The Last Cato Page 16

  With an unexpectedly protective gesture, Farag took me by the arm until we reached the sidewalk.

  The sacristan stuck an enormous key into the church’s wood door and pushed it open, without entering. “His Excellency the archbishop asked us to leave you alone, until seven o’clock Mass. Our patron’s church is all yours. Go on in. I’m going back home to have breakfast. If you need anything, I live over there.” He pointed to the second floor of an old stucco building. “Aye, I almost forgot! Captain Glaser-Ro, the fuse box is on the right, and here are the keys to the entire place, including the chapel of the tomb and the baptistery next to it. Be sure to visit it, because it’s really special. Well, so long. At seven o’clock sharp I’ll come by to get you.” He took off running back across the street. It was 5:30 a.m.

  “Well, what are we waiting for? Doctor, you first.”

  The temple was completely dark, except for some overhead emergency lights. No light was coming in yet through the rosette or the large windows. The captain flipped the switches, and suddenly, electric lights hanging from the ceiling on long cables cast a diaphanous glow over everything. There were three richly decorated naves separated by pilasters, and a wood-trimmed caisson ceiling bearing the shields of the Spanish kings of Aragon who governed Sicily in the fourteenth century. Under a triumphal arch, there was a crucifix painted in the twelfth or thirteenth century and another one at the back from the Renaissance. On a magnificent silver pedestal was the processional image of Saint Lucia, with a sword sticking through her neck. In her right hand was a glass holding her pair of spare eyes.

  “The church is ours.” The Rock’s voice sounded like a thunderclap inside a cave. The acoustics were fabulous. “Let’s look for the entrance to Purgatory.”

  It was much colder inside than on the street, as if a current of frozen air bubbled out of the ground. I walked down the central corridor toward the altar. I felt an urgent need to kneel before the shrine and pray for a few moments. My head sunk between my shoulders, I covered my face with my hands and tried to reflect on all the strange things that had happened to me in the last several weeks. In just over a month, I had completely lost control of my once ordered life. In the last week, the situation had run even more amuck. Nothing was the same. I begged God to pardon me for having abandoned him, and with a desolate heart, I begged him to be merciful with my father and my brother. I also prayed that my mother find the strength she needed in these terrible times, and for the rest of my family. My eyes filled with tears, I crossed myself and stood up. Farag and the captain were examining the lateral naves. I walked up to the presbytery and looked at the red granite column. According to tradition, the saint lay there, dying from her wounds. Over the centuries the hands of the faithful had polished the stone. Its importance as an object of adoration was clear by how often this symbol was repeated on the church’s decoration. Her eyes were depicted to the point of overkill. Hanging everywhere were hundreds of those strange ex-votos in the shape of small loaves of bread. They were called “Saint Lucia’s eyes.”

  When we finished exploring the church, we headed down a narrow stairway that took us to the chapel of the sepulchre. Both buildings were connected by an underground tunnel carved out from solid rock. The octagonal baptistery contained the rectangular niche, or loculus, where the saint was buried after she was martyred. The truth is, her body wasn’t in Syracuse, nor in Sicily. When Lucia died, her remains traveled halfway around the world and came to rest in San Jeremiah Church in Venice. In the eleventh century, the Byzantine general Maniace took them to Constantinople, where they were venerated until 1204. In that year, the Venetians brought them back to Italy for good. The people of Syracuse had to resign themselves to honoring an empty grave that was wonderfully decorated with a beautiful wood painting placed on an altar. Below that was a marble sculpture by Gregorio Tedeschi representing the saint at the moment of her funeral.

  That was the end of our visit to the church. We had seen everything and examined it all in great detail. There was nothing strange or significant to connect it to Dante or the Staurofilakes.

  “Let’s recap,” the captain proposed. “What caught your attention?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” I said, very convinced.

  “So,” declared Farag, pushing up his glasses, “we have only one option.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m thinking,” the Swiss Rock observed, as he went back down the corridor that led to the church.

  Thus, against my deepest wishes, we descended into the catacombs.

