Thomas M. Disch (22 page)

It was like that again. He was a tourist once again, but there were no guides and no guidebooks. He was able, in this case, to speak the language, but he didn’t dare to ask directions. The people around him assumed he was their bishop, and it was not an assumption he wished to challenge. His identity was a kind of camouflage. As it had been (it dawned on him) throughout his life as a priest. The collar had always exacted a certain deference and respect from others, even those not of the Faith or at odds with the Church. Like the Pope when he appeared in a motorcade, there had been a barrier of protective glass between Father Bryce and a world that is always potentially hostile. That had made his occasional forays out of uniform, whether cruising the gay bars or just shopping at a mall, seem so enlivening.

But he had always had the collar to return to, and when his affair with Donny Petrosky had been discovered and he had faced the prospect of being defrocked, he’d experienced an unbearable dismay. When he’d submitted to the demands of his blackmailer, it wasn’t just to save his ass from jail. It was to keep the collar around his neck.

And now that he was the Bishop of Rodez and Montpellier-leVieux, he felt the same determination to preserve appearances, even if they were only appearances. It would not do to ask too many questions to which the Bishop would be assumed to know the answer, even such a plain question as “Who is that?” or “Where is the bathroom?” Indirection sometimes served. Of someone he had not seen before, he could ask St-Loup, who was a constant hovering presence, “Why is he here now, do you think?” Such questions sometimes yielded a forthright answer (“The Deacon, Your Grace? He’s come on chancery business, I presume”), sometimes a comment too terse to decode (“It must be that time of the week”), and sometimes one guardedly puzzled (“Why do you ask, Your Grace?”). He could always take refuge in “Never mind” or “I was just curious,”

but it would not do to be a frequent questioner of matters usually taken for granted.

He was similarly stymied in what should have been the simple matter of reconnoitering the world he’d arrived in, for he was a prisoner not only of his role as a bishop but of the episcopal palace as well. Even there he could not explore at will without causing alarms that often seemed to verge on genuine terror. Silvanus de Roquefort, whom Father Bryce now served in some sense as deputy, must have been a formidable tyrant to those who dealt with him daily. The servants watched him with the transfixed attention that small mammals accord to a roving predator, the ones that have wagered that there is more safety in immobility than in panicked flight. The canons of the cathedral, whose liturgies and rituals defied the clamor of the masons with a steady, solenm din of hymns and chanting, did not react to his unannounced visits with quite so candid an alarm, but they did perform their rites with increased unction and gravity. It was instructive to note the differences in performance style between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, broader and louder seemed to be the rule. Genuflections were balletic, and the anthems operatic. The dean of the canons, when he led the antiphon, belted out his lines like a Verdi baritone. But so slow. All tempos seemed retarded here—music, speech, the plodding way that people walked—as though someone were holding a finger against the revolving record of reality.

But the palace and cathedral and their grounds represented the limits of the world he could explore. Of the life people led beyond the precinct of the cathedral he knew only what could be inferred from the faces, clothing, and comportment of those who came to worship. He had yet to walk down any street of Montpellier-le-Vieux, for the soles of a bishop’s feet were not suffered to tread upon the common cobbles; he must either be borne aloft in a gilded, unsteady episcopal throne, a kind of gargantuan sedan chair, or his carriage must be summoned, and the social world visible to him from either of these conveyances was not much different from the one he knew within the cathedral precinct—gapes and cringes, doffed hats, genuflections, grimaces, and hands stretched out to implore his episcopal blessing. Most of the citizens on the street wore ragged clothes and seemed diseased or stunted or clinically insane—and all but a very few were so gaunt and spindlelimbed within their bulky, stinking clothes that you would have thought a canvasful of Brueghel peasants had been sent off to Buchenwald. Two such expeditions outside the cathedral precinct and his urge to see the larger medieval world was no greater than had been his desire to tour the prisons and AIDS hospices in Minneapolis. His curiosity about extraclerical realities had never been large.

