The Conduct of Saints Read online

  Lovingly, your son in Christ Jesus.

  He lay on top of his bed in the grainy morning, eyes burning, waited for the birds and for voices from the court below—the custodian sweeping, the scullery nun—the soft sounds a familiar ferment. You thanked God for that and, always, for morning.

  He recited a Glory Be to the Father, bathed (Villa Carlotta was allowed hot water for two hours each morning), shaved, dressed, went downstairs, picked up his mother’s letter, found inside it a deposit slip showing a credit of two hundred dollars paid into his account at the Banca d’Italia on via Nazionale from his mother’s bank in Philadelphia, and several pages of closely written text. He pushed the letter through the slit in his cassock into his trouser pocket, then thought, weighing the pros and cons: bad coffee and bread with margarine here, a decent cornetto con crema and drinkable coffee at the expensive place on Crescenzio. He found a stub of pencil on the porter’s table, wrote, “Thanks for the $” on the back of his own letter, tucked it behind the crisscrossing elastic straps on the notice board for the postman to pick up, and left.

  THREE

  ALESSANDRO SERENELLI

  ◂ 1 ▸

  Brendan asked, “Whose voice was it?”

  “My father’s,” Alessandro replied.

  “What did you take your father’s words to mean?”

  “That I’d done well in promoting Marietta’s cause.”

  “Well, a dream is only a dream,” Brendan said, “but that you would tell it to me represents progress. I think you have more to say.”

  Alessandro in the dream had said, “Marietta, see what I have in my hand,” though he himself had not known what it was. He withheld this from the priest.

  As if reading his mind, Brendan added, “If I may be candid, I think you hide a great many things—from yourself as well as from me.” He spoke in an absent way, looking through papers in a file, turning pages quickly, as if they did not interest him. “I see you were released from the prison in Sicily in 1929, three years short of the term of your sentence. Have we got the date right?”

  “It was 1928. December.”

  “Was the early release related to publicity concerning the vision you’d had, the matter of your redemption, about which so much had been written?”

  “The sentence was reduced for good behavior.”

  “But I think it had something to do with your vision, don’t you?” The priest turned soiled, flimsy pages, touching a thick thumb to his tongue. “There’s no order to these files. It’s a wastebasket.” His heel drummed, stopped, drummed again. “Here. You were admitted as a lay brother to the company of the Friars Minor Capuchins at the cloister near Macerata in the spring of 1931. How did you manage in the years between?”

  “I worked as a day laborer on farms and helped to repair roads. There was a square in Ancona where we waited in the morning from before dawn for the bosses or foremen to look us over and perhaps hire us.”

  “How did you occupy yourself while you were working as a day laborer and repairing roads.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I mean to ask how you lived. What did you do at night? Where did you sleep?”

  “I slept where I could. In a barn or shed, or in the courtyard of a peasant’s house if it was warm. Sometimes I was given a room to share with other men like me, if a son was away or a daughter had gotten married and moved into her husband’s house. There was a count’s estate near Ancona. I was able to live there for most of a year in a shed he had built for his workers. When I could, I tried to find a place to sleep alone, because the presence of others disturbed me.”

  “Why do you suppose that was?”

  “Something to do with prison, I think. There is no privacy in such a place.”

  “Then you didn’t make friends?”

  “No.”

  “No girlfriend?”

  “I had no friends in the sense you mean,” Alessandro said. “The men I worked with were friendly until they found out I was a jailbird and a murderer, then they became afraid and kept their distance. When someone was sympathetic, I talked about Maria Goretti. I promoted her cause. I did not touch a woman.”

  “Not in all that time?”

  “No.”

  “You remember your cellmate at Noto?”

  “Vittorio.”

