The Great Concert of the Night

MARCH

Online, a Q&A session with Antoine Vermeiren, recorded in Paris after the release of Le Grand Concert de la Nuit; intermittently subtitled. The attire is smart, and slightly dandyish: sugar-white shirt; a black suit of self-evidently expensive fabric; similarly fine footwear. The one exception to the monochrome scheme is the hosiery: violet socks. The other extravagance is the hair: a thick sweep of striated grey, just short of collar-length. For every question he has several hundred words; the voice is drowsily low-decibel; as he speaks, his left hand describes curlicues in the air, mimicking the turns of his thinking; it holds a cigarette, which is deployed with easy technique, like a miniature baton. The right hand is for raking the hair. Before each answer, the hair is raked or a cigarette sipped.

Inevitably, a questioner remarks that the subject of sex is prominent in Vermeiren’s oeuvre; the director is invited to share his thoughts on the subject. Another cigarette is lit at this point; Vermeiren considers the lights in the ceiling. ‘Sex is not that important,’ he pronounces. ‘Sex is of less importance than work,’ he goes on, squinting into the light. Work, productive work, is what makes us human; the separation of sex and work is the basis of civilisation. ‘And I work very hard,’ he says. The cigarette is halted in mid-air, in anticipation of a downbeat. ‘But sex is also of great importance,’ he resumes. Some of the things he says are things that Imogen said to me; the same phrases are used. But he goes further: sanctity and transgression, he maintains, are inseparable. Nobody could deny, he proposes, that the libertine is closer to the saint than is the man who has no desire. His work is ‘profoundly spiritual’, Vermeiren asserts, because ‘the things of the body are the things of the spirit.’ A strong emphasis on sont – as if the syllable were a hammer with which, at a single blow, he shatters the carapace of hypocrisy.

The characters in Le Grand Concert de le Nuit – indeed, in all of Vermeiren’s films – are loquacious, extremely so, a member of the audience observes. ‘They deliver speeches,’ she says, at which Antoine Vermeiren smiles and nods; he encourages her to continue; she is pretty. The question has something to do with rhetoric. The eighteenth century was the golden age of rhetoric, Vermeiren states. That is why he likes that period so much. That is why he loves the music of the eighteenth century. ‘It is reasonable music, but it has passion,’ he says. He suggests that the questioner has identified a paradox that lies at the heart of Le Grand Concert: ‘These people talk about their wildness, but how can wildness have a language?’ He wants it to be understood that Le Grand Concert de le Nuit is not merely set in the Baroque era – it is Baroque in spirit, because Baroque art is concerned with ‘the representation of what cannot be represented’, and is imbued with the ‘melancholy of failure’. There is something of the Baroque in Vermeiren’s answers; the logic is hard to discern, but the performance is enjoyable, like an opera with fine music and an unfathomable libretto.

He must be absolutely clear: he is no apologist for violence. This is something that he deplores in American culture: its appetite for violence without consequence, its use of violence as entertainment. Within a minute he has declared himself to be a vegetarian. This is connected to his ideas on Christianity. Contempt for animals is intrinsic to Christian morality: ‘The beasts are beneath morality, and therefore disgusting,’ he explains. ‘I do not share this disgust,’ he says. ‘Deus est anima brutorum. God is the soul of beasts.’ The cigarette performs an intricate loop.

His next film, he announces, will be based on the life – the outrageous life – of Georges Bataille. A script has been written. He has much to say about Georges Bataille, about the ‘reversal of values’, the ‘profound affinity between erotic pleasure and religious exaltation’, et cetera. The accusations that were made against Vermeiren, a few months later, no doubt played some part in the annulment of that particular project.

Pierre/Vermeiren walks down the main street of Vézelay, so self-consciously that he appears to be suffering the after-effects of cramp; his hands hang like lumps of chicken meat. And the ghastly smile that he does: intended to suggest a deep and dark and illusion-free mind, but more suggestive of toothache. Vermeiren believes, I suspect, that his creativity transcends any considerations of mere technical competence. He can no more act than I can.

Francesca tells me that I should pack a copy of Lucretius for my Roman holiday. I will like him, she promises. How could one not admire a man who, writing in the century that preceded the arrival of Christianity, argued that the gods neither created us nor have any interest in what we’re up to? Why would any deity create a species as vulnerable as humans and then confine them to this inhospitable lump of rock and water? Why bother? Do the gods crave amusement? No – they reside in a place of infinite tranquillity, and have nothing to do with the world in which we live. They do not punish us and they do not reward us. Nature is the ruling force of our world.

As did many of his coevals in the medical profession, Samuel Vickery believed that one could read in the contours of the skull the character of the mind within. The head-bones of criminals were not of the same form as those of the law-abiding, he maintained, and in proof of this theorem he displayed in his consulting room three skulls that he had acquired. They were of Italian origin, and were said to have been removed from the skeletons of a swindler, a violent drunkard and a matricide. All three came into the possession of John Perceval, and are now in room seven. The trio of criminal skulls are placed on a shelf at median adult head-height, so that they may meet the viewer on more or less equal terms.

I showed Imogen the skull of the belligerent drinker; the bumps of the cranium were indicative, supposedly, of a propensity to Combativeness. Having bought this item, John Perceval had shown it to a colleague who, like Samuel Vickery, was an adherent of the pseudoscience of phrenology. The skull, John Perceval explained, was the brain-case of a commedia dell’arte actor from Cremona. From the irregularities of the dome, he proposed, it was clear that this individual had been an exemplar of Wit and Mirthfulness. The colleague, after careful examination of the specimen, concurred with his analysis.

