When In Rome by Anthony McDonald

Dominic awoke in terror, alone in the darkness of the small hours. Darkness but not silence. He had been woken by the smash-smash sound of an axe raining violent blows on a piece of furniture – he guessed the chest of drawers – less than two metres from where he lay. He fumbled for a light-switch. He seemed to remember a bedside table-lamp with a switch some way along the cable. The smash-smash of the axe continued. It must surely wake the whole pensione, Dominic thought, his panicked brain clutching at straws just as his panicked fingers made contact with the lamp cable and felt their way along it like someone fumbling with rosary beads. Ave Maria, gratia plena …

His fingers found the switch. He pressed … and there was light. And sudden silence. Dominic looked around him uncomprehendingly. There was the plain little room: the rug on the tiled floor, the old-fashioned wash-basin in the corner, the bare table and the wooden chair, the hanging-cupboard … and the chest of drawers, intact, as he had last seen it a few hours ago, just before turning the light out and going to sleep. The door was shut, the windows closed. Dominic’s heart was pounding, his forehead clammy with sweat. Slowly he got out of bed. Checked the door - firmly locked. The window – latched. With trepidation he opened the hanging-cupboard. No-one hung there. He ran his hand over the surfaces of the chest of drawers. He had expected to see it halfway towards the condition of firewood. But there were no axe-marks, no more scratches than were consistent with normal wear and tear. He stood still, naked, in the middle of the floor, for a full minute. At last his pounding heart began to slow. He found that he badly needed to piss. He still felt too frightened to leave the room to make use of the communal facility along the dark corridor. Instead he took two strides towards the wash-basin, pulled back his foreskin and emptied his bladder down the plughole, chasing the torrent down with a hygienic dispensation of cold water from the tap. Viewed in the mirror above the taps, his cock appeared larger and heavier than it did when seen directly from above, and he felt reassured and curiously comforted by the idea that that was how it must appear to others, and in particular to John, who would be joining him in a little over twenty-four hours. In fact, he thought, the whole of his mirrored top half - the smooth lean chest, the flat stomach, the faintly visible but not ostentatious muscles of his arms – looked pretty good, and that thought gave him succour as he climbed back into bed, still quite frightened, alone on his first night in Rome. He was nearly twenty-one. Nevertheless, he kept the light on while he drifted, none too quickly and with some apprehension, back to sleep.

And it was only the fact that the light was still on when he awoke again into bright autumn sunshine that convinced him that the whole nocturnal disturbance had not been a dream. Even so, he began to think that, though his waking terror had been real enough, the violent sounds that had occasioned it were mere products of his imagination. He dressed and prepared to go out in search of breakfast in the sun. On his way downstairs, and rounding a bend in the corridor on the floor below his, he passed a young man in the act of locking the door of his own bedroom. He was someone of his own age and very nice looking, not to say beautiful, with dark hair and eyes, but he stood out mainly because of the clothes he was wearing: he was draped from collar-bone to ankles in a black, button-fronted soutane or cassock – the street-garb of a Catholic priest. Dominic said buon giorno and the priest, if that was what he was, said buon giorno back. Something about the way he said it made Dominic guess that the young man was no more Italian than he was, but he didn’t give himself the chance to find out, continuing instead around the angles of the corridor and down the last flight of stairs. Then he hung his key on the hook on the board behind the untenanted reception desk and stepped out into the bright sunshine.

Pity about the cassock, Dominic thought. The young man had looked both sexy and nice. Much too young to be a priest … Unless they caught them in their teens here, like the castrati of times past. A silly line of thought, Dominic told himself. He wasn’t here to ogle the young men of Rome; John would be here tomorrow. And even if that were not the case and you were looking for fun in the Eternal City, to start your search among the priestly classes would have been exceptionally perverse.

He found a café, sat at a pavement table, ordered a cappuccino and a brioche and sipped and munched contentedly in the warm sun. He took his phone from his pocket and dialled John’s number. Only John must have switched his mobile off, since the machine invited him to leave a message. He was alive and well, he said. Would talk later. “Love you,” he finished. Had John answered, Dominic might have told him about his night-time terrors or he might not have done, but it was not a piece of news he was going to leave by way of a phone message.

By the end of the morning Dominic had explored a substantial part of the old city. He was surprised by its compactness. He had seen the Piazza Barberini, the Spanish Steps and the Mausoleo de Augusto, had stood beside the Tiber and looked across the water towards Castel S. Angelo and the Vatican. He did not cross the river. In-depth exploration of the city’s treasures would wait till John joined him the next morning, after arriving by overnight train from Brindisi. This afternoon he would be on a ferry, coming to him from Greece.

How bright the sun was here – and by contrast, how deep and black the shadows. Together, sun and shadow turned the whole cityscape into a pattern of jet and bright ochre. Indeed the window and door recesses of the sunlit buildings around him seemed so fathomlessly black that Dominic found himself thinking of the sockets and orifices of skulls.