He was not the sort to look under the engine of a car or go down into the basement when there were plumbing problems. Rarely had he strayed from the orbit determined by his professional duties—the church, the rectory, various school basements; hospitals and funeral parlors. When President Bush was ridiculed for his naiveté concerning supermarket bar code scanners, Father Bryce had blushed in sympathy: He would have been just as surprised. To have shopped for his own groceries would have been inappropriate and unpriestly.

Seven centuries had not changed him much in that respect.

The one way he would customarily have informed himself about an unfamiliar situation was not available to him here. He could not read. There were no newspapers, no bulletins, no files of old letters and memos. Such records as he could discover were the barest inventories of the diocesan holdings in real estate and church furnishings. There was a ledger of rents and tithes that could be expected, parish by parish, and another ledger of expenditures, but Father Bryce could glean little useful information from these sources. Beyond this, the Bishop’s library consisted of Psalters, ordinaries, breviaries, and three volumes of the Bishop’s own sermons, the parchment still as supple as glove leather.

On the evidence of these sermons the Bishop seemed to have a limited homiletic range. He preached hellfire and damnation and was the scourge of heretics, meaning Albigensians, against whom the Church must show no mercy.

The Bishop’s diocese—and Montpellier-le-Vieux in particular—was declared to be a hotbed of heresy, and the faithful were regularly exhorted to denounce anyone they suspected to be harboring heretical beliefs, even if the heretics should be their closest kin, for by his own report Christ had come to set son against father, daughter against mother, and so forth. Father Bryce had never had any argument with that. He’d often preached from the same text—Matthew, chapter 10, verses 34 through 39—both on Sundays from the pulpit and on Saturdays, using the confessional as a kind of prompter’s box from whose shadows he’d been able to cue a variety of family showdowns and crises, engineering the scripts of dozens of soap operas large and small every week.

“My dear child, you must not allow your husband to practice any method of contraception except the rhythm method.” Or “The Church does not recognize divorce and certainly does not tolerate remarriage. Your son’s children by his second socalled wife are not properly your grandchildren at all, and you must not recognize them as such.”

But those dramas had been insignificant compared to what was possible here. Heresy upped the ante exponentially. Here heretics were tortured and burned at the stake. A crusade had been declared against the Albigensians, and the army summoned by the Pope had lately put all the inhabitants of Béziers, just south of Montpellier-le-Vieux, to the sword. That army now was garrisoned in the ruins of the city it had depopulated, and all of Languedoc—from the mountain fastnesses of Toulouse in the west to the barren massif of the Cévennes, where Bishop de Roquefort held his see, waited to know where the army would next turn. It was as though the terrors of hellfire had been summoned from their mythic realm beneath the earth’s thin crust and flamed now in plain sight. Heretics had reason to tremble.

It was needful, therefore, for the local clergy to demonstrate to those who represented the papal authority that they were doing everything in their power to root out all known or suspected heretics within each parish and diocese. Without a conspicuous show of zeal, one’s own diocese might be fated to become the next target of the Crusaders’ restless and ill-provisioned army, which could not sustain itself much longer on the corpse of Béziers. The need for such zeal and how best to display it were presumed to be the Bishop’s overriding concerns by all those admitted to his presence, from the lowly but ever-present Abbé St-Loup to the Abbot of Notre Dame de Gevaudon, who served as a kind of deputy bishop at those times when Bishop de Roquefort moved his residence to the collateral diocese of Rodez.

The city of Rodez was not in the same jeopardy as Montpellier-leVieux, for it lay outside the area infected by heresy. The invisible line that divided the realms of
langue d’oc
and
langue d’oil
, the southern and northern dialects of the language that was not yet French, bisected his double see, and the Albigensians had taken root only in the hill towns and mountain fastnesses of Languedoc. High altitudes seem to breed a spirit of independence, and in this age independence was synonymous with heresy.

