty. Legal relationships between the church and civil society; Church Sanctions; Temporal Goods of the church; Divine gift of the Institutes of consecrated life; the canonical Consuetudine …’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Speculative studies are a waste of time; the ones based on rules are a welcome rest.’

‘No, no!’ exclaimed Ardèvol. ‘I like Aramaic; I love looking at manuscripts and understanding the morphological differences between Bohtan Neo-Aramaic and Jewish Barzani Neo-Aramaic. Or the reason behind Koy Sanja Surat and Mlahso.’

‘You know what? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do we study at the same university? In the same faculty? Are we both in Rome? Are we?’

‘It doesn’t matter. As long as I don’t have to have Pater Levinski as a professor, I want to learn everything there is to know about Chaldean, Babylonian, Samaritan …’

‘What good will all that do you?’

‘What good will it do you to know the difference between ratified, consummated, legitimate, putative, valid and nullified marriage?’

They both started to laugh in the middle of Via del Seminario. A woman dressed in dark clothes looked up, a bit frightened to see those young chaplains making a commotion and violating the most basic rules of modesty.

‘Why are you down, Ardevole? Now it is a question.’

‘What interests you, in your heart of hearts?’

‘Everything.’

‘And theology?’

‘That’s part of everything,’ answered Morlin, lifting his arms as if he were preparing to bless the facade of the Biblioteca Casanatense and the twenty-odd people who, unawares, were passing in front of it. Then he set off walking and Fèlix Ardèvol had trouble keeping up.

‘Look at the European war,’ continued Morlin, pointing energetically towards Africa. And in a softer voice, as if he worried there were spies around, ‘Italy has to remain neutral because the Triple Alliance is only a defensive pact,’ said Italy.

‘The allies are going to win the war,’ the Entente Cordiale responded.

‘I am not moved by interests beyond being true to my word,’ proclaimed Italy, with dignity.

‘We promise you the unredeemed regions of Trentino, Istria and Dalmatia.’

‘I repeat,’ insisted Italy with more dignity and rolling its eyes, ‘Italy’s honourable position is that of neutrality.’

‘All right: if you join today, not tomorrow, OK? If you join today, you will have the whole unredeemed package: South Tyrol, Trentino, Julian Venice, Istria, Fiume, Nice, Corsica, Malta and Dalmatia.’

‘Where do I sign?’ answered Italy. And with shining eyes, ‘Long live the Entente! Death to the Central European empires! And that’s it, Fèlix, that’s politics. On both sides.’

‘And the great ideals?’

Now Félix Morlin stopped and looked up at the sky, preparing to emit a memorable phrase.

‘International politics are not the great international ideals: they are the great international interests. And Italy understood it well: once you have got on the side of the good guys, who are us, launch the offensive in Trentino to destroy that divine blessing of forests, counter-attack, the battle of Caporetto with three hundred thousand dead, Piave, breaking the front in Vittorio Veneto, then the Padua armistice and the creation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenians — which is an invention that won’t last more than a couple of months even if they call it Yugoslavia. And I predict that the unredeemed regions are the carrot that the allies will snatch away, leaving Italy frustrated. Since everyone is going to keep fighting, the war won’t be entirely over. And just wait for the real enemy, who hasn’t even woken up yet.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Bolshevik communism. If not now, in a few years.’

‘How did you learn all that?’

‘Reading the newspaper, listening to the right people. It’s the art of effective contacts. And if you knew the sad role of the Vatican in these affairs …’

‘And when do you study the spiritual effect of the sacraments on the soul or the doctrine of grace?’

‘What I do is studying, too, dear Fèlix. It’s preparing myself to serve the church well. The church needs theologians, politicians and even an enlightened few like you who look at the world through a magnifying glass. Why are you down?’

They walked in silence for a while, their heads bowed, each with his own thoughts. Suddenly, Morlin stopped short and said nooo!

‘What?’

‘I know what your problem is. I know why you’re down.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘You’re in love.’

