Gospel (48 page)

“Columbus was Jewish,” interrupted the rabbi, now standing beside them in the subway car, hanging on to a strap. “The Sephardim were the greatest navigators of the age. If Chris had steered a little farther north, you know, he'd a hit Brooklyn, smack dab in the Promised Land.”

O'Hanrahan cleared his throat, hoping to proceed.

The rabbi persevered: “First Christian wipe-out of the Jews on record is in Spain,” he got in before he saw O'Hanrahan's pretended ire. “All right, just trying to educate the little girl, go ahead, Mr. Tour Guide, tell 'er about 1492, the Edict of Expulsion.”

The Edict of Expulsion.

Ferdinand and Isabella marched into Granada at long last, giving them the southern third of the peninsula … and thousands of infidels to process, village upon village of Muslim women and men waiting for the stake, some 200,000 inconvenient Jews. What was Isabella to do?

(Pope Sixtus IV expressed mild disapproval with her Inquisition, but he was otherwise engaged with arranging for murderers to kill Lorenzo de Medici and his brother in Florence's Santa Croce, timed so they'd be bowed in prayer during the elevation of the Host. Not the pope, really, the situation called for.)

The rabbi explained that some 100,000 Jews wasted their time by going to Portugal but they were thrown out of there, too. And so began the wandering of the Sephardim and the end of Spanish Jewry, who had proud origins before the rise of Rome—gone, all gone.

O'Hanrahan: “But 1492 wasn't ready to say
adios
quite yet.”

(We sense the Borgias coming on …)

“1492, that
annus mirabilis
saw the ascension to the Holy See of a Spanish pope—Alexander Borgia.”

(An abysmal man, even for a pope.)

“At 62, syphilitic, debauched, swollen with every vice,” said O'Hanrahan, beaming as if he might fit that description himself, “accompanied by his mistresses, catamites, and bastard children, His Holiness marched to his papal coronation in a spectacular Roman parade of pontifical money-wasting: garlands before him, the papal armies draped in the most expensive silks, his cardinals festooned with jewels, amid the music and noise, handfuls of ducats were thrown to the masses, and to the amazement of the crowd there were human statues, the pubescent breasts of the nymphs lacquered in silver for him…”

Lucy checked around to see if anyone looked like they could understand English. Yes, the entire subway car looked engrossed.

“How His Holiness's hand would grip the firm buttocks of the naked boys caked in gold! And what better celebration for the Old Basilica of St. Peter's than a bullfight in the inner churchyard. The Vatican was to become a brothel, a casino, a place of sport and murderous fights. Through extortions of every ingenuity, His Holiness plundered benefices, raking in the spoils of the Christian world.”

O'Hanrahan lovingly described Alexander's spawn, the heartless Lucrezia, mistress of poison, incestuous orgiast, married off to a variety of noblemen to secure papal power. Her monstrous brother the Cardinal Cesare, responsible during his dad's reign for up to five murders a week, a man whose face was so eaten away by syphilis that he had to wear an executioner's hood in public—which was appropriate. Cardinal Cesare personally cut out the tongue of one man who repeated a joke about him. He will even come to murder his sister's husband, and after that, their little brother, Juan … whom Lucrezia always preferred.

“Oh, please now, not that you should leave anything out,” said the rabbi.

Prisoners were brought into the churchyard of St. Peter's where Cesare, before a cheering drunken mob, practices archery upon them. He'll hit this one in the eye, that one in the groin … Alexander VI is too ghastly to behold, his skin blackened, his saliva white froth, as every disease of sexual degeneration wracks his ancient body—or was it that Lucrezia, tired of his grotesque furtive advances, is poisoning him?

“An absolutely
identical
description,” interrupted the rabbi, “exists of Herod the Great, another fine moral presence. The sores, the disintegrating body, and the stench. Do you suppose it's merely legend about hated rulers or could it be that such really happens to you when you are very, very bad, hm? The blackened skin, the liquefying stomach that has to be bound up so as not to spill out…”

“Yuck,” said Lucy. “You guys…”

Surrounded by his mistresses—always married women because he loved to cuckold the Italians—Pope Alexander opened the vaults of sacred treasure to those who could amuse him. “The Ballet of the Chestnuts!” proclaimed O'Hanrahan. Naked serving girls stoop and bend to pick up the chestnuts His Holiness has hurled across the marble floor of the Vatican. Soon his cardinals disrobe and help the girls, soon they are coupling and rolling about. Would His Holiness participate? No, he shall watch, just watch, and his hand slips under his papal robes to provide himself some last spasm of delight … Who among the young men retained by Alexander can perform the most times? The treasures of the Vatican for the most ejaculations!

