Warburg in Rome (34 page)

His questions rolled on: Am I a mystery to her? What does she want me for? He had no idea, but the skin on his neck tingled. All he knew was that he had never been gazed upon so nakedly before.

He straightened his posture and touched a finger to the curl at his forehead, to remind himself of his handsomeness. “Did you find your priest?” he asked, hardly breathing. When she did not answer, he went on, “You came to the Casa that night looking for your priest from the convent days.”

“No. I did not find him.” She ashed her cigarette and put it to her mouth.

He was aware of her lips, the barest sight of her tongue. He said, “I thought I might meet you when I visit the Red Cross offices, but I did not.”

“What brings you to the Red Cross?”

“To register protests, how German prisoners are mistreated in the camps. The Red Cross ignores us.”

“Mistreatment should not happen to anyone.”

“Germans are especially mistreated.”

“For example?”

“The massacre by Americans.”

“What massacre?”

“At the very end, German soldiers were attempting only to surrender, but the Americans shot them. Twenty. Thirty. Shot dead while trying to surrender. This is well known. Only one example. There are others.”

“Where did that happen?”

“In Bavaria.”

“Where?”

“Near Munich.”

“A place called Dachau?”

“Perhaps.”

“The German soldiers were guards at Dachau?”

“Perhaps.”

“The Americans saw what the German guards had done there. Is that why the guards were shot?”

“It is not for the Red Cross to judge. Geneva requires the respect of soldiers who surrender. The Red Cross refused to condemn the massacre.”

Marguerite nodded slowly. “If there was a massacre, it should be condemned. Of course, you are right about that.”

“I know of my own experience . . . My uncle was taken prisoner on the eastern front. He was a regimental officer. His captors simply shot him dead. Bolsheviks.”

“How terrible for you.”

“Terrible for
mia madre
. He was her only relative.” Lehmann felt himself blushing.

“You are her relative,” she said quietly, “no?”

“Yes. I meant others. Now there is only me.”

“And the loss of your uncle was painful for you as well.” She said this with a quality of sympathy that had rarely been directed toward him. Always toward his mother, rarely him.

She sipped her Cinzano, and he did likewise. Above the rims of the tulip glasses, their eyes met. She said, “You have a difficult position, Father. A man in between, no?”

“Very much so. You speak more accurately than you know.”

“And sometimes the difficulty of your position becomes more than you can manage. And you remove your soutane, put on your tired white shirt with rolled sleeves, and come out into Rome looking for the night. What are you looking for, Father?”

“I saw you. I was passing in my car. I saw you sitting here. Do you sit here often?”

“Sometimes. Only sometimes.”

“Because of gelato.”

She gestured with her glass. “Vermouth now. Wormwood.” She quaffed her drink, then threw her head back, laughing. “Waiter!” she cried. “More wormwood. More bitters.” She laughed again, and he joined her. Both their faces were happily transformed, but only for a moment. After the waiter put a fresh Cinzano in front of her, she raised it. “To the Book of Revelation.” She took a large swallow, then said gravely, “And the many people dying of the poisoned waters.”

“I sensed that in you when you confessed to me.”

“You sensed it because neither of us was made to be alone with bitterness.”

He waited for her to lower her eyes, but she did not. He was not breathing.

“Am I wrong?” she asked.

“No. But when you confessed that night, you did not specify your sin. I was wrong to absolve you. It has troubled me since. The sacrament requires specificity. You refused. And I yielded.” He looked away from her, made a quick survey of the others in the café, of figures passing on the street. Who was watching them?
Madre
, he thought. But no,
Madre
was across the city.
Madre
was asleep. He brought his eyes back to the woman and said, “I was wrong to do that.”

“Is this your confession, Father?”

“I, too, am a sinner.”

“But neither do
you
specify.”

He found it possible to say, but quietly, “I am here with you.”

Still holding his eyes, she put her glass down, retrieved a few lire notes from the side pocket of her dress, threw them on the table, and stood. As she turned and walked away, Lehmann understood that she expected him to follow, and so he did.

