The White Dominican (19 page)

“From your point of view as a Catholic priest, Father, do you think it is possible for the Devil to assume the form of a sacred figure, say Jesus or the Virgin Mary?”

For a moment the Chaplain stared at me, then he clapped his hands over his ears and cried, “Stop, Christopher, stop! It’s your father’s spirit that prompted you to ask that question. Please leave my faith in peace. I’m too old for such shocks. When I come to die, I want to die with my belief in the divine origin of the miracles I have seen and marvelled at intact. No, I say, no, and no again. However many forms the Devil can assume, he must stop at the Blessed Virgin and her Son, who is also the Son of God!”

I nodded and said nothing. I kept my mouth shut tight, as I did during the séance when in my mind I heard the mocking words of the head of the Medusa, “Why don’t you tell them everything you know?!”

What is needed for the future is a great leader who will have complete mastery over words and use them to reveal the truth without killing those who hear them. Otherwise all religion will be nothing more than a half-dead cripple. At least that is what I feel.

I was awakened early next morning by the sound of the bells ringing from the towers, and I could hear a soft chant with a barely subdued undertone of wild excitement.

“Hail Mary, Mother of Grace, blessed art thou among women.”

An eerie rumbling went through the walls of the house, as if the stones had come alive and were joining in the singing in their own way. ‘Years ago it was the hum of the lathe that filled the alleyway; now the torment of labour is silent and the hymn to the Mother of God is rising from the ground as a kind of echo’, was the thought that passed through my mind as I went down the stairs.

I stood in the house doorway, and along the narrow street, with Mutschelknaus at the head, came a procession of people in their Sunday best, thronging together and carrying mountains of flowers.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us.”

“Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy.”

The old man went barefooted and bareheaded, his dress was the habit of an itinerant monk; it had once been white, but now was threadbare and covered in patches. He walked unsteadily, feeling his way like a blind old man. He glanced at me in passing; for a brief moment his eye rested on my face, but there was no trace of recognition or memory to be seen in it. His pupils were fixed in parallel axes, as if he was looking through me and the walls into another world.

More drawn by an invisible power than under his own impulse, or so it seemed to me, he made his slow way to the wrought-iron gate at the entrance to the garden, opened it and went up to the statue of the Virgin. I joined the crowd shuffling along a respectful distance behind; they seemed to be in awe of him and stopped at the gate. The singing grew softer and softer, but the undertone of excitement was becoming more intense by the minute. Soon it was a wordless, vibration of notes; there was an indescribable tension in the air.

I had jumped up onto a ledge projecting from the wall, from which I could see everything clearly. For a long time the old man stood motionless before the statue. It was a disquieting sight; I began to wonder which of the two would come alive first. I was seized by a dull fear, similar to the one I had felt at the spiritualist séance, and once more I heard Ophelia’s voice in my heart, “Be on your guard!”

Immediately after that I saw the old man’s white beard begin to quiver, and from the twitching of his lips I guessed that he was speaking to the statue. A deathly hush suddenly came over the crowd behind me, even the soft singing of those at the back stopped, as if a sign had been given.

The only sound that was left was a soft, rhythmical and repetitive jingling. I looked around to see where it was coming from: timidly squeezing into an alcove in the wall, as if he were hiding, was a fat old man with a laurel wreath on his bald head; with one hand he was half covering his face, while the other was stretched out, holding a tin box. Beside him in a black silk dress, with such thick make-up on as to be almost unrecognisable, was Frau Aglaia.

That toper’s nose, shapeless and blue, those eyes, hardly visible behind the rolls of fat: there was no doubt about it, it was Herr Paris, the actor. He was collecting money from the pilgrims and Frau Mutschelknaus was helping him. I saw her quickly lean forward from time to time and cast an anxious glance at her husband, as if she was afraid he might see her there. Then she would whisper something to the people around her, who would mechanically feel in their pockets and, without taking their eyes off the statue of the Mother of God, drop a couple of coins in the tin.

