“Finding a church in Rome is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Vanetta said, “at least if its name has been changed… you know what I mean.”
“Well,” Daisy said, “I always tell myself that this needle-in-a-haystack business may be difficult, but it is not impossible. Just burn down all the hay and go through the ashes with a big magnet.”
Contini burst out laughing. “That is what they call ‘search and destroy’ in the military!”
“Well, if the needle can take it, why not?”
Sister Liz, who was translating everything in sign language for Morag, sniggered, and the deaf girl pulled Daisy’s earlobe in merriment.
The five of them were sitting in Contini’s office, somewhere in the Curia building, and it was very cosy. The acoustics of the place suggested a well-upholstered room, the walls covered with books and the windows framed by heavy curtains. It was ten in the morning and Contini had just ordered a round of coffee for them from his secretary. Like Liz, his secretary was a nun, Sister Maria Tabitha; all female staff at the Vatican belonged to some order or other. Soon the office smelled of coffee and Italian biscuits (hmm… soft almonds!), which blended well with the sweet and spicy remnant odours of the cigars that the Curia bishop apparently favoured. When they’d finished their coffee, Vanetta started reporting his findings, and Liz interpreted for Morag.
“So, a needle in a haystack,” the old man explained, “but thanks to human nature, this is precisely the reason why various scholars, experts and cognoscenti throughout history couldn’t resist the challenge and tried to compile catalogues. Today we claim that there must be nine hundred churches in Rome; in Rorick’s time already, there must have been a few hundred of them in the holy city. So, as a scholar, what did you do then, and what do you do now? You publish a list, and you try to persuade your colleagues that yours is the most complete: the ultimate, authoritative catalogue… So I went looking for these in the literature and in the archives.”
The oldest lists dated from the early Renaissance, Vanetta said, so 14th century at the earliest.
“You always claim, Monsignor, that these things have been studied for almost a thousand years. Well, I say: make that six hundred and you’ll be closer to the truth.”
On top of that, he explained, there were a number of difficulties to overcome when you parsed these venerable documents.
Those who compiled lists of Rome’s churches were seldom interested in their precise location, except to distinguish, say, San Paolo alle Tre Fontane from San Paolo fuori le Mura, or all those Santa Marias from one another, but even then such indications of location were rather vague. St Plautilla was listed a few times, but because there was only the one, no indication of location had been deemed necessary.
Some churches had changed names, for instance during the Counter-Reformation or the Enlightenment, and at other periods of Catholic revival, when Sacred Hearts and Holy Trinities became all the rage. To complicate matters further, the newer lists seldom mentioned the old name of a church, once it had been changed, and when a name disappeared and another one appeared, it was not always clear which old name had been replaced by which new one.
Then the few authors who did mention a St Plautilla could have done so simply because they had read about her shrine in Rorick’s Compendium.
“In other words,” Vanetta concluded, “my search was not very fruitful.”
“Now I understand that we are dealing with a very complex haystack, sir.”
“Exactly, and no way of burning it down! All I can say is that St Plautilla was last mentioned at the end of the 16th century…”
“So she must have been a victim of the Counter-Reformation.”
“Very good, my dear, you know your history.”
“But then this brings us back to the testimony of Contessa Lavinia Barelli, and to Morag’s remark. As a child, around 1800, the Contessa worshipped in a ‘chapel dedicated to St Plautilla’, and it must have been in Baroque style. This would be consistent with a change of name due to the Counter-Reformation, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely. The Baroque is the style of choice of that period. And before you ask: it could very well be that this chapel had been renamed in the 16th or 17th century, but that it was still known by its original name among the faithful. Such place names can survive for a long time through folklore and oral tradition.”
“Incredible!”
“But what can you give us in concreto, my dear Vanetta?” Contini wanted to know.
“Well, Monsignor, I could compile a little list of my own and mark those churches on a map of Rome. Now that I know that St Plautilla is not an old church, nor a new one that has kept its old name, it narrows things down considerably. We need to focus on new churches with new names. By new, I mean Baroque, of course. Some of these will really be new, others will have replaced old ones under a new name. There is no telling which is which, alas.”
