Time in the monastery on the Via Sicilia—where Hamilton seems to have taken his own vow of silence. The food I fill the plate with there reflects the character of the institution: it is simple, but perfectly sustaining. We have our own little cell. The monastery is full of wayfarers like me, ghosts with half a name (I feel I’m between names at the moment). The Vatican is full of supplicants like me, calling, “Father. Father.” Europe, probably, is full of people like me, adjusting our stance for the lurch into war. So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else. Shame heats our cell, and push-ups, and prayers. Yes, prayers. His prayers are like the noise you make to drown out an insupportable thought. I might be impressed and affected by this sudden talent for suffering, if it weren’t for its monotony: fear, just fear, fear only. Why? We’re all going to make it. Yet with hands clasped he whimpers and gibbers with such desperate ardor for his own preservation, on his knees. To show good faith, or to show something, he even tried a thing with . . . you know: the chair, the belt suspended from the rafter. It didn’
work, needless to say. As I took the trouble to explain earlier, you can’t do that. You can’t do that, not once you’re here.
Yesterday we found a photograph, under the bushes behind the willow trees. In small scraps—we pieced it together. The face of a young woman: dark, downy, pleasant, direct. Not especially forgiving. I fear that’s our wife.
How heavy it is to sit there in the waiting room, on the chair, by the table, with one’s penitent perfecto, watching the cankered apples heal.
“We help those that need,” said Father Duryea, on our final visit, “not those that deserve.”
“You do what you do best,” said Hamilton, “not what’s best to do.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“I can’t explain what I did. I can’t ask you to help me.”
“Ah now.”
“I’m nothing. I’m dead. I’m just . . . I’m not even …”
Father Duryea sat up. And so did I. In a deep and distant voice Hamilton went on, “I lost my idea of the gentleness of human flesh.”
“Explain,” said Father Duryea.
“We lost our feeling about the human body. Children even. Tiny babies.”
So. Sense. Here it comes. It’s all coming out. It’s been in here too long and now it’s all coming out. The corridors and theaters, the Peter Pan Ward, the desk-top terminations, the eyes of the unlistened-to: that world of pain with darkness at the bottom of it.
Father Duryea’s face contracted around the scorched core of his nose. And he said, “I understand.”
“You know where I was. In a situation like that certain acts suggested themselves.”
“I understand, my son.”
“The situation was mad and impossible.”
“There is no need to say.”
Hamilton moistened his cheeks with his sleeve and sniffed richly. “There were things …”
“Speak.”
“I still want to heal, Father. Perhaps, that way, by doing good …”
“Hell?”
“I’ve been to hell.”
“Of course. Of course.”
“I have sinned, Father.”
“You seem troubled, my child.”
At this point Hamilton handed over our various laissez-passer, and Father Duryea presented him with his new documents. Before doing so, Father Duryea stared at them for many arduous minutes. Stared at them with his bleeding eyes. Our parting was marked by the usual formalities, the usual compliments paid to my unimprovable English.
Hamilton and I spent our last night in Rome at a very respectable hotel on the Via Garibaldi, near the high walls of the prison. So high were these prison walls, indeed, that they left you wondering at the build of the common Italian criminal. I pictured a menagerie of depraved and black-toothed giraffes, each with his slashback and switchblade. . . . We even had our own bathroom, in whose tub we wallowed for well over an hour. Clean breast. Clean hands.
Our name has changed once more. I don’t think it will ever change again. Rather alarmingly at first, it has to be said, we are now called Odilo Unverdorben.
And clean heels. Our journey north was charmed. We were the baton in a relay race to war.