  According to the sign by the door, the catacombs of Saint Lucia were closed to the public. If anyone was curious, the poster added, he could visit the nearby catacombs of Saint Giovanni. Terrible images of earthquakes and cave-ins flashed before my eyes but I brushed them aside. Using one of the keys the sacristan had given him, the captain opened the door and squeezed himself inside.

  Contrary to popular belief, the catacombs didn’t serve as a refuge for the Christians in time of persecutions. To begin with, the persecutions were very brief and very limited in time. In the middle of the second century, the first Christians started to buy land to bury their dead, because they were against the pagan practice of cremation, believing in the resurrection of their bodies on Judgment Day. In fact, they didn’t call these underground cemeteries catacombs, the Greek word meaning “cavity.” They called them koimeteria, “bedrooms”—from which we get the term cemetery. They believed they would simply sleep until the resurrection of the flesh. Since they needed more and more space, the galleries of the koimeteria grew underground in every direction, becoming true labyrinths up to several kilometers long.

  “Let’s go, Ottavia.” Farag cheered me on from the other side of the door, seeing I had no intention of entering.

  A naked lightbulb hung from the ceiling of the grotto, casting a dim glow of shadows on a table, a chair, and some tools covered with a thick layer of dust located next to the entrance. Luckily, the captain had brought a powerful flashlight that lit the space up as though it was a thousand-watt beam. Some stairs, excavated in the rock many centuries before, tumbled toward the depths of the earth. Without hesitating, the Rock began his descent, while Farag stood to one side to let me pass and brought up the rear. Along the walls, lots of graffiti carved in the rock recalled the dead: Cornelius cuius dies inluxit, “Cornelius, whose day dawned”; Tauta o bios, “This is our life”; Eirene ecoimete, “Irene went to sleep.” After a cramped space, the stairs turned left. There, several headstones were piled, some of which were only fragments. Finally we came to the last stairway and found a small, rectangular-shaped sanctuary decorated with magnificent frescos that must have dated from the eighth or ninth century. The captain shined his flashlight on them, and we were fascinated to discover the prayer of the forty martyrs of Sebastia. According to legend, these young men made up the Twelfth Legion and loaned their services in Sebastia, Armenia, during the reign of Emperor Licinius, who ordered that all his legionnaires make sacrifices to the gods for the good of the empire. The forty soldiers of the Twelfth Legion flatly refused, since they were Christian. They were condemned to death by numbness—that is to say, they died frozen, hung by a rope, naked over an icy pond.

  We admired how that whitewashed plaster wall had stayed in nearly perfect condition all those centuries, while later works done with more advanced techniques were in lamentable condition today.

  “Don’t shine your flashlight on the frescos, Kaspar,” Farag begged, from the dark. “It could damage them forever.”

  “Sorry.” The Rock quickly pointed the light toward the ground. “You’re right.”

  “What do we do now? Do we have a plan?”

  “Keep walking, Doctor. That’s all.”

  On the other side of the sanctuary, we came to a cavity that seemed to be the beginning of a long corridor. We continued for a long stretch in complete silence, passing other galleries on the right and left in which you could see an endless line of tombs dug into the walls. The only
sound we heard was that of our footsteps. Despite the vents in the ceiling, I felt I was suffocating. At the end of the tunnel, there was a new stairway, blocked off by a chain with a sign prohibiting entrance. The captain went around it and led us to the second level underground; there, the atmosphere was even more oppressive, if that were possible.

  “Let me remind you,” whispered the Rock, “these catacombs have hardly been explored. This level has never been studied, so be really careful.”

  “Why don’t we study the upper level?” I felt the blood racing in my temples. “We have passed many galleries. The entrance to Purgatory might be there.”

  The captain walked forward a few steps and stopped, shining his light on something he saw on the floor. “I don’t think so, Doctor. Look.”

