by bart plantenga & black sifichi (par avion)
“The psychoanaytical theory of money must start by establishing the proposition that money is, in Shakespeare’s words, the ‘visible god’; in Luther’s words, ‘the God of this world.’”
Norman O. Brown
ONE
It always begins the same way. The same way for the Pope. The same white meat. White-Oh-Glory-Be tender flesh. Nautical reveries in white chaussettes. Stretched reves of whispered white across sharp delicate ankle bones. Bones worthy of any religion or reliquary.
The Pope has discovered her ankles to be deserving of embracement & adulation. & he has, in his mind, already traced the rivulets of perspiration she has imported from her Venice with the velvet piping of his sleeve. Her ankles are indeed worthy of praise because they are grace inside flesh & of fantastic manufacture; brittle, precise, bird-like.
He is attuned to these delights (although, for propriety’s sake, he will never reveal the nausea that craving causes in his solar plexis) because, afterall, had this Pope not once been a poet? & thus, does it not seem likely that he, in the course of his writings, would have been forced to traverse the tight inseams, that hem of the Him & Her, where flesh is forever chainstitched to reverie? That prevailing notion of poetry, which seems to contain freedom in it somewhere, would seem to make all these questions foregone conclusions.
& what of her bellbottoms? Are they not always pink, pink & diaphonous? Like a gondola made of rose petals. Tight & pink as stipulated. Pink & provocative as a smile floating by on the canals of her Venice. Pink as an unhealed wound of lilies on the ponds of Giverney. & was it not this gorgeous pink (beautiful as a heretic’s tongue kiss) that provoked him to imagine her as exquisite flora rosa? As something pink & aromatic. Floating & hinged. Slang & seminal. Pink & carniverous.
DEUX
But it always leads to this same place. Like dog to same tree, blessing, with his urine, the fallen leaves which will eventually blow away, disappear, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Only the parfum will linger, invisible, like a saint. Or spirit; like an undiscovered apse containing the delicate pink marble statue of the Virgin Mary, “Pink & Carniverous.” This scent wafts among the listing taxis along the dark Rio Della Pieta like incense down the nave of a glass cathedral, slithering ichthyo-fishily through subterranean channels. & suddenly…light, gold, sun, huge open sky, purple waters shimmering.
Shimmering vulvic gondola. Images triggered by neuron, ganglion & solar plexis, leaning over & dragging his hand through the diaphonous fluid. The gondolier guides the vessel into the Bacino Di San Marco . San Marco’s Torre rises in the near distance. The sensation between departure and arrival dances like bullets in the Pope’s chest. & he knows the feel of the hot bullet, the miracle of bullet-proof glass, the difference between speed & impact, flame & gypsy moth.
The papal colours change at Canal Vallaresso. The terra firma hues of the Torre bricks add a sense of earthly stability to which the Pope responds. The combination of the way her curves round harmoniously into the echo of the Byzantine arco, with its muscular knots of stone, the way her silence fits perfectly into the pews of Saint Peter’s, perfect for vigilance & circumspection & the way her delicate moire-scaled pale hands wave wistfully; all seem to mirror his own gestures, giving eternal value to vision & dream.
She looks down as his gondola nudges the piles into its snug berth. He’s like a lost sailor, marinaio dressed in white cope heavy with knuckles of jewelry, delivered before his sirena. Hoping she will bless him with extraordinary knowledge, with the wetness of rutting season, recovery, bottomless breath & the amphibious freedom of multi-dimensional movement. Not just Forward & Back, To & Fro, In & Out, but forever Through & Within, Above & Below, Confessor & Confessed, the unity of the circle with the balance of the cube.
The gondola dipped unsteadily as the gondolier leapt to the pier with the aid of his remo, elegant oar of gondoliers, near the Theatra San Moise. A book drops from his striped jacket pocket; William Pope’s HOLYSTONE falls open at page 111. The Pope reads:
I HAVE DONE THE DAMNABLE DEED. THE HORRIBLE DAMNABLE DEED. I CANNOT
PRAY. GOD WILL HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH ME. I WILL NOT HAVE SALVATION
AT HIS HANDS. I LONG TO BE IN THE BOTTOMLESS PIT, THE LAKE WHICH BURNETH
WITH FIRE AND BRIMSTONE …I WILL NOT HAVE SALVATION. OH GOD, DO NOT HEAR
MY PRAYERS FOR I WILL NOT BE SAVED. I HATE EVERYTHING THAT GOD HAS MADE.
The Pope hands the book back to his gondolier. & looks up at the tower. She’s no longer there. He wonders if Mr. Pope’s text would still be valid if he substituted the word “salvation” with “orgasm” – as in I WILL NOT HAVE ORGASM. Unforgettable speculations that only the courtesan-rife floating history of Venezia could adequately provide. The same Venezia that had sullied its canals & our collective lyricism. The same Venezia that now looked more like a rundown Luna Park de Pizzas, along the Merceria, with its dealers of plastic gondolas made in China. The same Venice which, back in 1562, condemned that gondolas be all black because they had become objects of ostentacious display. But was the gondola not now the perfect container for her white & pink servitudes?
The driver continued with his book. The Pope wiped sweat from brow. He watched the tower for some sign of his bellbottomed “Bovolo.” But she had taken a simple step back into the sanctity of shadow. Perhaps too cool to indulge in secret sentimentalities, however utilitarian. The gondolier looked up too, curious as to the object of the Pope’s gaze. He paused an instant & then asked into the empty trompe l’oeil space, “Is money god in action, Dio di Dollaro, Your Holiness?”
THREE
Perhaps he’d been too obstinate to insist that Money could NEVER (as in Absolutely Not Ever) be God in action. [In 1955 the U.S. Congress passed a law requiring that ALL U.S. coins & paper money carry the motto, In God We Trust.] Just as likely, though, the Pope (official title: Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the West, Primate of Italy, Archbishop & Metropolitan of the Roman Province & Sovereign of the Stato Della Citta Del Vaticano) had allowed critical acumen to succumb to the assembled belief in his defacto moral & spiritual infallibility.