It was impossible, from listening to the talk about him, to determine the particulars of the heretics’ faith, only that they denied the efficacy of the sacraments except for one, the
consolamentum
, which could be received only once, at the point of death. Some of the priests—or
perfectas
—who administered this sacrament were women. Abbé St-Loup maintained that if there had been no other proof that the Cathars were in fealty to Satan, that fact alone would have sufficed. Much of what was charged against the heretics struck Father Bryce as generic vilification of the sort that all the Church’s enemies have been accused of at one time or another: They desecrated the Host; their women were unchaste, and both sexes practiced abominations (this, despite the Cathars’ avowed rejection of
all
forms of sexual congress, even that between man and wife); they were atheists
and
they worshiped Satan; they violated graves.

This last imputation was a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black, for one of the chief activities of the entourage of the Papal Legate and Inquisitor, Durand du Fuaga, had been the exhumation of the corpses of accused heretics; even death was no protection from the attention of the Inquisition. Often those suspected of heresy, when they were examined and threatened with torture, would denounce those already safely dead rather than betray the living, whereupon the Legate would order these dead heretics to be disinterred and have their corpses dragged through the streets on sledges and posthumously burned at the stake. The heirs of these heretics would then be dispossessed of their inheritance, and the expropriated property would be razed to the ground and the very ground declared anathema, never again to be built upon or tilled. Already, in the little time Durand du Fuaga had been at work in Montpellier-le-Vieux, several of the city’s most prominent citizens had been dispossessed in this fashion. It had begun to seem that even if the city were to be spared wholesale destruction by the armies of the Crusade, the Inquisition might accomplish the same essential purpose on a piecemeal basis.

For the process of discovering heresy worked like a chain letter or similar pyramidal schemes. First there had been the Legate’s proclamation, offering a week’s grace period in which any citizens guilty of heresy or with knowledge of a neighbor’s heresy were to present themselves to the Holy Office and confess their errors. Those who answered this summons could be meted out only canonical punishments; at worst, they might be sent abroad on a pilgrimage. Then those who had been denounced were summoned and put to the question in turn. Eventually a confession would be obtained, and more names would be named, more summonses issued, and so on,
in saecula saeculorum
.

“And where will it stop?” asked the Abbot in a querulous whisper. “Can we be sure that all those who are denounced before the Holy Office are truly guilty? What easier way to revenge oneself against an old enemy?”

“Ah, but there are safeguards against that,” Abbé St-Loup had countered, with a smile of smug orthodoxy. “There
must
be two accusations, independently obtained.”

“And if a man has
two
enemies? And they collude against him?” The Abbot clearly was thinking of his cousin, Guilhabert de Beaujeu, a petty nobleman who had been summoned before the Inquisition and was sequestered at that very moment somewhere in the cathedral’s catacombs, awaiting questioning.

“In that case,” said Father Bryce, “we must trust in the wisdom and discretion of the Holy Office itself.”

“Amen to that, Your Grace,” the Abbé concurred, and the discussion was ended before the Abbot had compromised himself any further.

The old man gave Father Bryce a smile of resentment commingled with gratitude, a smile not unlike the wine they had been drinking, its sourness masked with honey and spices. He excused himself from the table, and Father Bryce had only to nod to the Abbé for him to take the hint and follow the Abbot from the room.

At last Father Bryce was able to help himself to the wine without feeling each cupful monitored and tallied by St-Loup and the Abbot. It was a familiar moment of relief, as when loosening an uncomfortable belt or slipping out of too-tight shoes. After the first unobserved fullthroated guzzle of the night, it almost didn’t matter where he was, Minneapolis or Montpellier-le-Vieux. All that existed was the tang of the grape on his tongue, the quickping of pain as the honey connected to nerves in his rotting teeth, and then the assuaging and solace of the wine sliding down his throat and into his blood. This is my body, he thought, and this is my blood. He would drink until there was nothing left in the ewer, and when he had drunk enough to be able to sleep, he would collapse, still clothed, onto the lumpy pallet that was the best mattress this wretched century had to offer for a bishop’s repose.