Knowledge of Angels Page 3

  The sensation was increased when Lazaro helped him from the donkey, and he at once collapsed. The two fishermen stood over his supine body, telling their story volubly to the rapidly gathering crowd. His plight, especially since he was handsome, touched hearts at once. In caring for him the fishermen had a superior claim, and since Miguel had a noisy brood of children, while Lazaro lived with his widowed mother, it was to Lazaro’s house that the swimmer was carried. But Lazaro’s mother could not possibly be allowed sole possession of such a treasure – the women of the village crowded into her little room and drove out the men.

  A great coming and going followed. Every nearby kettle was raided for hot water, and ewers were carried at a run down the street. The women from nearby houses fetched clothes for him. Hardship made them thrifty, and most families had old clothes laid by, neatly mended and laundered. An hour later he was washed, oiled, and decently clad in humble clothes. He emerged to be led to the tavern with uncertain steps by a crowd of triumphant women and girls, every one of whom knew more about the stranger than their menfolk by the width of a loincloth; unfavourable comparisons would be made for many years.

  While he ate, ravenously, sitting at a table outside the tavern door, half the population of the village looked on, and he was surrounded by the buzz of voices like a lily in flower by the hum of bees. ‘See how hungry he is!’ the women told each other. ‘Poor soul, poor soul, however long was he in the water?’

  The men, meanwhile, were discussing the question of where he could have come from. On one thing they were agreed: he could not, as the farmers were suggesting, simply have swum round the jutting head land from a nearby cove, because the ferocity of the currents would have prevented it. He would have been swept straight out to sea.

  ‘Well then – so he was – and you saw him swimming back again. Why not?’

  The fishermen shook their heads. They knew what they had seen – a man swimming from the most distant horizon, making directly for land.

  And now the stranger had finished eating. He could be questioned.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Palinor.’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘A country very far from here. Aclar.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You have never heard of it?’

  ‘Never. What were you doing in the sea?’

  ‘Swimming. Hoping for landfall.’

  ‘But why were you in the sea?’

  The stranger shrugged and spread his hands in a deploring gesture. ‘I fell in,’ he said, and laughed. Laughter filled the square.

  ‘Hard luck, friend!’ said the tavern-keeper.

  ‘Could have been worse, after all,’ said Palinor, smiling. ‘There was no land in view. I was lucky in the direction I chose.’

  ‘And there isn’t enough luck in the world for all of us, at the best of times,’ said the tavern-keeper. ‘We’ll celebrate for you. I’ll fill a glass for everyone free tonight.’

  The tavern-keeper became the hero of the hour. By and by Palinor said to Miguel, ‘I am going to have trouble getting home, I fear. I shall need to find a money-lender, and passage on a ship . . .’

  ‘We will take you to the citadel in the morning,’ said Miguel. ‘Perhaps the prefect will help you.’ Help with moneylenders and passage on ships was beyond the competence of anyone in the village, he well knew.

  That night when the stranger was asleep in Lazaro’s bed and Lazaro was lying on a bale of straw borrowed from the donkey, on the floor beside his mother’s bed – all three sleeping in the only room of the house – Lazaro said softly to his mother, ‘He offered us gold. He without so much as a shirt on his body!’

  His mother said, ‘I hope you accepted, son. Did you notice his hands?’

  ‘Hands?’ said Lazaro. He turned his head. The stranger’s hand lay on the rough blanket of the best bed, barely visible in the dark room, though moonlight fingered through the shutters of the window that looked towards the garden.

  ‘Not a callous on them, and the nails cut neatly and unbroken,’ the woman said. ‘They are not working hands. They might belong to a prince . . .’

  Each of the four corners of the island had a citadel; a fortified acropolis, dating from the period of danger from pirates. In this north-easterly region the citadel was small – a simple ring of battlemented walls, containing an ancient church and the prefect’s house, and commanding a view over the furrows of the earthred, earth-gold roof tiles of the town to the surrounding plains and distant mountains. It was an hour on foot from the village.

