Gospel (52 page)

O'Hanrahan seated himself amid the reference books, indices of indices. His dream discovery: an early commentary of a father of the Church, ignored, rarely read, that quoted an excerpt of the Matthias gospel to agree with or disprove. Another useful discovery would be a list of languages, primers of African tongues, ignored perhaps because they translated, say, Nubian to Ge'ez. He hated to admit it but his rival Father Beaufoix, the Dominican among the Acolyte Society, wrote a compendium ten years ago concerning African Christian scripts. Ha, O'Hanrahan swore he'd do it without Beaufoix's book. And that old goat was publishing another tome next month—to hell with him!

Friar Luco returned, as if in slow motion, his shuffling, measured old man's pace alerting O'Hanrahan a full minute before his arrival.
“Eccolo, eccolo,”
he sang as he put down the scrollcase before O'Hanrahan.

“Grazie,”
said the professor, opening the tube and sliding the medieval contents out.

“Il Trecento,”
mused Brother Luco, showing a mild interest.

O'Hanrahan explained it indeed was of the 1300s, but it was in scroll form to appear older and therefore more valuable. However, like most medieval fakes, it gave itself away by insisting too much on its accuracy and prophetic qualities. Halfway through the prophecies of St. Andrew in Ethiopia, the Disciple launches a discourse about the triumph of Latin rite over the East, the supremacy of Rome—in which Andrew has a vision of Peter in papal tiara!—and finally a dire warning that an Antichrist of the Gauls will signal the coming of the End Times and come in the guise of Babylon, represented, as in
Daniel,
by a griffin. This, of course, was a blatant attempt to coerce the Avignon, French-controlled popes to return the papacy to Rome during the so-called Babylonian Captivity, from 1309 to 1379. Pseudo-texts, before the age of linguistic scholarship and exact dating processes, wreaked havoc on the medieval Church; some clever forgeries, like the
Apostolic Constitutions
and, of course, the
Laudabiliter,
which gave papal approval for England's domination of Ireland, became bedrock documents of state. The
Gospel of Barnabas
of the 1200s, which pretends to have Jesus predict Mohammad, is still given credence by some Moslem scholars.

“Non ha nessun valore, eh?”
suggested Friar Luco, leaning over the desk and breathing harsh cigarette breath on O'Hanrahan.

Yes, it's worthless scholastically, O'Hanrahan explained in Italian, leaning away from the breath, but a nice museum piece. O'Hanrahan took his
International Herald Tribune
and his morning's
La Repubblica
newspaper and rolled them into a scroll, while Friar Luco chuckled knowingly. O'Hanrahan placed the newspaper in the scrollcase and asked Friar Luco to return it, to act irate, and send the assistant back for another one as if he'd made a mistake. Meanwhile, O'Hanrahan shoved the 14th-Century scroll into his briefcase, careful not to damage it.

Lunch with Rabbi Hersch was next in the appointment book.

Upon leaving the Vatican Library and walking across the expanse of Piazza San Pietro, O'Hanrahan asked the friar where he went to eat in Trastevere and learned that Luco never missed a meal back at San Francesco a Ripa. Do they have a good cook? asked O'Hanrahan. The friar shrugged. The one Italian without taste buds. Father Vico's tea-making skills perhaps were indicative of a Franciscan lack of prowess in culinary matters.

(Not everyone lives for their stomach, Patrick.)

O'Hanrahan, parting from Luco, followed his nose toward San Crisogono and then turned into the warm, ochre alleyways and shambling streets of Trastevere, “across the Tiber,” ancient dwellings supported by ivy and clotheslines, a peasant village within Rome.

“Reminds you of old times, doesn't it?” asked the rabbi, meeting O'Hanrahan at the Trattoria Maria, joining him at an outside table.

“Like Cairo in 1946,” said O'Hanrahan while polishing off the breadsticks, referring to when the two men met for the first time.

In Cairo in 1946, the lost, verifiable
Gospel of Thomas
slipped onto the black market and among the dozen academic agents hunting for it in the alleys of the Khan al-Khalili were, one, a young Jesuit novice on a year abroad at American University in Beirut named O'Hanrahan and, two, a grad assistant at Hebrew University named Hersch, each there in hopes of buying it for their respective universities. The
Gospel of Thomas,
the previous greatest gospel find in 2000 years, had eluded the Coptic Museum in Cairo and all the authorities, and made its way before the shenanigans were over to, yes, America! Where
anyone
could have bought it if they had known what it was. A hero of O'Hanrahan, Dr. Quispel of Utrecht University, nabbed it and it's in Utrecht to this day. But Quispel would be green with jealousy if he knew how close O'Hanrahan was to securing the
Gospel of Matthias!