To admit, on any level, that Dio, on occasion, could be Money in action was tantamount to admitting that he was nothing more than a ridiculously overdressed bankteller. But to get back to the point, which is power, there was no point in the Pope denying the facts of his vast temporal powers. The Pope was, afterall, the director of such important functions as the manufacture of the Vatican’s postage stamps, coins, flags, license plates, as well as the operation of the Vatican’s (ie. HIS) own telecommunications system, radio station & banca.
Perhaps, at some juncture, the Pope had stopped asking for divine assistance, as the successor of St. Peter, in matters both spiritual & temporal. Perhaps he’d lost his bearings. Perhaps he’d begun to rely too much on financial alchemists such as Michel Sindona. Perhaps politics had left him without the courage or wherewithal to admit certain truths. We, of course, have no way of knowing any of this.
But perhaps the belief (for what is belief but just a more desperately certified hope!), by Roman Catholics that Christ established the Vatican when he said: “Upon this rock I will build my Church…” &, by extrapolation, this came to mean the Pontiff was infallible. Which led him to affect a certain Papal swagger, a certain magnificent & cinematic toss of his sumptuous, white, wool-banded vestments which made cape ripple with all the aplomb of a matador who defies death the way the Pope must defy doubt & temptation.
Actually, the Pope stood to gain much by denying the very immensity of these temporal powers. This denial – no matter how elegant or articulate – had long ago become an inverted form of bragadosio, the hubris of over-invoked humility. He can kiss earth or viscous pavement a thousand times & it will still be not unlike a gigolo, in baggy pants, refusing to call attention to the bulk of his bulge.
Thus his immense temporal power is ultimately enhanced by the assertive pomposity of his denials. &, in spite of all his obstinancy, had he not already bought her? Or tried to? Had he not already decided that money was no object? Yes, he had indeed paid her train fare to HIS Rome from HER Venice, the Venice of Proust, Casanova & Mann, where just a week ago, during Carnivale, he had experienced the Scirocco, magical, warm southeasterly, bluster down narrow callis, rippling the water on the rii, surprising the souls of some, the skins of others. In fact, this Scirocco had done much more. It had lifted the intimate, overlapping cycloid scales off her fabulous bombastic fusiform. Flapping gently like spangles on the sigh of a summer dress.
Yes, he had sensed that his magniloquently-informed vista guidata of private Vatican treasures, made of ivory, gold & geld would impress her. He had thought that his well-timed pious & sweeping hand gestures, revealing priceless (too expensive for a mortal to conceive) statuary, Egyptian & Etruscan antiquities & gilt (beyond guilt?)-framed oils, would leave her in his thrall.
But, instead, she was awed more by how easily she had gained his confidence, by how obediently he had donned a particular pair of jeans. & the knees of these jeans were already chalky because he had already been down on his knees before her furlocked amoretto gusto sandals (based on the design of a certain slender vaporetto.) & he had already impetuously bludgeoned her with flattery, likening her to a breathless Venus, an Ingres on fire, a torrid Titian with “the lazy caterpillar brows wrapped around aromatic cup-of-coffee eyes.” She forgave him his purple poetics.
Hymn \ him \ n [ME ymne, fr. OF fr. L hymnus song of praise, fr. Gk hymnos] 1: a song of praise 2: a song of joy. hyomen \ hiomen \ n [LL, fr. Gk hymen membrane]: a fold of mucous membrane partly closing the orifice of the vagina – Hymen [L, fr. Gk Hymen]: the Greek god of marriage.
The Pope was emboldened by what he read in the dictionary. It convinced him that hymen contained “hi men!”, a greeting, a welcome, an invitation. & that hymn sounded like him & that both hymn & hymen were marked by God as part of their meaning. This gave the Pope a better sense of his Manifest Destiny, that his future with her was not only inevitable but expansive & benevolent as well.
But she remained curiously in & of herself. That is to say; untouchable. That is to say numinous. Illuminous. Unreproachable, unapproachable. Like inexplicable points of light in the sky.
On his knees the loose change of many nations jiggled in his pockets. & before her he was both nervy & nervous. He confessed that he liked the snug fit of the jeans, the way they clung to his loins. As she’d predicted. & he caressed his own hips & loins in much the same manner as John Travolta had in a previous, more incendiary incarnation. Had the Pope studied Travolta’s gestures or were they mere genetically coded movements that informed the male species of the gestural ritual of courtship? No matter.
For it was the Pope, who controlled a massive Holy Empire, with 800 million adherents prepared to believe his every infallible utterance. He knew she’d denounced her faith. & he knew that he could ceremoniously forgive her & gain political leverage. He knew she’d done time for seditious acts, in the women’s prison on the Isle of Giudecca, in a previous incarnation. & he knew that she knew what he knew. & yet, somehow he was NOT in control. In fact, the more faraway her eyes seemed the more he sensed she could see right through him.
She had already remarked that the way he looked in jeans pleased her. & he had already blushed red, a blood-engorged red, the same red as his shoes, the ones with crosses embroidered on the front.
She had already issued her derisive laugh, noting that the 2 chalky spots on his knees resembled his bald spot. & she had already sardonically made the sign of the cross, touching each of the 3 “bald stigmatas” in proper sequence. It was gestures of this sort that made him realize he could never again leave her alone. That he could never let her leave. That she could never leave this Palace of 1000 rooms alone – or alive.
He must discover within himself a way to convince her that HE was curator & SHE mere bauble. That HE was sculptor & SHE his voluptuously contoured statuary. & he must assure her that his banca was always open. That money was of no value. That by showering her with it he would prove her more valued than all the In God We Trust dollars, yen or marks in his bank.
& ultimately he knew this woman (thinks he knows the soul of Woman), & that this will impress her & ultimately yank down her sardonic guard. He thinks this will prop up his charade which can best be described as that pious swagger.
But before HER he is always humble (but only in as much as he thinks this will manipulate her) – & alone. & all else is merde. & he thinks this well-rehearsed humility (which is nothing but well-dressed unrequited yearning) will impress her. & if not impress her, confuse her, but he could NOT have been more wrong.
QUATRE
Confused she was not & impressed she only pretended to be. She had lived in Paris, eating with the bourgeoisie, hobnobbing with ministers of business & culture as a translator for a large multi-national based in Rome. Quick talk, hollow promises & exhorbitant, tax-subsidized meals were old barbeques for her.