Fèlix Ardèvol i Guiteres, fourth-year student at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, winner of the special prize for his brilliant performance over the first two academic years, opened his mouth to protest, but then closed it again. He was seeing himself on the Monday after Easter, at the end of the Holy Week holidays — with nothing to do after preparing his dissertation on Vico, the verum et factum reciprocanture seu convertuntur and the impossibility of understanding everything, unlike Félix Morlin, the anti-Vico, who seemed to understand all of society’s strange movements — when he crossed the Piazza di Pietra and saw her for the third time. Luminous. The pigeons, about thirty of them, created an obstacle between them. He approached her, and she, carrying a small package in her hand, smiled at him just as the world turned brighter, cleaner, purer and more generous. And he reasoned logically: beauty, so much beauty, cannot be the work of the devil. Beauty is divine, and so must be her angelic smile. And he remembered the second time he had seen her, when Carolina was helping her father unload the cart in front of the store. How could that sweet back be made to carry rough wooden boxes cruelly filled with apples? It was intolerable to him, and he rushed to her aid. They unloaded three boxes between the two of them, in silence, with the ironic complicity of the mule, who chewed on hay from his muzzle. Fèlix stared at the infinite landscape of her eyes, not wanting to lower his gaze towards her incipient cleavage, and Saverio Amato’s entire store was silent because no one knew what to do when a father dell’università, un prete, a priest, a seminarian rolls up his holy cassock’s sleeves and acts as a porter and observes their daughter with such a dark gaze. Three boxes of apples, a blessing from God in times of war; three delicious moments beside such beauty and then glancing around, realising that he was inside Signor Amato’s store and saying buona sera and leaving without daring to look at her again. And her mother came out and put two red apples in his hand, whether he wanted them or not, which made him blush because it crossed his mind that they could be Carolina’s lovely breasts. Or thinking of the first time he saw her, Carolina, Carolina, Carolina, the most beautiful name in the world, when she was still a nameless girl, who walked in front of him and just then twisted an ankle, and let out a shriek of pain, poor baby, and almost fell to the ground. He was with Drago Gradnik who, in the two years since he’d entered the Theology Faculty, had grown a few inches taller and six or seven butchers’ pounds heavier and, for the last three days, lived only for Saint Anselm’s ontological argument, as if there were nothing else in the world that proved God’s existence, for example the beauty of that sweet, sweet creature. Drago Gradnik was unable to realise how terribly painful that twisted ankle must be, and Fèlix Ardèvol took the leg of the lovely Adalaisa, Beatrice, Laura, delicately by the ankle, to help her to rest on the ground, and as he touched her little leg, an electric current more intense than the voltaic arcs at the World’s Fair ran down his spine and while he asked her if it hurt, signorina, he would have liked to pounce on her and have his way with her, and that was the first time in his life that he’d felt such an urgent, painful, implacable and terrifying sexual desire. Meanwhile, Drago Gradnik was looking the other way, thinking about Saint Anselm and other more rational ways to prove God’s existence.

‘Ti fa male?’

‘Grazie, grazie mille, padre …’ said the sweet voice with the infinite eyes.

‘If God has given us intelligence, I take that to mean that faith can be accompanied by reasoning. Don’t you agree, Ardevole?’

‘Come ti chiami (my precious nymph)?’

‘Carolina, Father. Thank you.’

Carolina, what a lovely name; of course you have a beautiful name, my love.

‘Ti fa ancora male, Carolina (sheer, absolute beauty)?’ he repeated, distressed.

‘Reason. Faith through reason. Is that heretical? Is it, Ardevole?’

He had had to leave her sitting on a bench, because the nymph, blushing intensely, assured him that her mother would soon come by. While the two students resumed their walk — as Drago Gradnik, in his nasal Latin, ventured that perhaps Saint Bernard isn’t everything in life, that Teilhard de Chardin’s conference seems to invite us to think — he found himself bringing a hand to his face and trying to smell what remained of the scent of the goddess Carolina’s skin.

‘Me, in love?’ He looked at Morlin, who was watching him with a smirk.

‘You show all the symptoms.’

‘What do you know?’

‘I’ve been through it.’

‘And how did you get over it?’ Ardèvol’s tone is anxious.

