FORTY-TWO
Rome, 2 March
The Madonna was very old and very worn. Her face was a filigree of cracks, the blue paint of her robe was flaking in places, and the gold leaf of her halo had all but disappeared. Whether it was age that had most taken its toll, or adoration, it was impossible to say. But her eyes seemed tired and unfocused, as though the prayers and laments of numberless generations had at last proved too much for her. The spirit, like the flesh, has its limits, and compassion, whatever the theologians say, is not inexhaustible.
Assefa stepped forward and added his candle to those already burning in front of the icon. He stood for almost a minute gazing at her ravaged face. She was black like him, and tired like him, and in her crumbling features he found more comfort than in all the city’s statues and paintings put together. He sighed and dropped to his knees, turning a plastic rosary between exhausted fingers.
In a shadow close behind him, Patrick stood in silence, his hands clasped before him, keeping careful watch. Santa Maria delle Grazie was a little-frequented church off the beaten track in the Vicolo de’ Renzi, just south of the river in Trastevere. No tourists came here, not even the clever sort who toss aside their Baedekers and lose themselves deliberately among alleyways smelling of cats and rotting citrus peel. Even pilgrims were few and far between, a mere handful of cognoscenti drawn by the Black Virgin.
According to legend, the icon had originally been brought to southern France from the Holy Land during the time of the Crusades, by a Templar knight, Guillaume de Pereille. Some said that it was, like so many other Black Virgins, the work of Saint Luke. After the Albigensian crusade of the thirteenth century, it had been carried from Languedoc to Turin, and from Turin to Rome, where it had been housed in its own chapel in Santa Maria delle Grazie and named La Madonna Mora. The more prosaic said it was probably the work of the Roman artist Pietro Cavallini, who was known to have painted a very similar Madonna di Constantinopoli for the Benedictine Abbey in Montevergine around 1290.
Assefa had found the little church early in his seminary days. It had, in a sense, become his private chapel, his place of retreat. At first the Virgin herself had been the attraction: he had sought in her blackness a sort of mirror for himself, a spiritual location for all that was African in him and in danger of being engulfed by the legacy of Greece and Rome. He had prayed to her, and she had answered him in her tired and wounded fashion. But with time the church itself had won his heart: the small side chapels, in which a single light burned before the altar; the shadowed recesses, with their tiny figures of saints on marble pedestals; the odours of beeswax and frankincense, of polish and dry rot, of musty linen and crumbling stone.
In the past, he had directed his feet to this asylum at least once a week. To flee the uninterrupted roar of traffic, the blaring of radios, the incessant chatter of the streets. To escape the cramped and closeted worlds of the seminary and the Accademia Pontificia. And more recently, to still the frenzied babble of his own thoughts.
Now he had been driven here by fear. By fear and loathing and a world of doubts. He felt frozen by doubt, unable to think or act, yet aware that, if he did not act soon, he would fail to avert a terrible tragedy.
Patrick waited patiently in the shadows. He himself felt no need for prayer. It was not a question of belief or disbelief; he had a simple horror of the numinous dark, of the loss of self that all these pleasant odours and muted colours signified. To Patrick, God would reveal himself in daylight or not at all.
Assefa rose at last. His face was marked with tears, but he seemed less ill at ease.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve already taken more time than I should.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘What about you, Patrick? Don’t you want to offer a single prayer?’
Patrick shook his head.
‘I think it would only confuse me,’ he said.
What about your friend?’ He meant Francesca. She was waiting outside, keeping watch on the streets.
‘You know what she thinks, Assefa. That all this is just a travesty, that the truth lies somewhere else.’
Assefa sighed.
Won’t you at least light a candle for her? The Madonna may be old, but she isn’t deaf or blind.’