Her beauty, she was well-accustomed to. She wore it like a short strapless sequined dress on a starry night, exciting all with the gravity & brilliance she could only see indirectly via the reflections in the eyes of wrought-up suitors. Eyes that shimmered relative to the amount of “shimmy” she decided to generate.
Eyes like thermometers. Beauty as barometer. She controlled the climate. & all this getting to know the wealthy was mere prep for meeting the Pope, whose ties to organized crime & multi-nats she did not underestimate.
She was prepared, prepared for his being prepared. But he wasn’t. While the Pope was lost in the blue cling of his new Levi’s (deliriously noting the anagram of which spelled ELVIS/EVILS), she had already begun her assault. She had already crossed the threshhold of propriety when she’d passed behind a “delicious” Michelangelo & unbuttoned a blouse button.
He hadn’t noticed her pass behind the statue. & when she reappeared he suddenly DID notice the undone button. After the button – the undone. After the undone – the hole. After the hole – gold Cross. Gold Cross above her poitrine. Feditura exotica under Cross. Cross near the hole.
“Which came first?” He mused. “Button or Cross? Chicken or egg? Passion or passion flower? Poem or poet?”
His Holiness wrote in a vision:
Virginal Vesuvian Firsts
Holy Primary Hymens
Singular Secular Penetrations
Unique Mysterious Union
Infinite Unending Intercourse
The Pope had his Roman way with Latin phonics & allusion, despite his Eastern European background. And this poetry, this 1st poem of the day, this unwritten sketch which had almost alighted from his lips (the translation could reach millions) he wanted to first transcribe into Kinetics. Kinetics with her. Vowel into skin touch. Consonants into grunts & cries. Verb into crevice. Thrust, heave, torque.
“All good things in time,” she purred, the words coming from on high, descending through her from some far off place to finish his thought. Like host finished communion. He mused. If the body of Christ can transport itself as a salty wafer…could he not be transported by trucks carrying sweet biscuits in the shape of the Virgin Mary’s nipples? Popo Biscotto! “The Mother & Son In One.”
The Pope’s mind was ablaze with new ideas, sensations, marketing plans & sexual allegories. Bovolo was source to amazing inspirations, not triggered by daily routine, but by the grandiose, the global, satellites, private musees. Close things – open buttons. Feminine things. The Pope needed SPECIAL things to excite him. Long distance phone sex. But why call when he could be live?
And so he journeyed to Venice, home of John Paul I (a sentimental aescetic, romantic Luddite, heretic, loony lacking the proper grandeur, he smugly judged). & while visiting the newly restored paintings in the Chiese San Marco, he had captured one of the most beautiful women in Italy, utilizing twinkle in eye, a Brando lisp in 12 languages, video tapes of himself in passionate arousal before 25,000 Byelorussians & Lithuanians in Lomza, his 5000 pressbooks, 100 bank accounts, 1900kw of radio power, his immobilier on the Champs Elysees, Vatican tourist profits (4120 visitors daily).
The figures seemed to swoon her like the image of the Milky Way, all the galaxies in the universe, the square of the square of the square.
“My cubic presence is probably the greatest of any individual on the planet.” he proclaimed with a smile. But while he was remembering & multiplying “worldly things,” [The millions invested in dummy bonds, guns, bombs, tanks, speculative ventures, real estate, even contraceptives.] Another button opened to reveal yet another hole. And near this hole he spotted a fold of flesh. Powdery cool bronzed pelle, (as cultivated on the Lido). Orbital flesh. Buttonhole flesh.
His conquest wandered through the gallery, pausing at statuary, observing paintings, touching velvet draperies. Elusive, at arm’s breath. All while appearing to be warm (?)…provocative (?) &…just..just…barely…stripping.
The Pope slipped in & out of himself, the warp & woof of ecstasy & fact, as Bovolo pushed hands into pockets, feeling her own loins, breathing, just 10 feet ahead in a farflung corner of his vision.
& his jeans revealed what his robes had always concealed. The curve of his excitement had begun to pulsate. & the darkness of the gallery scythed out a swath of freedom (that freedom & darkness were symbiotically connected was, at best, an excommunicatable notion). In the dark all humility & guilt evaporated. While its brumal clime donated a “rational temperature” – 68oF, 17OC., the temp. of invigoration & arousal – where temporal & physical were “perfectly balanced.” Even if the pendulous profundity of his testicular globosity would be lost.
He sat like a male model for a sexy yoghurt ad, one leg up on a crate, other dangling, his sex centered & forward. The gilt-framed art provided him a spine of comfort. & the Pope felt good. Rich but somehow Bohemian. His sinewy nerves revealed themselves to be as functional as dense fiberoptics cables. The kind laid along the ocean’s floor. & then – flash frames. Dark-lit forest scenes. Paintings of the hunt, Titian’s Rape of Europa.
& with a swing of his scepter & a valiant lunge mid-groin she became living sculpture to add to his vast collection. Or the Vatican Arboretum. Or Zoo?! Crown her “Queen Bee Pope Joan”, or, “Anti-Pope of Avignon”, or “Femme Sovereigna di Zen Button.” In tiara & bikini of her choice. Would his Polish poetry, with its gutteral incantations, convince her to partake of such a venture?
The Pope continued to slip between quandry & reverie while she orbited about him, playing her cool game of Duchampian “chess.” “Chess with a razor,” was a phrase that came often to mind. And this “razor” she imagined with ivory handle, ergonomically sculpted for a Botticelli hand, supporting silver blade, fired black, gleaming, one edge a French curve the other as straight as an assassin’s bullet.
It is with this mental blade that she starts to ‘play’. It is with this mental blade that she intends to ‘castrate’ the Pope, pry open ‘locks’ of information, ‘engrave’ her initials on the bedposts of the king size bed she imagines awaits them.
PLAY CASTRATE LOCK ENGRAVE.
The holes that normally held buttons in place were now beginning to hold the Pope in place. “My kingdom for another undone button,” she mumbled sarcastically, regarding the bulge he tried to hide with his white ecclesiastical beret.