  At our feet, enclosed in an intense circle of light, you could clearly make out a monogram of Constantine with the horizontal traverse line, identical to the one on Abi-Ruj Iyasus’s body and on the cover of the codex of Saint Catherine. There was no doubt that the Staurofilakes had been there. What we couldn’t know, I told myself in anguish, was how long ago they had been there, since most of the catacombs had fallen into disuse during the early Middle Ages right after, little by little, the saints’ relics had been removed for security reasons and the vegetation had sealed the entrances, many of which had disappeared completely.

  Farag couldn’t contain his delight. As we advanced at a good pace through a very low tunnel, he celebrated the fact that we had deciphered the Staurofilakes’ mysterious language. From now on, he said, we would be able to understand all their secret clues and hidden signs. His voice rose from the darkness that closed in behind me; only the captain’s flashlight lit up that cavern a good meter in front of me. In the reflection of the light on the rock walls, I examined the three rows of loculi—many of them obviously occupied—that meandered at the height of our feet, our waists and our heads. I read the names of the dead engraved in the small headstones: Dionisio, Puteolano, Cartilia, Astasio, Valentina, Gorgono. Each one had a symbol for the work they did (priest, farmer, housewife) or for the primitive Christian religion they professed (the Good Shepherd, the dove, the anchor, the loaves and fishes). Encrusted in the plaster were the deceased’s belongings, from coins to tools or toys, if they were children. That place was a priceless historical resource.

  “A new chrismon,” the captain announced, stopping at the intersection of two galleries.

  To the right, at the back of a narrow passageway, was a cubicle with an altar at its center; on the walls were various loculi and large niches, each shaped like an oven, in which an entire family was usually buried. To the left was another gallery with a high ceiling identical to the one we had just passed. In front of us was a new stairway dug into the rock. It was a spiral stairway that twisted and turned down around a thick central column of polished stone that then disappeared into the dark depths of the earth.

  “Let me have a look,” begged Farag, stepping in front of me.

  The monogram of Constantine was chiseled right on the first step.

  “I believe we need to keep going down,” the professor murmured, passing his hands nervously over his hair and pushing up his glasses.

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” I objected. “It’s dangerous to keep descending.”

  “We can’t turn back now,” affirmed the Rock.

  “What time is it?” asked Farag looking at his own watch.

  “Six forty-five,” the captain announced, starting to descend.

  Given the chance, I’d have tromped back to the surface. But who was brave enough to backtrack alone, in the dark, through that labyrinth full of dead people? I had no choice but to follow the captain and descend, with Farag close behind me.

  The spiral stairway seemed endless. We continued down into that pit, step by step, breathing air that grew heavier and more stifling, as we held on to the column to keep from losing our balance. Soon the captain and Farag had to walk stooped over, as their foreheads grazed the stairs overhead. The steps began to grow narrower, and the wall and the central column started to close in, making that dreadful funnel more suitable for children than adults. The captain had to stoop over and walk sideways, since his wide shoulders no longer fit through the opening.

  If the Staurofilakes had thought up those stairs, they had twisted minds. The place was claustrophobic. The air was dwindling; and the thought of returning to the surface seemed just short of impossible. It seemed as though we’d bidden farewell to the real world (its cars, lights, people) forever. I felt like we’d entered one of those niches and we could never leave. Time stood still, and there was apparently no end to that diabolical stairway, which grew smaller and smaller at each step.

  At one point, I was seized by a panic attack. I couldn’t breathe, I was choking. I just wanted to get out of there, leave that hole, get back to the surface immediately. I was gasping like a fish out of water. I stopped, closed my eyes, and tried to calm the ferocious, hurried beats of my heart.

  “Wait, Captain,” Farag said. “Doctor Salina isn’t well.”

  The place was so narrow that Farag could barely reach me. He softly stroked my hair and then my cheek. “Are you better, Ottavia?”

  “I can’t breathe.”

  “Yes you can. Just calm down.”

  “I have to get out of here.”

  “Listen to me,” he said firmly, taking my chin and raising my face to where he stood a few steps above me. “Don’t let claustrophobia get the best of you. Take several deep breaths. Forget where we are and look at me, okay?”

