The Council of Egypt Read online

  When he asked at the porter’s lodge for the Di Blasi brothers, Father Giovanni and Father Salvatore, the men who were gathered around talking glanced at each other and whispered among themselves; after many if’s and maybe’s, one of them brought himself to go up to see if... He came back presently to tell the Abbot that Father Salvatore, Father Salvatore only, was awaiting him in the library; Father Giovanni, poor man, simply did not feel it in him to see the Abbot. Ah, ah, ah, the Abbot thought. The library! Once more he saw the scene where his plan had first taken shape: the Ambassador from Morocco leaning over the codex, Monsignor Airoldi eagerly waiting for his comments. Who knows, if Father Salvatore is receiving me in the library, at the scene of the crime, he may be doing it on purpose?... But no, he must have many other things on his mind.

  Father Salvatore was working. He rose and came to meet his caller. They shook hands without speaking. Then the monk motioned the Abbot to sit down, and he also sat down.

  “Perhaps I am disturbing you,” the Abbot said, “but I could not help coming to see you the moment I heard the news, because for your nephew I have—”

  “I know, I know,” Father Salvatore said, and the Abbot thought that he detected a tremor of impatience.

  “A man of intelligence and feeling, of whom there are few. And I absolutely do not believe what they are trumpeting all over the city – that he planned to sack churches, steal holy vessels... All malicious slander, circulated by people who did not know your nephew or who have some interest in spreading such rumors.”

  “You’re right. I don’t believe he would ever have stooped so low, although, you understand, there could be people in the group who thought differently. But he, no, I don’t believe it... The fact is, however, that he had an even worse plan; he wanted to subvert public order and proclaim a republic... A republic, dear Jesus, a republic!”

  “But—”

  “That does horrify you, doesn’t it? You would never have believed he was capable of conceiving of such a monstrous plan... I understand you; I would applaud your feelings, if only the tie of blood that binds me to him, and the memory of my poor brother—” He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his eyes – “Ah yes, you too have the right to be horrified, even you.”

  That’s the first slap, the Abbot thought. “Not at all. I do not feel I have any right to judge him, much less to be horrified. On the contrary, I must tell you that a little while ago I was amazed and incredulous, but now I see it clearly: I did not believe your nephew was capable of plotting to pillage churches, but if you tell me he was preparing a revolution—”

  “That doesn’t surprise you?”

  “No.”

  “I see... Actually, that is the way it is: the people closest to a man are the last to recognize that he is mad, especially if the madness grows slowly – the way, living together all the time, one doesn’t notice age creeping over the faces of others... He seemed to me to be a man of sound sense, and yet he was mad, mad...”

  “You have misunderstood me. I mean that for him the republic was an ideal, and so I am not surprised that he would try to make it a reality.”

  “Ah.” The monk’s eyes narrowed as he scrutinized the Abbot’s impassive face. There was a long silence.

  “If,” the Abbot resumed, “if it is possible, given the way things have gone, to discuss it at all, one could ask whether the moment was right, whether his resources were adequate and his judgment balanced – whether, in sum, given the time and the circumstances, it was not madness, in the usual meaning of the word. Folly. But that is very far from saying that your nephew is mad.”

  “Ah... Would you, by any chance, hold the same ideas? About a revolution, a republic?”

  “For me, republic and monarchy are the same brew, the same swindle. Whether there be kings, consuls, dictators, or whatever the devil they may be called, matters less to me than the course of the stars. Perhaps less... But revolution? I confess I feel differently about revolution. That out-with-you-and-in-with-me... what shall I say? I like it. The powerful are unseated and the poor rise in triumph—”

  “And heads fall,” the Benedictine added ironically.

  “Well, yes, a few,” the Abbot said composedly. Suddenly he felt like a boy egged on to defiance. “A few. After all, what is an unthinking head worth?”

  “So it isn’t true, you aren’t totally indifferent to the form of the State, or to the methods and the men of government. If you make a distinction – a distinction, I might say, as thin as the edge of the guillotine’s blade – between heads that reason and heads that do not reason, it is clear that you would prefer to be governed by heads that do reason; that is, by heads that in your opinion reason. I imagine it is a foregone conclusion that the others would fall.” Father Salvatore’s voice faltered with indignation.

  “Yes,” the Abbot said, “perhaps you’re right... Actually, I have never given any thought to these things... Eh, yes, you are quite right.”

