Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"Did Max tell you that?"

"No, Mr. Verloren van Themaat."

"And you remembered that."

"Yes, why not? I hardly ever forget anything."

Onno looked at the statue for a while, lost in thought.

"That's the spot where they burned him as a heretic." He pointed with his stick at the crowd between the stalls. "Do you know what all that is? All that is also what it is not."

"I don't understand."

"The world will now always also be the Max-less world."

Quinten knew that Max had meant more to his father than to him, that long ago there had been a friendship between them of a kind that he had never had or would ever have with anyone. He looked at his father out of the corner of his eye. His head had sunk slightly forward; there was something elusive about the closeness of the hairy face with the sunglasses, as if at the same time it were too far away to reach.

The waiter came out of the cafe and greeted Onno like an old acquaintance, calling him "Signor Enrico." As he wiped the tabletop with a damp cloth, he glanced at Quinten with slightly raised eyebrows.

"This is my son, Mauro," said Onno in Italian. "Quintilio."

Mauro shook hands with him, without the ironic expression disappearing from his face. It was clear that he only half believed it; the old eccentric had obviously taken up with a rent boy, on the Via Appia — but he didn't begrudge him that.

"Everyone knows me here as Mr. Enrico," said Onno, when Mauro had gone inside. "Enrico Delius," with a diffident note in his voice. "They think I'm an Austrian from the Tyrol."

Quinten nodded again with an expression that seemed to say that it was all quite natural. "That Mauro gave me a rather funny look." He told his father about the advances made to him in Venice and Florence, and Onno asked:

"Didn't you leave some great love behind in Holland?"

"No," said Quinten curtly.

That didn't exist for him, and he didn't want to talk about it. Onno was about to say that he should keep it that way, since every love ended inexorably in heartbreak; but he decided not to encumber Quinten with his own gloom. That belonged not to the beginning but to the end of a life. They sat in silence and looked at the swarming activity in the market.

When the waiter put down caffe latte and croissants at their table, Onno said: "I suddenly fancy rissoles again."

"I like these much better. If only Granny could see us sitting down to breakfast like this."

"Have you already let her know that we've met?"

"No. I haven't written at all yet."

"Perhaps you should keep it to yourself for now."

"Why?"

"I don't know.. otherwise your uncles and aunts will get to hear of it, and I'm not sure I want that yet."

Quinten nodded. He was also glad to be able to share a secret with his father.

Onno rested his elbows on his knees and dipped his bread in the coffee. He still felt at a loss, but suddenly he asked: "What would you say to moving in with me, Quinten? I don't know how long you plan to stay in Rome, but it's ridiculous being stuck in a hotel somewhere when you can live with me, isn't it?" When Quinten looked up in astonishment, he went on: "Let's buy a camp bed. You can pick up your things, and then that problem's solved."

A broad smile appeared on Quinten's face. This was it at last: he was living with his father!

He had never been with Onno for so long at a stretch before. Now they went into town together every day. Entering St. Peter's Square for the first time, Quinten was struck by the obelisk in the center of Bernini's embracing colonnades, more than by the awe-inspiring front of the basilica, which also obeyed the Pantheon principle.

"Well, what do you make of that?" said Onno. "An Egyptian obelisk in the heart of Christendom. This is where they crucified Peter upside down, in the circus of Nero. You find obelisks everywhere in Rome."

"Perhaps," said Quinten, "that might be connected with the Egyptian exile that Moses liberated the Jews from."

"Who can say?" said Onno, laughing. "But that connection can only be grasped with your inimitable way of thinking."

Quinten looked at the long shadow cast by the obelisk, like a sundial, and then at the sides without inscriptions. "There's nothing on them. There should be something written on them."

Onno focused his eyes on the smooth granite, pointed at the top with his stick, and then a little lower with each word:

" 'Paut neteroe her resch sep sen ini Asar sa Heroe men ab mad kheroe sa Ast auau Asar.' That means—"

"I don't want to know. It sounds much too beautiful for that."

Everything became new again for Onno, too. In the past he had been in Rome repeatedly — the last time as a minister of state: preceded by police outriders with blaring sirens, a government car had borne him straight through all the red lights from the airport to the Quirinal; but since he had been living there, he had not left his own district.

In the colossal basilica he helped Quinten translate the gigantic words that stood in a circle in the cupola above the high altar:

TV ES PETRVS ET SVPER HANC PETRAM

AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM

"At first sight it seems to say: 'Thou art Peter and on this Peter I shall build my church.' But you need to know that petra is a Greek word meaning 'rock.' Peter's grave is supposed to be under this altar, and hence the church is built on it — not only this building, but the Catholic Church as a whole. The popes regard themselves as his successors."

They visited the Vatican museums and the precious shrine of the Sistine Chapel, where they were allowed to talk only in whispers but where the cardinals behind their Golden Wall of course screamed and shouted when they had to elect a new pope from among their number, at least to the extent that they had not nodded off to sleep dribbling. On seeing Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, which had emerged in bright colors from the dark-brown candle smoke of ages, Onno suddenly remembered the neon Communist version on the Rampa in Havana eighteen years before, when everything had begun. But he did not mention that.

"Do you think Adam had a navel?" asked Quinten, as they came back out. "He didn't have a mother, did he?"

"It's just as well you're not a Dutch vicar. They've branded each other as heretics on that kind of issue for centuries."

Quinten also took him to all kinds of places where he had never been, such as the Aventine, "to look through the keyhole." In a quiet district, on the edge of the hill that dropped steeply down to the Tiber, there was an oblong excrescence from the street with walls on three sides, shaded by cypresses and palms. The Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta could scarcely be called a square; the space was more like an unfinished temple.

There was no one there, and Quinten was immediately seized by a shudder, whose origin he knew: the Citadel. Onno saw that something was preoccupying him, but did not ask him about it; Quinten simply said that it was a design of Piranesi's. While Onno sat down on a stone bench to allow his dizziness to pass a little, Quinten started climbing along the wall, which was twelve or fifteen feet high, glancing at his compass. On the long southern side and the shorter western side it was interrupted by obelisks, stelae, pla-quettes, and mysterious ornaments in such a strange kind of style, or non-style, that he could scarcely believe his eyes. Lyres, globes, points, helmets, crosses, swords, wings, panpipes. Set in the northern side, the wall was the gateway to the monastery of the Knights of Malta, a broad theatrical structure that at first sight reminded him of Palladio, but on second sight was as odd as the other constructions, with its Manneristic ornaments, blind alcoves like windows, and the row of great-urns on the roof.