The Translation of Father Torturo (3 page)

“I would prefer to read it in Greek,” the boy said.

Father Falzon was dumbfounded. “Would you now?” he said scratching his head. “Well, my Greek is not as good as my Latin, but I could teach you some basic grammar and vocabulary I suppose.”

“Please do. It is necessary for Bible study; and Uncle Guido will appreciate it.”

“Yes,” the father murmured, fingering the box of Montecristo No. 3’s Xaverio had handed him that morning. “I am sure he will.”

One day, upon visiting the father for his lesson, Xaverio found him sick in bed. His cheeks were pale and, in the weak light admitted through the aperture which some humorous architect called a window, appeared extraordinarily long. His nose was as red as coral. Black rings circled his eyes.

“I am afraid that I will not be able to give you lessons,” the old man said.

“Maybe not today, but tomorrow.”

“No, not today, tomorrow or the next day.”

“What?”

“Bring me a glass of wine and water. The water is there, on the dresser. Look under my bed; you will find a bottle of Barbera . . . Yes, that’s it; a nice portion of wine – Please, not quite so much water! – There is no need to drown me.”

When the boy had complied with his request, the old man held the glass of light red liquid to his lips and drained half its contents at a swallow. “Ah, that’s better,” he murmured, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I had fire in my throat.”

Xaverio looked at him seriously and asked: “So, you don’t want to give me any more lessons?”

“It is not that,” Father Falzon grinned hideously. “For one thing, I am not sure I have much left to teach you. You are a better latiniser than I, and, furthermore, your Greek is nearly at the same level.”

“So you think I know enough; that is the reason?”

“No; I would still have you come around even if it was you who gave me lessons. To my feelings Xaverio, you are my only ally here on earth. In the kingdom of heaven maybe I have a few friends; possibly even a connection or two downstairs; but here you are really my single interesting associate. This might surprise you, but many people look on me with suspicion. You ask why the lessons will end? I have spent my life in sedentary occupation; too much poring over books without the appropriate exercise; too much blood meat and maybe a sip too much wine. If you want a lesson then look at my sagging body, a mass of puss, fat, bile, blood and hair precariously clinging to a stack of weary bones. The only thing that keeps me attached to this bag of flesh is the thin stream of air which I laboriously drag in through my swollen lips and raw nostrils. The soul quivers, inconstant in the body like a bubble in water. Let me tell you frankly, without beating about the bush: I will be dead within the week.”

“Dead?” the boy asked simply.

“Yes. I am ill. I had a dream last night that my body was consumed by maggots. After I die I want you to go to a seminary school.”

“Fine.”

“You have the intelligence to one day be a bishop, cardinal; – even Pope!”

“I will do as you wish.”

“Go to my closet.”

“Yes.”

“You see the box?”

“This cardboard box?”

“Right.”

“Should I open it?”

“No. Get it out of here. When I am dead, burn it.”

“Burn it without opening it?”

“Yes; better you don’t open it.”

“Burn it?”

“Burn it.”

“Fine.”

“Do you want some advice?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t give yourself away. Not until you have them check-mated. You are smart, you stay relatively quiet. Better keep it that way . . . Look at me. I was never silent, never able to keep the words from falling from my mouth . . . I should have been a cardinal, not a damned putrid priest . . . Yes, stay quiet. That is the best gambit . . . Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Now come closer . . . Kiss me; on the cheek . . . Do I smell so bad?”

“Yes; you do.”

As Father Falzon predicted, he was dead four days later, of what malady the doctors were hesitant to report. Against the old priest’s wishes, Xaverio opened the box. Inside were a number of books in Latin (The
Satyricon
of Petronius,
The Life of Heliogabalus
by Aelius Lampridius), an Italian copy of
Justine
by Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, as well as a vast assortment of improper contemporary literature. The boy scanned through the glossy illustrations of the journals, remarking on the depravity of the Italian presses, who certainly managed to outdo that of any other nation in the art of lascivious crudity and symbolic perverseness. The books in Latin and
Justine
he kept and read. The other literature, which was of no intellectual value to him, he distributed at the schoolyard after class. As he walked away he looked back, over his shoulder. He could see knots of boys stationed in front of the building, pushing each other and craning their necks over each others’ shoulders while several, getting hold of some torn out page, scampered away gleefully, the obscene icons flashing in their clenched fists.

“You should have seen it, after school today,” Marco told him that evening, when they were sitting in their room.

“You were there, after school?”

“Yes, helping Professor Lorenzo.”

“And what happened?”

“We looked out the window and saw the boys – They all had bad magazines in their hands.”

“And they were enjoying them?”

“They seemed to be. Professor Lorenzo ran out and caught two – Mario and Roberto. He asked them where they got the magazines from, but they would not answer. He beat their knuckles bloody with a ruler, but they still would not say.”

“And the magazines?”

“Confiscated – In Professor Lorenzo’s desk.”

“Ahh.”

“I wonder why.”

“Why what?”

“Why the boys like those things.”

Xaverio smiled contemptuously.

The next day he built a fire in the backyard and threw the empty box atop the flames.

“What are you doing?” his uncle asked, coming to the back door, a cigar clamped between his teeth.

