Jonathan Levi - Septimania

At the top of the staircase, the Guard turned right and then left with the Windsor-knotted Settimio and corduroyed Malory in their midst. They marched through a chamber of battle scenes before turning left past burning Troy and a host of other Raphaels. Malory stared up at The School of Athens. There were Aristotle and Plato out for a stroll, there was hemlock-swilling Socrates lying on the stairs and next to him a bewigged friend — could that be Newton? Isaac Newton popping up again today, this time in a Raphael painted over a hundred years before Newton’s birth? A second look was impossible. The phalanx moved forward into another corridor and then stopped. A door opened. The Swiss Guard stood aside.

“ In bocca al lupo ,” Settimio said, patting Malory — with the proper fraction of respect — on the shoulders and propelling him across a threshold into the beginning of an explanation.

There were a hundred of them, men. And Malory knew immediately — it was as impossible not to know as it was impossible to believe — from their scarlet capes and scarlet caps and generally ancient composures, that they were cardinals, well before he looked up at the shadowy figures on the ceiling and realized he was in the Sistine Chapel. There was a moment of awe approaching tranquility — a moment, looking back, that Malory wished he could have prolonged into a minute, an hour, a lifetime of gawking. There was a moment when the splendor of the caps and capes and frescoes and marble made him feel immaculately invisible, shielded and safe in a bottomless curiosity, alone with his corduroy jacket and Kit Bag in the Sistine Chapel without busloads of tourists but with a hundred-odd scarlet-beanied tour guides, each of whom Malory was sure had his own peculiar but culturally stimulating Unified Field Theory, his own cardinal interpretation of the origins of the universe. Instead, Malory felt immediately and literally drenched in a deluge of biblical embarrassment. It was worse than his first day of school. It was worse than his first mass, his first organ concert, and far worse than his first, very recent love-making. It wasn’t that Malory was embarrassed by his lack of familiarity with the frescoes that lined the walls — the story of Moses on one side, the story of Jesus on the other, and the Last Judgment behind him. He had been brought up believing that Moses and Jonah, whose huge portrait peered down on him from the ceiling, were merely Jesus in disguise — that the Savior was waiting until just the right moment to reveal himself. This, after all, was the bread and butter of the sermons he had sat through for decades as he waited to play the organ. No, the embarrassment was at the cardinals. These are cardinals, Malory thought. These are the cardinals. The College of Cardinals, all the cardinals of the world. And they are all looking at me, sweaty and unbathed, smelling of Dominicans and Louiza and hospital, as if they’d been waiting for me, as if they are waiting for me, waiting for me to do something.

And then the thought entered his head, he didn’t know how, although in the embarrassment of the moment he might have readily voted for divine intervention — the organ! The organ! The organ, of course! Fra Mario had said — what was it? — Forse oggi. Forse oggi , perhaps today. Today the cardinals were going to make the decision, perhaps they had already done so. Today they were going to choose the next pope, and they couldn’t do so — how could they? — without a freshly-tuned organ on which to proclaim their Hosannas and Alleluias. There is a certain urgency, Settimio had said. Little wonder. Forget this business of his grandmother’s inheritance. He was who he was, what he always had been — if not the best, well then, a damned-fine organ tuner. Word had got round, through Fra Mario and Settimio, that he was in town. The Vatican network moved in strange ways, and presto here he was and, lucky for them, he had his Universal Organ Tuner in his pocket, fresh from its triumphal rescue of Tibor. He looked up — the Last Judgment loomed before him. And on the ceiling above, the finger of God touched the finger of Adam just as he had touched that tiny finger through the translucent belly of Louiza an hour before. Malory pulled his Kit Bag snug around his shoulder and turned to look for the organ.

At the time, he had no idea what that turn meant. He had no idea that the turn, far from being innocent, was the decisive moment in the oggi that Fra Mario had mentioned only a few hours earlier. It was only later that Malory discovered that a key part of his inheritance, along with Settimio and the Driver and the Chapbook with Newton’s declaration of his discovery of the One True Rule, was the rank of cardinal. It was only later that Malory discovered that the honor came with neither church nor notoriety, but with the right to wear the same scarlet cap and cape, although since the title was shrouded in secrecy, Malory was only allowed to wear them in the privacy of his own room and not even in the presence of Settimio or the Driver.

Much more importantly, Malory had inherited the unique power to cast the deciding vote in a deadlocked conclave. After seven ballots, the papal conclave was still unable to decide on a successor to poor John Paul I. They had called Settimio. Settimio had brought Malory. And Malory’s turn, the turn of the unknowing, untutored Secret Cardinal towards what was, in fact, a perfectly tuned organ, would in the future be known as The Turn and become enshrined in legend and archive of Vatican history. As he turned, Malory found himself looking into the sympathetic face of the Polish cardinal, who had the great good fortune to be standing between Malory and the organ. Malory’s turn, his pivot, his awkward pirouette, his random ecclesiastical spin-the-bottle, chose this Polish Cardinal Wojtyla as the new Bishop of Rome, the soon-to-be John Paul II, as neatly as Louiza had found the Pip.

Such knowledge only came to Malory gradually. His official work done, Malory’s innocent walk to the organ was gently deflected towards a door in the back of the chapel. Another set of arms, these ones clad in the somber shade of deepest black of the Vatican functionaries, now put in motion the machinery designed to trumpet the announcement of the new pope to the visible world. They led Malory down a marble passageway and around to an ancient lift. Malory stepped forward into the cage and once again turned to find the chosen cardinal, the smiling Pole. The rest of the old men, the cardinals, stayed behind, or, as Malory was to discover later, went directly to the balcony of the basilica overlooking the piazza to await their new pastor.

The Pole smiled. Malory smiled back but looked over his shoulder, searching for Settimio. Alone, the two men descended through a hole in the floor that gradually became the hole in a cupola of another chapel. The elevator stopped. Another black-clad functionary opened the gate. Together, still smiling, Malory and the Pole walked from the elevator. He knew where he was, he recognized this statue, this Michelangelo, knew this mother, this boy, this dead child cradled in his mother’s arms. He stood for a moment, stripped hopeless with love and memory. The memory of Louiza, the warmth of her body against his as he dashed from basilica to hospital, mixed with a longing for another lap. He imagined a return to a lap and a mother that he must, once upon a time, have known, a beginning when there was no difference between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the mundane and the miraculous. Malory’s longing for this original enlapment pierced him so thoroughly that he could have wished for death if death were the requirement for such a peace.

But the functionaries had other plans for him. Two of them brought a cape, a green cape in a color that reminded Malory of that childhood garden in the South of France. Two others reached to remove his corduroy jacket and his Kit Bag. But Malory was not going to be parted from the Pip again and tugged back. It was the struggle of a second. But in that struggle, it wasn’t the Pip, but the book, the Newton Chapbook, the strange diary that Malory had received from his grandmother on that March afternoon in the second pew of St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey, that flew from the Kit Bag into the hands of the smiling Pole.