‘I didn’t get over it. I got under it. Until the love ended and then I got out.’

‘Don’t shock me.’

‘That’s life. I’m a sinner and I repent.’

‘Love is infinite, it never ends. I couldn’t …’

‘My God, you’ve got it bad, Fèlix Ardevole!’

Ardevole didn’t answer. Before him were some thirty pigeons, the Monday after Easter, in the Piazza di Pietra. The urgency of his yearning made him cut through the jungle of pigeons until he reached Carolina, who handed him the little package.

‘Il gioiello dell’Africa,’ said the nymph.

‘And how do you know that I …’

‘You pass by here every day. Every day.’

In that moment, Matthew twenty-seven fifty-one, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, the earth quaked, the rocks were split, and the graves were opened and the many bodies of saints who had fallen asleep were resurrected.

Mystery of God and the incarnate Word of God.

Mystery of the Virgin Mary and Mother of God.

Mystery of the Christian faith.

Mystery of the church, human and imperfect; divine and eternal.

Mystery of the love of a young woman who gives me a little package that I’ve kept on the table inside cinquantaquattro for two days. On the third day I only dared to unwrap the outermost layer of paper. It is a small closed box. My God. I’m on the edge of the abyss.

He waited until Saturday. Most of the students were in their rooms. A few had gone out for walks or were scattered among the various Roman libraries where they rummaged around, exasperated, for answers on the nature of evil and why God allows it, on the exasperating existence of the devil, on the correct reading of the Holy Scriptures or on the appearance of the neume in Gregorian and Ambrosian chants. Fèlix Ardèvol was alone in cinquantaquattro, no book on the table, nothing out of place because if something drove him nuts it was the infuriating chaotic profusion of objects that were relegated to junk, or objects out of place, or for his gaze to get stuck on things that weren’t well displayed, or … He thought that maybe he was becoming obsessive. I think so; that it began in that period: Father was a man fixated on material order. I think that intellectual incoherence didn’t bother him much. But a book on the table instead of put away on its shelf, or a paper forgotten atop a radiator, it was simply inexcusable and unforgivable. Nothing could ruin the view and he kept us all in line, especially me. I had to tidy up each and every day, all the toys I had played with except for Sheriff Carson and Black Eagle because they secretly slept with me and Father never found out about that.

He kept cinquantaquattro as clean as a whistle. And Fèlix Ardèvol, standing, looking out the window at the flow of cassocks entering and leaving the residence hall. And a horse and cart passing along the Via del Corso with some unconfessable and infuriating secrets inside its closed cabin. And the child dragging an iron bucket and making a gratuitous, infuriating racket. He was shaking with fear and that was why everything made him indignant. On the table lay an unexpected object, an object that did not yet have its place. The little green box that Carolina had given him with a gioiello dell’Africa inside. His fate. He had sworn to himself that before the bells struck twelve at Santa Maria he would have thrown out the little box or opened it. Or he would have killed himself. One of the three.

Because one thing is living to study, making a path in the thrilling world of paleography, in the universe of ancient manuscripts, learning languages that no one speaks any longer because centuries ago they were frozen into stale papyri that become their only window onto memory, distinguishing medieval paleography from ancient paleography, being happy that the world was so large that, when I got bored, I could start to investigate Sanskrit and the Asian languages, and if some day I have a child I would want …

