The Clowns of God (45 page)

Somehow, it was easier to talk while they were driving.

They did not have to look at each other. There was always a new distraction to bridge the betraying silence.

Roberta Saracini touched his arm and said: “I feel so much better than when I arrived. Things make more sense. I can cope better. I have you to thank for that.”

“You’ve been good for me, too.”

“I don’t know how; but I’m glad anyway.”

“How do you feel about your father now?”

“I’m not sure. It’s all a sad kind of mess; but I know I don’t hate him.”

“What holds you back?” He prompted her firmly.

“You love him; no matter what he was or what he did, he paid his own price and he gave you enough to get started, too. Say it! Say you love him!”

“I love him.” She resigned herself to the proposition with a smile and a sigh which might have been relief or regret. Then she added the postscript.

“I love you, too, Monsieur Gregoire.”

“And I love you,” said Jean Marie gently.

“That’s good.

That’s what it’s all about.

“My little children, love one another.”” “I hope,” said Roberta Saracini, “you didn’t have to be commanded to it.”

“On the contrary,” said Jean Marie and left the rest of it unsaid.

“How do you feel about women not necessarily me, in particular? I mean, you’ve been a celibate all these years and…”

“I’ve had a lot of practice at it.” Jean Marie was douce but very firm.

“And part of the practice is that you don’t flirt and you don’t play dangerous games and, most important of all, you never tell lies to yourself. I feel about you as any man feels about an attractive woman. I’ve been happy in your company and flattered to have you on my arm. There could be more; but precisely because I love you, there won’t be. We were set to walk on separate paths. We’ve met most pleasantly at the crossroads. We’ll part, each a little richer.”

“That’s quite a sermon, Monseigneur,” said Roberta Saracini.

“I wish I could believe half of it.”

He glanced across at her. She was driving steadily, eyes fixed on the road, but there were tears on her cheeks. She turned to him and asked bluntly:

“What made you become a priest in the beginning?”

“That’s a long story.”

“We’ve got all day.”

“Well! …” Immediately he was closed-in and reluctant.

“The only person to whom I’ve ever told that was my confessor. It’s still a painful subject.”

“It was” tactless of me to ask. I’m sorry.”

They drove the next half-mile in silence; then, without further prompting, Jean Marie began to talk, slowly, musingly, as if he were putting together in his mind the pieces of a puzzle.

“When I first joined the Maquis I was very young just arrived at military age. I wasn’t religious. I was baptised, communicated and confirmed in the Church; but there it stopped. There was a war; life was catch-me-if-you-can.

With the Maquis I was a man overnight. I carried a rifle, a pistol and a killing knife. Unlike the older ones who could sometimes slip into town, I was forced to stay out in the hills and the countryside; because if I got picked up in a city raid I’d be shipped out to forced labour in Germany. I did courier duty at night, of course; because I was young and could move fast and outrun the curfew patrols. Before, I had had girlfriends and some experience of sex just enough to make me want more. Now I was without a woman and my companions mocked me, as older men do, calling me the little virgin and the choirboy. Old, bawdy stuff, harmless enough, but very difficult for a youth who knew he might never live to enjoy a manhood.

“Well, one of my regular courier routes took me to a farmhouse near a main road. All troop movements in the area had to pass the place; so the farmer’s wife kept a list, which we collected every three days and passed on to Allied Intelligence. I never went to the house. There was a shepherd’s hut and a sheep pen about half a mile away, on the brow of a hill. I’d lie up there and tie a rag to a sapling for a signal. After dark, the woman would come up with the messages and food for me and for the boys in the hills. Her name was Adele, she was somewhere in her thirties, childless;

and her husband was missing since the first days of the blitzkrieg… She ran the farm with two old men and a couple of sturdy girls from nearby families.

“On this particular day I arrived late. I was scared and shaken. There were lots of German patrols out, and twice I was nearly picked up. To make matters worse, I’d gashed my leg on some barbed wire, and I was scared of tetanus. An hour after sunset Adele came. I was never so glad to see anyone in my life. She, too, had had a bad day, no less than three raids with troops stamping in and turning over the place. She washed my leg with wine, and bandaged it with strips from her petticoat. Then we drank the rest of the wine and ate supper together and afterwards made love on the straw mattress.

