Chapter 52

One of my favorite walks is quite short. You follow the staircases cut into the rock, and pass through alleyways and under archways, and between the tottering houses that lean so close they almost touch. After only a few minutes, you can clamber all the way from Amalfi to Atrani, a tiny medieval town that nestles in the next bay along this indented coastline.

In the central piazza of Atrani there is an open-air cafй where you can sip coffee or Coke and watch the sun slide over the looming volcanic hills. It’s peaceful enough, so long as you avoid the times when the schoolchildren flood through the square, or the early evenings when young men pose for the girls on their gleaming scooters and motorbikes.

Yesterday — it was a Sunday — I made the mistake of sitting there at noon. All was peaceful, just a few churchgoers, everybody remarkably smartly dressed as they strolled through the square, talking in that intense, very physical way the Italians have. The waiter had just brought me my coffee.

And somebody set off a cannon. I jumped out of my seat, my heart pounding. The waiter didn’t spill a drop.

The shot turned out to be from a church set high on the hillside, where the clergy celebrate each Sabbath with a little pyrotechnics. But in the square of Atrani the noise was deafening.

It is never quiet in Italy.

I know I can’t hide out here forever. Some time soon I’ll have to reconnect with the real world.

For one thing my money won’t last forever. There has been a stock market crash.

It was actually quite predictable. There’s an analysis that dates back to the Great Depression that has detected cycles, called Elliott waves, in the various economic ups and downs. Why do these simple analyses work? Because they are models of the human herd instinct. The traders on the stock exchange floor don’t make rational decisions based on such factors as the intrinsic value of a stock. They just see what their neighbors are doing, and copy them. Just like the rest of us.

Predictable or not, the crash has wiped out a chunk of my savings. So I must move on.

I intend to finish this account, and then … Well, I don’t quite know what to do with it, save to send it to Claudio at the Vatican Archives. It seems right that it should be preserved. If Rosa ever gets in touch again, she will get a copy, too.

I think I should pay another visit to my sister Gina in Miami Beach. She should know what became of Rosa — she’s her sister, too, whether she likes it or not. And perhaps Great-Uncle Lou will enjoy hearing of the fate of Maria Ludovica, the mamma-nonna, who was still producing babies like popping peas from a pod at the age of a hundred.

As for me, after that, I will go home, back to Britain. Maybe not to London, though. Somewhere without the crowds. I need a job, but I want to go freelance. I can’t bear the thought of becoming enmeshed in another huge organization, a great press of people all around me.

I think I’ll look up Linda. I haven’t forgotten how my instinct, in those dreadful moments in the depths of the Crypt, was to turn to her memory for support. One way or another she’s been there for me since we met. There’s a lot to build on.

Unlike Peter, I refuse to believe the future is fixed.

I hope one day to put all this behind me. But sometimes I am overwhelmed. If I am in a crowd, sometimes I will detect a whiff of that leonine animal musk of the Coalescents, and I have to retreat to my room, or the fresh air of the empty hills above the towns. I will never be free of it. And yet a part of me, I know, will always long to be immersed again in that dense warmth, to be surrounded by smiling faces like mirrors of my own, to give myself up to the mindless, loving joy of the hive.