This story first appeared in Blue Crow Magazine

            The beautiful and the horrible are not only hopelessly entwined - they are one. Everything depends upon the point of view, the place in which you stand. From the back of the nave the columns - radiant, white, slender as young girls - appear to be crowned with lace caps wrought in point de Venise by eyeless virgins on some dark forgotten rio behind the Grand Canal. Venice is full of such secret places, places unknown to the tourist, where the light on the shallow water lies as still as on a tabletop of old mahogany, places teeming with odours - rank, miasmic, deadly sweet - where the very birds are hushed, and the intrinsic music of human speech cannot even be imagined. When I am in Venice I always stay in a flat on the Grand Canal. You know what that means - shouts, vaporetti, noise and more noise. I avoid those other, those secret places, for I no longer wish to be moved by so-called atmosphere. There was a time, and even up until recently, when I sought out such places and such atmosphere, when I found such things interesting, amusing, stimulating. No longer. My hand upon the arm of the chair is white in the sunlight, white as any young girl's, from a distance it even appears to radiate youth and health. But I am no longer able to control this hand. I can still use the other, a little, enough to perform, in a haphazard way, the intricate tasks which the body goes on demanding year after year and day after day, night after night, and even hour after hour until it seems one's whole existence is subsumed in this degrading servitude. The garden where I am sitting is a large one, it was once a part of the monastery belonging to the great church whose south wall forms the boundary on one side, and my son has unearthed many treasures here. My son is now an archaeologist living in Egypt - I haven't set eyes on my son for many years. But as a boy he unearthed many treasures, living and dead, from under this garden, and he assures me that there can be no doubt that this property of mine contains the old refectory and dortoir, as well as the monks' burial ground. So, as I sit here, imprisoned in my carapace of rigid flesh, I am surrounded by dead monks. Sometimes I fancy I see them looking up at me through the living screen of grass and earth with bright eyes and livid faces like that of the Chinese demon in the Church. From the back of the nave the capitals appear as so much lace, delicately coifed, upon the pretty white heads of the maiden columns. But close up they are horrible. I have examined them many times with a pair of binoculars, and consider them to be altogether the most horrible things of their kind I have ever seen. Dona nobis pacem. I continue to puzzle over the riddle of those capitals. The Church itself is serene, lovely in light, of a typically Benedictine elegance. The worst it might be accused of is a certain excess of cleverness. Nor is it above dissimulation for the sake of effect. For example, the remarkable fullness of the nave, that grave, ample, floodlit space that seems to flow up to one's feet like a limpid sea, this nave widens progressively from east to west, the columns on each side are placed ever so slightly farther apart, so that the whole appears larger, grander than it really is. And then there is the remarkable floating effect in the apse, a pure illusion, that, magic and mummery, for the apsidal wall that appears to curve behind the great central pillars of the choir is in fact flat, and this juxtaposition of the curved space upon the unexpectedly flat surface gives rise to an optical confusion, so that the wall, lit only from the sides by windows that are invisible from the nave, is cut loose and bobs about freely on a sea of light, bearing its great dark crucifix above the waves. Such trickery is, perhaps, understandable if not forgivable, it is akin to the spirit that built, a hundred years later, the apse of Saint Julien at Le Mans, with its fanatical chapelles rayonnantes and astonishing race-track vault, it is in fact the Angevin spirit and has its considerable virtues as well as its faults. Its faults, after all, are not of this world, while its virtues proclaim themselves to be very much so, and it would take a monk to cavil with such success. An adulteress may find an appearance of virtue a very useful and necessary thing, whereas an Innocente sometimes lacks this appearance, and may place herself in a compromising position without any idea that she is doing so. Still, to the practiced eye, the fausse-naïve is easily discovered in a thousand trifles - the touch of a silk palm that lingers on the skin like the scented petals of the moss rose, an eye alive with milky underwater lights, a certain velvet in the voice, and, when you take them in your arms, a tendency to laughter, or even tears. In the same way this Church of Notre Dame, under whose wall I now sit in the sun, and from above I must appear to any spirit of the upper air, should such be passing by, to angel or demon, should he pause in his flight to look down into this closely walled garden, a white slug lying motionless on the fresh green face of the grass, in the same way this Church, upon careful examination, gives itself away in a thousand details. The lace caps wrought for the heads of milk-white maidens are seen to be adorned with an entire hell of lascivious monstrosities that grin and grunt and ogle, that slash and maim with zestful abandon, figures out of nightmares - hideous apes, birds with the heads of men champing their teeth in terror, randy goats dancing on hind feet, piping infernal music while their eyes snap with bestial lust, dragons that gnaw one another's flesh with greedy pleasure, and, most horrible of all, even the flagellation of the Saviour is treated as a titillating spectacle for perverse appetites. I wonder, do they sleep quietly, these monks under my feet? The carved capital I call the Chinese demon devours an entire column with his teeth. His eyes peer from behind a lewd mask - I have seen such masks betimes at Carnival in Venice, and I fancy I see them now, just under the grass, looking up at me and laughing. You'll soon be joining us, they say. It will be your turn next. And they're right. Summer is almost spent. By five o'clock the light lies thick as gesso. The nights are cold enough for a fire, at least for old bones. The hollyhocks have turned their pink cheeks to the ground, and the roses are shedding their silk underskirts on the wind. They used to have a fragrance like the lingerie of pretty girls - I can no longer smell them. I can still smell the mint, however, growing in the borders. There was a smell of mint, for she held a sprig of it in her hand, a girl, I have forgotten her name, but I plucked it and gave it to her in her hand, the palm was warm and slippery like pale silk, the hands like white lilies at the ends of long stems, the nails pink buds, and when she crushed the tender sprig between her palms and looked up at me it was like a sudden flame of incense in my heart. I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her, but it was too late, far too late, I can no longer move my left arm, my right arm is wholly occupied in the humiliating business of self-preservation, and my face is that of an ancient Chinese demon. I can still smell the mint, it torments me, I will have to tell the gardener to pull it up. I can still feel the light silk of her palm, the fine scaffold of bones under flesh as I helped her with her shawl (with my one arm), the sweet moss rose centre of her, the milky breasts, all that I would have tasted were it not too late. I can still hear - the rustle and sheen of hair, the water gurgling in the pond, the dim whispers of the monks under the grass, the hidden music in wood, in stones, the dying voices of insects, and birds that cry out suddenly in the night, like emissaries from another world - Awake, for thine hour is at hand! And the great bell tolling in the tower - for me, tolling for me.