the mouth, stumps at the bottoms of the legs. And the blood which had formed a black sash across the waist, flowing down both sides from the navel.
I went down into the cellar to kneel by her.
'Are you alive.'
At the first bomb-bursts, she moaned.
'I will pray for you.' Night was coming in.
She began to cry. Tearless, half-nasal; more a curious succession of drawn-out wails, originating far back in the mouth cavity. All through the raid she cried.
I gave her what I remembered of the sacrament of Extreme Unction. I could not hear her confession: her teeth were gone and she must have been past speech. But in those cries - so unlike human or even animal sound that they might have been only the wind blowing past any dead reed - I detected a sincere hatred for all her sins which must have been countless; a profound sorrow at having hurt God by sinning; a fear of losing Him which was worse than the fear of death. The interior darkness was lit by flares over Valletta, incendiary bombs in the Dockyard. Often both our voices were drowned in the explosions or the chattering of the ground artillery.
I did not hear only what I wanted to hear in these sounds that issued unceasing from the poor woman. I have been over it, Paola, and over it. I have since attacked myself more scathingly than any of your doubts could. You will say I had forgotten my understanding with God in administering a sacrament only a priest can give. That after losing Elena I'd 'regressed' to the priesthood I would have joined had I not married her.
At the time I only knew that a dying human must be prepared. I had no oil to anoint her organs of sense - so mutilated now - and so used her own blood, dipping it from the navel as from a chalice. Her lips were cold. Though I saw and handled many corpses in the course of the siege, to this day I cannot live with that cold. Often, when I fall asleep at my desk, the blood supply to an arm is cut off. I wake and touch it and am no further from nightmare, for it is night's cold, object's cold, nothing human, nothing of me about it at all.
Now touching her lips my fingers recoiled and I returned from wherever I'd been. The all-clear sounded. She cried once or twice more and fell silent. I knelt by her and began to pray for myself. For her I'd done all I could. How long did I pray? No way of knowing.
But soon the cold of the wind - shared now with what had been a quick body - began to chill me. Kneeling grew uncomfortable. Only saints and lunatics can remain 'devoted' for extended periods of time. I did feel for a pulse or heartbeat. None. I arose, limped about the cellar aimlessly, and finally emerged into Valletta without looking back.
I returned to Ta Kali, on foot. My shovel was still where I had left it.
Of Fausto III's return to life, little can be said. It happened. What inner resources were there to give it nourishment are still unknown to the present Fausto. This is a confession, and in that return from the rock was nothing to confess. There are no records of Fausto III, except for indecipherable entries.
And sketches of an azalea blossom, a carob tree.
There remained two unanswered questions. If he had truly broken his covenant with God in administering the sacrament, why did he survive the raid?
And why did he not stop the children: or lift the beam?
In answer to the first, one can only suggest that he was now Fausto III, with no further need for God.
The second has caused his successor to write this confession. Fausto Maijstral is guilty of murder: a sin of omission if you will. He will answer to no tribunal but God. And God at this moment is far away.
May He be closer to you.
Valletta: 27 August 1956
Stencil let the last thin scribbled sheet flutter to bare linoleum. Had this coincidence, the accident to shatter the surface of this stagnant pool and send all the mosquitoes of hope zinging away to the exterior night; had it happened?
'An Englishman; a mysterious being named Stencil.'
Valletta. As if Paola's silence since - God, eight months. Had she, by her refusal to tell him anything, been all this time forcing him closer to the day when he'd have to admit Valletta as a possibility? Why?
Stencil would have liked to go on believing the death and V. had been separate for his father. This he still could choose to do (couldn't he?), and continue on in calm weather. He could go to Malta and possibly end it. He had stayed off Malta. He was afraid of ending it; but, damn it all, staying here would end it too. Funking out; finding V.; he didn't know which he was most afraid of, V. or sleep. Or whether they were two versions of the same thing.
Was there nothing for it but Valletta?
Chapter Twelve
In which things are not so amusing
I
The party had begun late, with a core of only a dozen Sick. Evening was hot and not likely to get any cooler. They all sweated. The loft itself was part of an old warehouse and not a legal residence; buildings in this area of the city had been condemned years ago. Someday there would be cranes, dump trucks, payloaders, bulldozers to come and level the neighborhood; but in the meantime, nobody - city or landlords - saw any objection in turning a minor profit.
There hung therefore about Raoul, Slab and Melvin's pad a climate of impermanence, as if the sand-sculptures, unfinished canvases, thousands of paperback books suspended in tiers of cement blocks and warped planks, even the great marble toilet stolen from a mansion in the east 70's (since replaced by a glass and aluminum apartment building) were all part of the set to an experimental play, which its cabal of faceless angels could cause to be struck at any moment, without having to give their reasons.
People would arrive, come the late hours. Raoul, Slab and Melvin's refrigerator was already half filled with a ruby construction of wine bottles; gallon of Vino Paisano slightly above center, left, off-balancing two 25-cent bottles of Gallo Grenache Rose, and one of Chilean Riesling, lower right, and so on. The icebox door was left open