  I did as he said. I fixed my eyes on him, and as if by magic, his eyes gave me breath and his smile expanded my lungs. I calmed down and regained control. He stroked my hair again and gave the captain a sign to keep descending.

  Five or six steps farther down, Glauser-Röist abruptly stopped. “Another chrismon.”

  “Where?” asked Farag. Neither he nor I could see it.

  “On the wall, level with your head. It’s etched deeper than the others.”

  “The others were on the floor,” I pointed out. “As the steps wore away, the engravings could have worn down.”

  “That’s absurd,” added Farag. “Why here? It doesn’t point to any path.”

  “It could be confirmation to the aspiring Staurofilax that he’s going the right way. A sign of encouragement.”

  “Maybe.” Farag wasn’t convinced.

  We resumed our descent, but we had barely gone two or three steps when the captain stopped again. “Another chrismon.”

  “Where is it this time?” The professor was very annoyed.

  “The same place as the last one.” The previous chrismon was at the level of my face. I could see it perfectly.

  “I still think this makes no sense,” insisted Farag.

  “Let’s keep going down,” the Rock said laconically.

  “No, Kaspar, wait! Examine the wall. See if you notice anything. If not, let’s keep descending. But please check it over carefully.”

  The Swiss Rock turned the flashlight on me, momentarily blinding me. I covered my eyes with one hand and cried out a muffled protest. Just then I heard an exclamation louder than my own.

  “There’s something here, Professor!”

  “What have you found?”

  “Between the two chrismons, you can make out another eroded shape in the rock. It looks like a small gap. I can barely see it.”

  My blindness was passing. Suddenly I could detect the shape the captain was talking about. It wasn’t a gap at all. It was a sliver of stone perfectly embedded into the wall.

  “It looks like the work of fossores,* a reinforcement in the wall or a masonry frame,” I commented.

  “Push it, Kaspar!” the professor urged.

  “I don’t think I can. I’m all twisted up.”

  “Then you push it, Ottavia!”

  “You want me push that rock? It isn’t going to move an inch.”

  As I was pr
otesting, I rested my palm on the block. With just a nudge, it gently moved inside. The hole it left in the wall was smaller than the rock itself. The front face of the rock was chipped away along the edges so it would fit into a frame about five centimeters thick.

  “It moved! It moved!”

  It was strange. The ashlar stone slid away noiselessly and without any resistance, as if it had been greased. My arm wasn’t long enough to push the rock to the end of its track. We were clearly surrounded by several meters of rock, and the small square passageway it slid down seem endless.

  “Take the flashlight, Doctor,” yelled Glauser-Röist. “Get into the hole! We have to follow it.”

  “Do I have to go first?”

  The captain snorted. “Listen, the professor and I have nowhere to move. You are right in front of it. Get in the damn hole! The professor will enter after you, and then I will backtrack to where you are now.”

  So there I was, making my way down a narrow corridor barely two feet high and about a foot wide. I pushed the stone with my hands and pushed the flashlight with my knees. I nearly fainted when I realized that Farag was behind me and that I was on all fours, my skirt probably failing to cover me entirely. I told myself it was no time for foolishness. Still, in the future, when I returned to Rome—if I returned to Rome—I would buy some pants, even if my sisters, my order, and the entire Vatican had a heart attack.

  Luckily for my hands and feet, the passageway was as smooth as a newborn baby’s skin. It was like walking on glass. The sides of the stone cube that touched the walls must have been planed too, and that’s why it was so easy to move. When I lifted off my hands, it slid back toward me a bit, as if the tunnel were on a slight incline. I had no idea how far we’d gone—fifteen or twenty meters, maybe more. It seemed like an eternity.

  “We are ascending,” the captain’s voice announced from far away.

  That was true. That corridor was tilting more and more. The stone was starting to weigh on my tired wrists. It wasn’t a place where any human being could get through. A dog or cat, maybe, but definitely not a person. The thought that at some point I’d have to go back the way I’d come, ascend the sinister spiral stairway, and climb two levels of catacombs made me long for sunlight and fresh air.