ruined villa on Ischia, inhabited by friends of Stencil - a monk long defrocked named Fenice who spent his time breeding giant scorpions in marble cages once used by the Roman blood to punish their young boy and girl concubines, and the poet Cinoglossa who had the misfortune to be both homosexual and epileptic - wandering listlessly in an unseasonable heat among vistas of marble fractured by earthquake, pines blasted by lightning, sea wrinkled by a dying mistral; of their arrival in Sicily and the difficulty with local bandits on a mountain road (from which Stencil extricated them by telling foul Sicilian jokes and giving them whisky); of the day-long trip from Syracuse to Valletta on the Laferla steamer Star of Malta, during which Stencil lost $100 and a pair of cufflinks at stud poker to a mild-faced clergyman who called himself Robin Petitpoint; and of Paola's steadfast silence through it all, there was little for any of them to remember. Malta alone drew them, a clenched fist around a yo-yo string.
They came in to Valletta, cold, yawning, in the rain. They rode to Maijstral's room neither anticipating nor remembering – outwardly, at least, apathetic and low-keyed as the rain. Maijstral greeted them calmly. Paola would stay with him. Stencil and Profane had planned to doss at the Phoenicia Hotel, but at 2/8 per day the agile Robin Petitpoint had had his effect. They settled for a lodging-house near the Harbour. 'What now,' said Profane, tossing his ditty bag in a corner.
Stencil thought a long time.
'I like,' Profane continued, 'living off of your money. But you and Paola conned me into coming here.'
'First things first,' said Stencil. The rain had stopped; he was nervous. 'See Maijstral. See Maijstral.'
See Maijstral he did: but only next day, and after a morning-long argument with the whisky bottle which the bottle lost. He walked to the room in the ruined building through a brilliant gray afternoon. Light seemed to cling to his shoulders like fine rain. His knees shook.
But it wasn't hard to talk to Maijstral.
'Stencil has seen your confession to Paola.'
'Then you know,' Maijstral said, 'I only made it into this world through the good offices of one Stencil.'
Stencil hung his head. 'It may have been his father.'
'Making us brothers.'
There was wine, which helped. Stencil yarned far into the night but with a voice always threatening to break, as if now at last he were pleading for his life. Maijstral kept a decorous silence, waiting patiently whenever Stencil faltered.
Stencil sketched the entire history of V. that night and strengthened a long suspicion. That it did add up only to the recurrence of an initial and a few dead objects. At one point in Mondaugen's story:
'Ah,' Maijstral said. 'The glass eye.'
'And you.' Stencil mopped his forehead. 'You listen like a priest.'
'I have wondered.' Smiling.
At the end of it:
'But Paola showed you my apologia. Who is the priest? We have heard one another's confessions.'
'Not Stencil's,' Stencil insisted. 'Hers.'
Maijstral shrugged. 'Why have you come? She is dead.'
'He must know.'
'I could never find that cellar again. If I could: it must be rebuilt now. Your confirmation would lie deep.'
'Too deep already,' Stencil whispered. 'Stencil's long over his head, you know.'
'I was lost.'
'But not apt to have visions.'
'Oh, real enough. You always look inside first, don't you, to find what's missing. What gap a vision could possibly fill. I was all gap then, and there was too wide a field to choose from.'
'Yet you'd just come from -'
'I did think of Elena. Yes. Latins warp everything to the sexual anyway. Death becomes an adulterer or rival, need arises to see one rival at least done in . . . But I was bastardized enough, you see, before that. Too much so to feel hatred or triumph, watching.'
'Only pity. Is that what you mean? At least in what Stencil read. Read into. How can he -'
'More a passiveness. The characteristic stillness, perhaps, of the rock. Inertia. I'd come back - no, in - come in to the rock as far as I would.'
Stencil brightened after a while and changed course. 'A token. Comb, shoe, glass eye. The children.'
'I wasn't watching the children. I was watching your V. What I did see of the children - I recognized none of the faces. No. They may have died before the war ended or emigrated after it. Try Australia. Try the pawnbrokers and curio shops. But as for placing a notice in the agony column: 'Anyone participating in the disassembly of a priest -''
'Please.'
Next day, and for days after, he investigated the inventories of curio merchants, pawnbrokers, ragmen. He returned one morning to find Paola brewing tea on the ring for Profane, who lay bundled up in bed.
'Fever,' she said. 'Too much booze, too much everything back in New York. He hasn't been eating much since we arrived. God knows where he does eat. What the water there is like.'