  “Two years ago, Father Mauro went on the train to Naples to see him where he had gone to live after his release. He declared under oath that when you were together in the prison at Noto you described a couple of dreams you’d had just at the time of the Messina earthquake, and he said to you, ‘There. The earthquake together with those dreams. That’s your ticket out of this place.’ But he said to Padre Mauro that he himself had made up all that about a garden in paradise and told you that if you presented this to the authorities as a miraculous vision, it would be a way to curry favor, acquire privileges, perhaps get time taken off your sentence.”

  Alessandro said nothing.

  “Brother, listen. In this thing my concern is with doubt. To dispel doubt, I need to know.”

  “You say I’m a liar.”

  “You omit a great deal, which is a kind of lie. You pretend not to have given thought to these matters. You don’t remember. You don’t know. All omissions, all lies of a sort. There is a person within you who both knows and remembers. I urge you to make an effort to recall that person.”

  After a silence, the priest asked, “How do you sleep? Apart from dreams.”

  “I sleep very little, Monsignore.”

  “Forgive me. Do you masturbate?”

  “I promised God to be chaste.”

  “But nocturnal emissions, as they are called,” the priest said. “Even at your age—sixty-five, is it? What sort of dreams accompany those occasions?”

  “I understand what you mean. There are no such occasions.”

  “In the testimony given to Padre Mauro, you describe Maria Goretti, whom you refer to as Marietta, as ‘a little woman perfectly formed, though not yet twelve years old.’ Do you remember saying that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Forgive me. ‘A little woman perfectly formed?’ Did you say that?”

  “I was recalling Marietta’s appearance.”

  “Marvelous. Is that description from a fantasy in which you recall her appearance in some sexual way in order to arouse yourself? I’m being candid with you. I don’t speak in this manner to everyone, discussing things not normally discussed in polite company. But we’re not in the business of being polite now. We’re engaged in an investigation for His Holiness and his advisors. Reticence won’t move us forward.”

  “I don’t understand ‘fantasy.’ ”

  “To dream with your eyes open.”

  “I have no dreams of that kind, none of the kind that interest you.”

  “You may not yet know what interests me. Why did you come to Rome?”

  “The Holy Father commanded me.”

  “No, no. Allow me. You’re not under arrest or on trial. You were comfortable with your gardening, your reading—your Dostoyevsky and Stendahl. I have a copy of the letter sent to you from the Holy Office. I know you might have refused. ‘If it is convenient. If you are well enough.’ There was no command. You might have said you didn’t want to talk to us, and that would have been that.”

  “I’m obedient to the wishes of the Church.”

  “I think there’s something you want to tell us, and that’s why you came.”

  “No. Nothing more than I’ve said before.”

  The priest turned pages, heel drumming. “The man Vittorio, your cellmate. He declares in his statement that you two had what he calls a warm friendship at Noto. It goes no further, since I imagine Padre Mauro became embarrassed and stopped asking. But it’s clear Vittorio meant to say it was a homosexual friendship.”

  “We became cellmates in the eighth year of my sentence, the year I had the vision of Marietta. Some months after the vision, as a result of my friendship with Bishop Blandini, I took the vow of Saint Francis. The winter of 1910, 1911. Vittorio made an offer, and I refused him because I was not interested and because of my vow. I tell you the truth.”

  “So you said in your own statement to Padre Mauro. Here’s what I think. Vittorio was angry because he had told you how to exploit your dream of Maria Goretti and you had given him nothing in return. She was already famous by then as a Catholic martyr and, within the year, you’d begun to be famous too because of the publicity that came with your change of heart. That was when Vittorio spoke to the Bishop of Noto, who had been your friend and had spread the word of the miracle, and told him what he later told Mauro—that the vision was his creation entirely, a version of events our left-wing journalists have believed and exploited.”

  “The bishop did not believe him.”

  “Nor does His Holiness, who has faith in the miracle of your redemption. He’s told me so. He has no doubt. In his view, the precise nature of the dream you had in that prison is of little consequence. Whether or not there was a scheme in place, whether or not you utilized the details of Vittorio’s version to your advantage, it all comes to the same thing in his mind. You are a criminal who has paid his debt to the laws of society and whose soul has been saved through the intervention of a holy saint.”

