Chapter 34 Cosimo #2
Their rooms were together on the third level, where the senior novices resided.
There too the windows were narrow, like castle arrow slits, but being on the top floor at the top of a hill, they could glimpse staggering views out to sea.
They were supposed to resist, especially during prayer time, but if Cosimo kept his eyes averted, it wasn’t for ‘modesty of the eye’ but because he hadn’t seen the sea since leaving Tricase Porto.
It was too bound up with his memories of summers and everything that had happened there.
‘My father paid a visit.’
‘Oh.’ Savelli glanced across. Over the years together in Lecce, Cosimo had revealed his own story to him; he could have read most of it in the papers anyway, but Cosimo had gone further, confiding the pact with Fon and how its consequences for him and Rafaella had led him to retreat to the seminary.
Between grief, guilt and heartbreak, the wider world had nothing left to offer him. ‘… Are you OK?’
‘Sure,’ he murmured. In truth, he felt unsettled that even here – hidden behind metre-thick stone walls and committing himself to a reclusive existence – his old life could still reassert itself without notice.
Cosimo let his eyes wander as Father Polacco began the service, intoning prayers in a sombre voice.
He had never been a devout Catholic before Romola’s death, but he had learnt to find a sort of peace in the rituals of divine observance: rising with the sun, eating at set times.
He had never been an enthusiastic student but studying scripture for hours upon end left him with no time to think his own thoughts, and he was grateful for that.
In the weeks after the accident, when his entire world had lost shape, it was the Church that had given him structure.
He looked around at the cathedral in which they sat.
Even its form was reassuring, its solidity a comfort.
The building was essentially a simple monolith, a vast stone structure with triple-height ceilings, a central nave and two aisles either side divided by Romanesque arches over marble columns.
It was ancient and impermeable, still standing after centuries of wars and occupations.
As in the seminary, the only windows were narrow and set very high up so that the sanctuary itself was dark, inset in a large niche.
At a first glance, simplicity abounded here – the walls were white, the glass windows clear – and yet, look up and the cathedral was dramatically adorned by gilded frescoed ceilings; look down and an exquisite eleventh-century mosaic floor depicting the Tree of Life ran the entire length of the nave.
People had walked over it for nine hundred years; they had been baptized, married and carried in their caskets upon it.
If it could endure, so could he, surely?
He looked down to the sanctuary where Father Polacco was taking Mass, assisted by Father Caputo, both of them performing their sacred duties with reverential gravity.
No one in the congregation would ever have guessed they had had a fierce disagreement that very afternoon over the amount of butter Father Polacco put on his boiled potatoes.
It was difficult to see the faces of the congregation from where he sat.
At best, Cosimo could glimpse some people sitting at the very front of the right side of the aisle.
He recognized the owner of the taverna on Via Rondachi with his wife, and Signore Russo, who ran the bookshop.
He saw the man with the fruit stall on Piazzetta de Ferraris and the woman who wove baskets sitting on a ledge at the top of the steps beside Chiesa di San Pietro.
It was early days; names still eluded him, but he was pleased that traces of familiarity were beginning to creep in.
They were crumbs of comfort in a new place.
Afterwards, the novices all filed out, walking slowly and erect over the historic floor, the eyes of the congregation upon them as they headed for the side door that led back into the seminary.
He felt the weight of expectation in their gaze.
They saw not the young men but their ecclesiastical robes.
They were already seen as symbols of the Church, instruments of God’s power on earth.
But the moment the door closed behind them, the younger seminarians broke into sprints along the walkway, black cassocks swinging as they held onto their birettas.
‘Did you see that girl in the third row?’ whispered Brother Barbieri, gesturing with his hands to suggest large breasts. Another boy shoved him, laughing.
Cosimo looked away, trying to pretend he hadn’t heard.
He had sequestered himself in the closest thing he could find to a living tomb specifically to suppress the passions that had once throbbed through his veins.
It had been his desire for Rafaella and his enmity with Fon that had led to his sister’s death.
He couldn’t pretend otherwise, and he had to find a way to live with it.
But the truth was, behind the heavy church doors and beneath the robes, he wasn’t an emblem, any more than the rest of them. They were young, fallible men, and though his body was here, there were no walls he could find to hide him from his own mind.
Memories of Rafaella refused to die – and the road ahead was still long.