Less than ten minutes later, after moving through a maze of narrow streets and small, crowded piazzas—the sweet life of Rome at night—she entered a small hotel, ignored the desk clerk, crossed to the staircase, and went up. In the cramped lobby Lehmann hesitated, but the clerk took no more notice of him than of her. Lehmann went to the stairs, and as he took them, he unconsciously reached to lift the folds of his cassock, only to realize again that he was a man without vestments, a man like any other.

Marguerite had sensed at once that Lehmann was even less sexually experienced than she. Her advantage in what followed was in acting out of the numb core of dissociation.

Lehmann’s
dis
advantage, the result of having hesitated slightly at the door he’d found ajar in the dark corridor, consisted in finding her already naked, stretched out on the bed. Her arms opened to him, but it was her inner thighs he saw, her breasts, nipples pink, the offering of Eve. The further arousal of his fully erect penis fulfilled an exquisite longing, yet the sensation alarmed him. Knowing nothing else, he knew to go slower, yet the pulse of blood was leaving him behind.
No. No
.

He danced on alternate legs to remove his trousers. He pulled at his shoes, but snagged the laces. Because his eyes never left the unclothed woman before him, he stumbled. This, the most intense erotic sensation of his life, gave way, as he realized what was happening, to dread. Then dread gave way to humiliation, the dead opposite of pleasure, when his untimely ejaculation overrode his ferocious will. Will had nothing to do with it.
Oh. Oh
.

He fell gracelessly upon her as sperm pumped itself out of his penis, soiling the woman’s leg. In truth the priest had rarely even masturbated. Those climaxes, quick as they were, had reliably left him briefly elated, but this was instant ignominy. He groaned—
No, no
—and rolled away, awash in shame amid the stench of his own mean emission.

As he lay immobile beside her, the question came
vox Dei:
Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?
He would have laughed—I tried to eat, I tried, and what a tree!—but in fact he was weeping. Sobs broke out of him in spurts, just as unwilled as the ejaculation had been. In control of almost nothing, he was yet able to choke back the unwilled words rising in his throat,
Madre, mia madre
, aware that such infantile pleading would obliterate the last vestige of his dignity. Debased and wretched. Craven. He loathed himself.

Only gradually did Lehmann become aware of the finger tenderly brushing his cheek, blotting the tears. He had his back to her, and so had not seen it when she turned toward him. She enfolded his body in the curve of her own. Her mouth was by his ear. “Be still,” she whispered. “Be still.”

As if she were the mistress of nature, he obeyed. Stillness soon came, and he entered it as a sacred space. His sobbing quieted, his heaving chest settled, his fists unclenched themselves. All the while she moved her forefinger lightly on his cheek. Nestled against him, she pressed her legs into the hollow of his bent knees. He sensed a moist warmth against his buttocks, the faint scratch of her pubic hair. She enclosed him with her arm around his chest and drew him fully into the bow of her flesh.

Slowly, he became aware that the soft pushing against his back was pressure from her breasts. Her tranquility engulfed him. He’d been schooled in mystic contemplation, yet here was an unprecedented coherence between his relaxing body and his quiet interiority, a vacancy of the mind combined with acute awareness of every sensation.

Time meant nothing. At some point—minutes? an hour? longer?—he felt the stirring in his loins. She seemed to sense it too, for her hand moved slowly to his penis, and with her caress the stiffness came back. Growing erect, he turned to her and she welcomed him. When he moved to kiss her, he found her lips parted, and she fondled his tongue with hers. All the while she continued to hold his erection, pressing it, then guiding it. He was in her, pumping as quickly as before, but now in sync with the bouncing of her hips. He sensed the detached willfulness with which she moved, but mistook it for expertise. The surprise to Lehmann was in the way the physical communion about which he’d read, and dreamed, and offered spiritual counsel—ecstatic communion, a mode of transcendence—boiled down to fucking.

After, the word that spilled from his lips, pressed into the hollow of her shoulder, was “
Gracias
.”

As if his speaking even that word broke the spell, she came up onto her elbow, stared hard at his face, waited for his eyes to find their focus on her, and said, “Bless me, Father.”

