Jonathan Buckley - The Great Concert of the Night

For the past couple of days William has been washing cars. You can get away with paying people so little nowadays, he informs me, that a hand-wash is cheaper than a drive-through car wash. He’s making more than he’s been managing to get on the streets recently, but only a bit more. There are better jobs around, he knows. ‘Better, but still rubbish.’ There’s a vacancy he knows about, in the kitchen of a care home. He could do the work, but they want someone with experience, and a proper address. ‘And you’ve got to be confident, friendly and enthusiastic,’ he says. ‘I could do friendly. At a push.’ He’s sleeping on a different sofa this week, in Shaws Way, in the flat of a friend of the friend whose sofa he was using last week. This lad’s girlfriend works as a cleaner, and she suggested to William that he should check out the company’s website, because they were always looking for new people. ‘So I checked it out,’ he tells me, and he starts to laugh. ‘“We are seeking enthusiastic and reliable candidates. You will need to be able to demonstrate how you have delivered great customer service and how you meet our excellent standards,”’ he recites. ‘They always want enthusiasm. For fuck’s sake – enthusiasm. Has anyone in the entire history of the universe ever been enthusiastic about shoving a mop around? And references, on headed paper. Where am I supposed to get references from?’

I commiserate, and give him money. I could afford to give him more, of course; much more. But I allow myself to accede to arguments opposed to generosity. William would squander it. Thus I excuse myself.

In Adeline’s letter of September 15th, the one in which she wrote ‘I love you’ for the first time, she informs her beloved that her father wonders if Charles’s willingness to abandon the Church of England might not be an expression of his love for Adeline rather than of a newly awakened acceptance of the doctrines of Rome. He holds Charles Perceval’s intelligence in the highest esteem, but is of the opinion that knowledge does not ‘form the mind’ – it only ‘occupies’ it. ‘Apprehension of the unseen is our foundation,’ her father maintained, as I quoted, while Imogen scanned the letter. The Church of England, he argued, was a church of no doctrine; it was a ministry of the state, and its theology was an accident of history. For his part, Charles’s father was for some time of the view that his son had been bewitched by this young woman; how else could one explain his sudden conversion to the ‘bogus mysteries’ and ‘perfumed ceremonials’ of the Roman church?

Following Francesca’s lead, I come upon the story of Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini. Though he served as secretary to no fewer than seven popes, Bracciolini seems to have had a highly developed taste for earthly pleasures. In the spring of 1416 he visited the spa at Baden, and was much taken by what he found there. In a letter from Baden, he wrote of his delight at having discovered a place where men and women bathed together, in a state of undress. A ‘school of Epicureans’ had been established there, he wrote. ‘I think this must be the place where the first man was created.’ In January of the following year, at an unspecified German monastery, Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini made an even more significant discovery: a manuscript of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, a work of the highest reputation, but lost for centuries. In a monastery; the only known copy.

Full-price visitors to the Sanderson-Perceval museum today: seventeen. Revenue: £85. Reduction of visitor numbers since the introduction of the £5 charge: sixty percent.

First evening in Rome. In the park of the Villa Borghese for the approach of dusk. Air warm and motionless; the pine trees standing in shadow, but their branches full of light; grass turned briefly to the colour of coral. To accompany this scene of urban pastoral, the soft drone of traffic, with now and then the call of a horn. A large and handsome dog, such as a shepherd might have employed. A good-looking young woman and a good-looking young man pause at a statue. The climate, the light, the shadows, the trees, the beautiful lovers, arm in arm – from these elements arises a melancholic well-being, a nostalgia with no object, a mood of all-accepting surrender that is nothing but a mood, but sufficient.

In Santa Maria Maggiore. Looking up from my guidebook, I noticed a man who was sitting in a chair against one of the columns on the opposite side of the nave – fiftyish, well dressed. He was leaning forward, with his forearms on his thighs and his hands joined, not praying, it seemed, but in thought. His eyes were open and trained on his hands. Tourists passed close to him, incessantly, chattering, but he was not distracted. His demeanour was that of someone in contemplation of a problem to which no solution was apparent; there was a heaviness in his gaze, suggestive of guilt; from time to time, the fingers of his right hand closed on his wedding ring and turned it. An obvious deduction. For five minutes or more he sat there, gazing at his hands. When a woman came out of the confessional box he stood up, straightened his tie, and entered. I continued to read the account of Santa Maria Maggiore. It’s an old guidebook; ten pages are devoted to the church. I had time to read all of it before the well-dressed man emerged. Evidently his sins were weighty. At last the curtain was drawn back and he stepped out. He did not look like a man who had been relieved of a burden; he was still unhappy. But he appeared to be a little clearer of mind; there was the possibility of a solution, perhaps. Standing by the chair in which he had been sitting, he adjusted his cuffs, as though in readiness for an important meeting. He walked down the nave to a pew that was free of tourists; there he sat down and bowed his head.

The wreckage of the forum. Over there, the remains of a building that was raised five centuries before Christ; and there, another remnant of the ancient city, built a thousand years later. Columns, steps, walls, stones. The chaos is harmonious; the dusk applies its tone to every stone and brick; nothing dominates; the eye moves through the scene unhindered. The inscriptions, incomprehensible to most of us, are now little more than decorative embellishments. Stopping at one of the arches, I admired the beautiful lettering. Imogen had imagined a performance: hundreds of people deployed around the forum, reading aloud from Virgil, Julius Caesar, Pliny, Plutarch, Catullus, Seneca, et cetera; a cacophony of speeches, letters, memoirs, poems, epitaphs. We, the living, would become the intruders in the city of the dead.

An unexpected diversion in the church of San Crisogono – the shrine of the Blessed Anna Maria Taigi, died 1837, beatified 1920. Until today, unknown to me. Having renounced the frivolity of her youth, for almost fifty years Anna Maria was favoured with visions of a ‘kind of sun’ that was crowned with thorns, and through the agency of this sun-like object she was able to see into the future and ‘the secret of hearts’. She experienced ecstasies, of course, usually while receiving Holy Communion, but also at less exalted moments of the day, such as when doing the laundry. (She was married and had children. ‘First and foremost, she was a wife, mother and daughter.’) Anna Maria witnessed shipwrecks in distant seas and shared from afar in the sufferings of missionaries in China and Arabia. She observed ‘the eternal lot of the dead’. Furthermore, ‘the grace of healing was bestowed upon this humble woman.’ Sometimes she healed the sick with the touch of her hand, but often she effected her cures by means of an image of Our Lady, or a relic, or oil from a votive lamp that she kept burning on the altar at which she worshipped at home. An example: a ‘lady of the princely house of the Albani’ was dying of cancer of the womb until Anna prescribed a drop of oil from her lamp; the afflicted lady applied the oil to her skin, and the following night the tumour disappeared. The Blessed Anna Maria Taigi died on June 9th, 1837, and the procession of pilgrims commenced almost immediately, despite the outbreak of cholera that had struck Rome. We are told that the Lord had promised her that the cholera would not strike before her death. As soon as she expired, ‘the scourge broke out’.