Jonathan Levi - Septimania

But Malory hadn’t expected the destruction to reach as far as Rome. Outside Customs, he waited ten minutes, an hour for a driver, any driver, even Settimio. He joined the queue in the September heat and sat in the back of a Roman taxi for the first time in his life. Ruins. All he saw from the back seat were ruins, from the aqueducts to the Aurelian walls. The taxi drove past the Mattatoio in Testaccio, the crumbling slaughterhouse along the river, where once upon a time all the cattle of the Romans were carved and sliced to feed the imperial belly. There too smoke, if only from the afternoon dust. The taxi driver deposited Malory at the base of the Clivo di Rocca Savella. Malory pulled his suitcase up the cobblestones between the high walls that hid the villas on either side from the alleyway. He hadn’t walked up the Clivo in many years, had never noticed the scars of ancient wounds, the bricked-up archways of centuries, the rubble-filled omegas that had once led to other villas, other gardens perhaps. He passed a pair of Japanese girls heading down from the Aventino to the Tevere, to the Bocca della Verita, most likely, to pray to the goddess Audrey Hepburn. At the cancello to the Villa Septimania he stopped and rang the bell. He rang again. All was dark.

Malory sat for a good hour on a bench beneath the bitter oranges of the Giardino degli Aranci above the Villa. As the lights came on in St. Peter’s, he stood and wheeled his suitcase over to the parapet and looked down on the Tevere. The view wasn’t dissimilar from the view from the hidden garden of the Villa Septimania below. Except the view was public, open to anyone who turned right in front of the shaded portico of Santa Sabina and followed the gravel past semi-spliced teenage lovers and the occasional grandmother looking for a bit of orange zest for a torta. Below Malory, the late-summer plane trees shaded the sidewalk by the river. To his right, the Ponte Rotto and the arse end of the Isola Tiberina. How many times had he looked down at the hospital from his garden, the hospital where Louiza had given birth to their daughter? And for how many years had Malory neglected to see what was behind him — the massive buttress of Santa Sabina, whose cloister had housed that daughter, their Ottavia, for her first ten years.

Depending on how you looked.

Wasn’t that the way that MacPhearson had put it? Depending on how you looked, Ottavia was either his daughter or Tibor’s. Did that mean either Louiza’s or Cristina’s as well?

Was anything that MacPhearson said to him worth believing as gospel? Or was MacPhearson willing to say whatever if only Malory could lead him to the lost Louiza?

Wouldn’t Malory do the same?

An hour’s walk later, down from the hill of the Aventino, Malory sat in Santa Maria sopra Minerva — the church that the Dominicans had raised above the ancient Roman Temple dedicated to the Goddess of Wisdom. He took a seat in the second pew away from the altar — the nineteenth-century loincloth still hiding the operative bits of Michelangelo’s Savior from the worshippers — and thought about all the knowledge spinning away from him like the blades of so many windmills. Louiza gone, MacPhearson using him as bait to find her when he hadn’t the slightest clue where to look. Septimania dark and barred, no sign of Settimio — and he didn’t have the slightest idea why.

“ Signore ?”

“ Sì ?” Malory looked up. A white-robed friar, possibly the same age as the long-gone Fra Mario who had greeted Malory when he first walked into Santa Maria twenty-three years earlier, possibly wearing Fra Mario’s steel-rimmed glasses.

“ Siamo pronti. ”

“ Pronti? ” Ready for what? Malory was grateful, at least, that someone recognized him, that the past twenty-three years hadn’t been a tale within a dream within the filigreed lantern of some Arabian djinni. He picked up his suitcase and followed the friar past the Michelangelo Salvatore, past the tomb of headless and thumbless Santa Caterina into the Carafa Chapel. All was familiar. Filippino Lippi’s Annunciation , with Thomas Aquinas introducing the scrofulous Cardinal Carafa to the Virgin Mary. Above, the angels greeted the rising Virgin. To the right, Thomas Aquinas gently but firmly defeated a rogue’s gallery of heretics. Here in a yellow robe was Arius who said there was only one God and Jesus was just a very talented little boy. There in scarlet was Sabellius who preached that Jesus was just one of many blinks of God’s eye. Between them Mani, a Persian in the days before the Shah and Khomeini, who believed in Good and Evil, which was one god too many for some. Dante led a chorus of others who denied the laws of the Church and the truth of the Trinity as strenuously if with less discretion than Isaac Newton. Chief among them — the real serpent that Aquinas had to crush beneath his feet — was a white-haired, white-bearded old man holding a scroll. “ Sapientia vincit malitia, ” it read — Knowledge conquers evil. His entire mission, the mission of the Dominicans, was to show that knowledge alone was powerless against evil. There was something greater than knowledge.

“Bernini’s elephant knew, Minerva knew, before they dropped a basilica down on top of her.” Tibor had jerked his chin in the direction of the piazza on Malory’s first trip to the chapel many years before. “There’s knowledge and there’s knowledge.” Malory’s mission at the Villa Septimania, and perhaps even before, was to prove Aquinas wrong. There was a knowledge, hidden somewhere in the trinity of Newton, Louiza, and the Pip, that would — if not raise the dead and the Twin Towers — show the One True Rule that guides the universe.

Two pews had been set up for a service. The friar showed Malory to a seat in the second, his back to the altar. With the Annunciation on his left, the Triumph over the Heretics rose directly in front of him. Malory wondered whether any of the kings of Septimania thought of the Triumph the way he did. Not just as the triumph of the Dominican way of thinking over the Arian Heresy, the Gnostics, the Manicheans. It was the triumph of the artist, the triumph of Lippi — the illegitimate product of a friar and a nun. It was the triumph of perspective — the desire to fit within a single frame both the big picture and the little, the cosmology of galaxies millions of light years in diameter and the quantum theory that mumbles about things too small to mumble about. It was a two-dimensional solution to a three-dimensional problem, a painted path to distant solutions that one could enjoy from the comfort of a bum-polished pew. Perspective was the discretion that Settimio had preached to him for more than two decades. For several minutes, Malory let himself relax beneath the illuminated splendor of the fresco of his friend Aquinas, with all its little details and symbols that made it feel like a member of the family — as complex as that concept might ordinarily seem to Malory.

And then Malory noticed other people in the chapel.

Malory noticed the coffin.

Malory thought back to the last funeral he had attended — twenty-three years before in the Church of St. George, Whistler Abbey, the moment before the adventure began, when he was still so full of the discovery of Louiza that he had improvised a love duet on the organ at the funeral of his own grandmother. And although he wondered — perhaps for one of those unmeasurable quantum moments — who was in the coffin beneath the fresco of Thomas and the Heretics, in short order he knew. No driver at the airport, a locked gate at the Villa Septimania.

Settimio was dead.

Settimio, who had guarded almost every movement since Malory first straddled the Driver’s Vespa for his extraordinary maiden voyage from the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli to the Cappella Sistina. Settimio, who had awakened Malory and bid him goodnight for twenty-three years. Settimio, who had fed him tea and scones for breakfast, who had ordered books and computers, had overseen the cooking and the cleaning, the weeding and the waxing of Septimania. Settimio who had devised his own algorithm to filter out the unnecessary and bring Malory only what he wanted before he knew that he wanted it. Settimio, who had imported the distant world into Malory’s Sanctum Sanctorum.