She had been quiet long enough & thus she entered the middle game. Strop the razor, make her seemingly defensive position, fait accompli, offensive & undeniable. Yet, she had to sustain a sexual gravity more magnetic than self-same blade & eventually, swing back & slice his desire to holysmoke.
A magnetic storm of the highest order. Lightning. Gleam of blade. Thunder. Tornado of tug & torque. Echoes of stabbings. Shower of confessed tears. Blood. Ink of Royal Colour. She demanded the secret 10 Comadamentos written by Pope Pie XI, after he’d met with Marinetti & the other Futurists, in the Vatican, to put forth their theories of man & machine.
After the death of Pie XI in 1939, war broke out & these Comadamentos were deemed too sacred to be read by anyone save successive Popes.
Bovolo was also interested in the 3 Letters of The Fatima, Nostradamus’ unpublished writing cribbed by Hitler, Caesar’s litanies on Hypnotism & Power,The Quanta Cura (in which the Papacy denounced the notions of unrestricted liberty & aligned itself with juntas & absolute monarchies), Secret Records of the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, or IOR, or Vatican Bank, The AIDS File, the unedited tapes of John Paul I speeches, books on Erotica, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of banned books & diaries kept by country priests on exotic isles.
She undid a 3rd button. The Pope eyed lace. Black lace. Plunging neckline. Gravity made stronger by the insinuation of bosom. He wanted to examine the manufacture of her brasierre, a lace reggipeto. When suddenly she sparked up.
“Was it a sexual fantasy that killed John Paul I?” Long pause. “Or was he poisoned with digitalis, which neatly simulates a myocardial infarcation [all members of P2, Propaganda Due, undeniable lobby of CIA, mob, corporate junta & deadly influentials, carry digitalis to facilitate their own seamless exit if caught] for having refused to wear the Papal Crown?” She leaned back, nipples pressing through her pink silk blouse. He knew so much but every instant there would be more he would never fathom.
Mouth agape, legs spread & flexed, pret a commencer, he felt domination, something cinematic, something culturally ordained. She sauntered over to him, epic arching eyes fixed to his, lips pursed Vogue-style. But before he could speak she cut him again, this time with a demand.
“Let’s have the Secret Comadamentos, Your Holiness!’ The Pope lost his tongue for all 12 languages. Fixed his stare on the next undone button. He knew he’d tell her. His silence already ample confession. Compliance. Hypnotic acquiescence.
She leaned over, put her hands on his flexed knees. He felt like a crab on its back. His beret fell to the floor & she let out a “MMMMMMM” – somewhere between mantra & gastronomic delight. He stared down the flagrant feditura V, her blouse open to navel.
“Well,” she taunted, stood up, rubbed the last button (& his imagination) between her fingers, “Show me the book.”
He stood up. Hair on end. In the adjacent hallway lined with Fra Angelicos, Pinturiccios, Raphaels, they entered a small closet which contained a locked door. Here he matted his frightwig with sweat & spit. Secret closets led to secret bowers & more locked doors. The Pope punched in a code & the next door opened. Inside, a small staircase spiralled up 2 flights to another electronically locked door.
“The library.” he said as he tapped in the code. Click. Open. Shuffle. Click. Stolen embrace. Closed. Furtive sigh. The Pope opened a small light at a reading desk. An immense library. “31,000 Ancient latin manuscripts. 400,000 books. This inner sanctum houses some of the world’s most valued tomes.”
“Sit down, relax.” She said as she surveyed the shelves, fingering leather spines, calling out titles & catalogue numbers.
“#8666.” he shouted. “Over to the right.” She quickly found her way & slid out a Gold & Black codex with PIE XI engraved inside the Golden Papal Bull. She took the book to his table where her blouse unfolded like the limp petals of a chrysanthemum. Her semi-erect nipples mesmerized him. “Have you read this?”
“Of course.” He answered dryly. “I could’ve recited it to you but knew you wouldn’t accept it without seeing it with your own eyes.” She gazed down at the unopened tome & then back at him. The game listed to & fro, but ever forward. This sudden candor, on his part…was it naivete? Good heartedness? Trust? How sharp was he? His vanity (which relieved the faithful to learn) had, after John Paul I’s embarassing charade of trashy humility, indeed reasserted its earthly duty of manifesting God’s prowess with a vengence.
“Recite, s’il vous plait.” The Pope closed his eyes, spoke as if from a trance, as if each commandment could roll around in one’s mind the way her root beer sweet meat nipples might roll around in one’s mouth.
10 COMANDAMENTOS FOR PARADISE ON EARTH
1. Attach yourself to nothing. Live dangerously but not foolishly. Laugh in the face of authority.
2. Regard nothing as being higher than Yourself. Walk the Earth for 7 consecutive sleepless
days & claim Yourself as creator.
3. Love thy neighbor ephemerally, unconsciously & lustfully. Let no image be prohibited to the
speed of imagination.
4. The imagination is as large as the universe. Let it proliferate.
5. Let no ONE vice control You. Instead, let several compete simultaneously. Nothing is more
simple than a single-viced man.
6. Pleasure of the flesh should rise with You every morning. Ponder its immensity, its poetry,
its form; touch all roundness, fill all slips in space, fertilize all unlaid eggs.
7. Be rich & richer in Your generosity. Wealth has no definition if there are poor nearby.
8. All is natural. Cars, Earth, Bombs, Flowers. Embrace all & instill each in its proper place.
Power has no definition if not compared to beauty.
9. Influence many. A sound idea should be heard by all. Walk the streets talking loud, stand on
boxes & shout, if You have access to vision find a microphone, hire a stadium.
10. Be afraid of no one. Invite all types of experience. Fear has no relevance when its source is
multiplied by the speed of light.
The Pope sat silent. Bovolo, with opened tome, verified the text. Accurate to the word. A chill fluttered down her spine.
FIVE
& how do you know when you know too much? Is it the chill breeze that stirs the vain in weathervane?
“In the 5th Century the Latin Cross made its first appearance on the tomb of an empress.” Would he say she looked like that empress? Ben Her? For effect? For leverage? She hoped not.
