The Clowns of God (46 page)

“Do you think I exaggerate? You know I do not. If the embargo on grain is not lifted, the Soviet Union will come near to starvation this winter and her armies will march at the first thaw. Even if they do not, a movement by any power towards the oilfields in the Middle East or the Far East will precipitate a global conflict. I do not know the battle order, as some of you do; but you will recognise that I touch close to the core of the matter. I make no plea to you. If your own good sense, the promptings of your own hearts when you look at your children and your grandchildren, do not move you to action to avert the holocaust, then amen! So be it!

Ruat caelum let the heavens fall!

“I have sought only to define your folly; which is to believe that man can construct for himself a perfect habitat, and that every time he fails, he can destroy what he has done like a sand-castle and begin again. In the end the constructive impulse is overmastered by the destructive one. And all the time the tide creeps in relentlessly, to obliterate the small beach-head on which we play! …”

He could not tell whether they approved or disapproved.

All he knew was that the silence still held and their ears, if not their hearts, were still open to him. He went on, more quietly and persuasively.

“Now let me tell you of my folly, which is the reverse of yours, but which served only to compound it. When I was elected Pope, I was both humbled and elated. I believed that power had been placed in my hands, the power to change the lives of the faithful, to reform the Church, to mediate perhaps in the quarrels of nations and help to maintain the precarious peace we enjoy. All of you know the feeling. You experienced it when you were first elected to office, given your first embassy, your first Cabinet post, or when you bought your first newspaper or television station. A heady moment, is it not? And the headaches are all in the future!”

There was a small chuckle of assent. They were glad of the relief. The man was more than a rhetorician. He had a saving grace of humour.

“There is a catch of course a trap into which we all step.

What we have is not power but authority which is a horse of a different colour. Power implies that we can accomplish what we plan. Authority signifies only that we may order it to be accomplished. We pronounce -fiat. Let it be done! But by the time the ordinance filters down to the peasant in the rice-paddy, the miner at the coal face, the slum priest in the favela, it has lost most of its force and meaning. The definitions in which we enshrine our dogmas and our moralities are touchstones of orthodoxy. Whether we be Popes, ayatollahs or party preceptors, we dare not abrogate them; but their relevance to man in his extremity is minimal.

What theology can I teach to a girl who is dying with a septic abortion? All I can give her is pity, comfort and absolution.

What do I say to the boy revolutionary in Salvador whose family has been shot by the soldiers in the village square? I can offer nothing but love, compassion and an unprovable proposition that there is a Creator who will turn all this madness into sanity, all this sorrow into eternal joy. So you see, my folly was to believe that somehow I could exercise at once the authority which I had accepted, and the beneficence to which my heart prompted me. It was an impossibility, of course just as it is impossible for a foreign minister to denounce the obscenities of a dictator who supplies his essential raw materials.

“It is in this context that I want to explain my abdication, which, painful as it was at the time, I now neither mourn nor protest. In an experience which came unbidden and unexpected, I was given a revelation of the Last Things. I was given a command to announce them as imminent. I myself was and am absolutely convinced of the authenticity of this experience; but I neither had nor have any means of proving it. So, my brother bishops decided that I could not legitimately hold the office of Pontiff and, at the same time, assume the role of a prophet and proclaim an unauthenticated private revelation. I say nothing of the means they took to procure my abdication. These are at most a footnote to a history that may never be written.

“I do, however, say this. I am glad, now, to have no authority; I am glad to be no longer obliged to defend the formulae of definition; because the authority is too limited, the formulae too narrow to encompass the agony of mankind in the Last Days and the magnitude of the Parousia the promised Coming.

“It may be that there are those among you who, like me, have become conscious of the limitations of power and the folly of mass murder. It is to these that I’m …”

Suddenly he was aware that the words he was saying were not words at all, but a single childish sound, repeated over and over: “Ma … ma … ma … ma.” He felt something tugging at his trouser-leg. He looked down and saw his left hand flapping helplessly against his thigh. His vision was blurred. He could not see the audience. Then the room canted and he lurched forward across the table. After a certain confusion of motion and time he heard two voices very close to him. One of them was Waldo Pearson’s.

