Nativity
By John C. Wright
“Mr. Went, if you could visit anyone in the world, any time, any place, who would you go see? Oh, not for a long time. Long visits are never permitted. But just for a moment, just for an embrace, a long look, no longer?”
His words were not in English, and I did not speak any modern Romance tongues, but he must have been a priest or a scholar, because he and I could make ourselves understood to each other in Latin and in Greek, two living men with two dead languages in common.
I was not sure where I was. The streets in these ancient cities are narrow and crooked, and they don’t put the names on street signs.
The stranger in the top hat and long coat did not linger to hear an answer. Now he paused to listen to some children singing carols — I remember they sang O Come Emmanuel, but the words were not in English — while waiting for me to climb the alley. I had stopped.
It was not that I was tired, it was just that I was used to the broad and flat streets of the Midwest, so, to me, the sight of a cobblestone street turning into broad stairs for part of its climb was a novelty. It was, no doubt, a street older than my whole nation.
I wanted to make a comment to my wife, but she, of course, was not there. In my pocket was a small Christmas gift for her, wrapped in gold paper. I had put it in the pocket of the dark and formal coat I donned for the funeral. I had intended to leave it at the grave, but the idea of bright, cheery, frivolous colors of wrapping paper beneath the granite headstone, on the darkness of the newly-turned earth, seemed unbearably hateful to me.
And I still wanted to make a comment to her, share my thoughts, share my life. And I could not. So I had paused, wrestling with the aching emptiness inside me.
I turned my eyes outward. Between the narrow and dark houses looming to either side, the gap of the alley fell like a stone waterfall (as if the stair were the broken rapids) and in that gap I could see the famous city spread below me, adorned for Christmas. I could see the festive lights in the distance.
The stranger came up next to me, offering me a handful of the roast chestnuts he had just bought from a street vendor. The children singing he had shooed away by passing out the brightly colored banknotes which looked like Monopoly money to me.
I gestured to the view below. We were halfway up one of the seven hills. “There are more Christmas trees than there were years ago.”
He said, “You have been to the Eternal City before?”
“My wife is from here. Was. She—excuse me.”
He passed me a handkerchief, and turned as if to look at the city. “The Christmas tree is a Germanic custom. Such things travel south to the more civilized nations somewhat slowly. It is in the nativity scene where the Italian genius is manifested! You should see the one was displayed at the Church of Saints Cosma and Damiano. It was commissioned by Charles III of Naples. Six master woodcarvers labored on the scene for forty years, adding new figures each year! And in the Santa Maria Maggiore, where the first Christmas Mass was said, is a presepe, or permanent display of the crib. The reliquary below the altar is said to contain pieces of the original manger. History is fascinating, is it not? Are you ready to go?”
I nodded. The stranger walked a short way up the alley, took out with an enormous key and bent over the lock of intricately wrought black iron gates. The iron gates were decorated with images of roses and winged skulls. With a groaning clang they opened. Beyond was a courtyard shaped like an “L”, closed in on each side by windowless brick walls, and in the midst of the court was a dry well, filled with leaves and dust, rusting midmost under a tiny roof.
Around the corner of the courtyard, up the shorter arm of the “L”, were more stairs guarded by worn winged lions, gaping mouths filled with grit and dust, and the grime of their faces made them seem to weep.
To my surprise, the front door to the old house was not locked. He opened the door and stood in the doorway, fumbling with something on a small table set immediately by the door. There was the click of an electric striker, a flicker of flame, and the stranger lit a candle, which he carefully placed in a black iron candlestick. Inside he went, lighting his way with the candle, beckoning me to follow.
“The power is out?” I said. I could hear the singing of the children in the street below clearly enough, but the door was so heavy and so well fitted to the frame that all noise was cut off when I shut it.
“There is power here,” said the stranger, smiling crookedly. “More than enough to shatter the cosmos. But the site has never been electrified. It would identify the era too closely, and disturb the anachronic echo effect. Come. The machine is in the attic.”
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