What happened to him in the end?
I thought for a long time hed been liquidated by the partisans, for I never believed that story about the gondolier. I suspect he got someone to spread it for him. Mr. Visconti, as I told you, was not a man for fighting with knives or fists. A man who fights never survives long, and Mr. Visconti was great at survival. Why, the old sod, she said with tender delight, he survives to this moment. He must be eighty-four if hes a day[147]. He wrote to Mario and Mario wrote to me, and thats why you and I have taken the train to Istanbul. I couldnt explain all that in London, it was too complicated, and anyway I hardly knew you. Thank goodness for the gold brick, thats all I can say.
The gold brick?
Never mind. Thats quite another thing.
You told me about a gold brick at London Airport, Aunt Augusta. Surely?
Of course not. Its not that one. That was quite a little one. Dont interrupt. Im telling you now about poor Mr. Visconti. It seems hes fallen on very lean times[148].
Where is he? In Istanbul?
Its better you shouldnt know, for there are people still after him. Oh dear, he certainly escaped the hard way. Mr. Visconti was a good Catholic, but he was very very anticlerical, and yet in the end it was the priesthood which saved him. He went to a clerical store in Rome, when the Allies were coming close, and he paid a fortune to be fitted out like a monsignor even to the purple socks. He said that a friend of his had lost all his clothes in a bombing raid and they pretended to believe him. Then he went with a suitcase to the lavatory in the Grand Hotel, where we had given all those cocktail parties to the cardinals, and changed. He kept away from the reception-desk, but he was unwise enough to look in at the bar the barman, he knew, was very old and short-sighted. Well, you know, in those days a lot of girls used to come to the bar to pick up German officers. One of these girls I suppose it was the approach of the Allied troops that did it was having a crise de conscience[149]. She wouldnt go to her friends bedroom, she regretted her lost purity, she would never sin again. The officer plied her with more and more cocktails, but with every drink she became more religious. Then she spied Mr. Visconti, who was having a quick whisky in a shady corner. Father, she cried to him, hear my confession. You can imagine the tension in the bar, the noise outside as the evacuation got under way, the crying children, people drinking up what there was in the bar, the Allied planes overhead
How did you hear the story, Aunt Augusta?
Mr. Visconti told Mario the essentials when he got to Milan, and I can imagine the rest. Especially I can picture poor Mr. Visconti in his purple socks. My child, he said, this is no fit place for a confession.
Never mind the place. What does the place matter? We are all about to die, and I am in mortal sin. Please, please, Monsignor. (She had noticed his socks by this time.) What worried Mr. Visconti most was the attention she was provoking.
My child, he told her, in this state of emergency a simple act of contrition is enough, but oh no, she wasnt going to be fobbed off with something cheap[150] like that Bargain sale owing to closing down of premises. She came and knelt at his knees. Your Grace, she exclaimed. She was used to giving officers a superior rank it nearly always pleased a captain to be called a major.
I am not a bishop, Mr. Visconti said. I am only a humble monsignor. Mario questioned his father closely about this episode, and I have really invented nothing. If anyone has invented a detail it is Mario. You have to remember that he writes verse plays.
Father, the girl implored, taking the hint, help me.
The secrecy of the confessional, Mr. Visconti pleaded back they were now, you see, pleading to each other, and she pawed Mr. Viscontis knee, while he pawed the top of her head in an ecclesiastical way. Perhaps it was the pawings which made the German officer interrupt with impatience.
For Gods sake, he said, if she wants to confess, Monsignor, let her. Heres the key of my room, just down the passage, past the lavatory.
So off went Mr. Visconti with the hysterical girl he remembered just in time to put down his whisky. He had no choice, though he hadnt been to confession himself for thirty years and he had never learnt the priests part. Luckily there was an air-conditioner in the room breathing heavily, and that obscured his whispers, and the girl was too much concerned with her role to pay much attention to his. She began right away; Mr. Visconti had hardly time to sit on the bed, pushing aside a steel helmet and a bottle of Schnapps[151], before she was getting down to details. He had wanted the whole thing finished as quickly as possible, but he told Mario that he couldnt help becoming a little interested now she had got started and wanting to know a bit more. After all, he was a novice though not in the ecclesiastical sense.
How many times, my child? That was a phrase he remembered very well from his adolescence.