'Really?' he said abstractedly.
'It was miraculous.'
He cleared his throat, unhappy with the choice of word.
She amended it to, 'Marvelous, then. Oh, the relief! I can't tell you how much better I felt.'
'Did it last?'
'For days, Father.' While he was absorbing that, she added plaintively, 'There's no one else I can ask.'
She made it sound like a plea for charity. Father Faustini sometimes fetched shopping for elderly members of his flock. He often collected medicine for their ailments. He'd been known to chop wood and cook soup for poor souls in trouble, so what was the difference in massaging Claudia Coppi's aching shoulders? Only that it set up conflicts within himself. Was it right 10 deny her Christian help because of his moral and spiritual frailty?
On the last two Friday evenings he had performed this service for her. Willingly he would have chopped wood instead, but the villa's central heating was oil-fired. He would have fetched shopping with alacrity, but she had a twice-weekly delivery from the best supermarket in Cremona. She had a gardener, a cook and a cleaner. What it came down to in practice was that the only assistance Father Faustini could render to Claudia Coppi was what she was suggesting. The poor young woman couldn't massage her own shoulders. Not well enough to remove muscular tension.
There was another factor that made him hesitate. Once a week in church he heard Claudia Coppi's confession, and lately-he wasn't certain how many times this had occurred, and didn't intend to make a calculation-she had admitted to impure thoughts, or carnal desires, or some such form of words. It wasn't his custom to ask for more details in the confessional once the commission of a sin was established, so he couldn't know for sure that there was a connection with his visits to the villa.
'I found something you could rub in, if you would,' she said.
He coughed nervously and crossed his legs. This was new in the routine. 'Embrocation?' he queried, striving to limit his thoughts to muscular treatment, remembering the overpowering reek of a certain brand favored by footballers. The stuff brought tears to the eyes.
'More of a moisturizer really. It's better for my skin. Really smooth. Try.' She reached out and smeared some on the back of his hand.
He wiped it off immediately. 'It's scented.'
'There's a hint of musk,' she admitted. 'If you'd like to hold the pot, I'll just slip my blouse off.'
'That won't be necessary,' he quickly said.
'Father, it's silk. I don't want it marked.'
'No, no,
'But I haven't unbuttoned yet' She laughed and added, 'Is it as dark as all that?'
'I wasn't looking,' he said.
'That's all right. I've got my back to you anyway.'
As she was speaking he heard the blouse being slipped off her shoulders. Now he was in a real dilemma. She sounded so matter-of-fact, so nonchalant By protesting, he was liable to inflate this into a moral crisis. It could appear as if he were letting himself be influenced by things she had said in the confessional.
'Not too much at once,' she cautioned. 'It goes a long way.'
He suppressed his misgivings, dipped in a finger and spread some over his palm.
Claudia's back was towards him, as she had claimed. He reached out and applied some of the moisturizer to the back of her neck.
She said, 'Oh dear, the straps are going to get in your way.'
'Not at all,' protested Father Faustini, but the brassiere straps were tugged aside, regardless.
On the previous visits, he'd been persuaded to massage Claudia, without using a liniment, through her T-shirt. This was a new experience. The contact with her flesh unsettled him more than he cared to admit. He traced the slope of her shoulders, feeling the warmth under his fingers. The smoothness was a revelation. When his hands cupped the round extremities of her shoulders he was compelled to pause.
She sighed and said, 'Bliss.'
In a moment he felt sufficiently in control to resume, spreading the moisturizer liberally across the shoulder blades and up the spine to her neck. She had her head bowed so that her long, dark brown hair hung in front of her. He gave some attention to the deltoid muscles, gently isolating them, probing their form. In spite of what Claudia had said about tension, everything felt reasonably flexible to him, but he was the first to admit that he was no physiotherapist.
'Let me know if I'm causing any discomfort,' he told her.
'Quite the reverse,' she murmured. 'You have the most incredible hands.'
He continued to apply light pressure to the base of her neck until quite suddenly she raised her head and drew the hair back behind her shoulders.
'Enough?' he enquired. He hoped so. The movement of her hair across the backs of his hands had given him a physical sensation not to be encouraged in the priesthood.
But Claudia Coppi remained unsatisfied. She told him mat there was still some tension at the tops of her arms.
'Here?'
'Yes. Oh, yes, just there. Do you mind if I lean back against you, Father? It's more comfortable.' She didn't wait for his answer.
The back of her head was on his chest, her hair against his cheek. In the same movement she placed her hands over his own and gripped them firmly. Then she pushed them downwards.
He hadn't discovered until now that she had altogether uncovered her breasts. She guided his hands over them. Exquisitely beautiful, utterly prohibited breasts offered for him to experience. For a few never-to-be-forgotten seconds of sin, Father Faustini accepted the offer. He held Claudia Coppi's forbidden fruits, passing his hands over and under and around them, thrilling to their fullness and their unmistakable state of arousal.
A monster of depravity.
With a supreme effort to banish fleshly thoughts, he blurted out the words 'Lead us not into temptation,' and drew his hands away as if they were burned.
Tormented with shame, he stood up immediately and strode resolutely through the patio doors and around the side of the house without looking back. He didn't respond to Claudia Coppi's, 'Shall I see you next Saturday?' He knew he had to be out of that place and away.
He thought he heard her coming after him, probably still in her topless state. As swiftly as he could manage, he wheeled his moped out to the road, started it up and zoomed away.
'Fornicating fool,' he howled to himself above the engine's putt-putt. 'Weak-willed, degenerate, wanton, wicked, wretched, sex-crazed fellow. Miserable sinner.'
The little wheels bore him steadily along, his headlight picking out the road, but he was barely conscious of the journey. His thoughts were all on the depravity of his conduct. A man of God, a priest behaving like some beast of the field, only worse, because he was blessed with a mind that was supposed to be capable of overcoming the baser instincts.
How will I answer for this on the Day of Judgment? he asked himself.
God be merciful unto me, a sinner.
Precisely at which stage of the journey he became aware of what was ahead of him is impossible to say. Certainly he must have traveled some distance before he was ready to submit to anything except the writhings of his tormented conscience. It had to be spectacular, and it was. Father Faustini stared ahead and saw a pillar of fire.
The night sky was alight above the Plain of Lombardy, fizzing with hundreds of brilliant fiery points. Their origin was a fiery column, perhaps three thousand meters away, and towering over the land. Emphatically this was not a natural fire, for it was more green than orange, bright emerald green, with flares of violet, blue and yellow leaping outwards. Father Faustini was seized with the conviction that the Day of Judgment was at hand. Otherwise he might have suspected that something had been added to the Barolo he had swallowed, because what he was seeing was psychedelic in its extraordinary combination of colors. He'd seen large fires before, and mammoth firework displays, but nothing remotely resembling this.
What else could a wretched sinner do in the hour of reckoning, but brake, dismount, go down on bis knees and