  The prefect was not impressed. He saw standing before him a man in working clothes, with no shoes on his feet and an attitude he at once sensed to be insufficiently respectful, asking for money. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘Are you an islander? If you are a native here, you should remember the punishment for an able-bodied beggar.’

  ‘I am not an islander of this island.’

  ‘Do you have permission to be at large here? You need a warrant for any journey outside the port at Ciudad.’

  ‘I did not disembark at Ciudad; I swam ashore to save my life.’

  ‘Nobody is allowed to land here. You should have come through Ciudad, and applied for a warrant.’

  Palinor regarded the prefect coolly. He said, ‘I had not the strength to swim round the perimeter of your island looking for the usual port of disembarkation. Since I have never been to Ciudad, I have no warrant to travel out of it. Do I need a warrant to go there now?’

  ‘Foreigners need warrants to move about the island, in any circumstances.’

  ‘Then I apply for one. To whom do I apply?’

  ‘I can give you a temporary one, if your answers are satisfactory,’ said the prefect grudgingly. ‘Name?’ He reached for a sheet of paper, and took up his pen.

  ‘Palinor.’

  ‘Port of origin?’

  ‘Aclar.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Aclar.’

  The prefect had never heard of it, but was unwilling to show ignorance. He was, truth to tell, unnerved by the unusual experience of dealing with an applicant who looked him straight in the eye.

  ‘You are a citizen of that country?’

  For the first time the man hesitated. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Answer yes or no,’ said the prefect.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Religion?’

  ‘None.’

  The prefect stared. ‘You can be Christian, Saracen or Jew,’ he said.

  ‘I am none of those,’ said Palinor.

  ‘What are you then?’

  ‘Nothing. Myself.’

  ‘You won’t get a warrant, as yourself. For a Christian it is a mere formality; for Saracens and Jews there are quotas, I believe.’

  ‘I am not going to state a false allegiance for the sake of a form,’ said Palinor. ‘You must write none, and we shall see.’

  The prefect finished writing. ‘This will take some time,’ he said.

  ‘You will find me with the fishermen who rescued me,’ said Palinor, ‘I shall spend the time learning to mend nets.’

  ‘You will spend the time in the lock-up here,’ said the prefect. ‘I’m not having you roaming loose.’

  The stranger blenched slightly. ‘That is not reasonable,’ he said. ‘I have committed no crime, and you have no reason to suppose that I will. It would be an outrage to deprive me of liberty.’

  ‘A man of no religion might do anything,’ said the prefect. ‘What is to restrain him? But while you are in my province you won’t get the chance.’

  He clicked his fingers, and his servants hustled Palinor away.

  3

  The youth stood for some time just inside the cathedral door. It took a little while for the darkness within, after the glare of the great sunlit square outside, to resolve itself; for the arrays of pillars, the branching vault, the heavy elaboration of the altar, the tombs, the paintings, the lamps, the incense burners and racks of candles to
become clear to the widening pupils of those who entered. But the youth stood longer than that, quietly, just to one side of the door, staring. Those who walked past him, going in or out, gave him barely a glance: a country boy in wretched clothes, and botched sandals, seeming afraid – overawed, certainly. Eventually he began to move, padding softly down one of the aisles, looking.

  The cathedral had been built by men of austere vision. It was of plain grey stone, roofed by a soaring vault of simple and beautiful form. A sort of polyphony of shape – the arched openings between nave and aisles, and the arched windows which muted and tinted the light of the day before admitting it – struck the onlooker like Lenten music. Nevertheless, a later age had decorated it. Behind every altar, in every chapel in the aisles, in frenetic emphasis behind the high altar, in orgies of jewelled enrichment were columns of coloured marble, riotously foliate capitals, carved angels, painted canvasses of piously gesturing saints. One might have thought the same building had been occupied in successive centuries by adherents of two different religions.

