Chapter 10 #5
Liam is also close to the ground, on his hands and knees, in the attitude of prayer, but he is in fact wielding a scrubbing brush and the hem of his robe is soaked in soapy water.
He is on retreat in Rome, and has been instructed to clean the orange-brown terracotta tiles of the covered quadrangle, so he is working backwards.
Scrubbing, sluicing, scrubbing, sluicing.
Three other brothers—scholastics, like him, in the secundi stage of their training—are similarly engaged on the quadrangle’s adjoining sides.
For the first thirty days of his stay at the college in Rome, Liam has been instructed to remain silent.
He must speak to no one save his assigned spiritual master, and then only in Latin.
He must spend his days exclusively in prayer, meditation, study and also menial offices, such as the cleaning of the college.
Later today, he will be required to memorise a portion of papal bullae.
Breathing hard, Liam sits back on his heels to rinse his brush in the bucket, and to wipe the perspiration from his hairline.
He is aware that he is smiling. Despite the tedium of this most menial of tasks, his heart is ticking away inside him, like a well-wound watch.
Ever since he arrived in Rome, staggering off the boat after a journey of four days, during which he was levelled by seasickness, he has felt suffused with excitement, with bliss.
It must be, he knows, for he has been told so by his secundi master, his vocation at work; the delight he feels is the deliverance inherent in serving God. How he welcomes this sign.
He moves his brush back and forth among the bucket’s bubbles, gazing out at the branches of the four trees in the quadrangle.
Planted at a decorous distance from each other, each to a corner, they have leaves thick and lustrous, with blossoms opening themselves to the sun.
The scent that comes from these blooms at nightfall is intoxicatingly sweet.
In a few weeks’ time, when the petals have fallen, oranges will start to grow in their place.
Liam can hardly wait. They will be green at first, he has heard, and that colour will gradually give way to a bright sunshine hue that signals ripeness, readiness to harvest. By that time, he knows, his retreat will be at an end.
He will then be spending his mornings at lectures in philosophy, logic, mathematics, theology, and his afternoons doing “works.”
It is the “works” that intrigue Liam the most. In pairs or threes, he and other secundi will be sent out into the city to visit the poor, or to teach in schools, to help in hospitals, to assist in the churches or cathedrals, in whatever capacity is required.
Behind him, he hears approaching feet—another brother, the reverend father, a spiritual master?
—and Liam startles out of his reverie, leaning forward to resume his scrubbing.
The tiles are worn and cracked, hoarding centuries of dirt in the gaps between them.
However hard Liam scrubs, there is always more grime.
The footsteps come closer, then pass him by. Liam doesn’t lift his head to greet the man—this is forbidden during these early weeks—but he glances up to see the gown of the philosophy master disappearing around the corner, to see that there is now a trail of dusty footprints for him to clean away.
Liam sighs but refuses to let this dent his mood.
How could he, when the square of sky he can see above the orange trees is the purest lapis, when he will be finished with this task in less than an hour, when he can smell the scent of rosemary and baking bread coming from the kitchens, when the city of Rome is waiting for him, just outside the college walls?
He can feel it there, pulsing in the heat, its streets and houses lying in wait for him.
In only twenty more days—no, twenty-one—he will be walking through the college’s large wooden doors.
He will be permitted to draw back the iron bolts and step out.
He and his fellow scholastics will then be free to move along the streets of which he caught only the briefest glimpse the night they arrived.
He has read that Rome has ruins of ancient temples and courthouses and villas and amphitheatres.
That there is a cathedral with a hole in the centre of its dome, through which you can look up to Heaven.
The Tiber river runs through the city’s heart, how Liam is longing to see it, and crossing it is a bridge with stone angels standing like God’s earthly soldiers along its sides.
And a chapel with a painted ceiling, and a piazza filled with flower-sellers, and a church around every corner, each with its own bell-tower, all of which chime more or less together on the hour.
Liam listens for their song at night, as he lies in his bunk.
For now, however, he must clean this floor.