  A thought crossed the Benedictine’s mind that, for the form it took, would require him that evening expressly to ask God’s forgiveness: This man is trying to squeeze my balls... But he was mistaken; the Abbot was genuinely astounded to discover that he cared about things he had always supposed remote, things even positively repugnant to him. Indeed, he had had occasion more than once in recent weeks to be astounded by his response to the conversation of others or to thoughts that germinated in his own fertile solitude. A memory from childhood had come back to him as a parable to express what was happening to him: it was from the days when he was a little boy, and he had begun to attend catechism class; other small boys filled the oratory benches, thick as swallows. After a week, his mother took a fine comb to his head, for red marks had begun to glow all over his scalp, and she discovered lice. Her horror at verifying this – his mother was a woman whom poverty did not prevent from worshipping cleanliness even to excess (the Abbot did not resemble his mother overmuch) – still echoed in his ears and conscience: “They’ve got you crawling with lice!” It was a warning and an accusation. The lice of faith. Now the lice of the mind. Quickly, as always, he drove the image, the memory, the parable, away; he had come now to the sin against friendship.

  The Abbot had been lost in thought. He collected himself to find the Benedictine’s unfriendly, inquisitorial eye upon him. He felt intimidated, confused. “That’s the way it is,” he said. “A person never thinks about some things until suddenly there they are, staring him in the face.”

  “Your hands were full of very different things,” Father Salvatore said sourly.

  Again the childish impulse of defiance welled up: “Yes, all that blessed work of falsifying the codices—”

  “You speak about it like that? To me?”

  “How do you want me to speak about it to you? It’s the truth.”

  “But do you know something? Crazy as my nephew is, he was the first person to suspect your swindle.”

  “Really? When?”

  “The evening you massacred Hager, that very evening.”

  “I am so pleased,” the Abbot said. “I am truly pleased.”

  Chapter XIV

  “When peasants mention feet, they use the expression ‘speaking with respect.’ Now you can do the same; you have cause.” Stretched out on a cot, he squinted down at his feet, which were hanging over the end of the cot, not because it was short, but so that they would not have to touch it: they were shapeless feet, like the lumps of earth that cling to uprooted bushes; bloodied, encrusted lumps of meat. They stank of scorched fat, of rotting flesh.

  As he lay looking down, the distance between eye and foot seemed unreal, and his pain was also remote. He thought how worms live buried in moist earth: cut them in two, and both ends continue to live; he felt like that, one part of his body living only by pain, the other by his brain. Only man is not a worm; feet belong to the mind, too: when the judges called him again, he would have to reconquer the part of his body that now seemed so far away, cut off almost; he would have t
o order his feet to set themselves down on the ground and to move. Before the judges, it would be up to his feet to express his serenity and strength of mind – feet that already seven times had endured torture. That nineteenth verse of the Inferno had helped him to withstand it – Allor fu la paura un poco queta/ che nel lago del cor m’era durata – and other poetry of Dante, Ariosto, Metastasio: all of them forms of that sorcery the judges so rightly believed in. The jurists Farinaccio and Marsili, who had written on torture, had helped him too; racking his memory for their definitions and their stupid commentaries had helped. For, after enduring the strappado five times, and sleeplessness for forty-eight hours, and having his feet burned seven times, he could now affirm with greater awareness that those who had conceived torture and those who upheld it were senseless men: they were men who conceived of man and of their own humanity as the wild hare or the rabbit might. Pursued by man, by their own humanity, they found their senseless revenge in the eternal question – jurist, judge, executioner alike. “Perhaps not the executioner. Perhaps the executioner, who is considered a vile thing because he must perform acts of cruelty, may at least derive some humanity from them, since they must make him realize how vile he is.”