“That was quite eerie. It sounded like glossolalia. Only yesterday we’d been talking about the gift of tongues.”

“It’s a typical symptom of C.V.A.”

“What’s C.V.A.?”

“Cerebrovascular accident. The poor devil’s had a stroke! .. . That ambulance is taking a hell of a time!”

“Midday traffic,” said Waldo Pearson.

“What are his chances?”

“Ask me in three days.”

The words reminded Jean Marie of resurrection. Instead he lapsed into darkness.

Believe not in every spirit, but test the spirits to know if they be of God; for many false prophets are about in the world.

First Epistle of St. John Ch. IV, verse 1 Now he was another man in a strange country. The country was very small. It had four white walls, two doors and a window. There was a bed, on which he lay, a small table beside it, a chair, a chest of drawers with a mirror above it in which the man in the bed was reflected. He had a curiously lopsided look, like a before-and-after advertisement for liver salts. One side of his face was mobile and upturned, the other dragged slightly downward into an expression of dolour or distaste. One hand lay motionless on the white counterpane. The other roved restlessly, exploring contours and textures and distances.

There was at least one other inhabitant of this new country:

a rather plain young woman in a nurse’s uniform who appeared often to take his pulse and his blood pressure and listen to his chest. She asked him always the same simple questions: “How do you feel? What is your name? Would you like a drink?” The strange thing was that while he understood her perfectly, she did not seem to comprehend a word he said although she did give him a drink, holding him up so that he could suck the liquid through a plastic straw.

And she held a bottle to his penis so that he could make water. When he did so, she smiled and said: “Good, very good’, as if he were a baby learning the act of peeing. She always used the same exit line: “Doctor will be back to see you soon.” He tried to remember who the doctor was and what he looked like; but the effort was too great, so he closed his eyes and tried to rest.

He was too disturbed to sleep; not disturbed about anything in particular, but anxious, as though he had lost something precious and were groping for it in a fog. Every so often he would feel that he was close to it and close to knowing what it was; but the moment of discovery never came. Then he would feel like a man in a cellar with the trapdoor locked above his head. Finally, the doctor arrived, a lean grey-haired fellow who displayed a kind of offhand concern.

“My name is Doctor Raven. Can you repeat it for me?

Raven.”

Jean Marie tried several times but succeeded only in saying:

“Ra… Ra… Ra…”

The doctor said: “Never mind. You will do better soon.

Just nod if you understand me. I am speaking English. Do you know what I am saying?”

Jean Marie nodded.

“Can you see me?”

A nod.

“Smile at me. Let me see you smile.”

Jean Marie tried. He was glad he could not see the result.

The doctor looked into his eyes with an ophthalmoscope, tested his reflexes with a little rubber mallet, checked his blood pressure and auscultated his chest. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and delivered himself of a small lecture. Jean Marie was reminded of the discourse with which the Rector of his Seminary used to greet each batch of newcomers.

“… You are a lucky man. You are alive. You are rational and you have some of your faculties intact. It is too early to know what damage has been done inside your skull. We have to wait two or three days before we know whether this is one episode or whether others may follow. You have to trust us and try to accept that for a little while you are helpless. This is the Charing Cross Hospital. Your friends and relatives know where you are. But they know you must have no visitors and no disturbance at all until we get you stabilised. Have you understood that?”

“Ma… ma… ma… most,” said Jean Marie, and was absurdly pleased with himself.

The doctor, too, gave him a smile and a pat of approbation.

“Good! That’s promising. I’ll be back to see you in the morning. Tonight they’ll give you something to help you sleep.”

