“Although you could be if you want to,” added Paolo from the front.
O’Hara leaned back, puzzled. “Do you not hear I’m expected somewhere?”
“Expected, yes. Certainly expected. But unfortunately, owing to unforeseen circumstances…” said Paolo, without taking his eyes off the road.
“The point is, my brother,” said Giacomo, “You sipped from the sacred well tonight. In ten days or so you’ll be bursting into leaf, if you see what I mean.”
Paolo slowed down the great car and picked up Honey on a street corner.
She got in with a guffawing laugh. “You again,” she said, peering at him. “But I’d know you better if you dropped your pants.”
O’Hara felt his mind spinning and, in the same instant, grew aware of an insistent slithering feeling inside his urethra.
Oh, fucking maledictions!
He tried to speak, but his tongue seemed to have recoiled into the back of his throat. The calamity had come. The locusts were swarming over his pastures. His house was burning. There was also an unexpected feeling, which he analyzed many times after. It was relief. Everything was lost. No longer would he have to carry all that luggage, all those boxes and crates and packages.
No more burdens.
From now on I shall please myself, he thought, looking at Honey and imagining what else he’d inflict on her, next time.
These thoughts were intensely private, of course. To the others in the car O’Hara presented the very picture of a man in the grip of remorse and regret — groaning, wailing, oozing with self-castigation.
Only Honey showed any empathy at all. She turned round and subjected him to a lengthy examination, then said: “If I were you, which thank fuck I’m not, I’d let yourself go a bit. No one minds a guy who likes to get his end away. Most women like it; why don’t you look at it that way? What could be worse than ending up with some bloke who just sits there and reads the frigging newspaper?”
Giacomo hooted with laughter, but Honey silenced him with a glare.
“Very well put,” said Giacomo. “I could transpose what you just said into better language and it would be a perfectly well argued piece of…”
“Yeah, well, I’m not like you. I speak fucking English.”
“Shut up,” O’Hara cried. “All of you. I can’t listen to this, you’re all foul, revolting people without any sense of…”
“I must admit I can appreciate your position,” Paolo cut in. “Being a maggot is not for the fainthearted. That’s why we thought we’d give you a choice.”
Something in Paolo’s voice stopped O’Hara short, made him sink into oblivious silence. The choice to do what? Nothing pleasant, to be sure.
His question was about to be answered.
On the outskirts of Rome the car left the autostrada and, after a few winding roads, turned down a bumpy track into a large walled and gated olive grove. In the middle, where the trees thinned, some twenty or thirty people were waiting for them. There were tables, sofas and cushions. Waiters hovered in the background. A log fire had been prepared earlier; the embers lay deep now and were easily hot enough to transform a human body into a skeleton in an hour or two.
They got out of the car. “If you prefer,” said Paolo, “this will be your cremation fire. As a special favor to you, if you’d like us to, we’ll scatter your ashes over Jerusalem.”
“Of course you might prefer to spend the evening here, with us?” Giacomo added. “It’s not such a bad night for sitting under the stars. And this is a good fire; really it would be a huge shame to sully it with human fat when we have brought sucking pigs nicely skewered and ready for roasting as well as a barrel of fine Nepente from Sardinia. Why don’t we just roast these piglets, drink this wine? We have fruits of the field, figs, peaches, with cream and vanilla — even a couple of harlots for corrupted appetites.”
“So the question you’re being asked,” said Paolo, “is whether you want to enjoy your life? There’s no need to follow Giacomo’s gluttonous path. Perhaps you’d rather be a good Dualist — stay clear of meat, partake only of fish and avoid sex altogether?”
O’Hara thought about it. Without a doubt, he was tired of earthly light constantly bombarding his optical nerve with its babbling irrelevance. But suicide was certainly not an option. He was not about to give up on his great sacrifice now and, in so doing, assure himself of damnation.
The fierce heat from the fire-pit burned against his skin. He stared down at the churning pool of vermilion, trying to remember if he had any principles left and, if so, what they were.
31
The following day, Michael seemed to be a prisoner of sorts in a monastery. He had a cell and a hard bed and not much else to occupy him except an abridged copy of Augustine’s City of God.
Even the food was lackluster. Not so much as a lamb chop or a glass of ale.
As evening set in he lost his patience and went to the door, repeatedly thumping it with all his might until he heard soft footsteps coming down the corridor.
“What ails you, brother?” someone said on the other side of the door.
“What fucking ails me is I don’t know why I’m being kept here. Where’s Giacomo?”
The answer, when it came, was unexpected.
Some sort of lever was pulled, he heard a screeching sound of pulleys and wheels turning. A large section of the floor beneath him gave way. For a split second he seemed to hover in the air, looking about him and wishing he was lying on the bunk or standing by the window admiring the view or in fact doing anything but hanging there in temporary suspension, nervously peering down a black shaft right under his feet.
Then he began to fall.
At first there was darkness, before he noticed tiny blue lamps sweeping by at dizzying speed.
Slowly the gradient of the shaft changed and he found himself sliding along a shiny, padded surface at a furious rate of knots. It was difficult to say for how long. It seemed like several minutes, but it must have been much less. Now and then he heard someone roaring just behind him. He looked round, expecting to see a figure in pursuit of him, until he realized that he was actually making the sound himself, and it was somehow echoing back at him.
An enormous sadness welled up in him. Images of his parents appeared. His mother, her cleanness and modesty. How he missed her. Then his father, his darling father, struggling with his demons and finding no damned peace wherever he went in the world. He even saw their house in Borehamwood, his puzzled grandmother in the top room — like a downy chick in a huge bed filled with ripped feather bolsters — and her constant demands for chicken soup.
The incline seemed to flatten out. His descent slowed, and he dropped heavily into a deep pile of straw.
He sat up and looked around, finding himself in an odd-shaped metal cage whose bars were like a giant rib cage. There was nothing much in there, just a pitcher of water, a hunk of dry bread, and, in a corner, a bucket. Overhead was an enormous vault, a space hollowed directly into solid rock, decorated all the way to the top with symmetrical florets, everything dimly lit by candles of enormous girth.
The exit doors looked strong enough to withstand a nuclear blast.
He heard a voice: “They always have to screw with your brain, Michael. Just because it’s the only thing you have that’s actually yours.”
He saw something moving in the straw at the other end of the cage. A tousled head of hair appeared, and beneath it, a sleepy face and mischievous eyes.
Ariel!