  He was feverish. And he was desperately thirsty. Now and then he glanced at the jug of water, but he did not move. He would not move until the judges called him again. The agony of standing on his feet would be more dreadful than his thirst; because the others were not there, he spared himself. The others. The police, the judges, the executioner. But now his mother also belonged to the world of the others, “the world where people walk, where feet tread the earth without pain.” Torture had given absolute definition to his solitude: “others” were henceforth different from him even in this: they were able to walk. Even his mother, torn by grief for him as she was, had at least this ability in common with torturers: she could move from bed to chair, from one room to another. And that was how he saw her, wandering through the dark, silent house, a figure of soledad, “like the Madonna in the Spanish church. We call her the Grieving Madonna, but Spaniards speak of soledad; for them, sorrow and mourning mean solitude... But my mother’s solitude is not mine: physical pain, the mutilation or diminution of the body gives solitude an absolute quality; it severs the slender bonds that even in the soul’s deepest despair we are able to maintain between ourselves and others... You said soul... Can you really still think about the soul’s reality when torture has shown you that your body is everything? Your body has resisted, not your soul; and your mind, which is body, has resisted. And very soon, body and mind... ‘Mas tú y ello juntamente en tierra en humo en polvo en sombra en nada...’ Another poet, but one you never loved very much. Now you love them all; you are like a drunkard who can’t tell one wine from another. The fact is, you now love life as you never loved it, never knew how to love it. Now you know what water is, and snow, and a lemon – every fruit, every leaf you know now, as if you were inside them, as if you were their essence.” These were the images of his desire, of his fever: the cherries that were now beginning to redden among the deep green of the leaves; the oranges that were becoming scarcer now, yet had a sweeter, stronger taste, like late grapes; and lemons, lemons and snow, glasses heaped with powdered ice, and the sharp scent of fruit... He saw the Cloister of San Giovanni degli Eremiti, the citrons so thick and heavy that they were caught up in small nets to prevent their falling from the tree. The Cloister of San Giovanni, the church, the red cupola, the dense trees with their fragrant burden. “You will never see them again.” The red cupolas. The Arabs. Abbot Vella. “He spelled out the fraud of life, after his own fashion... With zest... Not the fraud of life, the fraud that is in life... Not in life... Yes, yes, in life...” His thoughts swirled away on a wave of fever. “Yours was a fraud too, a tragic fraud.” No matter how far he wandered, he always returned to the men whom he had dragged into the conspiracy and, with compassion and remorse, to those who had accused him before the judges. Those who had withstood, like him, shared human dignity: Giulio Tinaglia, Benedetto La Villa, Bernardo Palumbo: he could not, it would not be just, to pity them, to feel remorse for their fate. That Corporal Palumbo: his steadiness, his silence, his scorn for the judges; who knew where... what experience, those things had come from? He regretted now that he had not known the man better, had known nothing of his life, did not remember who had brought him into the conspiracy, did not even remember his voice: a dark, taciturn man. “Sometimes you were suspicious of him because he was so closed and because he was a corporal, which you thought something lower than a simple soldier. And instead...”

  But it was the others, the others, the others who tormented him: the ones who had been afraid, who had trembled and implored and denounced. “No use your trying to hide behind your solitude: it isn’t real, you aren’t alone. You’re with them – their cowardice keeps you company. Because if they are cowards it is on account of you, and the day will come when they will realize this and will despise themselves... But now you can do nothing more for them than you’ve already done during the hearings. There’s nothing left for you to do for them except to hope that their sentences are light, or that they are released even... And why should they not be released?” He began lucidly to elaborate a defense until an aching, congealing sleep flowed over him, but in his sleep he continued to grasp at the echoes and fragments of that defense.

  Chapter XV

  Baron Fisichella, who shuttled between Monsignor Airoldi and Abbot Vella, arrived at the Abbot’s house early in the morning, surprisingly, for usually he appeared in the afternoon; he was out of breath, perspiring, and upset. He said straight off that he had bad news, but he took some time to come out with it bluntly. “They’re going to arrest you. They’re going to arrest you before evening.”

  The Abbot was unmoved.

  “Monsignor is sorry, he’s very bitter... He really did not expect this.”

  “I expected it,” the Abbot said.

  “But, heavens above, couldn’t you disappear, hide out somewhere?”

  “I have no wish to move, I am tired... And then, call me crazy if you will, I also want to see how it’s all going to end.”

  “Well, I can tell you that, and I’m just an onlooker. People are saying, ‘Let’s see how this imbroglio is going to end, let’s see how Abbot Vella will wriggle out of it’ – but you’re in it up to here!” He raised his hand to the level of his mouth to indicate the depth of the water in which the Abbot was about to drown.

  The Abbot shrugged indifferently.

  “I don’t understand you,” the Baron said. “By my word of honor, I don’t understand you.”

  “Nor do I,” said the Abbot.

  “But look – prison!... Doesn’t that make any impression on you, doesn’t it frighten you?”

  “I have never tried it.”