  The youth seemed simply overpowered, uncomprehending. He spent many minutes standing in front of a picture of a man kneeling in an amphitheatre, in military attire, with his head about to be severed by an executioner. The executioner’s sword was raised high. Behind it, and behind a bloodthirsty crowd, was a statue of a wolf, with two children crouched underneath its belly, reaching for its dugs with chubby hands. The boy stood frowning and staring, biting his thumb. But whatever story the picture told, it was not one that anyone had ever told him, and at last he moved on. Eventually he found a side chapel with a picture he recognized: St Jeronimo in the wilderness, shabbily clothed, kneeling, holding a book, and with a lion and a wolf lying at his feet. The church in his village was dedicated to St Jeronimo, and boasted a simple picture of the saint. The youth knelt down, bowed his head, and prayed.

  Not for long; soon he crossed over to the opposite aisle and found what he was looking for: one of those little cupboards with curtained doors, in which confessions are made, and a line of penitents, kneeling on a bench, waiting. He joined them. When his turn came, he entered the little cubicle, knelt down, leaned his face to the grill behind which the priest sat unseen, and said, ‘Help me, Father!’

  ‘You must say, “Bless me Father, for I have sinned”,’ said the priest.

  ‘I have not come to confess. Please, help me,’ said the youth.

  ‘If you do not wish to confess, get out!’ said the priest. ‘How dare you? How dare you abuse the sacrament?’

  ‘Is there no mercy then? I implore you to help me!’

  ‘If it is not with your sins, I cannot help you. You must go to the appropriate authorities.’

  ‘There is a man at every gate who refuses me entry,’ said the youth. ‘And she will die.’ But he had accepted that the priest would not help him; flat despair dulled his voice, like the note of a cracked bell. The priest sighed, stood up, stepped out of his booth, reached into the penitents’ booth, and pulled the youth to his feet. There were no other penitents waiting – no further tales of lust and greed and cruelty to be told that afternoon.

  ‘People die every day, and there is nothing to be done about it,’ he said to the youth, taking in his poverty, his helpless demeanour.

  ‘But she will die unbaptized,’ the boy cried.

  Severo, cardinal prince of Grandinsula, on the death of his elder brother having come to unite in one person both worldly and spiritual authority, had little use for pomp or luxury, or any of the appurtenances of power. Compared to the power itself, any benefit he might draw from it in personal comfort, or in gorgeous ceremony, seemed to him almost comically vulgar and trivial. He had a palace in the cool of the mountains, where plentiful springs of fresh water flowed unfailingly, but he had never lived there for more than a few days in the hottest weather. He lived with his secretariat in rooms above the cloisters behind the cathedral, and held court in the princes’ palace occasionally, to decide civic appeals. When he received a foreign deputation in the palace, especially a barbaric one from a distant country, he sometimes put on his cardinal’s scarlet, and had the royal crown of Grandinsula – he had never worn it – carried in front of him, but he lived from day to day in a simple black soutane, like one of his village priests.

  His room was a whitewashed, barrel-vaulted cell, containing a narrow bed, a desk, a shelf of books, a small and roughcut cupboard to receive his clothes, and a prie-dieu, unadorned and with no cushion for the knees. Above the bed, opposite the prie-dieu, where he could contemplate it day and night, was a painting of the Harrowing of Hell. Every cell in the cloister had a painting; Severo had chosen this one for the subject, though the cell also had a window facing the sea, which admitted cool air and a view of the bay, and a door giving on to a balcony above the garden, where it was pleasant to walk. The awe in which his subjects held him was greatly increased by the impression that he lived austerely and plainly; in fact he had provided himself unstintingly with all that he needed.

  His plainness deceived the boy. Having told his tale three times already to an ascending sequence of important dignitaries, the third being the canon residentiary of the cathedral clergy, in a splendidly furnished office, the boy was sulky, and disinclined to tell it all over a fourth time to this humble person found writing in a simple cell.

  ‘If you’re sending me for mare’s milk,’ he said, miserably, ‘forget it. Let me go home.’

  The priest who had brought him, horrified at his lack of respect, forced the boy to his knees, threatening terrible punishments if he did not at once kneel to and obey his cardinal and his prince, and at once repeat his story, as he had been told. The boy knelt, but was reduced to terrified silence.