“But Vanetta, you may still end up with a hundred items on that map!”
Then Daisy remarked, “Maybe we should start our search with the smallest buildings, as we know it must be a chapel rather than a church.”
“Excellent idea, but you can’t always tell if a church is big or small, nor at what point you would start calling a building a chapel. On the other hand, it is only a matter of ringing up the sacristans of those churches, if they have the telephone, and otherwise drop by briefly and ask if they have any Roman inscriptions on the premises.”
“So you are confident that the Desiderata stone would still be there?”
“Oh yes, absolutely! In that respect I can reassure you: there is no reason why it shouldn’t have stayed more or less where it has always been.”
“Yes, I’ve always said that stones can’t just disappear.”
“And quite right you are. You see, you can go back all the way to when the very first churches were founded in ancient Rome. At the time you would have called them ‘places of worship’, mostly clandestine, in the cellars of private houses, as our faith was still being persecuted by the authorities. One of the distinguishing features of such places was that the worshippers brought in the funerary stones of their forbears and loved ones. The slabs with inscriptions were mounted on the walls of these informal ‘temples’. It was a way of raising the numbers of the faithful from beyond the grave: the more the merrier. At the same time, when these first Christians were martyred, some remains or relics must have been carefully kept there as well. You can still see this setup in the oldest churches that survive today, those based on original Roman basilicas, like, say, Santa Maria in Trastevere. And those are precisely the places Rorick would have visited in the 6th century.”
“And there he would have seen the Desiderata stone. Not necessarily a Christian tombstone, right?”
“Not necessarily, no. The Quinctius stone you liked so much also comes from a church, I think.”
Vanetta proceeded to explain what had happened throughout the centuries when these oldest churches were refurbished, or torn down and rebuilt. The relics and the Roman inscriptions would be placed back in the new building on the same site, especially if it kept its old name. But on the other hand, during the Counter-Reformation and later, when relics and miracles were no longer in demand, the old “souvenirs” wouldn’t have been displayed in the place of honour, but they would never have been thrown out altogether either. You always had older people with a sentimental attachment to such things, who would make sure of that. So those same relics and ancient tombstones would have ended up in side-chapels, underground crypts, or even in the vestry.
“Oh, right!” Daisy exclaimed, “maybe that is why the Contessa never mentioned the stone: she went to the right chapel, but in the meantime the Desiderata stone had been spirited away to an inconspicuous hiding place within the new Baroque building.”
“Possibly, yes.”
“Isn’t that something of a paradox, though? The name of St Plautilla survived, but the stone was forgotten!”
“Names often last longer than stones in that respect; names are not as easily hidden away.”
Contini said, “Vanetta, if you prepare that map for us this afternoon, we can go looking for the chapel tomorrow. But for now, let us repair to the museum canteen, shall we? I have an idea.”
“Time for lunch already?” Vanetta chuckled, “I lost track completely!”
And off they went, all five of them, from one wing of the Vatican to another. In Vatican City you never needed to walk more than a few hundred yards, no matter where you were. It was also very quiet, with no traffic, except for the odd delivery van or official limousine. The birds in the trees around them were clearly happy with their surroundings and voiced it unreservedly.
That morning Contini had decided they should avoid the mistake of the previous day, which was why they had convened in his office for coffee. This time Daisy would not be late for their daily briefing after lunch. Therefore they arrived rather early at the canteen, the first ones served and seated. But as they were tucking in, the place started to fill up; it became more busy than on the previous days. “Exactly what I thought,” Contini said, “it is Saturday; there are a lot more researchers coming in than on a weekday. Let’s give them enough time to settle in, then we’ll see.”
Daisy smiled, turning her face to Morag, who’d just been signed what the Monsignor had said. Daisy’s expression conveyed: aren’t these scheming old gentlemen a riot?
After a while Contini muttered, “All right, time to mobilize the resources assembled in this room.”
He finished eating hastily, and stood up. In the meantime the room resounded with the overwhelming hubbub of innumerable conversations. The dapper bishop stepped over to a lectern standing on a small platform at the front of the canteen. Apparently this place was sometimes used for larger conferences. Sister Liz described all this to Daisy sotto voce. Contini now tapped the lectern with a spoon he was still holding: “Erm… excuse me, brothers and sisters!”