“That I remember as the most wonderful experience of my life a mature passionate woman and a frightened youth, in a single ecstatic hour, in a world full of monsters. Whenever afterwards I have talked about charity, the love of God for man and man for God and woman for man, I have done it in the light of that single hour. From curate to Pope I have remembered Adele every morning in my Mass. Whenever I have sat in the confessional box and heard sad people tell the sins of their love-lives, I have remembered her and tried to offer my penitents the gift of knowing that she gave to me.”

He fell silent. Roberta Saracini swung the car into a lay-by, from which the land dropped away into a vista of farmland, and scattered coverts and walls of weathered ashlar. She wound down the window and stared out on the tranquil scene. Not daring to look at Jean Marie, she asked with singular humility: “Do you want to tell me the rest of it?

Where is Adele now?”

“Dead. She left me before midnight. When she got home there were Germans in the house again. They were drunk on her wine. They raped her and nailed her to the table with a kitchen knife. That was how I found her when, eager to renew the night’s loving, I broke all the rules and crept down the hill to see her at six in the morning!

“That was the day I decided I had a debt to pay. Later, much later, I decided that the exercise of the whole office of the priesthood was the best way to do it. The passion of Christ became very real to me as a drama of brutality, love, death and living again. I have never regretted the choice; nor, in spite of the horror that followed, have I been able to regret the wonder that Adele and I shared. My confessor, who was a wise and gentle man, helped me to that. He said, “The real sin is to be niggardly in love. To give too much is a fault, easily forgiven. What you knew, your Adele knew, too that you had shared a moment of strange grace. I am sure she remembered it at the end.” .. . Look at me, Roberta!”

She shook her head. She was sitting, chin on hand, eyes averted, staring out at the sun-dappled countryside. He reached out and turned her tearstained face towards him. His eyes were tender, his voice full of compassion. He admonished her gently.

“I’m old enough to be your father so you can adopt me as a Dutch Uncle if you like! For the rest, remember what I told you at the beginning. On ne badine pas avec I’amour. One doesn’t trifle with love. It’s too wonderful and too terrible!”

He handed her his pocket handkerchief to dry her eyes. She accepted it, but faced him with a last blunt question.

“After all that, how is it possible that your best friend, Carl Mendelius, is a German?”

“How is it possible,” asked Jean Marie, “that you and I are sitting here, because your father cheated the Vatican out of millions and was killed in a prison corridor? The biggest mistake we’ve all made through the ages is to try to explain the ways of God to men. We shouldn’t do that. We should just announce Him. He explains Himself very well!”

The day before the function at the Carlton Club he went with Adrian Hennessy to deliver the manuscript of Last Letters from a Small Planet. He laid it on Waldo Pearson’s desk and said: “There you are. It’s done. Good or bad, it’s a heart-cry. I hope someone hears it.”

Waldo Pearson weighed the package in his hands and said that he was sure, yes, very sure, that someone would hear the heart-cry. Then he handed Jean Marie the typescript of the English version of his speech for the Carlton Club.

Jean Marie asked him: “What do you think of it? Does it make sense?”

“It makes frightening sense. It makes wonderful sense. I cannot say how the audience will take it.”

“I’ve read it,” said Adrian Hennessy.

“I love it. I’m also scared. There’s still time to make changes if you will consent to them.”

He glanced at Jean Marie, who nodded agreement.

“I

know I am talking to new people in a new idiom. Be honest with me! I am your guest at your club. If I am overstepping the proprieties of the occasion, I must know.”

“There is no breach of the peace or the decencies,” said Waldo Pearson.

“Hold to the text!”

“Will there be questions afterward?”

“There may be. We generally allow them.”

“Will you please make sure I understand them before I answer? I am fluent in English but sometimes, in moments of stress, I think in French or Italian.”

“I’ll see you through it. There’s a lot of interest.”

