— Something did, Stanley brought out.
— Oh dear, he's gone again. He is so busy, she said, sagging slightly until she sat down. — He is such a dear.
— Is he a… a…
— A Dominican, and he is so kind to Us. So protective. . and she subsided into the chair with, — Now you must tell Us more about you.
And so Stanley told her once more of his interest in music, dwelling modestly on the organ work he had composed (which, as he said, might have been a Requiem Mass had he done it three centuries ago), and reiterating his wish to visit the church at Fenestrula, and possibly. .
— Play the organ there? But dear boy, nothing could be more simple. It was the gift of an American, and so of course they will let you play on it, an American whom We knew quite well, quite well indeed. .
After that, Stanley could hardly keep his mind on their conversation. Everything else seemed unreal, as this one vision soared before him. His eye fixed on a gold telephone across the room, and the tooth clutched in his pocket so that it almost bit his palm, the pain disappeared from his bandaged hand, and he scarcely heard Mrs. Deigh describe how, as a girl in school studying French conversation, lunching, and the mandolin, she had known all that while that greater things lay ahead, though what they might be she'd no idea until one day, floating naked on her back in the blue waters off Portugal, she was discovered by some peasant children who took her for an apparition of the Virgin, and since then, of course, her path had been clear. In fact, it was not until he was about to leave that he even noticed her wrist watch: its four gold hands mounted a delicately contrived figure, and those pointing to III and IX were apparently stationary. The other two told the minute and the hour, and since it was just ten minutes after four when he left, he had no thought for what it might be until he came for lunch next day, and was greeted by his hostess promptly at twelve-thirty.
Stanley had hung his own crucifix, broken though it remained, on the wall over his bed in the room he had found in the Via del Babuino. It is true, every time he looked at it his own knees went weak, and when he addressed it, a sense of emptiness quivered and then surged through him, until he dropped his face on his clasped hands and with all the concentration that makes images from the past the more vivid, tried not to remember. But if he stayed so for long, on his knees beside his bed, the floor itself seemed to rise, and fall away driven on by his pounding heart where the ship's engines echoed, his own gasps of nausea as he staggered up echoing the gasping moans of the beast he had fought all his life. He closed his eyes against the Christmas card he had seen in that uptown bedroom, and the image stood out the more vivid on this dark tapestry of memory; he opened them on the yellowed rigid thing itself, its drawn legs hard-muscled straight through the broken knees, and turning away unsteadily he resolved to get it repaired next day.
But there was always something else. First, of course, he must procure his identification booklet, guide to Rome, prayer book, and the pin to wear and identify him as a Pilgrim. He wore it on the lapel of his second-best suit (it had been his third and last, fortunately, that suffered the green-paint episode, and his best blue suit hung unfolded, unworn since his mother's funeral). It was in this same second-best suit, pressed between mattresses during the voyage, and donned with self-conscious anticipation under a porthole suddenly filled with a static landscape instead of the sea and the sky, that he had emerged from the boat, with that shiny flattened look of sailors ashore.
Still, making the round from Saint John Lateran to the tomb of Saint Peter, the Basilica of Saint Paul, and Santa Maria Maggiore, required for indulgences, he looked lonely. Crossing the Ponte San Angelo, where Pilgrims had already been suffocated and died in the crush, he looked lonely. Passing through the Gate of the Bells, entering the piazza before Saint Peter's and gazing up at the Egyptian obelisk and beyond it to the Apostles on the roof, and Michelangelo's dome, he looked lonely. His hair still stood out thickly on the back of his head, and had begun to curl near the neck. He had trimmed his mustache, but it was uneven, and he kept catching ends of it with his teeth anxiously. If anyone had stopped him and asked him what he thought of it all, he would have answered with his surprise at finding Rome so yellow. . but no one did. One after another he visited the places he felt bound to visit, and, it is true, he often found upon returning to the Via del Babuino that he could not remember which was which, that he was not sure whether he had seen the Laocoön, though here was a familiar picture of it before him, that he even, at one point, confused the Sistine and Pauline chapels, and finally both of them with the Vatican library, where he was quite sure he had not been at all. As for the statue of Saint Peter, with its foot worn smooth by kisses, he did not mention to Mrs. Deigh that he had wiped his lips after kissing it himself. He usually reported his excursions to her, as he did one day entering to interrupt her petulant murmurs over the newspaper, — He is wearing that heavy fisherman's ring back on his right hand again, which must mean his arthritis is better. Of course We have requested the Blessed Virgin Mary. . She thrust the paper away, showing a new book titled Le. cinque fonti sanguinose nesting in her ample lap.
— San Clemente! she repeated fervently. — But it was the upper church you visited? Yes, with its lovely ceiling. We knew Prior Mul-looly so well, you know. It's comforting to know it's all owned by Dominicans. Poor man, martyred by being thrown into the sea with an anchor tied around his neck. But we hope you did not descend all the way? because someone (and she often spelled out words which she considered unsuitable when Hadrian was anywhere near), — someone has built a p-a-g-a-n temple right square underneath it. A smelly damp dark little stone room where they went to worship the sun. Wasn't that stupid of them? But of course, they were all repressed, weren't they. .
Here and there he saw the fat woman from the boat, clutching her three-penny pamphlet on the Modern Virgin Martyr, that or some other, clicking her Machine, and though he was relieved enough when she fled at the sight of him, he wished it might be with something less than the look of terror she wore when she did so. Once he saw Father Martin, coming out through the Bronze Door, and almost hailed him. But Father Martin was at that moment joined by another priest and the two went off with their heads nodding and bowed in convocation, leaving Stanley to stare at a pale girl carrying a copy of Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread.
He might have got down to work. He should have, since the day he hoped and now could plan on for playing his composition for the first time, in the church he had dreamt of unnumbered times, lay not far off. He even tried, once or twice, to sit down at the practice keyboard and go through the copying he had done on the trip over: but a minute after Stanley had sat down to the printed keys, staring at an empty wall in the room in Via del Babuino, the whole place seemed to sway, the flat keyboard to rise under his fingers, the wall itself to be studded with rows of rivets binding its overlapping plates. The fingers of both hands drew up in frail fists, and a rash of irrelevancies crowded his mind to obscure the idea that possessed it. Sensing mistakes in the work before him, he did not find them. He did not really seek them out in fact, but might suddenly look up with some memory in his mind like that of oriental carpets made with a conscious flaw, in order not to offend the creator of Perfection by emulating his grand design.