“Can one imagine father and daughter, brother nearby watching jealously, commanding the church to be filled with the stallions of the Vatican stables? And the concubines of Rome—splayed upon the altars to receive the stallions?”

“You're making this up!” squealed an incredulous Lucy.

“No, it's all true,” said the professor. “Polish up your Latin and get out your John Burchard, social secretary to the Borgias.
Whoa,
it's our stop, you two!”

(Alexander didn't have nearly the fun doing it that you did telling about it, Patrick.)

The trio left the train and a carriageful of Italians straining to understand O'Hanrahan's English at Laterano Station. O'Hanrahan and his charges walked up the stairs and emerged outside the city walls, before them the modern version of the most sacred of Roman roads, the Appian Way, now an eight-lane boulevard, traffic lights, newsstands, cafés, bus stops.

“And when the pope himself,” said O'Hanrahan steering them along, “clutching the tiara, is helped to mount a gelding, his son and daughter cheering him on…”

Rabbi Hersch: “
Anus mirabilis,
indeed.”

“Well, you might have thought the very
end
of decadent imagination had been achieved.”

“One might have thought,” said the rabbi, distracted with crossing the impossible street and its maniacal traffic pattern.

“The Spanish, however, were just warming up. 1527, the Sack of Rome.”

(Dark days for Us indeed. Charles V of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire had been double-crossed for the last time by the vain and incompetent Pope Clement VII. The emperor naively hoped for an organized and dignified assault on the capital, but the Germans were ready for plunder and rape … and rape they did, convent after convent was emptied and enslaved, sisters of every order stripped, humiliated, and defiled at drunken auctions, then passed around the marauding troops. The rich were kidnapped, held for ransom, their valuables taken, their infants roasted and eaten as a delicacy, their palaces burned, and then they were killed anyway.)

Churches were raided, recounted O'Hanrahan, jewels and gold scraped from the mosaics and altarpieces, and as for the priests and young monks who didn't strike the German contingent's fancy, they were massacred and thrown into the Tiber until the river was jammed with corpses. Only the arrival of the plague and the worst fire since Nero drove the troops away, convinced finally there was nothing left to plunder.

“But not before the Spanish troops had mocked the Church, Bride of Christ,” O'Hanrahan concluded, “by crowning a harlot and putting her upon the Lateran throne, draping a mule in the papal robes and tiara and lashing it through the corpse-ridden streets. Meanwhile, with Rome so occupied, the King of England renounced popery, wanting to be rid of his shrill
Spanish
bride, and to the north, a man named Martin Luther was winning converts. In forty years, through Inquisition, Papacy, and Sack, the Golden Age of Spanish Catholicism winds to a close…”

A smattering of applause from the rabbi and Lucy, begrudging, and O'Hanrahan made a slight bow.

“And here we are at the Lateran,” he announced, as they gazed upon one of the Five Great Basilicas of Rome. The front was a mass of columns and pillars and monumentality with three-story doors that reduced the poor pilgrim to nothingness.

“But first,” said O'Hanrahan, “we must venerate the steps of Pontius Pilate's house.”

The Scala Santa, across from the Lateran, is a church featuring a staircase taken from Jerusalem's Antonia Fortess, allegedly the stairs that Jesus descended after being judged by Pilate and the mob.

(Pilate, We hate to point out, lived in the Praetorium across town, and in truth their staircase was any old staircase, but what fun the Moslems had selling this pile of bricks and old wood to the Christians.)

There are twenty-eight steps in the Scala Sancta. The pilgrim, kneeling on each step, does twenty-eight rosaries until he or she finally reaches the top to glimpse the miraculous ikon, the
Acheiropoeton,
painted by St. Luke and finished by an angel. As one of the few actual portraits of Christ by the Evangelist it was carried by angels in the 700s out of Constantinople's grasp and arrived at the Lateran miraculously—proving once and for all Rome's supremacy.