“Do you have a guest list?” Hennessy asked the question.

“Afraid not. When there’s a big attendance, as there will be this time, the members have to ballot for guest places. I have, however, invited the Soviet Ambassador and Sergei Petrov, if he should happen to be in London. If he appears it will be a sign that he is still viable politically. I have also invited Morrow, because I knew him when he was my opposite number in Washington. I suggested he might like to bring a colleague which leaves it open for him to present Dolman if he chooses. For the rest, it’s an impressive list: members of Cabinet, diplomats, heads of industry, press barons. So you’ll have a wide sampling of religions, nationalities and moralities as well.”

Hennessy added an ironic footnote.

“Maybe the Holy Ghost will give you the gift of tongues.”

“I used to talk about that with Mendelius.” Jean Marie picked up the joke and embellished it.

“He used to say that it was probably the least useful of all the gifts of the Spirit. If a man was a fool in one language, you’d never make him wise in twenty!”

They all got a laugh out of that. Waldo Pearson produced champagne. They drank a toast to Last Letters from a Small Planet and to a quondam Pope who was about to be tossed to the lions in the Carlton Club.

Jean Marie Barette gripped the edges of the table lectern and surveyed his audience, packed into the principal dining room of the Carlton Club. He had met only a few of them a privileged group entertained by Waldo Pearson to sherry in the committee room. Waldo, he found, ruled the Conservative stronghold with an iron fist. He would not have his most exotic guest mauled and put upon in the vacuous preambles of cocktail time. He had professed himself delighted with Jean Marie’s choice of dress a black jacket buttoned to the neck, with a minimal display of Roman collar and a simple silver pectoral cross. The dress expressed the import of his opening words.

“I stand before you a private man. I am a cleric ordained to the Ministry of the Word in the Roman Catholic Church. I have, however, no canonical mission; so that what I say to you in this assembly is my private opinion and must not be construed as either the official teaching of the Church or as a statement of Vatican policy.”

He gave them a grin and a Gallic gesture to take the weight off the words.

“I am sure you will need no elaboration of this point. You are all political men; and how do you say it in English? - a wink tells as much as a nod to a blind mule.”

They gave him a small chuckle to warm him and to tempt him, too. If he were fool enough to trust this audience, he would not be worth anyone’s attention in the morning. His next words jolted them out of their complacency.

“Because I am a man, I have experience of fear, love and death. Because I have been, like you, a political man, I understand the usages of power and its limitations, too!

Because I am a Minister of the Word, I know that I am peddling a folly in the market place and that I risk to be stoned for it. You, too, my friends are peddling follies monstrous insanities and all of us risk to perish by them!”

There was a deadly quiet in the room. For this single moment he held them hypnotised. They understood the arts of the forum. They knew that this man was a master; but if his thought proved unworthy of his orator’s talent, they would shout him down as a mountebank. Jean Marie thrust forward with his argument.

“Your folly is to promise a possible perfection in the affairs of men an equitable distribution of resources, an equal access to seaways, airways and strategic land-routes, a world, in short, where every problem can be solved by an honest broker, an inspired leader, a party apparat. You make the promise as a necessary step to power. You choose to ignore that you are playing with dynamite.

“You raise illusory hopes. You excite expectations you cannot fulfill. Then, when you see that the deluded people are turning against you presto there is a new solution: a cleansing war! Now, suddenly, you are not givers of gifts.

You are janissaries imposing the edicts of the Sultan. If the people will not obey the dictate, then you will make them do it! You will lop them, limb by limb, like Procrustes, until they fit the bed on which they writhe tormented. But they will never fit it. The golden age you have promised will never come.

“You know it! In a most terrible act of despair you are resigned to it! Already you have counted the cost: so many millions in New York, in Moscow, in Tokyo, in China, in Europe. The aftermath, the desert which will be called peace, you have elected to ignore, because who will be left to care?

Let the bandits subdue the populace. Let the casualties die.

There will be a new dark age a new Black Death. In some far distant future there will, perhaps, be a renaissance; but who cares, because we shall never see the wonder of it.