Looking through her reflection at the matricide’s skull, Imogen said: ‘An upholstered skull. That’s what a face is.’ She glanced at me, with a rueful smile. Years later, in her room, she would look at her wasted arm as it lay on the sheet, and say: ‘The bones are just about ready to come out.’

Walking down Union Street I catch sight of Samantha amid the shoppers and strollers, fifty yards off, heading towards me; two seconds later, as if she has sensed that she is under observation, she glances up the road, hitting me immediately, in the instant in which – feigning a sudden distraction – I detach my gaze from her. Having briefly simulated an interest in a display of jackets, I look in her direction, thinking she might have taken the opportunity for evasion. But Samantha would not be party to such pretence; she is approaching; she has prepared herself. So I smile; the smile is intended to let her know that I had seen her immediately, and was simply waiting for her. Her smile tells me that the deception has not been successful.

‘Seen something you like?’ she asks.

I indicate a tweed jacket, the most conservative item on show. ‘What do you think?’

‘A bit too horse and hounds?’ she suggests.

She has a point. ‘How are you?’ I enquire.

Her headmaster has announced that he’ll be leaving in the summer; he’s off to rescue an underachieving school in Liverpool. The topic sustains a one-minute conversation.

‘And what about you?’ Samantha asks.

‘I’m OK,’ I answer.

‘That’s good.’

In parting, I send my best wishes to Val. This is accepted wryly, with no words. Anyone passing within earshot would have mistaken us for ex-colleagues, at best.

Wherever he goes, William tells me, a CCTV camera is pointing at him. It’s like being an animal in a zoo. It’s worse than that, because the cameras make him feel bad about being himself, whereas a monkey cannot feel bad about being a monkey. It is like being accused all the time, says William. He has done nothing wrong, but the cameras make him feel that he has. In every corner of the town he is being judged and found guilty.

A woman of my age, emerging from room seven with the expression of someone who has just been grievously insulted, tells me that the warning notice should be more strongly worded. ‘There are some horrible things in there,’ she says: the dissected baby, for instance; the syphilitic head. Children could be given nightmares, she tells me. Later in the afternoon, shrieks of delighted disgust from a boy and girl in room seven; aged ten and twelve, I estimate. ‘Is that football thing real?’ the boy asks me. He points to the twenty-five pound ovarian cyst. ‘It’s real,’ I answer. ‘What about that?’ asks the girl, indicating the placenta in which repose the fractured bones of a foetus that was killed by its sibling in the womb. ‘That too,’ I tell her. ‘Sick,’ says the boy, and they go back for another close look.

I remember when Samantha first used the word ‘narrative’ in talking about herself. It was a word for which Val had developed a penchant. Val’s mission was to help people to ‘take ownership’ of their ‘personal narratives’. And now Samantha had come to understand her own story with a new clarity. While sorting through some boxes that she had brought away from her mother’s house, she had come upon a wallet of photographs. The photographs were miscellaneous in subject and in age. One made her linger: a picture of herself, at fourteen, with friends in what appeared to be a park. In the middle was Barbara, the beautiful one; to Barbara’s left, madcap Janet; to Barbara’s right, Gillian, the high-flyer, who eventually went to Oxford to study law, and forsook her old friends entirely; and beside Gillian, Samantha. She had forgotten how she had once felt about Gillian; looking at the photo, at the smile and the sidelong glance, it was so obvious, said Samantha. And before Gillian, she now remembered, there had been someone else, a delicate but regal girl, two years above her, whose elegant walk – as though she were following an invisible and extremely narrow path – Samantha had tried to emulate.

Imogen, at the age of fourteen, had been enthralled by an older girl called Hulda, a glorious blonde Amazon who threw the javelin as if intending to kill. Such adorations are commonplace, as Imogen said. Remembering Hulda, she felt no embarrassment at the infatuation; she felt nothing, because the smitten Imogen existed only as a source of memories. But for Samantha, there was a lesson to be learned from the past. She saw that she had allowed herself to be diverted from the right road. The manifold forces of conventionality – overt and covert – had prevailed over her, and consequently she had become someone who was not truly herself. Gillian had been directing her towards a road that she had not taken, and the years of marriage had been a diversion. Not that she regretted those years, I was to understand. But thanks to Val, Samantha’s narrative had at last come to make sense.

The former husband’s story, on the other hand, has yet to achieve a satisfactory form. No sense of a through-road there, as yet.

In her correspondence with Charles, Adeline played the part that was expected of a woman in her position. Again and again she praised her fiancé’s intelligence and denigrated her own. Her husband-to-be was ‘the quintessence of sympathy’, she wrote, quoting the words of her sister, who similarly revered him. In an episode of self-doubt – an episode that to me seems inauthentic, as if she had felt under an obligation to admit to a transient loss of confidence on the brink of matrimony – Adeline wondered if her ‘inferior’ mind and lack of education might not in time prove burdensome to him.

The letters provide ample evidence that Adeline’s mind was far from inferior. I removed from its file the five-page letter of October 5th, 1854. As Imogen started to read it, I told her what she would find there. I can recite much of this letter from memory. Protestantism is anti-scientific, Adeline proposed, because it places unqualified reliance on the word of the Bible. But the Bible is a book composed by men, and is imperfect for that reason. And the Protestant preacher compounds the error in ruling his flock by means of words. He interprets the words of the Bible on their behalf, immersing them in a ‘cloud of speech’. The Godhead is ‘beyond all language’, Adeline proposed. The figure of Christ is the mystery of the divine made visible, and the display of the Host is a truer communication than any sermon. The contemplation of the Cross is ‘a consideration of evidence’. And is not the practice of the medical sciences a consideration of evidence too?