Lucy stood in the doorway of the Church of the Scala Sancta, feeling uncomfortable, face-to-face with Eastern abasement for the first time. The old women in black, tearfully on their knees, prayed intensely—possibly the only eternal of religion, the old women in black. To the right of the door was the souvenir stand.

(The other eternal of religion, Lucy.)

Lucy listened:

“Dolce bambina Maria,”
said the nearest penitent,
“che destinata ad essere Madre di Dio, sei pur divenuta amantissima Madre nostra…”

“Time to go,” said O'Hanrahan, tapping her. “If we see the Lateran, then we can reward ourselves with drink.”

Entering the Lateran's vast portals and letting her eyes adjust to the dimness, Lucy found the interior breathtaking. This, the true seat of the pope and not St. Peter's, is essentially an overdecorated box, an avenue of marble, giant statues in porticos under pediments under arches under mosaics and insignia—a jumble of every architectural trick since the Greeks.

“Do you know about Pope Formosus, Morey?” asked the professor.

“Tell me a story, Paddy,” said the rabbi, contentedly looking at the splendor, impressed but not moved.

“The Trial of Pope Formosus,” commenced O'Hanrahan. “Formosus was a man of great piety and learning in the 800s, one of the few popes to lead a strict ascetic life. But he was ambitious. And when he alienated a powerful Roman family, he made an enemy of the man who was to become Pope Stephen VI after his death. Pope Stephen's maniacal hatred of his predecessor led him to convene his cardinals and deacons. ‘Exhume Formosus,' he commanded. ‘He shall stand trial for his perjuries!'

“‘What's everybody standing around here for?'” re-created O'Hanrahan in a low, gravelly voice. “‘Go find his corpse,' Pope Stephen said! Nine long months and a rain-soaked winter had elapsed since the former pope's death. But workmen exhumed Formosus—gray, half-rotted…”

“This is another yuck story,” moaned Lucy.

“… and they brought the corpse to Stephen. Stephen had him propped in the bishop's throne. Now go get his papal vestments, his insignia, his ring, his miter! Stephen forced a deacon to stand behind Formosus and pretend to be the dead pope's voice, and this frightened deacon, about to pass out from the stench of the corpse, answered yes to all Stephen's rantings and accusations. His Holiness then declared all of Formosus's acts void, defrocking a fair percentage of the Church.

“Not able to slide the papal ring off the dead man's rigid fingers,” O'Hanrahan informed them, “Stephen called for an ax and the pope hacked away at Formosus's hand; the three fingers Formosus had used to bless and pontificate fell one by one to the marble floor here.” He smiled to see Lucy's pained expression. “With Formosus stripped and mutilated further, Stephen felt vindicated and had him reburied.”

“Did he get away with it?” asked Lucy.

Understandably, Pope Stephen became anxious. Formosus's supporters were ready to riot; the cardinals, still in shock, were ready to lynch him. Stephen decided to hide Formosus's body, so there would be no evidence. Formosus was exhumed a second time and hurled into the Tiber, and his humiliated corpse, waterlogged and dissolving, floated downstream … where the mere sight of it caused miracles to occur. Downriver, healings were reported—a blind man could now see, a barren woman was with child in Ostia! Formosus was fished out of the Tiber and raised upon a bier! A tremor in 897 spelled the end of Stephen, and the Basilica of the Lateran fell into a heap. The town, convinced the earthquake was a sign of God's displeasure—

(Which it was.)

—rioted and demanded Pope Stephen's blood, but civil authorities threw him instead in prison. That night, in the dank cold and darkness, a priest came to His Holiness.

Are you here, asked Stephen, to hear my confession?

No, said the father, I come to deliver the judgment of God. And he strangled Stephen VI with hands that had recently held the Host. Formosus was buried once more.
“Only,”
chuckled O'Hanrahan, “only to be exhumed one
more
time by Pope Theodore II for a proper burial in St. Peter's.”

“Paddy, Paddy,” said the rabbi, cutting him short, “do you think this dump has a toilet for us poor pilgrims?”

“Ask that man there,” suggested O'Hanrahan, pointing to a sacristan, carrying a box of short memorial candles across the transept. Rabbi Hersch hopped away to interrogate him.