The Conduct of Saints Read online

  ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER DAVIS

  ◂ NOVELS ▸

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  Dog Horse Rat

  Suicide Note

  The Sun in Mid-Career

  A Peep Into the 20th Century

  Ishmael

  The Shamir of Dachau

  Belmarch

  A Kind of Darkness

  First Family

  Lost Summer

  ◂ NONFICTION ▸

  Working Words

  Waiting For It

  The Producer

  ◂ PLAYS ▸

  A Peep Into the 20th Century

  ◂ FOR CHILDREN ▸

  Sad Adam—Glad Adam

  www.wordsandstone.com

  THE

  CONDUCT

  OF

  SAINTS

  CHRISTOPHER DAVIS

  Copyright © 2013 by Christopher Davis

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction based in part on historical events and on some of the people who took part in those events. The novel’s characters in their actions and private interactions, their conversations, and the simulation of their thought, however, are products of the author’s imagination.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Davis, Christopher—

  The conduct of saints / Christopher Davis.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-57962-315-9

  eISBN 1-57962-346-8

  1. Americans—Italy—Rome—Fiction. 2 . Rome (Italy)—Fiction. 3. Italy—History—Allied occupation, 1943–1947—Fiction. 4. Historical fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.A933C66 2013

  813'.54—dc23

  2013001132

  Printed in the United States of America

  For sally

  ONE

  ALESSANDRO SERENELLI

  ◂ 1 ▸

  The Vatican man, a priest whose name was Doherty, wanted to know the details of the murder Alessandro had committed, the killing of the child, the saint.

  When Doherty arrived for his first visit, he and the penitent sat together on a stone bench in the monastery garden where Alessandro was working. The priest asked his questions, and Alessandro replied easily, since he had answered these or similar questions before in testimony given over the years. The priest had an accent—English or American, Alessandro thought—and spoke rapidly, as if he wanted to finish and be somewhere else. He did not appear the next day, and on the day after that—the second visit—stayed only ten or fifteen minutes. They were in the Superior’s office that time, the old bishop, Father Zecca, having left his room to them; and it was then, on the occasion of the second visit, just before leaving, that the priest, the canon lawyer, raised the question of memory.

  “It’s in the record,” Alessandro replied. “Maria Goretti was herself the witness. She described it all to the doctor and the attending priest before she died, and it went into evidence. I have no memory of it.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t do it.”

  Alessandro said, “Certainly I did it.” In the years since, none of the other interrogators had asked him the question. If they had, he would have told them what he told this priest, that the details of the event were lost to him, though it was not true.

  Because of the new leaves and shoots, the rain showers that raised a smell of leaf mold and earth, the restlessness of the creatures nesting, the redeemed murderer knew it was late May. He also knew the war had ended: the Germans and their guns were gone; the English and Americans were ordering things both here and elsewhere in Italy. Though he did not look at newspapers, people who did told him that this was the case, and also that he need not trouble himself about it one way or the other. He had been summoned to Rome and had come at once—a full day’s trip, during which he did not speak to the other passengers on the bus. He slept a little and watched the farms they passed with a critical eye as to the manner in which they were kept. The friars at Ascoli Piceno had supplied him with a lunch of bread, cheese, salami, and fennel, but he gave it to a mother and her boy who had turned away from the sight and smell of the food with the courtesy of the hungry. He kept back only a flask of water. The bus arrived in Rome before dark, and Alessandro found his way to the Franciscan monastery where he was to stay by asking directions of a priest he met in the street. He had been at the cloister for a week before the man from the Vatican made his appearance.

  Except as shadows of ordinary anxieties, little more than impressions forgotten on waking, he had not had dreams with recognizable people in them for thirty-five years. Not since the dreams in his cell at the prison in Noto had been crowned by the opening of his soul: the vision that led to the miracle of his redemption. Now, with this official and his questions, as if the projectionist had mended a tear and the interrupted film might continue, he had begun to dream once more in images. The first of these new dreams was vivid and remained with him:

  It was early morning, not yet hot. He was waiting with the rest of the family in the threshing barn, preparing to go out to the fields. His father, the last one as always, looked in at the door, the lean, lined, brown face bright with pleasure. “Alessandro! Well done!” he cried, though he did not say what his son had done well. He heard his own voice address the saint Maria Goretti. A child of twelve as she had been in 1902, she stood with her back to him, carrying the bottle of water for the fields in both arms. When she turned, he saw that her face was empty, as if its features had been worn away by the years like an image on a tomb in the floor of a church. He said, “Marietta, see what I have in my hand.”

  THE VATICAN man’s first visit: Alessandro looked out through the broken wall of the monastery and saw the priest dismount from his bicycle—a heavy man of ordinary height, broad face sweating and red in the warmth. A briefcase lay in the wire basket attached to the bicycle’s handlebars. The man unfastened a clip that held his trouser leg and was surrounded at once by begging children, hands out.

  “Get off! Cafone! I have nothing! Wait a minute.”