Furthermore, in its attitude towards sin, in its emphasis on confession and forgiveness, the Catholic Church, Adeline argued, is true to the reality of our lives, and in this respect its doctrines are aligned with the medical sciences, which adhere to ‘the facts of what we are’. The Mass is a bond of love, and so is the doctor’s mission. She cited the rule of Saint Benedict: ‘before all things and above all things special care must be taken of the sick or infirm so that they may be served as if they were Christ in person; for He himself had said “I was sick and you visited me,” and “what you have done for the least of mine, you have done for me.”’ Thus Charles’s father was mistaken in talking of the ‘mere superstitions’ of Catholicism. The Roman church is the church of life, Adeline maintained. It is a living thing, a tree; the Protestant sects are ‘dead branches, grown too far from the nourishment of the roots’.

Imogen was looking at me. ‘An obvious question, but I’m going to ask it,’ she said. ‘I take it that you and Adeline are of the same persuasion?’

‘Far from it,’ I answered.

‘Really?’

‘Really. Of no persuasion at all.’

She narrowed her eyes at me, as if I had presented a puzzle.

The museum: an assemblage of objects removed from the flow of time, protected from the depredations of utility. A nest of objects; a nest is a place in which things are born.

We had been talking about La Châtelaine. Imogen asked: ‘If I’d told you that there had been no stand-in, what would you have thought?’

All I could say was: ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Perhaps you would have liked me less.’ She added: ‘This is not an accusation.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’

We had reached the hotel. ‘Let’s go on for a bit longer,’ she said. We were walking a pace apart. With the smile of a friend, she looked at me and said: ‘But it would have made a difference, wouldn’t it?’

‘In some way, I suppose so.’

‘The thing is,’ she said, looking ahead, ‘I might have done it without a stand-in. It was discussed.’

A reaction was required of me. ‘In the interests of realism?’ I proposed.

‘If you like, yes.’

A woman with a terrier was coming towards us; we stopped to let her pass. When she had gone, we were the only people on the street. We were standing outside a large tall-windowed house; in the living room, a woman was watching TV; upstairs, a man sat at a table, looking into a laptop. The scene is as clear as my first sight of Imogen. As we stood in front of the house, she said that she had read a wonderful line somewhere: anyone observing a ‘distinguished woman’ making love would think that she was either ill or mad. As the woman in the living room reached for the remote control, Imogen moved away, and with a single finger hooked my elbow. ‘The Greeks got it right,’ she said. For them, the body was an ‘instrument of joy’. With Christianity, sex became a shameful business, with procreation as its only excuse; the body – or rather, the woman’s body – became a form of property. ‘It’s a long downhill road from Athens to Adeline,’ she said.

We were back at her hotel. ‘Have I surprised you?’ she asked, but not, it seemed, in the hope that she had; it was an enquiry as to the nature of my reaction. ‘Disappointed you?’

‘Neither of the above,’ I said.

She smiled and gave me a studying look. ‘I have never cheated on anybody,’ she said.

At home, I watched La Châtelaine again. Watching Imogen, I found myself experiencing something like jealousy, so soon.

In 1198, before assuming the papacy as Innocent III, Lotario dei Segni wrote in his De contemptu mundi: ‘Man has been conceived in the desire of the flesh, in the heat of sensual lust… Accordingly, he is destined to become the fuel of the everlasting, eternally painful hellfire.’ Even when perpetrated by man and wife, sexual intercourse, Lotario wrote, is infected with ‘the desire of the flesh, with the heat of lust and with the foul stench of wantonness.’ De contemptu mundi gives evidence of its author’s ‘deep piety and knowledge of men’, the Catholic Encyclopedia informs us.

When she was eight years old, Imogen told me, there was a party at her house. The word ‘party’ was perhaps too festive in its connotations. It was a gathering of many adults, on a summer afternoon, with quantities of champagne. The reason for this gathering could no longer be remembered. What she could remember was an incident that she witnessed, towards the end of the afternoon.

The sun was setting; she was playing on the lawn. Among the children was a local girl of whom Imogen was not fond: an aggressive and clumsy child, and a whiner too. Neither was Imogen fond of the girl’s parents: they were as humourless as their daughter. The father’s hair was silver, though his face was not old, and the mother had legs that were as thin as a stork’s. They appeared to dislike each other – to find either of them, said Imogen, all one had to do was go to the corner of the garden that was farthest from where the other was standing.

The game had become boring, and the whining child was getting on Imogen’s nerves. She decided to go indoors. The whiner’s father was ahead of her, on the terrace steps. At the threshold of the house he missed his footing and stumbled; this, Imogen would later understand, was the first time she had seen a severely inebriated man. She followed. In the hall he turned left, towards the dining room, but before Imogen had entered the house she saw him come out of the dining room and cross the hall to the library. She saw him smile, as if an opportunity for mischief had presented itself. The situation was intriguing. On tip-toe she advanced to the centre of the hall, and from there she could see the silver-haired man creeping across the carpet in the direction of the big window that overlooked the garden; he was creeping in the same way that Imogen was. She moved to the doorway and peered in. At the big window stood her mother, looking out at the gathering; she was holding a cigarette in her left hand, at a distance from her face, as though passing it to someone else. It was very strange, Imogen thought, that her mother did not seem to be aware that she was no longer alone; the intruder was almost within touching distance. Then the amazing thing happened. It all happened in the space of two seconds.

