He looked at me, directly.
"I'm not fading," he assured me. "It's just I saw and smelled the house again. You know? The smell of old people's rooms, the rooms in which people die. But it was so lovely. What was I saying? All right, it was during Proteus, one of the night parades, that Father Kevin made the incredible breakthrough that both these books had been dedicated by Wynken de Wilde to Blanche De Wilde, his patron, and that she was obviously the wife to his good brother, Damien; it was all embedded in the designs of the first few pages.
And that threw an entirely different light on the psalms. The psalms were filled with lascivious invitations and suggestions and possibly even some sort of secret codes for clandestine meetings. Over and over again there appeared paintings of the same little garden¡ªunderstand we're talking miniatures here¡ª"
"I've seen many examples. "
"And in these little tiny pictures of the garden there would always be one naked man and five women dancing around a fountain within the walls of a medieval castle, or so it seemed. Magnify it five times and it was just perfect. And Father Kevin began to laugh and laugh.
" 'No wonder there isn't a single saint or biblical scene in any of this,' Father Kevin said, laughing. 'Your Wynken de Wilde was a raving heretic! He was a witch or a diabolist. And he was in love with this woman, Blanche. ' He wasn't shocked so much as amused.
" 'You know, Roger,' he said, 'if you did get in touch with one of the auction houses, very likely these books could pu
t you through Loyola, or Tulane. Don't think of selling them down here. Think about New York; Butterfield and Butterfield, or Sotheby's. '
"He had in the last two years copied out by hand about thirty-five different poems for me in English, the best sort of translation¡ªstraight prose from the Latin¡ªand now we went over them, tracing repetitions and imagery, and a story began to emerge.
"First thing we realized was that there had been many books originally, and what we possessed were the first and third. By the third, the psalms reflected not mere adoration for Blanche, who was again and again compared to the Virgin Mary in her purity and brightness, but also answers to some sort of correspondence about what the lady was suffering at the hands of her spouse.
"It was clever. You have to read it. You have to go back to the flat where you killed me and get those books. "
"Which means you didn't sell them to go to Loyola or Tulane?"
"Of course not. Wynken, having orgies with Blanche and her four friends! I was fascinated. Wynken was my saint by virtue of his talent, and sexuality was my religion because it had been Wynken's and in every philosophical word he wrote he encoded a love of the flesh!
You have to realize I didn't believe any orthodox creed really, I never had. I thought the Catholic Church was dying. And that Protestantism was a joke. It was years before I understood that the Protestant approach is fundamentally mystic, that it is aiming for the very oneness with God that Meister Eckehart would have praised or that Wynken wrote about. "
"You are being generous to the Protestant approach. And Wynken did write about oneness with God?"
"Yes, through union with the women! It was cautious but clear;
'In thine arms I have known the Trinity more truly than men can teach,' like that. Oh, this was the new way, I was sure. But then I knew Protestantism only as materialism, sterility and Baptist tourists who got drunk on Bourbon Street because they could not dare do it in their hometowns. "
"When did you change your opinion?" I asked.
"I'm speaking in broad generalities. I mean, I saw no hope for religions in existence in the West at our time. Dora feels very much the same, but we'll come to Dora. "
"Did you finish the entire translation?"
"Yes; just before Father Kevin was transferred. I never saw him again. He did write to me later, but by that time I had run away from home.
"I was in San Francisco. I'd left without my mother's blessing, and taken the Trailways Bus because it was a few cents cheaper than the Greyhound. I didn't have seventy-five dollars in my pocket. I'd squandered everything Captain ever gave me. And when he died, did those relatives of his from Jackson, Mississippi, ever clean out those rooms!
"They took everything. I always thought Captain had left something for me, you know. But I didn't care. The books were his greatest gift and all those luncheons at the Monteleone Hotel when we had had gumbo together, and he let me break up all my saltine crackers in the gumbo till it was porridge. I just loved it.
"What was I saying? I bought the ticket to California and saved a small balance for pie and coffee at each stop. A funny thing happened. We carne to a point of no return. That is, when we passed through some town in Texas I realized I didn't have enough money to go back home, even if I wanted to. It was the middle of the night. I think it was El Paso! Anyway, then I knew there was no going back.
"But I was headed for San Francisco and the Haight Asbury, and I was going to found a cult based on the teachings of Wynken in praise of love and union and claiming that sexual union was godlike union and I would show his books to my followers. It was my dream, though to tell you the truth, I had no personal feeling about God at all.
"Within three months, I had discovered that my credo was by no means unique. The entire city was full of hippies who believed in free love, and panhandling, and though I gave regular lectures to large loose circles of friends on Wynken, holding up the books and reciting the psalms¡ªthese are very tame, of course¡ª"
"I can imagine. "
"¡ªmy principle job was that of business manager and boss of three rock musicians who wanted to become famous and were too stoned to remember their bookings, or collect the proceeds at the door. One of them, Blue, we called him, could really sing well. He had a high tenor, and quite a range. The band had a sound. Or at least we thought it did.
"Father Kevin's letter found me when I was living up in the attic of the Spreckles Mansion on Buena Vista Park, do you know that house?"
"I do know it. It's a hotel. "