Wasn’t his capo swagger in snazzy low-brimmed lynx fedora not unlike that of a 2-shit, sloshed gambler on a lucky tear? Proud as any trucker parking his 18 wheels on a narrow Roman street during rush hour? But none of this was the issue.
He tried to amuse her with an ivory back scratcher, in the shape of a Latin cross, a gift from Mozambique. At each point of the cross sat a small, flexed hand ready to scratch where itches might crawl. “Ta una pelle morbida.” Her skin was indeed soft.
“Arret already!” She had to think fast, straight, solid & expansively. Like a small caliber bullet that causes big damage. “You & your support for Humanae Vitae & the shabby triste treatment of women.”
“Mary, Our Mother of God, yes, was not among the Apostles at the Last supper. No?”
The outline of inquiry, observation & incredulity looked like this:
Papal intrusion #1: “ Christ was first shown crucified on the cross in the 11th Century. The cross is also central to the Mandala. The cross divides mandala into quadrants, each arm represents a cardinal point. Christ’s head was placed in the orb of the sun at the exact intersection of the arms of the cross.”
“Viva il Papa!” She proclaimed with playful scorn. “& what of Calvi’s head?”
1. Again, was he merely proud of his photographic memory? As much as he was, say, of his photogenic majesty?
2. Was he REALLY totally oblivious to the heretical nature of his peculiar 10 Commandments? Or, for that matter, the gunrunning, money laundering, blackmail, hoodlum accounts & arming of pro-Christian juntas.
3. Or was he letting her in on some Grand Secret, a hidden agenda? Apart from, or integral to, the very future of Catholicism? She thought not. Concentrations of power cannot withstand such notions as “laughing in the face of authority.” These Commandments would merely empower those who had never before been empowered. & in the eyes of Catholic Curia, this couldn’t be anything but foolish, heretical. Because power would no longer be power if it could no longer hurt the many for the aggrandizement of the few.
Papal Intrusion #2: (Strategy ; the glamour of humility placed , in his person, at her feet, to consolidate power. Ie. flattery amply applied will get you EVERYwhere.) Thus he is upon his knees before her. & here he unties her chaussure of missing leather, her furlocked amoretto gusto sandal. & he re-ties it too tight. Just right. & he runs his tongue along the fleshy hints & along the stitches to count them. & bless their ample constrictiveness.
“In Vedic documents one learns that the cross (also the swastika, by the way) is related to their Fire Cult. Both the Cross & Fire Cult refer to pieces of wood necessary to make fire. & fire here is symbolic of the divine spark as represented by the sun. Sympathetic magic to renew the sun daily at dawn. The ceremony of burning the lamb corresponds with Jewish Passover traditions in which 2 spits were driven through the victim to form a cross. Christ’s sacrifice on the cross took place during this same festival of the Vernal Equinox. Jung finds in this symbolism a key to tracing the liberation of libido for cultural creativity…”
4. Was he prepared to admit Christianity had merely been cribbed from Jewish & pagan rites. & was, in effect, a copycat religion?
4a. Was he prepared to come clean with the “facts”? During WWII some Vatican nuns did stowaway Jews from the Nazis. While many others sheltered Nazis from the clutches of advancing Allies. & eventually affected their escapes to Argentina & Bolivia? & Vatican Inc. money, through P2, funded death squads & private Neo-Nazi armies in South America.
5. Was his heretical10 Commandment mumbo jumbo meant to appease her? Make her believe he was some kind of Papal Blue Gene Vincent? Was all this pagan stuff just meant to get inside her pink bells? Or inside her blue aide-memoire?
6. Or was he merely needling her because he knew she was a member of Venezia’s branch of A/rivista Anarchica? [for whom she’d done time, martyred by the sub-terre press, as a more astute & sexier Ulrike Meinhof.]
7. Did he realize how close to Anarchist theory his 10 Commandments sounded? Did he believe its premises? Or only in so much as it could spook her? Afterall, hadn’t he rescinded all support for the Medellin Manifesto, drafted by liberation theologists? & wasn’t he a proponent of The Canon Law of Marriage (which believed in 3 criteria for marriage; erection, ejacualtion, conception – a total rejection of pleasure & oral contraception)?
8. How much of his gunslinging bragadosio regarding the Vatican’s intricate citizen surveillance network, modelled on South Africa’s, was true? Was it REALLY called “The Eye Of God”?
Papal Intrusion #3: “Earthly prison of anima,” he remarked as he held her foot enshrined in sandal. “I know how you wear out your heels in an unusual manner.” He boasted. “The Great Shoemaker knows. The Church rejects atheists but respects them as creatures of God.” He winked.
“As long as they’re creatures in a cage.” She countered. & he tied the laces of her left sandal tight too. & he dreamt that he had the power to hurt her. To hurt arch, bridge, knee, back of neck with the weighted cudgel of ivory wrapped in zebra hide he hid in a secret poche in the folds of his vestments. & he watched her traipse & hobble, confident of the secret pain & its preachments. & he hoped he’d always control her walk this way. & not how her walk might control him.
“The protective enclosure of the mandala is displayed during meditation. Outer circle full of fire. Flame of desire, your Venezia, your Parigi, Nueva York. Unclean streets, burning genitalia, burning with disease.”
To get his sleeping limbs moving, the blood circulating, he urged her over to the ancient lead glass window with its warped view of the meticulously kept giardino which purportedly mirrored the notions of the mandala.
“Our gardener sometimes pinches the blossoms before their bloom is totally spent. He does so because no one tells him otherwise. The Garden of Eden is the world’s most famous contemplative enclosure. & there stands the Tree of Life, cosmic beech, axis of the entire spiritual universe. Over there.” He pointed, breathing into her nape. His breath hot & smelling of radishes. “It marks where many Christians were martyred in Nero’s gardens. Here you will dwell & become familiar with its flora. Here you will be freed of your delusive knowledge, become child of nature, libertine of earthly & divine process.”
“Cut the merde Baldhead! It’s like Disney meets the Bible as done by Frank Capra. I know what gives & who takes behind the bronze doors of the Basilica past those snoozing Swiss guards in bumble bee pantalons.”
“This flower garden of the philosophes…”
“Junkyard of moneylaunderers, sniper theologians, land speculators & hitmen for god.”
