Gospel (56 page)

She laughed, still agreeably woozy. Lucy stole a brief glance at O'Hanrahan. He was staring mindlessly at the nighttime sea, the occasional shore light. “Did you ever…” Should she ask? Yes, she went ahead. “Did you ever really believe in God, Dr. O'Hanrahan?”

(Tell her the truth, Patrick.)

He looked at her kindly, but something within withdrew. You deserve an answer, sweet Lucy, but you won't get it tonight. Sometime, but not tonight.

(Tell yourself the truth, Patrick.)

He chuckled, “I
was
a Jesuit, young lady.”

She giggled, looking down. “That doesn't exactly answer my question.”

“I used to, yes,” he said quickly. “And I'd like to again. I learned too much in between, that's my problem.” But having said that, he refined the thought further: “No, more precisely, I've always believed in God. The problem with me was that … was that I grew not to like Him very much. But, interestingly, I have never lost an affection for the people handicapped by God. Do you know who I mean? There are, after all, people who get out of bed, marry and have children, laugh and live and go to the grave without giving God a second thought—moral, ethical, decent people.”

“Yes.”

O'Hanrahan struggled to explain. “And then there are the others. The old men who sat in the scriptoria for their whole lives copying out tracts, the nuns who can drink you under the table, old codgers like me who waste a lifetime reading theology. Maybe you're one of these people. These are my cronies, Miss Dantan, my partners in crime. We're different and we say it's because of God, but maybe we're just … just different, that's all.”

Lucy stared toward the horizon, black meeting black, but the night warm and inclusive. “Do you think when you lose your faith…” Not that she'd lost hers exactly, but it was changing. “Do you think you can ever get it back?”

Now O'Hanrahan also looked away. “I'll let you know the answer to that when we find that last chapter and get the
Gospel of Matthias
translated. Ask me then, okay?”

She smiled gravely. “Well, good night, partner. Hope you can live with yourself, leaving me defenseless out here on the deck.”

“Curl up with that Swedish contingent we saw in the snack bar. They looked pretty liberal. Europe's just one big orgy for you kids these days. Why, when I first came to Europe I was a bit younger than you, but it was after the war and…” But his ramblings weren't particularly directed anywhere. “Your generation doesn't realize how few epochs have been like this in history, how rare this is, traveling where you please throughout Europe—Eastern Europe too, now. You pack your backpacks and go. Sex for you kids is like drinking water…”

Lucy looked distracted but amused.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

She hid a smile. “I haven't been able to get it out of my head, Dr. O'Hanrahan, for three days. Catherine's wedding ring.”

And then they both laughed. “That's a good story, isn't it? Stays with you. Night, Miss Dantan.”

And he was gone. Accompanied by his duty-free.

Lucy took a final walk around the deck, going as far as she could go on both sides of the ship. There was room to walk, but just barely—one threaded an avenue of backpackers, teenagers in sleeping bags, there was a group of Italian boy scouts, every one of them a doll, talking loudly and sparring to the annoyance of the Germans beside them trying to sleep. There was a group of Americans trading hometown information, baseball talk, what college do you go to, what's your major … and after taking in these sights, she stood for a last time at the rail. No sign of land now. There was a light out there, but it looked like another ferry. It was comforting somehow, all these boats on the sea nearby, all going the same place.

It thrilled her anew: Greece!

After all the Greek she'd studied, to be upon the sea with Greece ahead!
Not the least shyness now,
she steeled herself in the place of Telemakhos,
You came across the open sea for this!

Lucy returned to the top deck where she had set her suitcase beside some card-playing Australians who said they'd watch it for her. She staked out a space on the deck, and tried to use her suitcase for a headrest unsuccessfully, before opening it and removing some dirty clothes, piling them together for a pillow. She also took out a sweater, though it wasn't necessary because the night was warm and the sea was ever so gently swaying the boat and a dull glow on the horizon meant a moonrise was imminent.

And then she heard a groan and a grunt to her side, so she turned.

It was a couple making out.