  “There was no scheme, Monsignore. With respect.”

  “It seems to me you’ve come a long way to tell us you have nothing to tell us.”

  “I was called and came.”

  “I don’t think that’s good enough, brother. With respect.”

  ◂ 2 ▸

  THE GARDEN within the walls of the monastery was paved with irregular stones. An old cypress, citrus trees, the olive under which the Vatican priest sat when he visited, stood each in its circle of baked soil. There were two earth-filled troughs of concrete, one for herbs, flowers, and fruit-bearing shrubs, the other for vegetables, this still unplanted, though it was well past time—in the first, a few bulbs and rhizomes exposed in the hard soil, shoots stunted. Wooden supports in the shape of a T had been erected at either end of the troughs, wires strung from one to the other. Except for a dead vine twisting up one of the posts and broken off at the top, these were bare.

  Near the breach in the street wall was a pair of iron-bound doors; these were opened only to admit vehicles that brought food and other supplies into the monastery. On his second day, Alessandro had helped unload a camouflaged truck belonging to the American Fifth Army—sacks of potatoes, rice, beans, and flour—while the brothers, their numbers diminished since the war, undernourished and frail, stood by smiling, carrying small items, continually thanking both the G.I.’s and Alessandro. Generally, these few friars and lay brothers kept to the inner cloister when they ventured out of doors. Father Zecca had instructed them as to their conduct towards Alessandro. They were not to approach him except singly and not to address him unless spoken to first, except to ask for his blessing. Now and then one would look from the inner cloister through the archway into the garden, and, finding Alessandro alone, might come in and observe silently for a time, while the famous penitent went on with his work. If the Vatican prelate appeared, the friar would leave without acknowledging or otherwise greeting him.

  The doors of the school across the alley opened at seven in the morning, and the students in their smocks, shouldering book sacks, crowded in. They did not look at the begging children as they passed them. They shouted to one another, backed into each other, linked arms, climbed the low, broad stairs, arms across each other’s shoulders, boys with boys, girls with girls. A young nun stood by the door and greeted them in a carrying voice. Alessandro watched through the break in the wall until they were in the building, doors closed, nodded, feeling something necessary had been accomplished, took back the bowl he had given to Rachele and the others, washed it at the courtyard faucet, and returned it to the kitchen.

  ◂ 3 ▸

  THE PRIEST did not appear the next day, but came the day after that in the morning, striding from Father Zecca’s office along the path into the garden, his handkerchief balled in his thick hand. This time, instead of an ordinary black jacket and trousers, Father Doherty wore a round broad-brimmed hat and a dusty soutane with red buttons and trim. Having hoisted the gown to manage his bicycle, it remained rucked to his hips for a time, and from it, when he moved, floated the odor of black tobacco. He embraced Alessandro, opened the briefcase.

  “Here’s where we stand in the order of things.”

  He put his reading glasses on the end of his nose, sorted through file folders, each with the seal of the Holy See embossed on it. “Here”—offering a document with a red cover: “The Decreto. Hot off the press. It authorizes the Congregation of Rites to proceed. This is in large part the consequence of your work, this decree—the thing you’ve struggled to promote for so many years. Marvelous.”

  The priest smelled of stale wine in the morning, fresh wine when he returned to the interrogation after he’d had his dinner. He initiated each interview with an embrace, the penitent conscious of a soft body with strength hidden in it.

  Alessandro understood country priests—men like himself, children of workers, sheepherders, farmers, people who knew that they were only men. This Vatican priest was something else. His briefcase against his knee, cassock twisted around him, face red and sweating, the man poked at the frail houses of truth, which had been put together out of God’s words. All you could reply—though he did not in fact say this—was that the sun rose in the east, that two and two made four, and that Christ had died for both of them and risen again.