Patrick drew out a five-thousand-lire note from his pocket and dropped it in the slot at the candle stall. He took a long candle and lit it from Assefa’s. As he placed it in the holder, he glanced up at the icon. The fluttering light stroked the ancient gold like a moth’s wing brushing flame. The Virgin gazed at him. Had she really been in Languedoc? he wondered. Had she witnessed the first fires of the Inquisition, the blood of innocent children spilled at Beziers and Perpignan?
For the expiation of sins, for the glory of the true Church.
He turned his back on her. Not deaf? he thought. Not blind? Just callous, then.
The photograph Assefa had found in Dublin had in small measure prepared Patrick for seeing Francesca again, but not for touching her or talking with her. More than anything, he found it difficult to accept the changes in her. He now realized that, from the moment in San Michele when he had first taken seriously the possibility of her still being alive, he had thought of her as frozen - a girl of twenty preserved in a magic, timeless realm out of which she would re-emerge to him exactly as he remembered her, young, energetic and in love.
For him, of course, she had indeed been in limbo: a silent, frosted figure, wrapped away in his memory. The Francesca who had returned to him out of the darkness of San Vitale, however, was anything but a fragment of someone else’s past. There were streaks of grey in her hair, and her face was thin and pale and tired. In her eyes he could detect a far-away sadness, as though something deep within her had indeed died all those years ago.
Since her appearance on San Vitale, they had hardly spoken. She had taken them to the mainland in absolute silence, steering by means of small, bobbing lights she had placed along the channels. The man with her had been introduced to them as Roberto Quadri, a lawyer. After beaching the boat, they walked to Caposile, where Francesca and Quadri had left a vehicle, a windowless Transit van with bedding on the floor. While Patrick and Assefa tried to rest in the back, she and the lawyer drove through the night to Rome, travelling on the autostrada via Bologna and Florence.
Quadri had accompanied them as far as an apartment on the Via Grotta Pinta, a narrow, curving street in the old city, not far from the Campo de’ Fiori. The apartment was situated on the top floor of a tall, ochre-coloured building in a row of small shops and trattorie. It was large, sparsely-furnished and draughty, and it was clearly not anyone’s permanent residence. More like a safe house, Patrick thought.
Who does this place belong to?’ he had asked.
‘Later,’ she had replied. ‘I’ll tell you all about it later. But now I want to sleep.’
Quadri kissed her lightly on the cheek and shook hands with Patrick and Assefa.
‘I will see you all later,’ he said. ‘I have to sleep as well. But before that, I have other work to do. Ciao, Francesca. I’ll call on Dermot, tell him all went well.’
Francesca slept until after ten, and in the end both Patrick and Assefa had relaxed sufficiently to give in to sleep as well. Over a breakfast of rolls and coffee, Assefa had asked if he could visit Santa Maria delle Grazie, which he knew was just a short distance away, on the other bank of the Tiber.
Now, they walked back slowly over the Ponte Sisto. The river flowed sluggishly beneath their feet, yellow and muddy, almost out of strength. Assefa walked several paces ahead, preoccupied. Now that he was alone with Francesca, Patrick felt awkward and tongue-tied.
‘I feel this is still all a dream,’ he said. ‘This doesn’t make sense. You were dead: I saw them bury you.’
Francesca shook her head. Her hair was tied back in a pony tail, just as he remembered it.
‘I was never dead, Patrick. Not ... in the sense that you mean. In other ways, perhaps. In all the ways that matter.’ She paused. For a moment, just as they stepped down from the bridge, he caught sight of her profile. At that moment, he knew for the first time that she was truly alive. Other things might alter, but her profile was exactly the same.
‘I lost over twenty years, Patrick. I’m sorry, for you more than anything or anyone. Nothing I can do can ever make that up to you. But I had no choice; or I thought I had none. Believe me, I really thought that then.’
‘And now...?’
‘If I thought I could undo a single moment... But I can’t, so I don’t even try. I just try to make amends, that’s all.’
‘I don’t understand any of this.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I know that. But in a few minutes we can get down to explanations. I’ve asked Roberto and