The
signora
—Maria, perhaps?—presented herself: a hulking woman, her eyes outlined in southern Italian–strength mascara, her emerald-green dress more appropriate for an opera diva. O'Hanrahan won her favor by quickly ordering a bottle of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, not the cheapest on her wine list. She disappeared inside a curtain of blue beads, to a kitchen of clanging pots and Italian clamor, a young girl's repeated laughter and an older man's voice chastising her.

“You not gonna give me the last breadstick?” asked the rabbi. O'Hanrahan surrendered it. “Rabbi Eleazar said whoever fails to leave a piece of bread on his table will never see the signs of God's bounty and blessings.” Rabbi Hersch then spoke of his adventures at the Vatican:

“… and so this little man who has been there since they built St. Peter's Church came by and was very helpful. He said ‘Signor Rabbi, do you want to see the back room, lots of Jewish, lots of Jewish.'”

Yes, thought the professor, half-attending. A book on Matthias—the oldest gospel ever found. It's the prize of the century, maybe the Dead Sea Scrolls included. What made you think, Paddy, that Morey was going to give you this privilege and not write the book himself?

“… I love the New Ecumenism, it was please, Mr. Rabbi and Thank you so much, Mr. Rabbi—Rabbi Abba was right: once the door has been shut it is not soon opened, so you gotta take advantage of these opportunities. And then I got to look at…” The rabbi noticed his friend wasn't listening. “Then I got to look at St. Paul's First-Century personal pornography collection. Lots of naked Syrian boys, Abdul and his pet camel, a shvanze down to here and I'm not talking about the camel.”

“What?”

“I'm talking to you, for Christ's sake. What's with you?”

O'Hanrahan shook his head, it was nothing.

The signora had arrived to take their order. A first course of
spaghetti alle vongole
for O'Hanrahan in which a
kashrut
discussion worthy of Quizzur Shulhan Arukh commenced over whether the rabbi was permitted under dietary laws to dip a piece of bread in the sauce on the fringes of the clam and tomato topping.

“Sorry if I seem distracted, Morey,” said O'Hanrahan. He risked, “It's like you're looking over my shoulder. Sort of throws me having you here, working in Rome.”

“Look, Paddy,” his friend said momentarily, “Hebrew University will … will let the PLO use me for target practice if this scroll slips through our hands again, so I'm staying close, and besides, I can't finish my Josephus book until I read this thing.” The rabbi eyed him knowingly, then quietly looked down in his lap and folded his napkin again and again. “It's your conquest here, Paddy; I'm not moving in on it. Look, I'm the wrong person to translate it. You're the Patristics man, not me.
You're
the man for it.” He took a deep breath. “I just want to help you and make sure we don't run into any more trouble.”

Two afterdinner glasses of Amaro Montenegro sundered the day for any serious work.

“Taxi,
signore
?” asked Gepetto the Cabdriver from his sentinel before the hostel. “Good rate for priest, for man of God!”

O'Hanrahan called back in Italian that it was siesta time, which the old man seemed to agree with, pulling his cap down over his eyes and getting comfortable in his front seat.

O'Hanrahan spread out upon his bed, sated. He looked at the ceiling and listened to the ebbing noise of the street as Rome closed her shutters and sank into beds of crisp cool linen sheets, leaving the empty carafes and breadcrumbs on the lunchtables, preparing to dream through the afternoon heat.

Lucy's key was gone downstairs and the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign was gone, so, he reasoned, she must be out cramming all of Rome into an afternoon. One life is not enough for Rome, says the old cliché, because half of her treasures are buried, or are uncelebrated, having eluded the guidebooks, or are shut up in private palaces, now sepulchers of old ghosts, clung to by the last bearer of a once-feared patrician name. And even if the veil were lifted, most of the treasures are too grand or ingenious to comprehend on the first viewing anyway …

If my faith was going to return to me, O'Hanrahan thought sadly, it should have happened here. This is probably my last visit to Rome.

(Indeed, My child, it is.)