A furious rage took hold of me, and I glared at the actor, immediately our eyes met and I saw his chin drop and his face turn ashen grey. He almost let the collecting box fall with shock. Filled with disgust, I turned away.

“She is moving! She is speaking! Blessed Virgin, pray for us! She is talking to him! There! See, she is bowing her head!” Suddenly a hoarse muttering, scarcely comprehensible, as if it were muffled by shivers of abrupt horror, ran through the crowd from one set of pale lips to another. “There! There! And again!”

I felt that any moment one single, piercing cry must erupt from the many hundred living lips and release the dreadful tension, but it was as if all were paralysed. Only here and there I heard an occasional confused, babbling “Pray for us”. I was afraid a riot was about to break out, but instead the crowd just slumped somewhat: they wanted to fall to their knees but were too tightly packed. Many had closed their eyes, as if they had fainted, but they could not fall to the ground, they were wedged in. They were so deathly pale, they looked like corpses standing upright among the living, waiting for a miracle to wake them from the dead.

The atmosphere had such a kind of stifling magnetism that when I breathed in it felt as if I were being throttled by invisible hands. My whole body was shaking, as if the flesh were trying to free itself from the bones. So as not to fall down, I clung to the window-ledge.

I could clearly see the old man’s lips in rapid movement as he talked. His emaciated features, bathed in the rays of the rising sun, shone with an almost youthful glow.

Then he suddenly paused, as if he had heard someone call out to him. His mouth wide open as he strained to hear and his eyes fixed on the statue, he nodded with a beatific expression on his face, quickly gave a soft reply, then listened again, raising his arms now and again in joyful excitement.

Every time he thrust his head forward to listen, a throaty whisper, more a wheezing than a murmuring, went through the crowd – “There! There! She’s moving! There! Now! She nodded!” – but no one pushed forward, rather they drew back in horror, staggered back as if hit by a gust of wind.

I scrutinised the expression on the old man’s face as closely as I could; I was trying to read his lips to see what he was saying. Secretly I was hoping – I had no idea why – to hear or read the name Ophelia, but all I could make out were long, incomprehensible sentences followed by something like “Mary”.

There! It was as if I had been struck by lightning: the statue had smiled and bowed its head! Not only the statue, its shadow on the light-coloured sand had also moved!

In vain I told myself it was an hallucination, my eye must have involuntarily transferred the old man’s movements to the statue, making it look as if the statue were moving. I looked away, determined to regain control of my senses, and looked back again: the statue was speaking! Was bending down to the old man! There was no longer any doubt about it.

“Be on your guard!” What use was it that I dwelled on the inner warning with all my strength?! What use was the clear sense of a vague yet infinitely dear something within my heart, what use the knowledge that it was the eternal presence of my beloved trying to resist, desperately trying to take on tangible form so that she could stand before me with outstretched arms and protect me?! I was slowly being drawn into a vortex of magnetism, stronger than my will-power. All the religiosity, all the piety which I had absorbed in my childhood and which, until now, had lain dormant in my ancestral blood, broke loose, engulfing cell after cell. A spiritual storm in my body began to hammer at the back of my knees, repeating the order, “I want you to kneel down and worship me.”

‘It is the head of the Medusa’, I told myself, but at the same time I felt that reason was futile. I took refuge in my last line of defence: ‘Do not resist evil.’ I gave up resisting and let myself sink into an abyss of complete acquiescence. I became so weak that even my body was affected by it; my hands let go their hold and I tumbled down onto the heads and shoulders of the crowd below.

I have no idea how I managed to make my way back to the door of my house. The details of such strange events often do not penetrate our perception, or pass through without leaving any trace in the memory. I must have crawled like a caterpillar over the heads of the tightly packed throng of pilgrims! All I know is that I found myself back in the arch of the doorway, incapable of moving forwards or back; but the statue was removed from my view and I from its magic influence. The magnetic current emanating from the crowd flowed past me.

“To the church!” From the garden echoed a cry in which I was sure I recognised the voice of the old carpenter. “To the church!”

“To the church, to the church.” The call rebounded from mouth to mouth, ‘To the church. It is Mary’s command”, and swelled into a many-voiced roar that finally released the tension.