Imogen’s mother was wearing a beautiful dress; it was the colour of young cherries, and reached the back of her knees. The girl saw the man crouch down, take hold of the hem of the dress and quickly lift it, as if whisking a dust sheet from a chair to see what was underneath. He raised it so high that Imogen could see her mother’s knickers. The knickers were pink and startlingly large. Only for an instant were they visible. At the touch of the air on her thighs, her mother swivelled and smacked the man across his face. It was not a lady-like slap. It was a full-force whack with a rigid hand and a long swing of the arm, as if she were smashing a tennis ball back. The noise was tremendous. The man staggered; he put a hand to his jaw as if he feared that something had been broken. That was when he saw Imogen at the doorway. Her mother saw her too, but turned back to the window, and calmly brought the cigarette to her lips. The man pushed past the child, glaring at the floor; one side of his face was now a different colour from the other.

In all the years that followed, her mother never mentioned this outrage. The man and his wife were never seen at the house again.

But one evening, near the end, Imogen fell asleep in the afternoon and when she woke up her mother was there, sitting in the window, turning the pages of a book of wildlife photos. As Imogen looked across the room, at her mother, a question spontaneously came out of her mouth: she asked about the incident with the silver-haired man. Her mother could not remember it; she could not even remember the man in question, she said. Imogen described him in as much detail as was available; she described the scrawny wife and blundering daughter. Her mother now thought she could dimly picture the girl, and her parents, but of an encounter with the father she professed to have no recollection. Episodes that seem important to a child often have no importance for their parents, she explained. Imogen did not believe that she had forgotten it, and knew that her mother knew that she was not believed. It was almost certain, Imogen thought, that the encounter had been what it had seemed to be: the stupid prank of a man who was drunk. Her mother wished it to be forgotten simply because it had been unseemly, and had involved a loss of temper. There was, however, at least one other possibility, the improbability of which did nothing to diminish its persistence. On the contrary: it was so unlikely that the thought of it was impossible to dismiss, like a malicious and uncorrected rumour. But nothing more was said about it.

In another of her letters, Adeline tells Charles that his father misunderstands the function of images. ‘He mistakes signs for idols,’ she writes. ‘We pray through them, not to them,’ she says. In Devotion, Beatrice makes the same comparison; the line was a late addition, made after I had shown Imogen this letter. Catholics are polytheists, John Perceval countered, and their saints are ‘subaltern gods’.

For the past couple of days William has been washing cars. You can get away with paying people so little nowadays, he informs me, that a hand-wash is cheaper than a drive-through car wash. He’s making more than he’s been managing to get on the streets recently, but only a bit more. There are better jobs around, he knows. ‘Better, but still rubbish.’ There’s a vacancy he knows about, in the kitchen of a care home. He could do the work, but they want someone with experience, and a proper address. ‘And you’ve got to be confident, friendly and enthusiastic,’ he says. ‘I could do friendly. At a push.’ He’s sleeping on a different sofa this week, in Shaws Way, in the flat of a friend of the friend whose sofa he was using last week. This lad’s girlfriend works as a cleaner, and she suggested to William that he should check out the company’s website, because they were always looking for new people. ‘So I checked it out,’ he tells me, and he starts to laugh. ‘“We are seeking enthusiastic and reliable candidates. You will need to be able to demonstrate how you have delivered great customer service and how you meet our excellent standards,”’ he recites. ‘They always want enthusiasm. For fuck’s sake – enthusiasm. Has anyone in the entire history of the universe ever been enthusiastic about shoving a mop around? And references, on headed paper. Where am I supposed to get references from?’

I commiserate, and give him money. I could afford to give him more, of course; much more. But I allow myself to accede to arguments opposed to generosity. William would squander it. Thus I excuse myself.

In Adeline’s letter of September 15th, the one in which she wrote ‘I love you’ for the first time, she informs her beloved that her father wonders if Charles’s willingness to abandon the Church of England might not be an expression of his love for Adeline rather than of a newly awakened acceptance of the doctrines of Rome. He holds Charles Perceval’s intelligence in the highest esteem, but is of the opinion that knowledge does not ‘form the mind’ – it only ‘occupies’ it. ‘Apprehension of the unseen is our foundation,’ her father maintained, as I quoted, while Imogen scanned the letter. The Church of England, he argued, was a church of no doctrine; it was a ministry of the state, and its theology was an accident of history. For his part, Charles’s father was for some time of the view that his son had been bewitched by this young woman; how else could one explain his sudden conversion to the ‘bogus mysteries’ and ‘perfumed ceremonials’ of the Roman church?

Following Francesca’s lead, I come upon the story of Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini. Though he served as secretary to no fewer than seven popes, Bracciolini seems to have had a highly developed taste for earthly pleasures. In the spring of 1416 he visited the spa at Baden, and was much taken by what he found there. In a letter from Baden, he wrote of his delight at having discovered a place where men and women bathed together, in a state of undress. A ‘school of Epicureans’ had been established there, he wrote. ‘I think this must be the place where the first man was created.’ In January of the following year, at an unspecified German monastery, Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini made an even more significant discovery: a manuscript of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, a work of the highest reputation, but lost for centuries. In a monastery; the only known copy.

Full-price visitors to the Sanderson-Perceval museum today: seventeen. Revenue: £85. Reduction of visitor numbers since the introduction of the £5 charge: sixty percent.