“One can’t run a church on Hail Marys.”
“Nor, Cor Unum, alms collected supposedly, haha, for the poor.”
“What you think you know you really don’t. The doors to all banks open to the Right, my lil fish sandwich.”
She just glared at him, bit her lower lip.
Blessed are the poor – & of course those who convince me of their worth.” He said with his 3-tier beehive tiara encrusted with precious stones tilted rakishly across his dashing eyes.
“Enough mumbo sophistry. Cut the jive!”
“There is the contemplation pond with Monet lilies. Here you will see yourself & here you will leap & frolic…”
“Sorry, dad, this train don’t go in reverse.”
9. Where was she? Deshabille? Breath burning on nape. 3 undone buttons going on 4. Him squeezing her clavicles like an accordion, soothing their smooth roundness – “pelle morbida.”
“All here is holy & virile & pungent & hopeless & unforgettable & prophetic…”
“Shut UP Karol! I know you see the vagina as nothing more than some kind of allegorical coin purse.”
9a. Did he also know – the pond, the leap, the contemplation – that she was a member of Venezia’s rare ichthyofauna? Moonlit calli nymph? That scales (like shingles & scandals) are overlapping bony discs developed from under the skin? That she was convergence of fish & femme, soul & muck? That her caviar birth had left her soulless & thus free of the Great Fisherman of the Sky’s net? That, at times, she wore shells prudently to cover her nipples? That she knew how to be incognito, underground, “be missing”, as Raymond Chandler once put it.
10. Did he know that she had once been “volunteered” for secret U.S. Defense Department Acquatic Mobility Development Projects? Of course he knew. Hadn’t he blessed the secret P2-CIA millions of dollars funneled into Poland? Hadn’t he condoned the machinations of Opus Dei & the interfacing of CIA, mafia & military regimes? They had, by the late 70s, already successfully mounted nuclear warhead missile launchers onto the dorsal vertebrae of the delphinidae, or common dolphin. For a handsome advance they had neonomian plans to mount much lighter anti-sub arms on her shoulder blades until…
11. Did he know that her seductive songs could rival Peggy Lee & could render man “oblivious of this earth,” to quote Homer?
But he dreamt on in the linger of his bold stooping genuflection that she caressed his receding hairline, finding the remaining hairs a handhold. He dreamt that she held these last strands as reins. His nose wandering up the inner portion of her tibia, up into her nectareous entre-jambes where he hoped this would distract her from broaching, in her charming canine Latin, the subject of the encroaching scandals.
“Are the tellers of the Vatican Bank considered spiritual intermediaries. & what could they tell, Your Holy Banchiere?”
“Dead?”
“Tu Rigolle!”
“No joke! Wouldn’t you rather be absolved of some sins you haven’t even committed yet?” (Each attempted probe – “Sindona…Cody…P2…Marcinkus” – into the scandals was met by a strategic nudge of his nose into her exquisite pinnacula, her delightful butterfly wings, wink, wink. “Omerta!” He demanded her silence.)
“You jivin’ me? Are you what you imagine yourself to be? What you’ve read your supposed to be? Or what others need to make of you?”
“Wouldn’t you like it if I made of you a little internuncio , a legate with a little influence in your own bower of exotic flora?”
A recent issue of a Milano Anarchist paper had summed up the emerging corruption scandal with a cartoon. The cartoon detailed the evolution of the cross from its early X-shape to its T-shape to Greek fish-hooked T to combination of T & X-shape as an * then on to its modern day cross shape & from there evolving into bound fasces, swastika, $ sign & Swiss Franc symbol.
Had he seen it? Huh? But he was absorbed. Absorbing. Regenerating missing maternal memories. Lust & lost. & he sank his face into her petto exquisito & licked the nipples & all the bitter blush his tongue found there.
She could show him. She had the clipping with her. So what DID he know? & did knowing really matter when a genius or a fool could be knocked off equally as easily with the .38 special that she’d packed with her deadly sense of self-restraint?
SIX
R.E.M. REM stink of potassium nitrate, charcoal & sulfur. Deep profound sleep. Chinese New Year. A gun. John Paul I. Phencyclidine Hallucination. The bitter blush that had tendered his langue had indeed been hi grade angel Dust.
“deadly sense of self restraint…” The phrase catapulted the dream, luminous ball, out the library window, through dark space, spinning with a kaleidoscope of changing imagery slipping along its surface. [Like a Roger Corman vision of an acid trip.] Flashes of the corrida; sweeping reds, galloping browns, jets of chrome flashes, Amoretto posters, pink sands, arena mandela, torreadors in sandals, audience of gondoliers dressed in black. POPO TORO! the gate swung open. The gondoliers roared. Then POW! KAZOOM! IMPACT!
The sphere slams through a ceiling of glass onto a steel bed. Splinters of glass flicker down like asbestos flakes in slo-mo.
In the aftershock the Pope realizes that HE was that hurtling globe. That SHE was its catapult, her lacy brasierre its sling. His body is now restored to its former glorious state, tied X tight, JUST RIGHT, to the steel bed. 6 inch nails grow, like grass, beneath his torso. Torches of fire dance on the ends of the copper bedposts. Feelings of deja vu murmur through his veins.
Looking around, he finds he is isolated in, what seems, a large white operating room. Bright light accentuated the starkness of this clinical rotunda.
Bovolo, dressed as a Klaus Barbie doll in stiff, tailored SS uniform (retrieved for her from the Vatican’s secret basement archives), entered the rotunda. She mounted the bed. Boot heels muffed his ears – creamy waxed ankles mere centimeters from his lips. Ankle bones fragile & allusive inside her boot & under her Lido-enhanced peau. Her uniform opened & fell the way of her totalitarian charade. Panties ever diaphonously pink. The boots slipped off with difficulty, with suction & with all the ecstatic excess of politics made aesthetic, horror made sexy.
The most accelerated part of the dream: The change of situation & space is magical. DISNEY-LIKE. A ROLLER COASTER RIDE. G-force thrust accompanied by the rustle of orgasm / hammered nails /drilled button holes.