“What?” He craned back, away. “What?”

She pulled the sheet free, wrapped herself with it, rolled off the bed, and fell to her knees in the posture of a child at bedtime prayers. Wrapped in white, not diaphanous, a vestal virgin. She crossed herself and bowed her head. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” She buried her face in her hands, just when he was most desperate to see her eyes, to read what madness was glowing there.

Lehmann did not move. Like Adam, aware in the instant of being unclothed, exposed.
Vox Dei:
Who told thee that thou wast naked?
Paralyzed, he waited.

Instead of God’s, her voice came, a whisper he could barely understand. “I have sinned against chastity, Father.”

Lehmann sat bolt upright, reaching to the foot of the bed for the tattered blanket. He covered himself, draping his shoulders as if with the amice, the first of the vestments donned for Mass. “No, Signorina, no.”

“I engaged in sexual relations with one to whom I was not married. For this and all my sins, I am heartily sorry. Please forgive me.” She raised her face to him, a wretched display of rebuke, yet aimed at herself. Now it was she whose face was streaked with tears. And, given how tenderly she had rescued him from the pit of self-loathing, and given, equally, that he was in possession of the means of her relief, it was all at once unthinkable that he should refuse her. Surreal, bizarre, baffling—but yes, unthinkable.

He knew the canon law: “
Latae sententiae . . . de delictis gravioribus . . . anathema sit
.” A priest who attempts to absolve a partner in a sin against the Sixth Commandment is himself
ipso facto
excommunicated. But all of that was in a realm apart, a realm that held no meaning for him then. Lehmann realized that he had been at this point with her before, as if she’d tested him, or prepared him—her request for absolution when she had refused to specify her sin. He had granted it, a sin of his own. Rehearsal. But now her sin was as specific as it could be, and who knew better than he? Her sin, his sin.

But sin pales before sacrilege—this sacrilege. It would belong to him alone, absolute and permanent, pure blasphemy. The sullying of his holy orders, the debasement of his vow. Yet already he had chosen her above all virtue, above all faith, above all hope. He had chosen love. And now he was choosing love again.

He reached to her, his lover, and placed his left hand upon her head. His right he held above her. If he could do this, it was because she wanted him to. He would do anything for her, and how, given the purity of his love, could that be wrong? “May Our Lord Jesus Christ absolve thee, and I by His authority do absolve thee from every bond of excommunication, or interdict, as far as I am able and thou art needful. I absolve thee from thy sins . . .” And here he made the sign of the cross, warding off all demons except the one alive in him. “. . . in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

“Amen,” she said in a clear, firm voice—certain. She blessed herself again, then came back up onto the bed, letting the sheet fall away, once again caring nothing for her nakedness. She leaned toward him. They went into each other’s arms and reclined. She kissed his brow and pulled him close. She arranged the sheet to cover them both, and, after all of that, they found an unexpected repose, and, lo and behold, it was chaste. She was his Madonna. He was her Child. Lehmann heard nothing but the beating of her heart until, out of their astonishing serenity, she said, “Tell me about the Casa.”

Nine

Obbedienza

I
T WAS MORE
than a year since he’d first entered the Great Synagogue of Rome. The place had made a better recovery than the people who worshiped there. For this Friday-night service, Warburg sat in his accustomed bench toward the rear, where, unobserved, his focus could shift from the text to the soaring space and back. He was dressed, as usual, in gray, but in here he wore the black yarmulke he’d first worn some months earlier. He had yet to don the
tallit
, however.

Moorish windows rose above him in three tiers, but after sundown the light came from the repaired wall fixtures and electrified candelabra that once again decked the columns and balconies. The sanctuary could hold about a thousand, but for this, the weekly ushering in of the Sabbath, perhaps a hundred men were scattered in the main space in front of Warburg, with a few dozen women in the balcony above. The tapestries had been restored to the walls, and the painted ceiling rainbow had been brightened, but the prayers were being recited in disjointed murmurs, and the rabbi, with his back to the congregation, rocked gently toward the ark as if he were praying alone.