First evening in Rome. In the park of the Villa Borghese for the approach of dusk. Air warm and motionless; the pine trees standing in shadow, but their branches full of light; grass turned briefly to the colour of coral. To accompany this scene of urban pastoral, the soft drone of traffic, with now and then the call of a horn. A large and handsome dog, such as a shepherd might have employed. A good-looking young woman and a good-looking young man pause at a statue. The climate, the light, the shadows, the trees, the beautiful lovers, arm in arm – from these elements arises a melancholic well-being, a nostalgia with no object, a mood of all-accepting surrender that is nothing but a mood, but sufficient.

In Santa Maria Maggiore. Looking up from my guidebook, I noticed a man who was sitting in a chair against one of the columns on the opposite side of the nave – fiftyish, well dressed. He was leaning forward, with his forearms on his thighs and his hands joined, not praying, it seemed, but in thought. His eyes were open and trained on his hands. Tourists passed close to him, incessantly, chattering, but he was not distracted. His demeanour was that of someone in contemplation of a problem to which no solution was apparent; there was a heaviness in his gaze, suggestive of guilt; from time to time, the fingers of his right hand closed on his wedding ring and turned it. An obvious deduction. For five minutes or more he sat there, gazing at his hands. When a woman came out of the confessional box he stood up, straightened his tie, and entered. I continued to read the account of Santa Maria Maggiore. It’s an old guidebook; ten pages are devoted to the church. I had time to read all of it before the well-dressed man emerged. Evidently his sins were weighty. At last the curtain was drawn back and he stepped out. He did not look like a man who had been relieved of a burden; he was still unhappy. But he appeared to be a little clearer of mind; there was the possibility of a solution, perhaps. Standing by the chair in which he had been sitting, he adjusted his cuffs, as though in readiness for an important meeting. He walked down the nave to a pew that was free of tourists; there he sat down and bowed his head.

The wreckage of the forum. Over there, the remains of a building that was raised five centuries before Christ; and there, another remnant of the ancient city, built a thousand years later. Columns, steps, walls, stones. The chaos is harmonious; the dusk applies its tone to every stone and brick; nothing dominates; the eye moves through the scene unhindered. The inscriptions, incomprehensible to most of us, are now little more than decorative embellishments. Stopping at one of the arches, I admired the beautiful lettering. Imogen had imagined a performance: hundreds of people deployed around the forum, reading aloud from Virgil, Julius Caesar, Pliny, Plutarch, Catullus, Seneca, et cetera; a cacophony of speeches, letters, memoirs, poems, epitaphs. We, the living, would become the intruders in the city of the dead.

An unexpected diversion in the church of San Crisogono – the shrine of the Blessed Anna Maria Taigi, died 1837, beatified 1920. Until today, unknown to me. Having renounced the frivolity of her youth, for almost fifty years Anna Maria was favoured with visions of a ‘kind of sun’ that was crowned with thorns, and through the agency of this sun-like object she was able to see into the future and ‘the secret of hearts’. She experienced ecstasies, of course, usually while receiving Holy Communion, but also at less exalted moments of the day, such as when doing the laundry. (She was married and had children. ‘First and foremost, she was a wife, mother and daughter.’) Anna Maria witnessed shipwrecks in distant seas and shared from afar in the sufferings of missionaries in China and Arabia. She observed ‘the eternal lot of the dead’. Furthermore, ‘the grace of healing was bestowed upon this humble woman.’ Sometimes she healed the sick with the touch of her hand, but often she effected her cures by means of an image of Our Lady, or a relic, or oil from a votive lamp that she kept burning on the altar at which she worshipped at home. An example: a ‘lady of the princely house of the Albani’ was dying of cancer of the womb until Anna prescribed a drop of oil from her lamp; the afflicted lady applied the oil to her skin, and the following night the tumour disappeared. The Blessed Anna Maria Taigi died on June 9th, 1837, and the procession of pilgrims commenced almost immediately, despite the outbreak of cholera that had struck Rome. We are told that the Lord had promised her that the cholera would not strike before her death. As soon as she expired, ‘the scourge broke out’.

Her body was brought to San Crisogono in 1865, and three years later, when the coffin was opened, the corpse was found to be incorrupt. Now she lies in a glass case, clad in a gown like a nightdress. She wears a white bonnet, fringed with lace, from which some curls of golden hair protrude. Her face – pale and softly wrinkled – has a smile of great serenity. A rosary is entwined in the fingers of her left hand. It is something of a shock to see this pretty old lady, lying in her glass box, as if in deep and untroubled sleep. But the skin of the pretty face is wax, not flesh, as is the skin of the shapely hands. The body of the Blessed Anna Maria Taigi is a doll with an armature of true bones. As I was examining the effigy-corpse, a young couple came up and stood beside me. Said the man, in the tone of someone who has chosen his words carefully before speaking: ‘That is utterly disgusting.’ I smiled my agreement.

The floor of the church, on the other hand, is a thing of beauty: thirteenth-century, an intricate patterning of porphyry, serpentine, white marble, grey marble. Whorls and discs and arcs and squares of coloured stone – quasi-Islamic geometries, a work of perfect abstraction, transcending the mortal, the merely figurative. It was created, we would like to believe, by craftsmen who subsumed themselves gladly to their repetitious and difficult work, to the glory of God, the supreme creator. We have no names for the artisans who made this wonderful floor. But one man has left his signature. Having paid for its restoration in 1623, a Borghese cardinal felt compelled to leave his mark: his family’s heraldic emblems, a crowned eagle and dragon, in clumsy mosaic.

