picture, which rounds it to perfection. Life is ugly with uncertainties, its unsureness abhorrent. One can become bankrupt and beggared, lose love and respect, be hated and downcast by life. Death does none of these.
Death should be tidy, as precise as a surgeon’s cut. Life is a blunt instrument. Death is a scalpel, sharp as light, and used but once then thrown away as dulled.
I cannot bear those who dole out death in ragged slovenliness, the hunters of fox and stag, for example. For those cruel and empty souls, death is not a mastery of beauty, though they claim it is, but a long-drawn-out journey of barbarity into an obscenity, into a degraded death. For them, death is fun. They should wish themselves to die quickly, avoid the deathbed scene and the agony of cancers, the slow deterioration of the flesh and the spirit: they would wish to die as if struck by lightning, one minute fully aware of the sun cutting its rays under broiling storm clouds, the next gone. Yet they want to issue death as slowly as they can, extort its every twist of fate, its every ounce of anguish.
I am not like them, the obscene men in their hunting uniforms, the colour of arterial blood. You see, they even fear to call their jackets crimson, vermilion or bloody red. They call them pink.
The dining room in Father Benedetto’s house is as sombre as an advocate’s office. No paintings hang in there save a dusty oil in a chipped, gold-lacquer frame, of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ almost at arm’s length. It is as if the baby Jesus was not her own offspring: perhaps he smelled as babies always do, from a soiled diaper or the cloying stink of soured milk. The walls are panelled in dark wood stained by centuries of polish, smoke from the baronial fireplace and previous incumbents’ cigarettes and soot from paraffin lamps. Upon the sideboard stand two such lamps, their funnels of clear glass protruding from frosted orbs upon which are exquisitely engraved scenes from the life of Our Lord.
The room is mostly filled by the dining table, a massive edifice of oak, black as ebony and five inches thick, with six legs carved like the fluted pillars of a grotesque cathedral. Up these clamber fertile vines bearing little smirking demons.
The priest’s best crockery is antique, fine porcelain and china edged with maroon and gold, big dinner plates and neat finger bowls which ring to the flick of a fingernail, solid soup dishes and oval platters for fish. Each serving dish could hold an entire meal for a peasant family of four. The vegetable dishes and soup tureen could contain sufficient to feed a small hamlet in the mountains. In the centre of each piece is a crest, a coat of arms surrounded by three golden birds, each with its head thrown back and its beak open in song.
Father Benedetto comes from a well-to-do background. His father was a merchant in Genova, his mother a noted beauty of her time, courted by many and famously flirtatious but cautious: like all the wise women of her day, she guarded her virginity until she could trade it in wedlock to a wealthy man. I have never discovered in what line the priest’s father was a merchant. He has hinted at chemicals, which could be a euphemism for armaments, but I have heard rumours he made a fortune after the war by the illegal excavation and exportation of antiquities rifled by peasants from Etruscan tombs. He died before he could fully enjoy his riches, his eight children – Father Benedetto is quick to point out his father was a good Catholic – inheriting what the government allowed them after taxation.
Now, the wealth and opulence of Father Benedetto’s youth have faded into a shabby and dusty decay, like the cuffs of his canonicals.
When I first sat at this table, I admired the crockery.
‘The crest is that of the family of my father,’ he explained. ‘The birds are Guazzo’s.’
‘Guazzo’s?’ I asked.
‘His Compendium Maleficarum ,’ he replied, as if I should know
Death should be tidy, as precise as a surgeon’s cut. Life is a blunt instrument. Death is a scalpel, sharp as light, and used but once then thrown away as dulled.
I cannot bear those who dole out death in ragged slovenliness, the hunters of fox and stag, for example. For those cruel and empty souls, death is not a mastery of beauty, though they claim it is, but a long-drawn-out journey of barbarity into an obscenity, into a degraded death. For them, death is fun. They should wish themselves to die quickly, avoid the deathbed scene and the agony of cancers, the slow deterioration of the flesh and the spirit: they would wish to die as if struck by lightning, one minute fully aware of the sun cutting its rays under broiling storm clouds, the next gone. Yet they want to issue death as slowly as they can, extort its every twist of fate, its every ounce of anguish.
I am not like them, the obscene men in their hunting uniforms, the colour of arterial blood. You see, they even fear to call their jackets crimson, vermilion or bloody red. They call them pink.
The dining room in Father Benedetto’s house is as sombre as an advocate’s office. No paintings hang in there save a dusty oil in a chipped, gold-lacquer frame, of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ almost at arm’s length. It is as if the baby Jesus was not her own offspring: perhaps he smelled as babies always do, from a soiled diaper or the cloying stink of soured milk. The walls are panelled in dark wood stained by centuries of polish, smoke from the baronial fireplace and previous incumbents’ cigarettes and soot from paraffin lamps. Upon the sideboard stand two such lamps, their funnels of clear glass protruding from frosted orbs upon which are exquisitely engraved scenes from the life of Our Lord.
The room is mostly filled by the dining table, a massive edifice of oak, black as ebony and five inches thick, with six legs carved like the fluted pillars of a grotesque cathedral. Up these clamber fertile vines bearing little smirking demons.
The priest’s best crockery is antique, fine porcelain and china edged with maroon and gold, big dinner plates and neat finger bowls which ring to the flick of a fingernail, solid soup dishes and oval platters for fish. Each serving dish could hold an entire meal for a peasant family of four. The vegetable dishes and soup tureen could contain sufficient to feed a small hamlet in the mountains. In the centre of each piece is a crest, a coat of arms surrounded by three golden birds, each with its head thrown back and its beak open in song.
Father Benedetto comes from a well-to-do background. His father was a merchant in Genova, his mother a noted beauty of her time, courted by many and famously flirtatious but cautious: like all the wise women of her day, she guarded her virginity until she could trade it in wedlock to a wealthy man. I have never discovered in what line the priest’s father was a merchant. He has hinted at chemicals, which could be a euphemism for armaments, but I have heard rumours he made a fortune after the war by the illegal excavation and exportation of antiquities rifled by peasants from Etruscan tombs. He died before he could fully enjoy his riches, his eight children – Father Benedetto is quick to point out his father was a good Catholic – inheriting what the government allowed them after taxation.
Now, the wealth and opulence of Father Benedetto’s youth have faded into a shabby and dusty decay, like the cuffs of his canonicals.
When I first sat at this table, I admired the crockery.
‘The crest is that of the family of my father,’ he explained. ‘The birds are Guazzo’s.’
‘Guazzo’s?’ I asked.
‘His Compendium Maleficarum ,’ he replied, as if I should know
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