Jesus immediately walked up to Günter and stroked his head. “Who is this brave man,” he asked, “maltreated by his brothers and sisters?”
Next, Jesus looked at Paolo and touched his forehead. “Welcome, brother, at our table.”
But when he turned to face Giacomo, Jesus’s voice changed. It dropped an octave and there was almost something conspiratorial in the way he addressed him: “So, the orator has come, but we shall not listen to his long-winded songs.” He leaned forward and whispered into Giacomo’s ear: “You must die, my friend; die. Only then will I welcome you.”
44
Giacomo spent the next few weeks in shock, sitting in an upholstered chair which he placed in the middle of a verdant patch of ground at the foot of Jesus’s hill, with a lovely view of clumps of flowering hazelnut and willow trees studding the banks of the stream. Come rain or shine, he sat in his chair, not caring that it was ripped, sodden, and crawling with insects, the lining spilling out like a white beard.
He stopped shaving, stopped combing his hair. He even stopped washing his tubby body, so that by and by the always slightly disheveled, food-stained Abbot turned into a bit of a spectacle whose odor hung disreputably about him.
When his friends asked what he was doing there, he answered:
“I am looking at the flowers, the clouds, the hills, the river. I need to take time to give myself time. I am doubly removed from contemplation, first by my humanity and secondly by my maggothood.”
His words were complex, and people assumed he knew something they did not.
Paolo had joined Jesus’s entourage. He was usually absent, and whenever he turned up to visit Giacomo, he was bursting with joy like a swelling droplet hanging from a petal.
Günter, on the other hand, spent most of his time lying in the deep bracken under the trees, or rolling on his back among the wild thyme and sprouting ruccola. He inhaled these fragrances with delight. For Günter this was a time of upheaval, not least physiologically. Since their arrival, a pair of tiny feet had started forming under the skin of his groin. Within a week or two the pink toes were pushing through the skin, itching slightly. As they grew, the shins followed, then the knees and thighs, although two hairy hind legs still hung from his hips like appendages fit for a monster of a traveling circus.
“You know the body is all we’ve got. We think with our bodies, we exist through our bodies, and right now I’ve got six damned legs, two of them about as useful as spare assholes.”
Looking at him, one could not be sure what he was: a man wearing a dog’s pelt on his back or some freakish werewolf? And so he kept out of view, ashamed of himself. He still loved to roll on his back like the dog he was, exclaiming as he did so with his great tongue lolling:
“I’ll miss it, you know, the hairiness and robustness of a dog’s body, its stamina, the strength of these teeth I can crack bones with. Humans are bloody pussy willows, aren’t they? Besides, what human being can lie naked on his back like this, rolling his balls around without a care in the world?”
Giacomo listened to Günter absentmindedly, his mind at this time steeped in remembrance of his many years on this Earth. The only good thing that had happened to him was that his memory had come back. Childhood was a very distant pocket of light still illuminating his life with a slightly eerie and preternatural intensity — although Giacomo suspected it was mostly invented. He also recalled the early years, a time of weighty illusions, foolishness, and self-aggrandizement. This had been followed by maturity, a smug era of self-approval. Then his middle years, bursting with denial, confusion, and justifications. Now, at last, like an old mushroom in the forest, he had come to the moment when he must drop his spores.
“I wonder if I’m a toxic mushroom?” he asked himself, suspecting that he probably was a very toxic one.
Günter, always a great observer, liked to lie at Giacomo’s feet watching the old man’s emotions passing over his face like clouds.
“And I also wonder,” said Giacomo with some sadness, “whether anyone likes me. I mean anyone at all.” He looked at his friend. “Do you like me, for instance?”
“I don’t really like people very much; they’re just blobs moving about, getting in your face,” said Günter, who was good at white lies.
About three months into their self-imposed seclusion, Günt-er was still spending his days with Giacomo, occasionally trying his weight on his brand new human legs or shaking the mangy pelt on his lower back like a diabolical cloak grown into his upper body.
Once he’d shed his canine skin and was able to look at his reflection in the river without shuddering at his ugliness, he took his farewell of the old man.
“Why don’t you come, Giacomo? Come to the city with me.”
Giacomo took a long time to answer, keeping his eyes on the lush river meadows. “I’ve decided I’m going to spend the rest of my life here, on this hill, looking at the trees and the river,” he said. “I’m going to have a house built in the meadow. A group of builders and tradesmen will come very soon from Rome to put up a priory here. Then I’ll make a garden with a good carp pond and a dovecote. I’ll recreate the lives of the ancient monks. I’ll spend my time in prayer.” He sighed. “And when the time is right I’ll have myself emptied and buried here with instructions that I’m not to be woken for at least a thousand years.”
“Somehow I don’t really think it works like that anymore,” said Günter. “Just look at what’s happened to me. I’m turning into a man again. Soon these old hind legs of mine will fall off like shriveled twigs. I’ll have to look in the mirror and see whether I’m a Günter, a James, a Matthew, or just plain old Fred. What I mean is there aren’t any maggot people anymore. We can’t go swinishly through the centuries like pigs in clover. We have to face the music.”
Giacomo sat for a long while listening to the tinkle of the stream, the meandering wind in the treetops stirring the leaves, and the crows caw-cawing as they had always done, frustrated at their lack of vocabulary.
“Do you know this?” he said.
“Everyone knows it.”
Giacomo smiled bitterly. From somewhere in the depths of a dream, he seemed to hear the unmistakable sound of masonry collapsing.
He took a pocket knife and scored a deep cut in his thumb. At first there was nothing apart from a sharp pain. Then a slow trickle of blood, like water rising in a once-dry well.
Giacomo had not seen his own blood for more than a thousand years.
45
Not many weeks after, Michael and Ariel were sitting by a hearth watching Jesus expertly tossing flatbread onto the embers of the fire. His hands moved swiftly, turning the bread without scorching himself and then passing it to those sitting beside him.
His wife was breastfeeding their child.
“Now you eat,” she said.
“I am not hungry,” said Jesus, who had spent all day cutting brushwood. His face looked drawn and preoccupied.
Ariel drenched the bread in oil and topped it with fresh white cheese, honey and parsley. She was ravenous; she had grown heavy and was accustomed to the sensation of little feet drumming inside her womb.
A somber feeling hung over their little group. Jesus turned his amber eyes on them:
“We are leaving. You know this,” he said. “You all have journeys you must make. We also have our journey.”
“But why? And where will you go?” said Ariel.
“You shouldn’t be so concerned with where,” said Jesus. “It is a great irrelevance, of interest only to those caught in the comings and goings, the hither and thither of things. We will go where we must go. What more could anyone do?”