Entering Sant’Agostino, I saw by the entrance a woman on her knees, weeping, at a sculpture of the Madonna. Her hands wrestled each other in front of her face. As I turned away I saw that I had mis-seen: these were tears of gratitude. Before leaving, she pinned a rosette of pink fabric to the wall beside the statue, in the Madonna’s line of sight. Many other rosettes, in pink and blue, were already attached there, with a number of padded fabric hearts, also pink and blue. This Madonna is credited with the power to effect miracles in conception and childbirth. Her stone foot has been so eroded by kisses that a silver replacement has had to be fitted. Sant’Agostino was popular with Rome’s pre-eminent courtesans, I read; they frequented the church in their bouts of penitence. Fiammetta Michaelis, the beautiful mistress of Cardinal Giacomo Ammannati Piccolomini and of Cesare Borgia, is buried in this church, as are other celebrated women of the same profession. They have no tombstones.

In the Vatican, two days ago, I inspected the votive offerings from the Etruscan temples of Caere. The little terracotta heads, limbs and organs would have been left at the shrines by the thankful and the desperate. They are perhaps of the same family: the Etruscan miniatures; the pink and blue padded hearts of Sant’Agostino; the trephines, saws, files, bone brushes, perforators and calipers acquired by Benjamin Sanderson. In 1905, at University College Hospital, a tumour was removed from the brain of Benjamin Sanderson by Victor Horsley, inventor of Horsley’s Wax and co-inventor of the Horsley-Clarke apparatus, of which the museum owns an example. When Benjamin Sanderson amassed his collection, and acquired the property of the Percevals, was the motive not, at least in part, that of the person who makes a votive offering?

A long walk along the river, at dusk, to look at Monte Testaccio, the hill of broken pottery. A detour for the pyramid of Cestius, then back to Monte Testaccio, where I had taken note of an enticing restaurant. No table was available at that hour – or not for a solo male tourist. Returning to the river, I passed another trattoria, uncharismatic in appearance, with an exterior of smooth new brick and matching brown awnings. As I hesitated, on the opposite side of the road, three women appeared, moving towards the trattoria with purpose. One of the three, walking a little in front of the other two and apparently the designated leader, turned back to say something, and I heard an American voice. The leader seemed to know what she was doing; she had the air of someone who was confident that her companions would enjoy the experience that she was about to give them. So I followed, at a tactful distance, and was shown to a table adjacent to the women’s. The place was no more than one-third full; it appeared that we were the only foreigners present.

The menu was not wholly comprehensible to me. As I was reaching for the phrasebook, the leader looked over, and smiled, and said: ‘Would you like a recommendation?’

She was in her mid-forties, I guessed, and the youngest of the trio by a decade or so. She was slight and perfectly groomed, with a short crisp bob of dark hair and photoshoot-quality make-up. The capacious white shirt, a man’s shirt, suited her very well. A recommendation would be appreciated, I told her.

‘Go for the cacio e pepe. Spaghetti with pecorino and black pepper. Home-made spaghetti. It’s fabulous.’

I thanked her. The decision had been made for me. Moving on to the main courses, I opened the phrasebook.

‘If you need any help,’ she said; the tone was of sincere courtesy; she might have been an employee of the restaurant.

‘You’ve been here before?’ I asked.

‘Many times,’ she answered. She came to Italy every year; this place was one of her favourites. ‘Genuine cucina povera,’ she said. The use of the vernacular was not for show; to my ears, the pronunciation was indistinguishable from the native. This area used to be the poor part of town, she explained, as her companions discussed their choices; the city’s slaughterhouse was here, and the kitchens of the neighbourhood made use of all the inexpensive stuff – tongue, liver, tail. ‘Quinto quarto, the fifth quarter,’ they call it.

‘Rachel,’ said one of her companions, touching her arm. ‘We need some assistance here.’

A conference ensued, much of which I overheard. Rachel advised on the food and the wine, and her friends accepted her suggestions, as would customarily be the case, I felt. The forceful clarity of her speech was lawyer-like; the finish and bearing were suggestive of high income. The waiter came, and she spoke to him in Italian, on behalf of the group; he found her attractive too.

Having placed my order, I took the book from my pocket.

One of Rachel’s friends whispered to her neighbour. ‘Sure,’ said the other. Rachel leaned over to me. ‘Join us,’ she suggested. ‘If you’d like to.’ I took a seat next to her.

The whisperer introduced herself: April. A robust and genial woman, twice the girth of petite Rachel; she looked around the restaurant as if every inch of it proclaimed delightful authenticity. The third of the group, Audrey, wore a floral dress in which a vehement red was the dominant note; she was silent for much of the time; she seemed at heart unhappy. They were from Long Island, and were on a food tour, beginning in Turin and ending in Naples. Each had a phone, on which the stations of their journey had been recorded. April invited me to scroll through her snaps. The three women smiled at tables in Venice, Bologna, Florence, Perugia; there were many photographs of dishes and jovial kitchen staff. In a Chianti farmhouse they had taken a two-day course in the region’s cuisine; April and Audrey were to be seen slicing vegetables at an outdoor table; Rachel stirred a pot, closely supervised by the portly boss; in another shot, the boss, laughing, had an arm around the shoulders of Rachel. At many restaurants, men had felt compelled to take hold of her in this way. April and Audrey went unmolested, it would seem.

‘I detect a theme,’ I commented, displaying a picture of Rachel smiling thinly next to a bearded giant, whose left hand was on her hip, while the right flourished a cleaver.

‘Everywhere we go,’ said April, rolling her eyes. ‘Even if the wife is there, they’ve got to have a Rachel hug.’

