Free The Gospel Of Judas by Simon Mawer Page B

apartment, on the
piano nobile
, groups of tourists shuffle round the relics of the once great past of the Casadei family, peering at the portrait of the family pope – Innocent the something-or-other – and wondering when the ceiling will be re-gilded. Up here beneath the rafters birds and rodents scrabble in the wainscot. When it rains water drips through on to the kitchen floor with a dull persistence. A bucket stands ready and provides an echo of rain long after a storm has passed on.
    Apart from the kitchen – little more than a galley – there is a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom. The bathroom is awash with Magda’s things: her tights hanging like flayed black skins over the bath, her knickers soaking in the cracked bidet, her pots of face cream, her lipsticks, her mascara brushes littering the shelves.
    Days pass. Spring becomes summer, with that imperceptible shift that brings harsh white out of effulgent amber; and Magda draws, observes, takes domes and roofs andtowers and transfers them, with a soft mutation, on to her paper. She draws other things, and paints them as well (the apartment fills with the organic smell of oils and turpentine and acrylic resin, like an artist’s studio). She paints the sun, setting like a bloody wound behind the ragged knife edge of the Janiculum Hill; she paints the strange, spiky plants that grow around the terrace (abstract shapes these, like something by Yves Tanguy); she paints the interior of the flat.
    Magda is an artist, and an artist possesses what she sees. It was an insidious possession, step by cautious step: first the view, and then the flat itself, the random assembly of things within it, the broken furniture, the dusty books, the dirty dishes, the sagging, ruined sofa in the sitting room; and then the occupant: Leo at the stove making coffee, Leo asleep in the armchair (his mouth half open, a thin ribbon of saliva trickling from one corner of his lips; pen and ink with a grey wash), Leo sitting and watching her quizzically and hiding who knows (except Leo) what thoughts? Leo the lion, looking old and ragged, scarred by time and circumstance. Interior with figure.
    Magda is an artist, and an artist possesses what she touches. She touches my flesh, with the tenderness of a nurse, the softness of a mother. She touches the slick, waxy skin of my trunk, the frozen waves of lucid skin which lap at my neck, the wax-paper tissue on the back of my hands where the tendons have fused and the fingers are clawed and almost useless. She touches this silently, as though the touching alone may do something for me.
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘Flames,’ I tell her. ‘Fire and brimstone.’
    Fire she understands, but not brimstone. Fire she can understand, but not hell. ‘You can feel?’ Her finger moves down the smooth, morbid tissue. ‘You can feel?’
    My skin is dumb. But I can still feel. I am alive to every twitch and whisper of the world, every movement she makes in the shadows of the flat, every breath she takes, every murmur of the city outside our walls.
    ‘Tell me,’ she says.
    Leo on fire, squatting like a pope on his throne, like a Bacon pope, Pope Innocent the something-or-other, screaming and burning, his flesh falling like molten wax, dripping like wax, his eyes staring out of his agony as though through a grimy pane.
    Magda is an artist and an artist possesses what she sees. She possesses the flat and all that is in it.
    Dear Father Newman
, someone wrote,
may you burn in hell
. The letter was anonymous, of course. It was signed ‘a good Catholic’.
    You cannot separate belief from context, that is what I have discovered. You cannot divorce what you hold from the circumstances that are holding you. When did the disciples’ faith let them down? During the storm on the lake, when Peter tried the same conjuring act as his Master and attempted to walk on the water – ‘Oh, ye of little faith’. Or when the man was being led away, a political prisoner, to a