Liam dips his brush and returns to the scrubbing with a new vigour. Only twenty-one more days.
Every night, Enda sleeps in the leaf-filled hollow under the bench. She crawls out before daylight, washes herself as best she can in the fountain, then takes herself off, before the park-keeper sees her.
She looks for work tirelessly, asking in the cafés and restaurants, presenting herself at the back doors of smart houses, knocking on the gate of a factory, then a paper mill.
The problem, as it becomes clear to her, is that she has no letters of reference and she doesn’t know a single person who can vouch for her.
Also, she looks odd, she knows, with her man’s jacket, her cropped hair, and her incongruous embroidered skirt.
As the weeks go by, she becomes more and more shabby and unkempt, more pinched and cold and desperate.
She plays her fiddle on street corners, her cap placed on the pavement, into which people drop pennies, if she’s lucky, so she can buy a roll at the bakery, even a cup of tea.
But the nights are cold and her fingers are stiff and split, and she is often too scared by noises to sleep; her increasingly dejected air puts people off.
On an unseasonably frosty evening, Enda cannot face another night in the park. She hasn’t the spirit for it, for climbing over the rails and lying in a bed of soil like an animal.
Enda wanders the streets, her mind dulled, her body aching, her feet frozen to numbness inside their boots.
She turns down a narrow lane, then comes out onto one of the city’s step-streets, where people are sitting behind their windows, beside their hearths or at the tables of restaurants.
There must be a place for me, she is thinking, there must be.
There is a noise to her left, a whooping and a gust of merriment, and she sees a group of men coming down the steps, two or three at a time.
They are shoving at each other, jostling, and when they see her, they stop.
One says something to her, not in French but in some other language, and the others laugh, and Enda sees that she might be in trouble.
Without thinking about it, she steps through the door of a restaurant, into its lit and warm fug, where people are eating and drinking and talking, as if nothing difficult has ever happened to them.
A waiter comes towards her, scowling, looking her up and down, taking in her filthy skirt, her wild hair.
“You must leave,” he tells her, through tight lips.
“I had to come in,” she says, breathless, “there was…I was…”
“Leave.”
He opens the door and motions for her to step outside.
“Would you have any work, mister?”
“For you? No.”
“Please?”
He pushes his spread fingers into her back and gives her a shove, propelling her back to the steps, the door shutting behind her.
The men seem to have gone but Enda cannot risk running into them again.
She climbs up, away from the direction in which they were moving, and turns into a narrower street, on one side of which is a viewpoint, where people congregate in the daytime to enjoy the vista across the river.
She doesn’t know what to do, there is nowhere for her to go: her mind repeats these words, what to do, where to go, over and over again, uselessly and persistently.
She walks across the viewpoint, trailing her hand on its low wall, then past a school, around a further corner, and she sees, before her, through the darkness, a crucifix and the arched doorway of a church.
She looks around, checking over both shoulders, then she pushes the chill metal of the handle, and to her surprise, it gives.
Serried pews of wood, an altar with a white cloth, a single candle burning beside an effigy, a statue painted gold.
Enda tiptoes across the stone floor, glancing around. There’s no one here. She stands for a moment outside the confessional, listening, in case anyone is inside. But there is nothing, just the barely perceptible hiss of wax sizzling in its candle flame.
She lifts the confessional curtain and ducks inside.
The relief of simply sitting down, of being off her feet, is immense.
She stares glassily at the wooden walls, tucks her legs up under her, and lets her head rest on the slats behind her.
Despite her exhaustion, sleep refuses her, and her eyes keep darting from one side of the confessional to the other, as if it might contain crucial written instructions for what she might do next.
When sleep does finally come for her, it is like a heavy woollen hood falling over her head. It is profound, deep, soundless and dreamless.
She is woken, much later, or possibly after no time at all, by a hand shaking her awake. She finds herself in a lightless, enclosed place, like a press or a prison, her legs numb, a smell of polish and candles filling her nostrils, and in front of her is a black silhouette in a long priestly robe.
Her mind forms the hopeful word: Liam?