‘It’s kind of irritating,’ said Rachel. ‘There’s this assumption that you’re going to want to get hugged.’

‘If you’re cute,’ said Audrey.

‘Or small,’ April mock-lamented. ‘But I’ve heard they like them big down south. I’m hoping. I take your point – it’s kind of irritating. OK. But once in a while. A hug. A little hug. I could live with that.’

April’s divorce had been finalised last month, Audrey informed me.

‘A younger woman,’ explained April. ‘Slimmer, younger, dumber. His secretary.’

‘Original,’ Audrey commented sympathetically.

‘No, but it’s love,’ sighed April. ‘It has nothing to do with her tits. Except he paid for them. But it’s OK. I’ve got the house. And my friends. And my freedom. Free at last, Lord. So we’re celebrating,’ sang April, with a chink of glasses. ‘And what about you?’ she asked. ‘I mean, what brings you here? What’s your line of work?’

I told them.

Rachel wanted information. She had many questions, and with every question I became more convinced that she was a lawyer. At one point, I winced at my own voice; it seemed that I was flirting.

‘This place must be heaven for you,’ April ventured. She had to admit, though, that she didn’t get much of a buzz out of the museums. ‘Too much stuff. And too many people like me,’ she explained. ‘And it’s like you’re under pressure to be amazed. That just doesn’t work for me. I can’t just turn it on.’ They had been to the Vatican. With hundreds of other people, like a crowd for a ball game, they had trudged down that never-ending corridor, for their appointment with Michelangelo. By the time they reached the chapel, she was not in a receptive frame of mind. ‘Yes, I can see that this is really something,’ was April’s reaction. ‘It’s totally spectacular. I can see that. I appreciate that it’s incredible. But I’m just not feeling it.’

Audrey concurred: the Vatican had exhausted her. Audrey was often exhausted, I sensed.

‘But I’m not an artistic person,’ April confessed. The people and the atmosphere were what she loved about Italy. ‘And the food, of course. I do love my food. I love my food so much. I’ll diet when I’m dead.’ On invitation, she removed a forkload of pasta from Rachel’s plate. ‘Rachel’s the cultured one,’ she confided loudly. ‘Her partner’s an architect. They have a wonderful house.’ Rachel was instructed to show me some pictures of the wonderful house.

After a little persuasion, Rachel produced her phone. A reel of images was called up. The house was modern, a single-storey building with huge windows and a lot of raw stone on show.

‘Show him the kitchen,’ urged April. ‘It’s amazing,’ she assured me.

The kitchen could have accommodated half a dozen cars. In the sink and cooker areas it looked like some sort of operating theatre, and the fridge was a hi-tech monolith. At the seventh or eighth photo, a woman who was not Rachel appeared, stirring the contents of a bright copper pan. In another, she raised a glass in the direction of the photographer. She had the look of someone who was at home.

Having seen a man apparently beseeching the image of a saint, Imogen remarked that this was perhaps not an irrational action: all the evidence suggests that God is arbitrary in the distribution of his favours, so why should he not, once in a while, accede to a request from a random member of the public? The image was the comely figure of half-naked Saint Sebastian, reclining like an odalisque, his limbs adorned with three golden arrows. This is not Saint Sebastian dead. He survived the arrows, and on his recovery took it upon himself to berate the emperor Diocletian for his persecution of the Christians. Taking exception at being upbraided in this way, and by a person who by rights should have been dead, Diocletian had the young man beaten to death with cudgels, a scene that is rarely depicted. In the chapel on the other side of the church from Sebastian’s tomb are displayed one of the near-fatal arrows and a segment of the column to which the archers tied the saint. Also on show are a piece of the Crown of Thorns, a tooth and some bones of Saint Peter, an arm of Saint Andrew, a tooth of Saint Paul, an arm of Saint Roch, relics of Saint Fabian, the skulls of the canonised popes Callixtus I and Stephen I, fragments of the skulls of the martyred saints Nereus, Achilleus, Avenistus, Valentine and Lucina, and a stone indented with what one is asked to believe are the footprints of Christ.

In the church dedicated to Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr: dozens of inspiring deaths, unflinchingly depicted. Saints boiled and skewered, flayed with spiked brushes, roasted, dismembered with blades, stretched, sawn in half (vertically, through the brain), pulled apart by horses, crushed, decapitated, and so forth. Hands and tongues and breasts are chopped off. Every mutilation is suffered with good grace, as if submitting to a haircut. There are no grimaces or howls of pain; screams would only have flattered the pagan butchers. Sacred hardcore.

Strange scene on the tram. In front of me, facing each other from opposite seats, sat a large soft woman and her male companion, perhaps forty years of age to her fifty, and considerably smaller, in all dimensions. He appeared to be a man of fretful disposition, raised to a greater anxiety by current circumstances. Their relationship, I felt, was in its early stages; he was on probation; it seemed likely that they had become acquainted online. The man sat straight-backed, knees and feet together, with a small backpack on his lap; a sheet of paper rested on a guidebook, on the backpack – a list of sights, with what appeared to be times for arrival and departure, plus entrance charges. A lot depended on the outcome of this trip, I felt. No sense of pleasure was transmitted by the woman’s gaze; her eyes seemed to acknowledge, rather, that the city had not let her down, so far. One intuited that she had often been let down. Several times the man leaned forward to lightly seize her arm. ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart’, he whispered, every time, pointing at a building, then at the corresponding photo in his guidebook; he might add a comment, at which she would concede a small smile, as if he had to be humoured. Again and again: ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart’, urgently, always repeating the endearment. Her smile was always the same. It did not appear that they had argued; there was no annoyance in her demeanour, just an affectionate condescension. He must have said ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart’ ten times in as many minutes. Only once did she speak. He made some reference to their plans for the afternoon, I think, at which she responded, sharply, with something that began with: ‘We are doing it because…’ He acquiesced immediately; sitting straight, looking directly ahead, he did not say another word. At the stop before mine she rose and moved to the door, as if alone; the little lover followed. On the pavement, she took the timetable from him, checked it, then strode off. As they entered a side street she turned, smiled, and brought her lips down onto his mouth, quickly, for a semi-second, as if stamping his face with a mark of her approval.