Jean Marie tried to say thank you. He found he had forgotten the words in English. In French he could only get as far as “mer …” He struggled with it until he wept in frustration and the nurse came in to pump an opiate into his arm.

* siAfter four days it seemed he had made enough progress for them to initiate him into the games of the new country. But first they had to find him a French-speaking assistant to teach him the rules. He was having enough trouble with phonic jumbles and word blocks, without launching him into a mania of mixed tongues.

The assistant was a handsome fellow in his early thirties, trim as an athlete, with the olive skin of a Mediterranean man, and an incongruous head of golden hair that looked as though it had been inherited from some long-dead Nordic crusader.

He came from what he vaguely described as the Middle East.

He confessed to being fluent in English, French, Arabic, Hebrew and Greek. He had built himself a modest career in medical circles in London by acting as interpreter, male nurse and physiotherapist to the polyglot groups who inhabited the metropolis. The neurologist introduced him as Mr. Atha.

Together they began a series of games, all designed to map the damage to the sensorium, the part of his brain which perceived sensations. For a man who had once been, by dogmatic definition, the infallible interpreter of God’s message to men, it was shocking to find how fallible he was, and in how many simple matters.

Asked to close his eyes and raise both arms horizontally in front of him, he was amazed that only one arm obeyed him fully while the other stayed, like the hand of a stopped clock, at twenty-five minutes to the hour.

Asked to tell where he was pricked with both points of a pair of dividers, he found some of his identifications were wildly astray. Worse, he could not even find the tip of his nose with his left hand.

However, there were some hopeful signs. When his feet were tickled his toes turned in. This, Mr. Atha explained, showed that his Babinski reflex was functioning. When the inside of his thigh was tickled, his scrotal sac contracted.

This, he was told, was also good because his cremaster reflex was in working order.

Then came a most unhappy moment. Mr. Atha asked him to repeat for the neurologist the words of the old song: “Sur le font, SHT le pont, Sur le pont d’Avignon.” He found, to his horror, that his mouth was full of treacle, and what came out was a burble of phonic nonsense.

Once again he began to cry. The neurologist admonished him firmly. He was lucky to be alive. He was twice lucky to have suffered so little impairment. The prognosis was hopeful, provided he was prepared to be patient, cooperative and courageous virtues quite beyond his capacity at that moment.

Mr. Atha translated it all into more soothing French and volunteered to stay with him until he was calm again. The neurologist nodded approval of the idea, patted Jean Marie’s good hand and went about his other business; which, as Mr.

Atha explained, included many patients far worse off than Jean Marie.

“I work with them, too; so I know what I am talking about. You can swallow. You have no double vision. You have control of your bowels and your urine. Eh! Think how much that means! Your speech will improve; because you and I are going to practise together. You see, with the doctor, you are trying to show that you are not damaged. You are determined to prove it by a sudden burst of oratory. When it doesn’t happen, you despair. We’re going to start from the fact that you are damaged. We are going to repair the trauma together.”

He was not only persuasive; he had an enormous quality of repose. Jean Marie felt the weight lifting off the top of his head, the fog dissipating from inside his skull-case. Mr. Atha talked on quietly.

“You used to be Pope, they tell me. So you must remember the Scripture: “Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Well, you’re like a child now. You have to learn simple things from the beginning.

You have to admit that you can’t cope with complicated ones for a long while yet. But in the end you will grow up again, just as a child does. You’re in kindergarten now. As the weeks go on, you’ll climb through the grades. You’ll learn to dress yourself, get your bad arm and leg moving again and above all, you’ll talk. You can talk now, if you take it slowly.

Let’s pick something very simple: “My name is Jean Marie.”

Now, one word at a time.”

Somewhere in the long night hours, when the only sounds were the footfalls of the night-nurse and the only light was the beam of her torch focused on his face, he learned another lesson. If he tried to remember things, they always eluded him. If, however, he lay quietly, making no effort at all, they crept up on him, and sat about him like woodland animals in a child’s picture-book.