The Pope shifts frantically upon the points of steel. & unconsciously maneuvers a pillow between his legs. The bed springs chime & hum of Krishna. Of virile submission. Of Vishnu. Of Wishnik – OMOMOMOM. Like a restless opium reve that traverses Super-ego & Subconscious in a single REM – OMOMOM.
& all the Pope remembers is that she didn’t open another button, but instead, opened the butt of her .38 Special from which she pulled 2 large planks of wood, hammer & 3 nails. [A drunken holographer’s seamless illusion.]
The handle of the hammer has a mysterious phallic quality. Torque, leverage, diameter. OMOMOMOM.
After the DIY Crucifixion, she placed an electric “Lenny Bruce” chair to the left of the bed with a thundering crash & plugged it in. The Pope stared, fascinated, like a Mexican watching the solar eclipse, as objects continued to emerge from the gun butt like elephants from a tube of toothpaste.
A machine gun & blindfold. Then a rope, a long rope, with which she made a hangman’s noose & hung from a white cross beam directly overhead. Then a bottle of acid which dripped caustically upon his quivering testicles. OMOMOM! Then a guillotine. A clove of garlic which she forced into his mouth. & 2 radishes up his nostrils.
The treasures are still not finished. A huge syringe, bottle of Chianti, glass & a pair of PINK rubber gloves which she immediately slipped on. She punctured the cork with the needle & filled the syringe with 1/2 litre of vino, poured herself a glass & sat down next to His Holiness.
“I like wine, don’t you?” A hearty sip. The Pope is silent. Beyond language, beyond testicular proclamation. The radishes & garlic make his eyes tear. He struggles for breath as his heart pounds its CHUCKMEAT RHYTHMS. Bovolo Barbie drinks her glass & examines the objects that the gun has filled the room with.
“Very contemp, don’t you think?” She mimmicks the enthusiasm of a collector. OMOMOM. He pounds his pillow. “This is West of EDEN, baldy.” she whispers in his ear. The word EDEN punctuates his gyrations which punish, then puncture…breaking the pillow open.
Bovolo peers into the pistol with 1 eye closed. Cherubic wonder fills her visage. Saint-esque? She pulls a rose from its barrel. Holds it close to her eye, trying to photo-memorize its delicate perfection. She looks from rose to ankle & back again. “Do you prefer my ankles or the rose?”
OMOMOMOM.
Bovolo placed the rose on his chest & with her lipstick drew a ™ around the flower. White tufts of chest pate add definition to the fragility of the rose.
She stared at the floral-heart configuration in its chest nest, her face took on a despondent pout. She turned away, fumbled with the gun, said “MONEY’S NO OBJECT, MON CHERI!”
Silence. White silence. Suddenly she yells – or something foreign inside her yells – PLAY LOCK CASTRATE ENGRAVE! PLAY LOCK CASTRATE ENGRAVE! Like Notre Belle Dame echoing heavy bronze. Over&over&over.
And in the cacaphony of bells & voices, he sees a flash, a synaptical spark or, better yet, a gleam of syringe, vino rosso entering a vein with fierce medicinal pressure. PUNCTURE RUSH CONFUSION.
The vino takes immediate effect. Things spin. Room goes dark. Only the bedpost torches lap at the dark. The radishes have popped from nostrils to farflung corners. The clove of garlic is now fixed in the pucker of his Holy Father culus. Bovolo stands naked, om, naked, om, naked at the foot of the bed. Her skin looks terrific. Bronze. Om. Biccioni. Om. Breathing pelle. Om. Cosmine scales forged to herpelle morbide. Om. The clean stitch seam. Om. Confluence of fish & femme. Om. Femme & accione. Blur & whirl.
She turns him over, points the revolver at the rose on his chest. Both hands steady her aim.
He sees it happening from 2 or 3 perspectives. (Eye of God.) Time is a bead of protoplasm suspended in a jar of oil. The sound is fantastic inside his head full of sleep. Loud like a sliding mountain. Loud like electrified sky. Like silver bullet entering chamber. Like her hot breath, the trigger cocking, the hammer smashing forward, striking the pointed cylinder of lead (hardened with antimony – antithesis of matrimony).
BANG!!!
Its metallic path – at 3000 feet per second – is etched with light, a light leading to his heart. Light & bullet push through petals, skin, bone, muscle, fluids, heart, fluids, muscle, bone, skin, & then exits via his back, terminating its flight with tinny percussion into the steel bed. Singed petals follow into the jet stream & enter his corpus like pollen, to season his heart. Sowing the soul with seeds of natural history. The body is completely relaxed. Dying. White Oh glory…Oh Glory Be White.
OMOM. OMMmmzzzzzzzz.
The dream ‘signals’ her discreet departure. Now only the electric chair remains. Its riveted legs like a contemporary sculpture of a Minotaur. The silence unbearable. The Pope begins to writhe on the nails…Lost autonomy of the fleeting moment. Unsure skin of a fallen apple.
Blurred eyes open…close…the electric chair seems to be sinking in a vat of petroleum jelly. & then he sees it is NOT an electric chair but his throne. He’s sitting on its velvet platform to the left of the bed. His REAL bed. He wipes his eyes. Senses his groin. The wet. Vatican silence fills the room.
He gathers the loose down scattered on the floor. He puts a pillow feather in his mouth & drinks a glass of water to wash it down – digested evidence, nocturnal host. The rest of the plumage flickers briefly – a magnesium flash of a dream – in the fireplace.
He sits back on his throne & examines this midnight still-life that whispers of lost lust. He tries to engage the puzzle of elements in his bedroom to jolt memory. But it is the rose that repeats itself most often & he cannot get far. Only the rose, a very special .38 & a woman with fish scale sequins…
“Blood of Flowers,” he whispers, staring at the crumple of soiled sheets hanging from his bed. They tell of an invisible voyage, of promised abandon & delivered release.
“Blood of Flowers,” he whispers a 2nd time & lifts himself slightly, prying a notebook from under the velvet cushion. He begins to write. To write a poem. A poem that he figures arises straight from his subconscious. A poem believable only because of its mystery.
EPILOGUE
The Pope manipulates the brass stays of his Opus Dei Corset.