  ‘Where are you from?’ asked Severo.

  ‘Sant Jeronimo, Holiness,’ said the boy.

  ‘A long way. Have you walked to Ciudad?’ The boy nodded. ‘Has anyone fed you?’

  ‘No, Holiness.’

  ‘You must be very hungry,’ said Severo. To his priest he said, ‘What are you all thinking of? Give him a meal.’

  ‘Thank his Holiness at once, and come to the kitchen with me,’ said the priest.

  ‘No,’ said Severo. ‘Why do you speak roughly to him? Can’t you see that you scare him? Bring food here; we will eat in the garden. Bring a plentiful platter of plain food – no delicacies, just what he’s used to. Let me see . . . a quartern loaf of dark bread, and some cheese and olives, an orange, and a flagon of water. Quickly.’

  The priest withdrew. ‘What is your name?’ asked Severo, contemplating the boy. Someone washed and mended his clothes, worn though they were. His wrists jutted out of the sleeves of his outgrown shirt.

  ‘Jaime.’

  ‘Then come with me, Jaime. We will sit in the evening sun outside and talk, while we wait for them to bring supper. First tell me this do – they still pasture the sheep in the high sierra above Sant Jeronimo?’

  ‘That is where we found her,’ said the boy, eagerly, launching again into his story.

  When the servant brought the bread and relishes, the telling had reached the point where the nevados carried the snow-girl away down the mountain. Severo had listened with a grave expression. He stopped Jaime talking while he ate – ate hungrily, rapidly at first, and then slowly, spinning it out. In a while the boy offered the bread and olives. ‘Aren’t you going to have any, Holiness?’

  Gravely Severo took a hunk of bread, broke it in two, and gave half back to Jaime. Nobody he had ever broken bread with, such was his vow, would be less than a brother to him, or would know want while he had substance. The youth did not know that; he shared the food with his exalted companion out of the courtesy of peasants, who on the island never ate in the presence of one who was not eating. Severo took olives to eat with the bread and sat down beside the widow’s son on the bench.

  ‘To continue . . .’ he said.

  ‘It was a month, nearly, before my brother came for me, He had a new wife – did I te
ll you? – and I think he was sorry to leave her. When he came I was free to return to Sant Jeronimo, to my mother. I asked about the snow-girl as soon as I got home, and they said she was with Juan. They did not seem interested, Holiness. I set out to find Juan. I had a hard time; he was moving around – one town, then another town, always for market day. You know, Holiness, there is a leather market on Monday and then a fish market at Porto . . .’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Severo gently. ‘Where did you find her?’

  ‘It was stupid. I followed him all round the island – always a day late – and then caught up with him at home. Everywhere I went, people were grumbling about him. He had charged them to look at her, but they thought they had been cheated.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They paid to look at a wolf-child, but they thought they had seen an animal. When I caught up with him, I saw her again and I was not surprised. He had not washed her, or covered her. He is keeping her in the little cage they made to bring her down the mountain. She is starving. She refuses food. Holiness, she will eat only raw meat, and he will not give her any because he says it makes her savage. She has bitten him, more than once, and he no longer lets her out of the cage. So she is filthy. I do not think he can take her round the markets again, Holiness, because people are enraged at being, as they think, cheated, but he would not sell her to me for anything I could pay him. My mother would have pawned her rosary, but it was not enough. I implored him to give her raw meat, but he would not. All I could do was give her a little milk to drink, and come to find help . . .’

  The boy’s voice shook.

  ‘Would not the priest at Sant Jeronimo help you?’ enquired Severo. ‘Does he know about this?’

  ‘He knows. He did nothing. I thought if I came to Ciudad . . .’

  ‘And here you found all doors closed to you except that of the confessional? I suppose I am not surprised. My officials are beleaguered; they have too many requests, no doubt. But I am surprised at the priest at Sant Jeronimo. Are you telling me the truth, Jaime?’