The Fallen Angel

FOUR

The scooter climbed the steep, winding road from Trastevere and the noise it made meant Peroni’s song from the previous day — Vespa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa — rarely left Nic Costa’s head all the way. They got off in the forecourt beneath the white marble facade of San Pietro in Montorio. He recalled what Mina had told him about the procession from the Ponte Sant’Angelo to this small and, by Roman standards, humble, church. It must have been a long and arduous journey, one taken by thousands following the bier that contained Beatrice’s broken corpse.

Montorio was part way up the Gianicolo hill, by a bend on the busy road to the summit where Garibaldi had once fought. It was a quiet place, green, with expensive houses and views of Rome that encompassed an entirely new perspective. The dome of St Peter’s was invisible. All one saw was a view back over the river to the centre which, from this height, fell into an unfamiliar panorama of distant steeples and towers.

‘The Tempietto,’ she declared, snatching off her helmet, shaking her long blonde hair then popping another stick of gum into her mouth.

He followed her to the iron gate of the cloister next to the church. It was locked. The opening hours had passed. Inside he could see Bramante’s tiny temple, circular with Doric columns, perfectly proportioned in a way which Palladio would consciously copy.

‘It’s a martyrium,’ Mina told him, clinging to the bars, poking her pale, narrow face through as she tried to see more, winding her leg round the iron uprights, as a child would with a playground ride. ‘That’s what you call a monument that marks the site of a martyr’s death. Peter, supposedly.’ Her hand rose, and with it a didactic finger, as if she were practising to be the tour guide for Joanne Van Doren’s non-existent condominium customers. ‘They used the hill for crucifixions. That much is true but Daddy said there’s not a shred of evidence Peter was executed here. Or even that he came to Rome.’

Costa recalled this argument well. It was a recurrent one when sceptics and believers locked horns.

‘I think some people would challenge that idea.’

She watched him.

‘Would you?’

Costa thought about it for a moment and said, ‘I’m not qualified. We all have the right to believe what we want, for or against. I don’t think private opinions are worth fighting over.’

‘You sound like Bernard, Daddy’s boss. Typical liberal woolly thinking. The truth is the truth. If you could prove Peter never came to Rome, you should. However much you hurt people’s feelings. They shouldn’t base their lives on lies.’

‘Truth can be relative. And unpleasant. Did Bernard and your father quarrel?’

Mina smiled at him and he wondered if she felt he was prying.

‘Do you want the truth? Or a nice, polite answer?’

He smiled and said, ‘The truth, please.’

‘They hated one another. Daddy was supposed to edit some papers about science and religion. Put his name to something he didn’t believe for one moment. Just like Galileo.’ She glanced in the direction of the Tempietto. ‘One more martyr in Rome. We may have been broke but you couldn’t buy his principles. What else did he have left?’

‘He had his family,’ Costa said.

‘Suppose so,’ she said, then picked up her helmet and tripped off to the church without looking back.

It was a compact, quiet place. Two people, a middle-aged man and an elderly woman, were on their knees in the shaft of light that illuminated the nave, praying. Mina came close to Costa and whispered, pointing with her right hand, ‘They never marked Beatrice’s grave. Some people say it was beneath the altar. Others in the chapel there.’ He caught the brief sign of an impatient expression on her young face. ‘I can’t believe they hated Beatrice so much they’d deny her that. Then the French came.’

By the time Napoleon invaded, the Cenci story was part of Roman folklore. It was this that attracted the marauding soldiers to Montorio, and an orgy of destruction that, rumour had it, saw her remains disinterred then scattered across the hill where imperial Rome once crucified those it regarded as criminals.

Mina sat down on a bench and stared at the altar. Costa joined her. They stayed there for a few minutes in silence. Then, without another word, she got up and marched outside, crossed the forecourt and climbed onto the perimeter wall overlooking the hill, perching there like any other teenager, hands round her knees, helmet strap gathered round her wrist, gazing at the view: the historical heart of the city stretching in front of them like a magical panorama with the ragged crown of the Sabine Hills beyond.

He thought it best to leave her alone for a few minutes. Costa went and peered at Bramante’s Tempietto through the cloister’s bars. It resembled a monument that had escaped from Ancient Rome only to find itself locked in a beautiful prison for some reason. Finally he walked over to the wall and saw, as he reached her, that she was crying.

The tears ran in two vertical streaks down each cheek, bright and viscous. After a little while she sniffed then wiped them away with a scrunched-up tissue dragged out of her jeans pocket.

‘Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea,’ he said. ‘I can run you home.’

‘I’m not crying for Beatrice,’ she spat at him with a sudden, childish petulance. ‘She’s been dead for four centuries.’

‘Of course not. If you want me to go. .’