  The priest’s method was plain—to appear to be his brother on one hand, so that he would open his mind, and to make him angry on the other, so that, having opened his mind, he would say what might be a fact but not the truth. It was no great matter. The ability to hide behind anger had left him years before. When Father Zecca asked if he liked the man, he replied that he thought he was a good man but did not know if he liked him.

  The prelate said, “I practiced law for a couple of years back in the dark ages and sat with a fellow, a murderer, whose case was lost. I saw him killed.”

  It had been done with electricity, the priest said, in Pennsylvania, in America. Alessandro could tell from the priest’s smile and the way he sought his, Alessandro’s, eyes that the man was offering him a fact without any truth in it. Or perhaps it was not even a fact.

  “I’ve spent my adult life visiting prisoners, brother, both as lawyer and priest. Those who are hungry for love, approval, forgiveness, evolve into something like pure spiritual beings in order to get it. It’s done with a sincerity which is not quite sincere, not quite religious, if you see what I mean—a form of bargaining: a new hearing, a new trial, freedom to order their lives in prison, freedom itself, in exchange for obedience to power. It’s easy to confuse this ritual process with God’s understanding. Do you follow?”

  “Yes, Monsignore.”

  Sitting under the olive tree on the stone bench, the priest suddenly turned his head to the ruined wall. “Signorina Rachele has come to pay her respects.”

  “No, it’s another who comes sometimes in the afternoon. Bella, she calls herself. Rachele hasn’t been for a day or two.”

  “You have a little passion for Rachele, I believe.”

  “She’s ashamed of what she has to do to live.”

  The priest watched him. “In my opinion you respect honesty, yet are not honest. Anyhow with me. You feel you needn’t bother because you are candid within yourself, in your thoughts, acknowledging that you aren’t chaste.”

  Alessandro said nothing.

  “Have you dreamed about your father again?”

  “No.”

  “Rachele? Bella?”

  ◂ 4 ▸

  DURING AND after the trial, the newspapers had written about Alessandro’s father, saying he was a cruel, ignorant peasant, that he had treated Alessandro harshly, and that this was a formative reason for the son’s violent act. He had tried to correct that in the testimony he gave to Father Mauro, and he had said the same to Monsignor Doherty—that the popular idea of his father was false. Doherty was someone with the ability to arrange things, the sort of man to be interviewed by reporters himself, so that perhaps he would set the record straight. In fact, Alessandro’s father, who had died in the poorhouse at Ancona in 1918, had been a good man, though newspapers and journals, for whom the pain of others is of no consequence, declared the opposite to be the case.

  “Yes,” Brendan said when Alessandro put it to him. “That record again. I will see that the sense of what you say is in the record”—turning over pages. “Here’s a note about tattoos, of all things.”

  “I testified that Vittorio had many on his body.”

  “Apparently. The man removed his sweater and shirt to show Padre Mauro. He told that simple priest he had tattoos on his buttocks, even on his penis. He started to remove his trousers to show him, and only when poor Mauro begged him to stop did he desist. Mauro asked the man what the decorations signified, but he would not say.”

  “They signified nothing. It was filth.”

  “You didn’t like them.”

  “I admired them at first. That was before, you understand.”

  “Who made them for him?”

  “Other prisoners under his direction, those who were practiced in the skill. He traded food or tobacco for them. If it was something difficult or what he called artistic, he paid with sexual favors. If he could reach the place on his body, he did them himself.”

  “Did you do any for him?”

  “I was no good at it. In any case, we weren’t friends. I was thinking of freedom every day then. I thought of nothing but my own comfort and happiness. It was before my redemption. I was like the prisoner you describe. I was corrupt yet believed I was good. I was a murderer yet believed I should be free, as anarchists believe in individual freedom. In fact I deserved to be hanged.”

  “Why weren’t you hanged, brother?”

  “It was the law in those days,” Alessandro said. “I was nineteen. If I’d been twenty-one, they would have hanged me.”