Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 259

GOVERNOR

I see. This-Popeye-

STEVENS

-discovered himself betrayed by one of his own servants, and took a

princely vengeance on his honor's smircher? You will be wrong. You

underrate this precieux, this flower, this jewel. Vitelli. What a name for

him. A hybrid, impotent. He was hanged the next year, to be sure. But even

that was wrong: his very effacement debasing, flouting, even what dignity

man has been able to lend to necessary human abolishment. He should have

been crushed somehow under a vast and mindless boot, like a spider. He

didn't sell her; you violate and outrage his very memory with that crass

and material impugnment. He was a purist, an amateur always: he did not

even murder for base profit. It was not even for simple lust. He was a

gourmet, a sybarite, centuries, perhaps hemispheres before his time; in

spirit and glands he was of that age of princely despots to whom the

ability even to read was vulgar and plebeian and, reclining on silk amid

silken airs and scents, had eunuch slaves for that office, commanding

death to the slave at the end of each reading, each evening, that none

else alive, even a eunuch slave, shall have shared in, partaken of,

remembered, the poem's evocation.

GOVERNOR

I dont think I understand.

STEVENS

Try to. Uncheck your capacity for rage and revulsion -the sort of rage and

revulsion it takes to step on a worm. If Vitelli cannot evoke that in you,

his life will have been indeed a desert.

TEMPLE

Or dont try to. Just let it go. Just for God's sake let it go. I met the

man, how doesn't matter, and I fell what I called in love with him and

what it was or what I called it doesn't matter either because all that

matters is that I wrote the letters-

GOVERNOR

I see. This is the part that her husband didn't know.