And why am I thinking about having a child? he thought, annoyed; no, he thought indignantly. And he looked at the little box again, alone on the tidy table in cinquantaquattro. Fèlix Ardèvol brushed an imaginary thread off his cassock, ran a finger along the skin chafed by his clerical collar and sat in front of the table. In three minutes they would ring the bells at Santa Maria. He took a deep breath and came to a resolution: for the moment, he wasn’t going to kill himself. He picked up the little box with his hands, very carefully, like a boy carrying a nest he’d stolen from a tree to show his mother the greenish eggs or the helpless baby birds that I will feed, Mother, don’t worry, I’ll give them a lot of ants. Like the thirsty deer, oh, Lord. Somehow or another he knew that the steps he was taking were creating an aura of irreversibility in his soul. Two minutes. With trembling fingers he tried to untie the red ribbon, but each time the knot grew tighter and it wasn’t because Carolina was inept but rather a question of his nerves. He stood up, irritable. One minute and a half. He went over to the wash-hand basin and grabbed his shaving razor. He opened it hurriedly. One minute and fifteen seconds. And he cruelly cut that ribbon, of the loveliest red colour he’d ever seen in his entire long life, because, at twenty-five, he felt old and tired and wished these things wouldn’t happen to him, wished that they would happen to the other Félix, who seemed to be able to handle them without … One minute! His mouth dry, his hands sweating, a drip running down his cheek and it wasn’t a very hot day … Ten seconds left before the bells of Santa Maria in Via Lata strike twelve noon. And while in Versailles a bunch of novices were saying that the war was over and as they signed the armistice, their tongues hanging out from the effort, they set into motion the mechanisms to make a splendid new war possible just a few years later, bloodier and more evil, a war which God should never have allowed, Fèlix Ardèvol i Guiteres opened the little green box. With hesitant gestures, he removed the pink cotton and, as the first bell rang, Angelus Domini nutiavit Mariae, he burst into tears.

It was relatively simple to leave the residence hall incognito. He had practised it many times with Morlin, Gradnik and two or three other trusted friends, and they’d always got away with it. Dressed in lay clothes, Rome opened many doors; or it opened other, different doors than it did for the cassocks. In normal attire they could enter all the museums that decorum kept them from entering with cassocks on. And they could have coffee in the Piazza Colonna and even further, watching people pass by, and two or three times Morlin took him, beloved disciple, to meet people whom, according to him, he had to meet. And he introduced him as Fèlix Ardevole, a wise man who knew eight languages and for whom manuscripts held no secrets, and the scholars opened up their safes and let him examine the original manuscript of La mandragola, which was lovely, or some trembling papyri related to the Maccabees. But today while Europe was making peace pacts, wise Fèlix Ardevole slipped out of the residence hall, unbeknownst to the hall authorities and, for the first time, without his friends. With a pullover and a hat that hid his clerical air. And he headed straight to Signor Amato’s fruit shop to wait, and the hours passed, he with the little box in his pocket, watching the people circulate blithely and happily because they didn’t have his fever. Including Carolina’s mother, and her little sister. Everyone except his love. The gioiello, a crude medallion with a rudimentary engraving of a Romanesque Virgin beside a huge tree, some sort of fir. And on the back, the word ‘Pardàc’. From Africa? Could it be a Coptic medallion? Why did I say my love when I have no right to … and the fresh air became unbreathable. The bells began to chime, and Fèlix, who had yet to be informed, attributed it to a homage that all of Rome’s churches were making to his furtive, clandestine and sinful love. And people stopped, surprised, perhaps searching for Abelard; but instead of pointing at him they asked themselves why in the world were all the bells in Rome chiming at three in the afternoon, which isn’t a time they’re usually rung, what must be going on? My God: what if the war was over?

Then Carolina Amato appeared. She had come out of her house with her short hair fluttering, crossed the street and gone directly to where Fèlix, who thought he was perfectly camouflaged, was waiting. And when she stood before him she looked at him with a radiant, but silent, smile. He swallowed hard, squeezed the little box in his pocket, opened his mouth and said nothing.

‘Me too,’ she replied. And after many chimes of the bells, ‘Did you like it?’

‘I don’t know if I can accept it.’

‘It’s mine, the gioiello. My Uncle Sandro gave it to me when I was born. He brought it from Egypt himself. Now it’s yours.’

‘What will they say to you, at home?’

‘It’s mine and now it’s yours: they won’t say anything. It’s my pledge.’

And she took his hand. From that moment on, the sky fell to earth and Abelard focused on the touch of Heloise’s skin, which dragged him down an anonymous vicolo, filled with trash but smelling of love’s roses, and into a house that had open doors and no one inside, while the bells chimed and a neighbour lady, from a window, shouted nuntio vobis gaudium magnum, Elisabetta, la guerra è finita! But the two lovers were about to begin an essential battle and couldn’t hear her announcement.