The Lucy of a few weeks ago could have been expected to sneer, say something cynical for Judy's benefit—disgusting, wasn't it? Hey, give us all a break, take it to the bedroom, who wants to see it?

But not tonight.

She beheld them a moment longer, then looked away, rolling over on her other side, curling up smaller, holding herself more tightly, and she thought of Gabriel,
arrivederci, Poverello,
even of Farley—a passing glance, smiling—and then she settled on David. David, who took her arm so happily, David, who stammered and shuffled before giving her that farewell kiss. It was his clumsiness that Lucy replayed in her mind again and again because in it there was something beautiful for her, and if she had not been so expert at restraining her heart, it might have filled her with a longing so pure and sharp that she might have cried tears held in reserve for as long as she could remember and feel.

For she had prayed, Blessed Mary, very very hard for a very very long time not to end up alone. How the word echoes in any language:
alone.
She could see the vision with supreme clarity, taste its medicinal bitterness, the mandatory task of visiting maiden Aunt Lucy, with the fussy ways, not good with people anymore, just a little tea and toast please, the veinous trembling hands, the outdated, airless apartment of dust and mother's bedclothes and cameo photographs, the Irish spinster world of black and white, contagiously gray, and the only sound the ticking clock on the nightstand, ticking old maid time.

No, she thought. Not tonight, not now. I am melancholy, she thought, and I am lovesick and I am directionless in my life and I am half-drunk but tonight I choose to believe that Love shall find me or I shall find it, because Love is mostly the hope for Love, isn't it?

(Yes, My dear.)

Rocked to sleep by the
mare Adriatico,
charting a course between the bogus miracles of Italy and the crumbling glories of Greece, she awaited dreams with tender thoughts of Love.

(My dearest Lucy. You have never seen them above you, looking down,
con amore,
the ancient and all-permitting stars.)

4

And this, alas, brings us to a sorry episode, the once noble city of Tyre, now seat of every whoredom, a city where the stones themselves are wicked. Against our wishes we were put ashore in Tyre so ship repairs could be effected, intending in a day or so that we would be off to Antioch. Oh, poor Xenon! I blush to tell our miseries there—would that we had never left the boat!

2.
As you may know, one enters Tyre through the Syrian quarter in which one is spared no rapacity. In a complete folly, dear Xenon and I entered the shop of a merchant who called to us: “Come, fine men of Judea, away from this godless street. You look in need of tea.”

No sooner had we settled ourselves in his room and the tea was brought out, than a bolt of cloth stretched the length of the wall before us begin to shimmer with the gyrations of those behind it. Our host announced that what lay behind the Temple Curtain could not rival the treasure behind his own, and with that the curtain dropped from its hooks and we were presented with twelve bare-bottomed youths. The odious man proceeded to take a feather and run it along the laughing boys' posteriors, and he sang out some wretched song in Syriac to the effect of: “Tall ones, short ones, black ones, white ones,” and such. I commanded Xenon to leave while I harangued our host for such an outrage. Xenon lingered to behold this spectacle until our host's veiled Syrian wife reached under Xenon's robe for a pinch of his buttocks. “Ah, an ample Jewish fundament,” she sang, “that should catch many a shekel.”

One sees by this illustration the state to which Tyre has fallen.

3.
As Ephesus has given itself over to female whoredom, Tyre seems to have set up an equivalent trade in boys for the unending flow of sailors from the world over who must clutch at something while in a port. Many of the taverns have names like “Ganymede's Bower,” which suggests the most depraved of Greek pagan myths. To dignify this trade with the purer, higher sensations of true
eros,
with Socrates and Alcibiades, with Hippotades and Aristogiton,
1
with Jonathan and David whose love lyrics I rendered in
The Hebraika,
(which, you recall, were fore-mostly admired in certain circles), does not bear pursuing.