  He looked intently, as if nearsighted, through the gap in the wall. Grenades thrown by German soldiers in the retreat from Rome had left a ragged knee-high parapet; the break was blocked more or less with scraps of timber the brothers had taken from a store of it in a corner of the monastery garden, left there when a building project was abandoned.

  “That was a lie,” the priest said. “There’s always something to give, only I’m pressed for time. You’re Serenelli? I’m coming straight in. Hang on. I’ll pay my respects to the Superior first. Wait, you little bastards! Give me a break. Can I get in through this hole?”

  “You’ll tear your clothes. Go around to Via Due Fratelli. There’s an alley about halfway along that leads to the gatehouse. The office is on the left as you go in.” Not liking the sound of his own raised voice, Alessandro shouted, “Leave the father in peace.” And to the priest: “Mind your hat.” It had fallen to the pavement when he unfastened the clip, revealing a cap of gray curls.

  The little street flanking the rear of the monastery precinct was crowded—men on bicycles; women in black, old and young, with their bits of shopping; a horse-drawn wagon carrying a load of turnips, earth clinging to the roots; an American motor scooter buzzing like a wasp; a two-and-a-half-ton Allied Military Government truck blowing black diesel exhaust; a pushcart filled with melons. Simultaneously, another racket: the elementary sc
hool across the street setting its children free for a recess in the iron-railed yard adjoining the building—blue smocks filling the space, a sudden treble shouting in the quiet morning. Even in this time of poverty, these appeared to be the children of people of means.

  The priest searched his pockets, came up with a packet of cigarettes, gave one to each of the half-dozen beggars, boys and girls alike, lit one for himself with a lighter that flashed in the May sunshine, crumpled the packet, and dropped it to the pavement. Then he picked up his hat, slapped the dust from it, put it on, and, walking his bicycle, his own cigarette between his lips, chin in the air to keep the smoke out of his eyes, moved off. The cigarettes he had given the children disappeared into their rags of clothing.

  They gathered at the breach at six every morning, knowing when the Franciscans would have finished their breakfast. One of the monks or brothers would come to the place with a basket of bread. Alessandro had begun to recognize some, had learned a few names. He would save his own pane nero and half-liter of milk to share among them, divide the hard loaf as well as he could, and pass the bits through the broken wall. Though they were not his to give, he picked oranges from the trees in the garden at night, kept them in his shed, and gave them to the children in the morning.

  Alessandro had been told that the priest, Brendan Doherty, was Advisor to the Sacred Congregation of Rites—a Monsignore, to be addressed as such. He reappeared, this time from the monastery’s chapel and offices, burly, walking fast, heels sounding on the flag-stone path, the briefcase in one hand, a handkerchief to pat his forehead in the other. Alessandro had been kneeling beside one of the garden’s long, earth-filled, concrete troughs, using a claw to weed among long-neglected herbs, of which only the toughest had survived the winter. Now he straightened and rose to greet the other. He thought: All right. We’ll do it again.

  “I believe the Superior wants us to beatify you as well as Maria Goretti,” Brendan said. “He doesn’t like me much, however. What’s that?”

  “Rosemary.”

  Alessandro took a few leaves from the stunted shrub and offered them. The priest put away his handkerchief, set his briefcase on the stone bench, hat beside it, took the leaves—“Marvelous!”—holding his cupped hands to his flaring nostrils—“Rosemary”—brushed his palms together: “I’m Brendan to you. With permission, brother, I’ll address you as Alessandro.” Then, before Alessandro could reply, he was embraced. “This is a matter of business, but I see no reason why we should not be friends. Have the Franciscans been seeing to your comfort?” He ended the embrace with a push, stood, legs spread, head raised, mouth open, as if he were drinking the air, then turned in his sudden way, and began to study the various herbs and other plants, edging along the raised concrete border of the bed. He had blue eyes, a broad fleshy nose, a big jaw with patches of gray beard he had missed in shaving. He wore a black suit, a frayed, soiled priest’s collar and bib, a gray cardigan under his jacket, a soup stain where a button should have been. “I know this!”—bending, pinching a leaf. “You could put my knowledge of the flora of the earth in a thimble, but I know mint. When I was young I spent my holidays in Morocco and drank mint tea morning and night. Lovely people. Marvelous. Do you know anything of the Muslim faith?”

  “No, Monsignore.”

  Brendan was looking at the orange trees, the lemons, turning to squint against the brilliance of the scarlet bougainvillea, sniffing the oleander blooms as if they had a scent. Now and then, he would yawn with a shout, show his yellow teeth and red tongue, scratch his arms. He seated himself on the bench, opened the briefcase, and looked into it, rubbing his hair into a bristling nest, talking all the time, one heel drumming, as if to discharge the congested energy in him. His words dimmed, fled over the wall of the garden, turned Alessandro deaf. When, after a time, actual questions came, Alessandro’s hearing returned, and he replied frankly, without hesitation.

  Now and then in the midst of the current of words, question and reply, the priest would look at the watch on his thick wrist. “This should not occupy us long,” he declared in a pause. “We ought to have you out of here and back to your mountains in a week.” The formal questions complete, he reached into one of the inner pockets of his jacket, came up with another blue packet of cigarettes, opened it, and looked for a place for the scraps. Alessandro took them and put them into the pocket of his leather apron.