This city stands for all that I've contended with and fought against all my life; from my childhood piety to my Jesuit vow, which I broke, to my latter-day crusades against the recidivist likes of John Paul II, who has preached this very year on Protestant error in Mexico, the necessity of celibacy, the sin of birth control, preaching against the errors of the Jews—God forgive him—and this year decrying “intellectualism.” Lord, what a throwback.

(A typical pope, really.)

It was the atrocities, thought O'Hanrahan, of the last century of Catholic policy that made me permanently combative. Pius IX and his condemnation of free speech and thought, and the idiot Pius X railing against modernism, and the war criminal Pius XII not breathing a word against Hitler. All the Marian shrines, all the
mater dolorosa
Mediterranean sideshows, the Maria Gorettis!

Again, merciful God, what are we doing to our young women?

Every Catholic girls' school gets a dose of Maria Goretti. An eleven-year-old girl from Ancona. Accosted by a rapist, she refused him, then was stabbed, and then from her hospital bed she forgave him before dying. The spectacle of the cardinals, old celibate men, arguing, debating—
seven
volumes of evidence gathered—was she a martyr of chastity or not? She told the rapist that God disapproved, but she also said
Si si si,
which might have meant that she really wanted it after all. The long hours, the pros and cons … God's work in the world? Deciding if an eleven-year-old wants to be raped and enthroning her in the pantheon of saints if she didn't?

It is Rome who deserted
me,
the thinking Catholic. O'Hanrahan pulled the linen sheet around him and felt the consciousness of the afternoon slip away from him, his eyes getting heavy. My Church threw in its cards with the peasantry, the widows in black, the rosary brigade, the wound-counters, the indulgence-mongers. And yet. If my faith was to return to me, it should have happened here.

(Faith doesn't walk in the door and take you by the collar, Patrick. You must incline your heart.)

Then he felt something.

And as he was on the verge of sleep, he felt a pain in his side. A pain that had stayed away for some time now, not since the one bad night this spring in Rome, and the intimations of another one back in Florence. He opened his eyes and tried to predict from staring at the ceiling whether it would go away.

Then, like a knife, it cut into him again.

All right, enough discussion. He rose and got to his shaving kit and took out a bottle of pills. Two of these and he'd be out no matter what his body wanted to do to him.
Man wastes away like a rotten thing, like a garment that is moth-eaten.
He lay back in the bed, stoically ignoring his side.
His bones are full of youthful vigor, but they shall lie down with him in the dust.
It was his liver. Doctors say—hell, they'd told him a hundred times—your liver can't hurt, not like you say it does, Mr. O'Hanrahan.
An old man, and full of days.
But there it was, raging back at him for all the abuse and impertinence.

Soon the Percodan kicked in.

And the rock poured out for me streams of oil!

And then there were no more thoughts as the narcotic seethed within him in waves and all he knew was peace and absence of pain, a bliss and relief Heaven, it seemed today, was unlikely to provide.

*   *   *

O'Hanrahan was awakened by a knock on the door, and the rabbi called out: “Paddy, come see what's on TV.”

He stretched in place on his bed. He fumbled for his watch: nine
P.M.

Down the hall in the TV room the rabbi was transfixed before
“Colpo Grosso,”
a game show that featured topless Vanna White–equivalents, eight of them. Breasts presented themselves each and every question amid the incomprehensible workings of the show, and the contestants themselves competed for the right to strut down the runway and take it off, including the middle-aged Italian woman they were watching now.

“This is the kind of quality TV Israel needs,” mumbled the rabbi.

“Look at the
rack
on that one,” said O'Hanrahan of a chestnut-haired presenter; some ancient memory of young girl's breasts, circa 1971, telegraphing back to him. An undergraduate who fixated upon his lectures, and an expensive after-lecture dinner in which he plied her with booze, and then in the car they were revealéd, made manifest! Oh, there was much to edit out of memories like this: the fact that the next day she called up crying and said there would never be a repeat performance, the fact that all through dinner she said he reminded her of her own father—best not to follow the implications of that—the fact that Beatrice figured something was up when you got home and she wept silently beside you in the bed … No, let's not drag in all the peripheral stuff, let's remember those young, sumptuous, creamy nineteen-year-old breasts where you lightly reclined your head. In the car, motor running, windows fogged, outside her drab student apartment complex, and where you placed your tender kiss … Precious ikon! Bejeweled and resplendent as no holy relic ever was revered!