The spell was broken. Slowly, step by step like some gigantic fabulous beast with a hundred feet that was freeing its head from a noose, the crowd backed out of the alley. The last ones had surrounded the old man and, as they pushed past me, they were tearing off pieces of his robe, until he was almost naked, kissing them like sacred relics.

When the alleyway was once more deserted, I went through the thick covering of trampled flowers to the elder tree. I wanted to touch again the spot where the bones of my beloved were laid to rest. I had a clear feeling that it would be the last time. “Can it be that I will never see you again, Ophelia? Not even one more time?” I poured out my entreaty into my heart. “I long to see your face again, just one more time.”

A current of air carried the sound of the chant from the town, “Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy.”

Involuntarily, I raised my head.

The statue before me was bathed in a light of unutterable brightness. For the tiniest fraction of a second, so short that a heartbeat seemed a lifetime by comparison, it was transformed into Ophelia and smiled at me; then once more it was rigid and motionless, the golden face of the Madonna gleaming in the sun.

I had had a brief vision of the eternal present, which, for us mortals, is nothing but an empty, unfathomable word.

It was an unforgettable experience when, one day, I started to go through my inheritance from my father and our forebears. I inspected one storey after the other; I felt as if I were climbing down the centuries until I was back in the Middle Ages.

Above elaborately inlaid pieces of furniture, the drawers full of lace, were blind mirrors in shimmering gold frames from which my image looked back at me like a greenish, milky ghost; there were darkened portraits of men and women in antiquated dress, the look changing according to the period, but always with a certain family likeness in the faces, which sometimes lessened, the hair changing from blond to brown, to reappear in its true lineaments, as if the blood-line had suddenly decided to revert to type.

I found gold boxes decorated with precious stones, some still containing traces of snuff, as if they had still been in use only yesterday; mother-of-pearl fans; bizarrely shaped high-heeled shoes of threadbare silk which, as I placed them beside each other, called to mind youthful female figures, the mothers and wives of our ancestors; sticks with yellowed ivory carvings; rings with our coat of arms, some tiny, as if made for a child’s finger, and others so large that giants must have worn them; distaffs on which the tow had become so thin with age that it disintegrated when you breathed on it.

In some rooms, the dust was so deep that I waded ankle-deep through it and it made huge ridges when I opened the doors; in my footmarks floral ornaments and animal faces appeared as my steps laid bare the patterns of old carpets.

I was so enthralled by the sight of all these objects that I spent weeks examining them and sometimes lost all sense that there were other people than I living on this earth.

Once, as a boy, I had been taken on a school trip to the town museum, and I can remember the weariness that befell us as we looked at all the antique objects that meant nothing to us. How different it was here! Every object I picked up had a story to tell, they all exuded a particular sense of life: they were steeped in the history of my own family and filled me with a strange mixture of past and present. People whose bones were now rotting in the grave had breathed this air, forebears, whose life I bore within me, had lived in these rooms, had begun their existence as snivelling infants and ended it in the rattle of death throes, had loved and mourned, rejoiced and sighed, had cherished things which now stood where they had been abandoned and which filled with secret whisperings when I picked them up.

There was a glazed corner cupboard containing medallions in red velvet cases, golden ones with the profiles of knights, still bright with a lively glow, and silver ones that had gone black as if they had died, all laid out in rows and each with a ticket on which the writing was faded and illegible. They transmitted a decrepit and yet passionate craving: ‘Collect us, collect us, we must become complete’. Characteristics which I had never possessed fluttered up to me, caressed me and begged, ‘Take us in, we will make you happy.’

An old armchair with wonderfully carved armrests, apparently the personification of dignity and repose, lured me to dream in its arms with the promise of tales from the old days; then, when I had entrusted myself to it, I was smothered by a wordless, senile torment, as if it were the grey spirit of care itself in whose lap I was sitting, my legs grew heavy and stiff, as if a cripple had been bound there for a hundred years and was trying to escape by turning me into his likeness.