The film captures Venice in Winter. The Pope watches from his bed. He likes his bed, the same one the Dead Pope had slept in. Something about the proximity of bed to images of Venice.
Storms inundate the piazzas with trill upon trill of dark water. & the Pope no longer feels odd sleeping in the same sheets that covered the Dead Pope the night he became The Pope Who Could Not Swim In His Own Vomit to those uomini di fiducia, those trusted prelates & backbiting Bishops emboldened by the attitudes of THEIR Pope.
The music was Scarlatti. & too perfect for bankrupt Venice, desolate but still splendid. Its edificios up on wooden piles, driven into muck, sink 1/4” per year.
A pity. A tragedy. But a tragedy not nearly as fraught with anxiety as her irascible disappearance. Why? Where? Well, that depended on how much of her was truly ichthyo & how much was virago.
He rang the bell from his 3rd floor bedroom. & asked Sister Vincenza to light another cone of gunpowder-based incense in an old chalice.
The corset had been a gift of gratitude from the Opus Dei Sect. Gratitude because the Pope had prayed at the tomb of its founder. Gratitude because this lent legitimacy & momentum to their bleed & flog cult of hyper-wealthy ultra-crats & their agenda of tidy jackboot trade despotism.
The horsehair corset is lined with 100 inward-pointing prongs. The prongs stimulate the torso, invigorate 7 layers of flesh. Draws blood. Warm blood. The way her fingernails insinuated their intoxicating configurations into him.
Bovolo: Could she really be a siren with scales? Enchantress of the fluid realm with a 4-octave range? & rashes burst upon her skin like a blaze of blossoms. Science advisors & theologians were allied in their contempt for such fanciful speculation. Because sirens, or the belief in sirens, repudiates the very bases of both science & Christianity. Yet, the more experts renunciated the more faith made fetishistic certitude out of doubt.
Unscrupulous siren, fishy femme fatale, she hints at a netherworld where a humanoid might breathe, in part, through her skin by the exchange of O2 & CO2 between surrounding water & numerous blood vessels near her skin’s surface. & she WILL be safe (if indeed, she’s not just a ruse), he reads, he hopes, he is perturbed by doubt. Her blood temperature will adjust to prevailing weather conditions. Her blood is cold. He knows that. She is cold-blooded.
The Pope is proud. For charisma supercedes information which supercedes benevolence. & proud he should be for he is his own man. Or, at the very least, a man of his own chosen vice & virtue.
Pinstriped men wrote checks in mid-genuflection. Long queues of pointmen prelates, dingy diplomats, CEOs, generals, press pundits, hoodlum accountants & pop stars waited to kiss his red Fisherman’s shoes.
& they thanked him. & they showered him with adulation. & they heaved reprieveful sighs of relief. Because the Pope knew money & how it could be used to consolidate power. & that a state within a state is like vice inside virtue.
The Pope had already decreed: 1. that when a man looks at his wife he commits adultery of the heart, 2. that Catholics who remarry can only receive Holy Communion if they take a vow of celibacy, 3. that oral contraception is a sin even while the Vatican profited from investments in the Istituto Farmacologico Sereno, maker of Luteolas, a popular oral contraceptive, 4. the reestablishment of Humane Vitae which enforced Papal Authority by denying the notion that the Church was somehow beholden to earthly realities.
In 1988, 10 years after the death of John Paul I, the Pope issued a Papal Bull ([bull – L. bulla, knob, boss] 1. a papal edict or official document from the Pope), stating that Zen & Yoga could “degenerate into a cult of the body,” debasing Christian prayer.
He said Christian prayer is a “personal & profound dialogue between man & god.” As opposed to “some physical exercises which can create a kind of rut, imprisoning the person praying in a spiritual privatism.”
In the morning, as on other mornings, after the Venice film, the gunpowder incense & the uncapping of the bottle of perfume, the kind she liked to wear, the heavy regal blankets quilted with gold thread seemed nailed to the floor. As if holding a night of rain. His horsehair C-cup Opus Dei Corset stood in a corner beyond his nightstand not so much contemptuously as longingly.
& now it is 6am. & he must begin to act with vigilanti cura. The odd “pearls of unreason,” the effluvia of his misshapen desire have again emerged from the snap-thrust of his groin & have again soiled his sheets. & he knows there are ways to keep the sisters mum. He will emphasize the saintliness of silence in the face of all doubt & toil.
At 7am he will receive his breakfast & freshly ironed white cassock. They will deliver a vase of fresh-cut flowers & the day’s mail. They will change his sheets. & Sister Vinzenza will administer his shots.
& then they will burn the soiled sheets without question. For the greater glory of God. & he will offer them quality confessions in the bower of the garden.
& he knows there will be no trace. He knows fire purifies. & he knows that is why witches burned. & he knows how well the Vatican’s investment plans are doing.
But he does NOT know where Bovolo has retreated to. Or whether she will be back again, with her face that held pain like a glass holds brandy. Wearing her pink bellbottoms & head phones. Listening to Prince.
& he knows the plume of smoke arising from the stack will be grey. He picks up the phone. & he knows that the assembled in St. Peter’s Square will see in it what they will. Stability. Pensions. Profit sharing. & he will speak directly to Bishop Marcinkus, “God’s Banker” & board member of Bahamian banks. & Marcinkus will agree. It’s in his best interest to agree. Yes, the Pope’s Bovolo knows too much. “Venezia…P2…Eye of God (Vatican secret service originally est.to hunt & destroy “modernists,” est. by the chief spy under Mussolini.)… snuff…sasso in boca.” Yes, Marcinkus agrees the rock in her mouth will fit & look semi-precious when wet. & this will become her. & this will serve as stark & stylish warning to the others.
Marcinkus chuckles when the Pope does. The Pope knows she will thusly talk no more. Si Si!
“Buono notte. A domani. Se Dio vuole.” & Marcinkus chuckled because the Pope had chuckled. & Marcinkus knew what the Pope knew – that these were the last words the Dead Pope heard. More chuckles. “Good night. Til tomorrow. If God wishes.” & the Pope knows as Marcinkus knows that ALL is holy & virile & hopeless & unforgettable & prophetic.
FIN
[originally published in WIGGLING WISHBONE, Autonomedia, 1995]
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