“Fulfilling my teacher’s last wishes,” the boy responded gravely, his eyes fixed on the burning cardboard, black smoke curling up into the blue sky.

A week later he set off for the Collegio di SS Pietro e Paolo, located just outside the city of Parma.

“I wish I were going as well,” Marco sighed, as they sat together, waiting for the train while Guido went off to buy the ticket.

“Your mother does too,” Xaverio grinned.

“Yes, but it is father who makes the decisions, and I am afraid he has other things in mind for me besides praying.”

“You’ll manage,” Xaverio said, taking the ticket from Guido as he walked up.

The train pulled in. Xaverio shook hands with Marco and kissed Guido on the cheek. Carrying his grip he boarded the iron beast which, squealing and moaning, carried him away, over rivers and past lakes, with snow-capped blue mountains behind them. He watched out the window, the farmers tilling the rich land, the land that had been marched over by armies, travelled by men of genius, fertilised by the bodies of hundreds of thousands, plague stricken, and soaked with the blood of millions more – through war, treachery, the struggle for power and the unpluckable thorn in man called hate. He watched the businessmen who sat on the same train as him, sporting ostentatious gold watches and well-tailored suits that were worth a months food. Then there were the women, the prima donnas, sheathed in costumes like snakes’ skins which, by their movements, their motions and smiles, they seemed ever ambitious to shed. These were the people whose sins he must one day hear, the people that he must one day acquit, yet the people who, as sure as the moon did glow, he despised. He thought of his old friend, Father Falzon, who was more intelligent than any of these men of business, yet had lived his life without comfort and scarcely a pleasure outside of books, wine and tobacco. Lying dead he was, rotting in a pauper’s grave.

“I’ll be damned if I stay miserable for
them
,” Xaverio murmured, looking at the garrulous crowd around him, which he thought more stupid than sheep, more dumb than oxen; the gregarious nature of the Italian people striking him at that moment, the first moment of his independence, as particularly distasteful.

At the Parma station, he was met by a young priest from the seminary, with a very high forehead showing the signs of early hair loss.

“Xaverio Torturo I presume?”

“Yes.”

“Very well, come with me,” the priest said, placing his hand on Xaverio’s shoulder and guiding him out of the station. “You are a very handsome boy. Strong shoulders. You should do well,”

Xaverio felt very much like breaking the fellow’s fingers and telling him to go to hell, but he did not. He remembered the last words of Father Falzon and, lowering his gaze to the ground, kept silent. Pleased, the young priest smiled and patted him on the back.

Torturo’s grip was put in the trunk of a two seater. The priest unlocked the passenger’s side, threw the keys in the air and, jauntily catching them in the other hand, stepped around to the driver’s side. As they drove through the streets and then on to the edge of town where the seminary was, the priest never ceased talking, in his clipped, slightly arrogant voice, telling the boy about the town, its history and benefits, the seminary itself, the staff and the noteworthy students. On the whole it was a well practiced speech, one Xaverio was sure had been used on numerous others. He made a mental note to despise this young priest. The fellow’s instant familiarity disgusted him to no small degree, and was a gross but prognostic taste of what life was to be away from home.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” the priest smiled, showing his teeth.

“Immensely,” Xaverio replied.

He was determined to play his hand strategically.

At the seminary he was immediately introduced to the rector, an ash-coloured man with wide, pseudo-ecstatic eyes, who said to him:

“You have been born in lawful wedlock, have surpassed your twelfth year, and have indicated that you wish to be of service to the Church. You are here so that we may form Christ in you, for thereafter you are to form Christ in others.”

Xaverio’s nature was such that, whatever he did, fair or foul, he put his whole nature into it. The basic courses at the seminary were for him a simple matter. His spare time he devoted to his own studies and training in the gymnasium. He read like one possessed, lifted weights, boxed and practised hand stands. At night, while the other boys slept, he devoted himself to rigorous meditation in the chapel. That there were things supramundane, things which were hidden from everyday eyes and mute to everyday ears, he knew through reading. It was not possible that there could be so many reports of the fantastic without them having any foundation in reality. The Holy Bible and the Lives of the Saints and desert fathers were full of the supernatural, not to mention all those numerous accounts he had come across in his other readings. Much of the material he had studied under Father Falzon’s care certainly had a mystical flavour to it. He felt reasonably confident that the paranormal was an actual thing. It held great attraction for him; he was fascinated with the notion of miracles and aspired to gain a bit of mystical authority. All wicked temperaments like power, and it has been generally acknowledged that the greater part of the power of the universe is hidden. What was hidden, he desired to find, without in the least equating it with a straying from his religion. Some say that magic is but a disease, a corruption of religion, while others maintain that it is the natural preliminary phase of all religions. He found the former view to be hypocritical, inwardly professed the latter and, in the end, followed a creed all his own.

For the first two years he studied philosophy, elocution, geography, mathematics, natural sciences, and Church history. The last four years he studied Holy Scripture, rhetoric, English and French, apologetics, dogmatic, moral, and pastoral theology, liturgy, Gregorian chant, canon law and bookkeeping.

His means equated perfectly with his aims.