Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

Adrian tried to look as though it had never occurred to him to pray to any saint for purity because it came naturally to him.

All the way home with the relic in his pocket, Adrian wondered how much the saints in heaven knew about the sins of people on earth. Did God in his mercy keep all the holy virgins and the innocent saints like St Gabriel from knowing about the foul sins of impurity committed every day? Or was the news of each sin broadcast all over heaven as soon as it was committed? (‘News Flash: Adrian Sherd, Catholic boy of Accrington, Melbourne, Australia, abused himself at 10.55 this evening.’) There were people already in heaven who knew him. (‘Yes, he was my grandson, I’m sorry to say,’ says old Mr Bracken.) If Adrian managed to break the habit at last and get to heaven in the end, he would have to hide from his relatives.

But then there was the General Judgement. Even if no one in heaven had heard of his sins before then, every person who had lived on earth since Adam would learn about them on Judgement Day.

Adrian Sherd walked up to the platform between two stern angels. The crowd of spectators reached beyond the horizon in every direction. But even the farthest soul in the crowd heard his name when it was broadcast over the loudspeakers.

Towering above the platform was a huge indicator like the scoreboard at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Beside each of the Ten Commandments was an instrument like the speedo in a car. The crowd gasped when the digits started tumbling over to show Sherd’s score for the Sixth Commandment. The blurred numerals whirled into the hundreds. Somewhere in the crowd his Aunt Kathleen shrieked with horror. This was the boy she had wanted to be a priest, the boy she had once enrolled in the Archconfraternity of the Divine Child, the hypocrite whose filthy hands had touched the sacred dust from St Gabriel’s tomb.

Brother Methodius told the Latin class one morning that the Romans in the great days of the Republic reached the highest level of culture and virtue that a pagan civilisation could possibly attain. Many of their greatest and wisest citizens were hardly distinguishable from Christian gentlemen.

Adrian Sherd did not believe the brother. He knew that one people did not conquer another just to give them paved roads or a new legal system. Adrian knew what power was for. If the citizens of Melbourne had made him their dictator he would have gone straight to a mannequins’ school and ordered all the women to undress.

The Romans were no different from himself. Among the back pages of his Latin textbook was a story entitled The Rape of the Sabine Women. (Adrian had waited all year for his Latin class to reach this story. But they progressed so slowly through the textbook that he suspected Brother Methodius of deliberately holding them back to avoid the embarrassing story.) Adrian often studied the illustration above the story and even tried to translate the Latin text on his own. Of course it was all watered down to make it suitable for schoolboys. The Roman soldiers only led the women away by their wrists. And even the Latin word rapio was translated in the vocabulary at the back of the book as ‘seize, snatch up, carry away.’ But Adrian was not deceived.

Whenever he read the story of a battle, Adrian barracked for the enemies of Rome. He had no sympathy for Roman boys of his own age. As soon as they started wearing the toga of manhood they could do whatever they liked with their father’s slaves. But the young men of Capua or Tarentum or Veii had troubles like his. When they crept out as scouts towards the suburbs of Rome they saw young Publius or Flaccus enjoying himself in his orchard or courtyard with some young woman captured from a tribe like their own. But of course their own people were not strong enough to capture slaves.

But when the Roman legions finally invested their city, the young fellows saw every night, from the tops of their threatened walls, the goings-on in the Romans’ comfortable camp. How many of them must have abused themselves for the last time when they lay down briefly between turns on watch and then fallen in battle next morning — killed by the very fellows whose pleasures they had envied so often.

As city after city was conquered in Italy and Gaul and Germany, everyone had the chance to own slaves. The only people who still kept up the habit of solitary sin were the slaves themselves. Some of them did it thinking of the flaxen-haired maidens they had once known on the banks of the Rhine and would never see again. Others did it peeping around the marble columns at the bare-armed Roman matrons teaching their daughters to spin and weave.

And then came Adrian’s hero, a man sworn to destroy Rome and avenge the raped slavegirls and wretched self-abusers.

Hannibal himself came from a lustful land. (It was later to be the home of the Great St Augustine, a sex maniac in his youth, but destined to be the holy Bishop of Hippo and a worthy patron saint for boys struggling to break the habit of impurity.) But as a young man, the Carthaginian had turned his back on all the pagan delights of North Africa. He spent the rest of his life wandering round the countryside of Italy far from the luxuries of the cities.

It was probably a blessing that he was one-eyed. When he led his army to the gates of Rome he would have seen only dimly from his siege-towers the beauty of the women inside the walls that he would never breach. Not that anything would have tempted him to give up his ascetic way of life. It was clear from his superhuman courage and endurance that he was the absolute master of his passions.

After the defeat of Hannibal, the Romans did what they liked all over the civilised world. The only citizens who refused to join in the orgies were the early Christians, huddled by candlelight in their catacombs deep under Rome. Sometimes they could hardly hear the priest’s words during mass for the squeals and grunts coming from overhead as a burly patrician subdued a slavegirl in his triclinium , or chased her naked into the pool in his atrium. It was no wonder the Christians preached against slavery.

Outside the Pax Romana were the primitive tribes on the Baltic coast or in the darkest Balkans who could only afford one wife each. When Latin writers described these people as barbarians or hinted at their savage practices, they were probably referring to the habit of self-abuse, which the Romans themselves would have all but forgotten.

But the barbarians had their day at last. When the Goths and Vandals sacked Rome, the lucky ones who got there first leaped on the stately Roman matrons and even the trembling Christian virgins with all the ferocity of men who had been shut out for centuries from the delights of the Empire. Those who were still hurrying towards Rome saw the flames rising over the Seven Hills and sinned by themselves one last time at the thought of what must have been happening in the Eternal City (and what they would soon be enjoying themselves).

During the Dark Ages, bestial tribesmen from Central Asia roamed around Italy, grabbing the ex-slavegirls and orphaned patrician girls who were still wandering bewildered beneath the cypresses on the grass-grown Appian Way. Those who missed out on the women abused themselves in front of the shameless murals and mosaics in the crumbling villas or, if they could read, over the scandalous novels and poems of the corrupt last days of the Empire.

But as time passed, some people were sickened by the sexual excesses. Pious men and women went into the desert and lonely places to found monasteries and convents. The Christian way of life was gradually established in the lands once ruled by the Romans. And the sex maniacs, like the wolves and bears and wild boars of Europe, had to flee into the swamps of Lithuania and the glens of Albania and go back to their furtive habits of old.