The loud rap, combined with the purple sash and skullcap of a bishop, no doubt, made the whole room go quiet at once. “Scusete, fratelli e sorelle,” he repeated, in fact in Italian, and then he proceeded to ask the assembled lunch guests if anyone had ever heard about “la lapide di Desiderata” from any other source than “il ‘Compendium Mirabilium Sanationum’ del vescovo Rorick di Treviri”. He also asked about “una chiesa o capella di Santa Plautilla qui a Roma.” What a beautiful, singsong language, Daisy thought with a sigh of longing; she should definitely learn it one day. After Contini’s little speech it was quiet for a very short while, and then a solitary voice piped up: “I think I do! There’s a Church Father who mentions ‘the inscription of Saint Desiderata’.”
“Wonderful! No one else? Well, please join us at our table, my friend, and tell us all about it.”
It turned out that the scholar who came over with his tray was German, “Kurt Morgenthaler at your service,” and that he spoke passable English.
While he finished his meal, he told the little group about an obscure early Church Father, Aristobulus of Sinope, who mentioned “the inscription of Saint Desiderata” in a letter to his more renowned colleague Tertullian.
“They were arguing about the Seneca hypothesis,” the German scholar specified, smacking a little.
“Oh, I see,” Vanetta exclaimed, “Tertullian is the first author who mentions an alleged exchange of letters between St Paul and Seneca. Nowadays we think that these ‘Epistles of Paul and Seneca’ are a complete hoax.”
“Yes, the existing epistles clearly are, but at the time, around AD 220, some authors claimed they had seen the original correspondence. However, the hypothesis these two Church Fathers were arguing about, was not whether there had been a correspondence or not, but whether Seneca had converted to our faith, and whether Stoicism could have influenced St Paul’s thinking.”
“Wasn’t Seneca also Nero’s tutor and advisor?” Daisy asked.
“Ah, your encyclopaedic knowledge again,” Contini chuckled, “Very good! The New Testament also tells us about some Christians living at the palace, probably slaves. At the end of his Epistle to the Philippians, St Paul, who was in Rome, wrote: ‘The brethren which are with me greet you. All the saints salute you, chiefly they that are of Caesar’s household.’ And at that time it was Nero who was the emperor; he held the title of Caesar.”
“That’s exactly what Tertullian argued as well: Seneca, a regular at Nero’s court, must have known the first Christians, and Paul stayed in Rome for two years before Seneca’s death in AD 65. However, Aristobulus argued that the two could never have been on friendly terms. ‘I only need to remind you of the inscription of Saint Desiderata,’ he told Tertullian in his letter. And that’s all. He was assuming his correspondent knew exactly what he was talking about. It’s a quirk letter writers often have, regrettably for us down the line of posterity, as we are no longer in on this insider information.”
“So that is all there is to it?” Contini asked.
“Yes, I’m afraid so, Monsignor. It’s not much, I know.”
“Oh, but the interesting thing, here,” Vanetta exclaimed, “is that in AD 220 these two authors were completely familiar with the stone and its location. Just imagine. The Christians were still a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire… Who’s reign was this? Wait… Heliogabalus was the emperor! Now, Tertullian lived in Carthage and Aristobulus in Sinope, yet when these two gentlemen visited Rome, they would go and pray at this particular shrine as a matter of course. For some reason St Plautilla’s chapel must have been very important indeed.”
At the debriefing that day, Father Cadogan asked, “Can any of you recall the very first moment you realized that you were different?”
As no one else came forward, Daisy said, “Yes, I can. For me that’s quite easy because I remember it exactly.”