Ludovica Albertoni was sixty years old when she died of a fever, but the Ludovica Albertoni sculpted by Bernini, marvellously, is youthful in her fevered ecstasy. She is beautiful; the stone is etherealised. Her face is Imogen’s face, her hands are Imogen’s hands, her dying eyes are Imogen’s. Which is not to say, as Charles de Brosses quipped, speaking of Bernini’s Saint Teresa: ‘If this is divine love, I know it very well.’

Before the airport, time for one last sight: Sant’Andrea della Valle. In the dome, high above the floor of the church, above the golden walls, a welter of clouds and bodies; amid the celestial turbulence, the Virgin is being taken into the light of Heaven, which is signified by the circle of light in the lantern of the dome. I discern a large figure, clad in red and Virginal blue; a kneeling man, wearing black; a nude male, seated; cherubs; cloaks. Without the use of a lens, the scene is not legible from where we stand. We comprehend the action, but cannot properly see it. A painting created to be imperfectly visible.

Tonight, on BBC 1, part one of June 6, 11pm. An adulterous businessman is involved in a hit-and-run accident, and ‘finds himself lost in a labyrinth of lies’. The businessman is played by Richard Hatton – the Richard Hatton with whom Imogen was once involved. More of his hair has gone, and his face has lost some definition, but I recognised him immediately from the small photo in the paper. I remember the evening: we came out of the cinema near Hyde Park Corner and he must have registered Imogen’s voice, because he turned round with some purpose, as if his name had been called. As soon as he saw her he moved in, arms wide; his delight was immense. Visually he was interesting: sharp facial bones, strong jaw, very tall, lean. Though several years short of forty, he had a receding hairline, but the profile was photogenic in a Mahler-like way. The combination of tweed jacket, white T-shirt and well-worn jeans was artful. ‘An old friend of mine,’ was how Imogen introduced him. His quick smirk clarified the meaning for my benefit. He gave me a handshake of potent masculinity. When he suggested a drink, she looked at me, in the hope, I felt, that I could improvise an excuse. He saw the glance, I am sure, but it did not deter him.

He bought the drinks; in return, Imogen asked the opening question: ‘So how are you?’

Richard was very well; Richard was busy. He was about to start work on a TV three-parter – he was going to be an outwardly respectable man whose mind was a seething pit of violent fantasies. A ‘ticking bomb’, was the phrase he used. The role had entailed a great deal of research. Some of the things he’d been reading had really messed with his head; he told us a horrible story about an outwardly respectable rapist-murderer.

‘And what about you?’ he finally asked Imogen, after ten minutes. The eye contact was powerful; his self-belief was impregnable.

He did not enquire as to how we had met, or what I might do for a living. While Imogen was talking, he glanced at me a few times, thinking, obviously: ‘What does she see in this one?’ A reasonable question; I have often asked it myself. But what troubled me more, at that moment, was that Imogen had been in a relationship with this tedious and self-absorbed character.

When we parted he kissed her and said that he would call, which he did, the following week, to suggest, with little preamble, that they might meet one afternoon and go to bed. One of the things that Richard most admired about himself was that he always went straight to the heart of the matter. Within two days of meeting Imogen, she told me, he had informed her that they were attracted to each other; the statement was made plainly, as if he were merely observing that her hair was the same colour as his. And she was indeed attracted to him. He was an intelligent actor, and his bluntness was disarming. Before long, however, it became apparent that the intelligence of Richard Hatton was a somewhat cosmetic quality. He was intrigued by the paradoxical phenomenon of himself: it was strange that he had become an actor despite the fact that he was, essentially, a ‘deeply introspective’ person. Some people, he knew, disliked him for what they took to be his tactlessness. Honesty was not the easy way to make friends, he knew. He submitted himself to regular sessions of self-inquest, he told Imogen, making it sound like a regimen of quasi-monastic spiritual discipline. But in fact, she said, Richard studied himself ‘as if reading the Sunday papers’; he skim-read himself, to divert himself, and perhaps learn a little. And by the following day he had forgotten everything he’d read the day before.

Imogen was not the same person now as the one she had been when Richard Hatton had been her lover. The relationship had been brief, and was no sooner commenced than regretted. ‘But he is very good at his job,’ she said. I watched part one of June 6, 11pm. Richard Hatton was not very good, I thought. Too much staring into the carpet as if into the pit of damnation; too much stroking of the brow. Too much acting.

Lucretius on love: ‘This is the only case in which the more we have, the more the heart burns with terrible desire. Food and drink, when taken into the body, enter their appointed places easily, and thus our desire for water and bread is satisfied. But from a lovely face or blooming complexion nothing comes into the body for us to enjoy other than images, flimsy images, and vain hopes.’ De rerum natura, Book Four. Saint Jerome maintains that Lucretius became insane after taking a love potion, and composed De rerum natura in his lucid intervals, prior to committing suicide.