4.
Many dreadful heresies have sprouted here and the life-account of Our Master has degenerated to fable and hearsay. One sect, the Lapsarians, has decided that sin must be purged from the body by repetition. (This is what the pagans do with less pretension of course, but observe how these things thrive in Nazirene circles.) After endless orgies and saturnalia, the priest performs an exorcism and the demon, exhausted and spent (it is thought), is removed and the person free of any more sin. In no time, as one could predict, the demon comes back and the whole process is repeated.
2

A variation on this occurs in nearby Sidon in which all the women of the commune are communal property, and not a day must pass without every man being satisfied in his lusts by every single one of the women.
3
In essence, these harlots must remain prisoners of concupiscence, barely having time to dress between their duties. Again, here, too, the priest has his way with whomever he wishes and then exorcises these imagined demons after he has had his fill.

5.
In the days following Ptolemais, I was reminded painfully of my inadequacies as an evangelist—Thomas, Maryam of Bethany, and even James bar-Alphaeus had in their way bettered me. So I was determined that while in miserable Tyre I would regain the station worthy of a Disciple and set a fine example for Xenon, for indeed, Tyre held the greatest challenge a disciple could face, an enemy of the Nazirenes from earliest days: Simon the Magus.
4

Xenon and I went to the empty Syrian marketplace, which stank of discarded fruits and greening meat scraps, and there we waited for the nightly appearance of the Magus. It seemed the whole of Phoenicia had gathered in usual expectation of glimpsing some illusion. At last the demon Magus and his entourage appeared, parting the crowd as he walked, awing them with simple tricks of producing flames and flowers, mumbling incantations no doubt learned from Belial himself. Ah, what a near-corpse Simon was, aged and stooped for a man of his years, sodden with the corruption that clotted his veins.

In his train was Menander,
5
once Simon's catamite and boy-whore, now a decrepit old ruin with more face paint than an embalmed Persian. Menander attended his master, calling the rabble to press nearer for the divine demonstrations. O but there was none more foul than the unspeakable Helen, his accomplice! But a teenage girl when the pair debated Peter some thirty years ago, she had grown into a creased, slatternly harlot, moist with disease and license, attired as no courtesan of Rome would dare!

6.
Throughout the early moments of this theatrical Simon staged an invocation to the Higher Powers and performed sleights of hands any court magician can manage. With, I suppose, the help of some associates in the audience, he brought people upon his platform and pretended to read their minds, spouting hatred of Romans, hatred of Medians, all things to endear our race and bring unthinking hordes to slavish adoration, stirring the crowd into a froth of excitement and credulity.

Helen—that such a name as that Trojan beauty, or worse, the queen that fed our wretched nation in its need,
6
should be debased on this mantle!—Helen entered again wearing less than before. With her help, Simon the Magus produced a full-length Arabian saber from between her legs and illumined torches from what appeared to be her tongue, no doubt aided by some vile mechanism underneath Helen's immodest toga. Soon he brought out a tisane containing an essence that he mixed with great flourish into a bowl and with show poured and extracted, finally setting this unguent alight. When it had cooled he began to paint Helen, as if she were an Athenian statue, until she seemed a living idol herself, caked in gold.

“Behold,” said the Magus. “I give you the New Ark of the New Covenant!”

7.
Then the Magus undid the Slattern Helen's robe and exposed her nakedness, her breasts lacquered in gold potion. She fell into a trance, or pretended to, and Simon asked which of the Men of Tyre was man enough to touch the New Ark.

Said Simon: “Behold, my good men! Whereas My Father once gave us water from the rock, manna from the sky, I shall give you a greater drink. He who receives it shall never thirst again!”

A man I assumed to be a coconspirator stepped forward, playing at being unsure. He began by berating the Magus, but this was surely part of the act. He put his lips upon this she-devil's breasts and sucked as a babe, as wine trickled from his lips. He cried out:

“The wine of Shiraz!”

8.
At this harlotry, the crowd grew frenzied and some fell on their knees, some exclaimed they were not worthy to drink the Blood of the New Covenant. Xenon asked me how the illusion was done and I knew not—such sorcery might have the aid of Legion himself—indeed, Satan was more than present and wasted no time in revealing our whereabouts to his minion. The Magus pointed to my young charge and myself.