‘I didn’t say that, did I?’

‘No. If you want to talk about anything. .’

She stared at him with cold, glassy eyes.

‘That’s why you came, isn’t it? To interrogate me?’

He hitched himself up onto the wall, sat a little way along from her and said, with a shrug and a wry smile, ‘Actually I came because you asked me. I nearly said no.’

Her head went to the city again. She was silent for a while then she murmured, ‘I’m sorry for being hateful. It happens sometimes. Mina, the perfect child. Not so perfect really.’

‘I meant it. If you want to talk, fine. If not. .’

‘I don’t.’

He waited. For all the knowledge that Malise and Cecilia had crammed into this bright and unusual girl, for all her skill with words and languages, she was still a teenager. Sullen and joyful in turn, unpredictable, uncertain of herself and the world around her. Grieving inwardly for a father whose death she, perhaps, failed to understand too.

‘Somewhere there,’ she said finally. Her arm was sweeping the glorious panorama in front of them. ‘In that dip to the right of the Vittorio Emanuele monument. .’

‘Yes?’

She wouldn’t look at him. She was uncertain of saying this somehow.

‘There’s another church, Santa Francesca Romana. Next to the Forum. It’s white. Pretty brick campanile. Somewhere behind the Palatine, close to the Colosseum. You know it?’

‘There are so many churches in Rome,’ he said, trying to recall that section of Mussolini’s broad and insensitive highway cutting through the core of the imperial city. Then it came: a small, elegant building perched on a ridge next to the fence marking off the Forum, and a memory of traffic jams in spring.

‘You mean the car drivers’ church?’ he said, remembering. Santa Francesca was the patron saint of motorists. On her feast day in March hundreds would converge on the area to have their vehicles blessed.

She stared at him, full of doubt. Costa explained.

‘I suppose that’s the place,’ she said, listening to his description. ‘Daddy told me a story. About Simon Magus, the wizard, and St Peter. It’s as true as anything else.’

She clasped her hands, fingers gripping one another tightly. Telling stories helped her somehow.

‘Nero,’ Mina Gabriel began, ‘was the emperor and ordered a debate, a contest of miracles, a trial of the powers of Peter and the wizard. Simon called on his masters and flew. Levitated.’ She gestured with her hands. ‘Right in front of everyone. The emperor. The people, thousands of them, because they’d come to see. It was magic, wasn’t it? Everyone wants to believe in magic. So Simon flew.’ Her hands unclasped, her fingers rose to the blue summer sky. ‘High up. Like a bird. Like an angel.’

Her eyes went back to the distant line of steeples and towers.

‘Peter’s miracle was to kneel down and pray to God to bring the magic to an end. It wasn’t God’s magic, you see. It was someone else’s and that was not allowed. So Simon fell to earth, died on the stones in front of Nero. Broken. Gone.’

Tears again. He waited. The tissue came out. She coughed, struggling to regain her composure. Then she gestured towards the city.

‘In Santa Francesca Romana, on the right, next to the main altar, there’s a stone with some hollows on it. They say they’re the marks that Peter’s knees made as he prayed to God, with such force he could move rocks, kill a man, do anything. This was God’s magic, wasn’t it? Nero was furious. He had Peter crucified.’ She nodded towards Bramante’s Tempietto. ‘Perhaps here. Who knows? But you see the point?’

The story was new to him yet it seemed so Roman, so cruelly apposite.

‘Not exactly.’

Mina’s round, liquid eyes, too sad, too worldly for someone of her age, held him. Costa felt he was being slow.

‘If you believe this story,’ she went on, ‘Peter wasn’t crucified for being a Christian. He was tried for murder. His prayers sent Simon crashing to his death. He killed someone because they were different. And now. .’

Her gaze strayed towards the Vatican, hidden by the hill.

‘. . look where he is.’

‘Rome’s full of stories,’ Costa told her. ‘Full of beauty and barbarity too. That’s what we are. A kind of magnifying glass for humanity. All the best parts, all the worst, out there in the light of day for everyone to see. Not so much of the barbarity any more, though. Usually, anyway.’

‘Daddy told me that story. He said it comes from the Acts of Peter. They’re apocryphal but it’s the same source that says Peter was crucified upside down. If you believe that. . and most of the world does.’

She closed her eyes, remembering something, then, in a pure soprano, sang out loud the foreign words. .

‘The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended

The darkness falls at thy behest.’

Mina watched him, her eyes dark with some inner fury.

‘At thy behest,’ she said, back in Italian again. ‘All Peter did was pray. He didn’t murder Simon Magus. God did.’

Mina Gabriel wiped away her shining tears, snatched up the helmet and pulled it down over her golden hair.

‘There’s one place left,’ she said.