  “And I’ve never tried— Excuse me, that would be too unseemly... I’ve never tried... You understand me... Eh, do I make myself clear?”

  “What you have never tried has nothing to do with man – because I do understand what you mean... But prison, yes, prison does have to do with man, indeed I would say that prison is in man, in his nature.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” the Baron said on an ascending scale, but meanwhile he was thinking to himself, Let’s let him have it, then. This fellow is stark, raving mad. He got up.

  “Do I seem mad to you?” the Abbot asked.

  “Not at all, not in my wildest dreams... But listen to me. What I am about to say to you now is the last warning Monsignor Airoldi will send you: stand firm on the Codex of San Martino. You did not corrupt that text, you translated it word for word. Do as you like about the Council of Egypt – say that it’s false or not, as you please... Even if you confess that it is false, you will still have ways of justifying what you did, of attenuating your guilt. Because, in effect, the Council of Egypt was born from seeds in a wind that favored the things Caracciolo and Simonetti were trying to accomplish here; you might say that it was born
at their suggestion, veiled or open, as you prefer. Hold to these positions, in a word, and Monsignor Airoldi will not fail you.”

  “We shall see,” the Abbot said.

  “You know the saying, ‘God helps those who help themselves’? In this case, if you help yourself, you will be putting Monsignor in a position to help you.”

  “We shall see,” the Abbot said again.

  They bade each other good-bye. The Abbot stood at the top of the stairs as the Baron went down. Before he reached the door, he turned around for a final farewell.

  “Excuse me,” the Abbot said. “I forgot to ask you about Lawyer Di Blasi. Is there any news?”

  “No news. Just that he’s cooked.”

  “Cooked?”

  “He wouldn’t talk. They did use fire, you understand...”

  “And then did he talk?”

  “No. But by now they have all the information they need, they’re ready to go after him tooth and nail. His sentence will be something to remember.” Clutching his throat, he mimicked what – the gallows.

  “Is all this already known for a fact?”

  “Of course,” the Baron said. He waved and went off.

  The Abbot returned to his chair by the window. He sat there for hours, hours on end, like a paralytic.

  The cruelty of the law, the practice of torture, and the atrocious executions, several of which he had witnessed in the past, had never disturbed him: he had assigned such things to the category of natural phenomena or, to be more precise, had thought of them as natural corrective measures, not unlike pruning vines or trees, and just as necessary. He knew that there was a book by someone called Beccaria that opposed torture and the death penalty: he knew of it because Monsignor López had only recently ordered any copies of it to be sequestered. Also, he was familiar with Di Blasi’s ideas on the subject. But so many fine ideas are abroad in the world; the only trouble is that they have a double aspect, the other being desperate and violent. Now, however, he had to envisage a person whom he knew, a man whom he esteemed and loved, wracked by torture and condemned to the gallows; suddenly he felt how infamous it was to live in a world where torture and gallows were a part of the law, of justice; his revulsion was physical, he felt as if he were about to vomit. “I’d like to read Beccaria’s book. Monsignor Airoldi is sure to have it... But they’re going to arrest me. Perhaps I won’t be allowed to read books at all, much less if they’re proscribed... Who knows? – Will they take me to the Vicaría or to Castellammare? I forgot to ask the Baron. Castellammare, perhaps; Monsignor Airoldi will have put in a good word.” Prison truly did not intimidate him; he had lapsed into a state of total indifference toward comfort and the pleasures of life; he had a far stronger appetite for showing the world what luminous proof of imagination and ingenuity he had given in the Council of Sicily and the Council of Egypt. In a word, the writer in him had shaken off the hand of the impostor and broken free; like one of those shining, black, mettlesome Maltese horses, the writer was off at a gallop, dragging the impostor behind in the dust, his foot caught in the stirrup. Also, he was accustomed to live in the company of his own thoughts. He followed public events, past and present, in order to deduce their meaning and portent just as once he had derived lotto numbers from people’s dreams. “Life really is a dream. Men want to be aware, to understand, and they do nothing but invent cabalas. Every age has its own cabala, every man has his own. And out of the dream that life is we form constellations of numbers to play on the wheel of God or the wheel of Reason. All in all, we are more likely to end up with winning numbers on Reason’s wheel than on God’s: we play out the dream of winning within the dream of life.” His old occupation as numerist supplied him with the words to express, at least approximately, his own cabala, a faint, wavering, fugitive cabala that flickered out in superstition.