At the age of five or six, she started telling the group, when other children ask such questions as “How are babies made?” and “Where do people go when they die?” she’d once asked her mother, “What does ‘blind’ mean?” Her mother had been taken aback. “That’s hard to explain, darling… Maybe you should ask your father when he comes home from work. Daddy is a lot better than me at explaining these things…”
“Now it was my turn to be taken aback,” Daisy went on, “I said yes but, Mummy, are you blind too, just like me?—No! I am not!—Is Daddy blind?—No!—And how about Granma, Aunty Agatha, and Cook, and Nanny?—No, no, they’re not blind either, none of them!—So it’s only me?—Yes… well, there are other blind people in the world at large, but you don’t happen to know them… And that is when it suddenly dawned on me that most people were not blind, and that they had been keeping this fact from me. I felt obscurely that I’d been taken advantage of, and this made me very sad… and a bit angry as well. When Daddy came home from the bank where he worked, at the end of that afternoon, he had a lot of explaining to do, believe me.”
It was very quiet for a while after Daisy had finished telling her story, then at length Father Cadogan said, “Thank you ever so much, Daisy dear, your testimony is quite impressive, you seem to remember the whole conversation word by word… Now, does anyone wish to comment on this?”
“Yes,” Morag said through Sister Liz’s competent services, “I find it very moving, of course, typical Daisy too, but I also want to tell you this: you were so lucky! At least you could talk it through… your Mum and Dad could explain straight away what was going on. With me it took ages before I could communicate with anyone, and for years and years I was completely baffled… I had no idea what was going on, and there was no way anybody could tell me.”
Daisy raised her hand and stroked Morag’s arm, while the other deaf participants vied for ‘speaking time’ through Liz and expressed that they agreed, they too could only be jealous of how a blind little girl could ask, and receive answers.
“I know, I know,” Daisy said when it was finally her turn again. “Only yesterday I told you, Father, that being blind, after all, is only a minor inconvenience. I had it easy, because in my case language and communication were never affected, except for reading, maybe… but I understand now that the isolation of a deaf child must be a terrible thing. It must restrict your sense of self, I suppose… almost suffocate your very soul! At least I was spared all that.”
“And your dad worked at a bank,” someone said, “and you had a cook and a nanny.”
“Yes I know, we had it good, but that is not my fault, obviously… On the other hand, it did mean that my dad could help his blind daughter in ways most people can’t afford to. He hired a private tutor to develop my verbal skills even before I went to school, then he sent me to a special boarding school for the blind, no expenses were ever spared for my development. So it is true I was very privileged.”
“Is your father still alive?” Father Cadogan asked.
“Yes, he retired recently, but he’s still going strong: your typical, strappy Great War veteran, with pencil moustache and all!”
“Ah, we don’t have those in Ireland, but next time you go visit him, please say hello from Father Cadogan from Dublin. Tell him I’m a great admirer!”
As they were walking back to their digs, that day, Daisy felt that the mood between her and her companion was different. Of course they were never very communicative during their walk, but Morag would always make clear that she enjoyed her blind partner’s company in the way she held her hand or her elbow; sometimes even with an exuberant little dash up the street to the convent. But not this time; she was rather absent-minded; she seemed to be lost in thought. “Is it what I said at the debriefing?” Daisy wondered. Maybe Morag had been saddened by bad childhood memories, or put off by the fact that her companion turned out to be a banker’s daughter who’d had a very fancy life… Surely she’d never had that, on top of how tough it must have been to be born deaf. Daisy made them stop and gave Morag a long tight hug; then they walked on; there was nothing more she could do.
A few hours later, when they had settled down for the evening, Daisy suddenly retrieved her notebook from the handbag on the nightstand, and wrote a message for her roommate: what is on your mind, morag?
Then she took out the wax tablets she’d recently bought in a souvenir shop; the first set had been brought back to the educational service. She handed them over to the girl sitting on the bed next to hers. A moment later an answer came back, that she could make out with her fingertips.
N O T H I N G
J U S T S A D
A new message was pencilled in the notebook: was it something i said at the debriefing?
A B I T
I T S O K
sorry! maybe a bit confronting? it couldn’t be helped, though.
W I L L Y O U
L E A R N B S L
oh yes, i will, i promise. but not now. there is not much i can learn in a week.
Y O U W A N T
T O F I N D
T H E S T O N E
yes. we are so close now! will you come along tomorrow?
N O N E E D
Y O U G O
H A V E F U N