  “You’re not Italian, Monsignore,” he said.

  The priest winked. “Philadelphia Irish.”

  “America.”

  “America”—grinning. He slapped the bottom of the packet so that a cigarette showed and offered it.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Really!”—astonished.

  He dropped the cigarettes into the briefcase. Alessandro lifted his head and looked at the sky. It was past noon. Clouds had moved over the sun and cooled the air. As he watched, the clouds began to boil and shift. The Monsignore, lighting his cigarette, observed the man as he stood with his face lifted.

  “What are you looking at, brother?”

  “An airplane. In the clouds.”

  ◂ 2 ▸

  ALESSANDRO’S BED was in a hut built into a corner of the garden, which had sheltered chickens before 1943 and then, during the German occupation, a goat. The doe had given the monastery some milk for a few months, then died of mastitis; now the shed held only gardening tools. Alessandro chose this place over the Superior’s courteous protests and his offer of a bed in the dormitory the Franciscans shared because, as always in the years since prison, he could not sleep unless he was alone. He had slept here each of the nights since his arrival in Rome, wrapped in a U.S. Army blanket the friars had given him from a store presented to them by Mark Clark’s friendly infantry. He had no candle, so he went to bed before it was fully dark, having first used the monastery’s privy, which stood under the dormitory wall, washed and brushed his teeth in the water that poured day and night from the mouth of a bronze dolphin into a green-bearded basin in a corner of the courtyard. He took off vest, trousers, shirt, and long underwear and, standing naked in the increasing cold, pulled on the nightshirt which had been the traveling gift of the Capuchins at Ascoli Piceno. Then he knelt and prayed for the strength to continue to dispose himself in faith, hope, and charity. He asked for the good health of the Superior of this place, Father Zecca. He asked Marietta—Saint Maria Goretti—for grace to love the servant of God Brendan Doherty, the Vatican lawyer, who had addressed him with courage, demanding the truth. He asked if he might be allowed to dream about Marietta again, though he wished he might be able to see her face clearly this time. His breathing slowed and deepened. He stretched himself on the bed of straw-stuffed ticking, rolled himself in the blanket, and, using his leather gardening apron for a pillow, the strong smell of it in his nostrils, went to sleep.

  The cold woke him from another dream, this time of Assunta, Marietta’s mother. It was midnight. The moon looked in at him, three-quarters full in a now clear sky, its face pocked with white scars. It blazed bloodlessly over the wall of the Franciscan cloister and the upper half of the divided door of the shed, which he had left open for it.

  TWO

  BRENDAN DOHERTY

  ◂ 1 ▸

  Brendan found half a dozen journalists at the door of the monastery and more of the begging children. The newspapermen lounged against a low wall surrounding a fountain in the cul-de-sac that led from Via Due Fratelli to the door of the gatehouse. There were a few shops in the little square and a cafe. Some of the journalists, all middle-aged, shabby-looking, sat at tables under umbrellas before the cafe. The begging children moved from one table to the next, dirty hands extended for a coin. A man in a leather jacket and the striped trousers of an old business suit rose and approached Brendan.

  “Monsignor Doherty?”

  The man poked a package of cigarettes at Brendan, shaking it so that two jumped up. He had a lighter ready in the other hand.

  “What do you want?”
/>
  “How is he? What did he say to you? Have one, please.”

  The priest took one of the cigarettes.

  “Moretti. Il Messaggero.”

  The man lit both cigarettes with care.

  “Have you rid your paper of its Fascists yet?”

  “There are no Fascists in our offices, Father. Only ex-Fascists and reconstructed Fascists. We even have a Communist now.”

  Brendan asked, “How did you people find out where he is?”

  “Everyone in Rome knows where Serenelli is and what you and he are talking about. Allow me to buy you a coffee. Five minutes.”

  “Sorry, no.” Then, relenting: “Another time. I’ll remember you.”

  HE PEDALED through Rome’s noon traffic, rattling his old bike over the cobble, squeezing between vehicles, slapping the door of a car to make it give way, prodding the ribs of another cyclist who came too near. A prewar Dunlop, his own bicycle was skeletal, without tire fenders or chain guard, so that he needed to wear the clip to prevent his trouser cuff from tangling in the bicycle’s gear chain, his cassock, when he wore it, tucked up to his waist. Prior to the war, an official in the Holy Office would have been entitled to a car and driver when he was in the streets on Vatican affairs, provided he had applied in time and a car was available; but Brendan found the current necessity of the electric tram cars, autobuses, and bicycles more to his liking and more efficient in traffic. Scarred and rusted as it was, his bike was no temptation. He could wheel it into the courtyard of a building, leave it tethered to some handy extrusion by a chain that was no defense against bolt-cutters, and be sure the contraption would be there when he emerged from whatever business he had in the place.

  A traffic policeman threw up his white-gloved hands when Brendan moved from the street to the sidewalk for relief from the punishment of the cobbles: “Cretino! Psicopatico!”