More cheerfully, his other principal impression of the city was the sheer physical beauty of its young males. They swaggered through the streets and piazzas with a breezy sexual self-confidence that seemed to say: I’m up for it, just say the word. Dominic had to remind himself that nearly all of them would be straight and would not welcome any kind of come-on from him – and also that he wasn’t supposed to be ‘up for it’ himself. John was coming tomorrow. All the same, he thought he might check out one or two spots in the Trastevere district that night and see if Rome’s gay youth came up to the standards set by their heterosexual counterparts.

By way of exception to the general rule of male peacockry were the priests, walking black shadows themselves, who streamed in both directions across the bridges between the old city and the Vatican, heads downcast as if to avoid sight of the temptations all around them. But even here it was as if beauty could not be completely quelled; it triumphed here and there and shone out, beacon-like, from a good number of youthful faces, and Dominic remembered the young man he had said good morning to in his pensione.

After a mid-day pizza and a beer had rounded off his morning’s exploration, Dominic returned to his room. He felt surprisingly tired and thought that perhaps a siesta was in order. First though, he went to his window, opened the shutters and casements to the autumn warmth and leaned out. It was a room without much of a view. The pensione was built round four sides of a courtyard and his window gave onto that. There was no sign of life here. Until a movement inside a window opposite caught his attention and he focused his gaze on that. The window was on the floor below his, and through it he could see the bottom half of a bed and, stretched on top of it, a pair of jeans-clad legs and bare feet that looked as if they belonged to a boy or young man. It was the legs that were doing the moving. Dominic couldn’t see the whole of them: his view was cut off about halfway up the thighs by the top of the window. But they were twitching about in such an extravagant way that Dominic could only conclude that their owner was either having some sort of a fit or else … The feet suddenly lifted off the bed and were drawn rapidly back, up and apart, almost following the knees out of sight. A few seconds later and they were back in their original position, but this time they lay relaxed and still. Dominic was aware that inside his own jeans his cock was thickening. There was not much doubt left about what he had just witnessed - or rather, tantalisingly - not quite witnessed. He watched from his window for a half-minute more, but there was no further movement of any kind. The show was clearly over. He turned away from the window, towards his own bed. An idea of what he might do next was stirring, not so much in his mind as in his pants.

He stopped, rooted to the floor with shock and fear. His bedside light was on. It hadn’t been when he had entered the room a few minutes ago. But it was worse than that. No longer did the lamp sit demurely on his bedside locker, but it was on the floor, on the far side of the room towards the door. The flex – how extraordinarily, unnecessarily long the flex was – stretched all the way from the wall socket, past the end of his bed … and … and this was the worst thing … the flex was being pulled, straight and taut.

For the second time in twelve hours Dominic found himself terrified into immobility in the middle of this pensione bedroom. And, if anything, this time was even worse. For the implication of this second manifestation had quickly flashed upon his mind. The bedside light had been his ally last night. Switching it on had caused the shattering noise of the axe to stop, had returned the room to normality. But the light was no longer at his command. It had gone over to the other side.

After what felt like an eternity Dominic approached the shining light. After all, he had to do something. Step by step he crept towards it. Equally cautiously he bent down, reached out a hand … and was thrown back across the room like someone who has attempted to do a repair on an electric cooker without first switching it off. Whatever had dragged the lamp across the floor was not about to let go.

Back at the window again, Dominic glanced quickly out of it and down at the window he had been watching just a minute ago. The bed was now unoccupied; the legs had gone. There was no other sign of the room’s occupant. Not brave enough to attempt to switch the light off (the switch on the cable was rather too near the lamp itself for comfort) Dominic had a new idea. He made his way gingerly towards the wall socket and, with the quickest movement he was capable of, unplugged it. The plug jerked away from him, the bulb went dark, the lamp appeared almost to jump a foot or so towards the door, then fell over with an anticlimactic bump.

Dominic had never felt less like a siesta, with or without an autoerotic prelude, in his life.

Gingerly skirting the now inert lamp on the floor, Dominic left the room and locked it behind him. Was it possible, he asked at reception, to change rooms? No, he was told, the pensione was full. It was a Saturday, after all. Why did he want to change? Dominic’s Italian was not up to this challenge, nor, he supposed would the receptionist be able to make much of his answer supposing he decided to give an account of events in English. “It’s OK,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

He went out into the street. He tried to phone John again but couldn’t make contact at all. He’d never before tried phoning someone on board a ferry in the middle of the Ionian Sea; perhaps it wasn’t as easy as all that. He looked for another nearby pensione – even though he had arranged to meet John at the one where he’d spent last night. He found two and enquired at them both. They too were full. Did he not know it was Saturday night?

He sat at a pavement café and ordered a coffee and a grappa in the hope that a plan of action would occur to him while he drank them. Still the sun blazed on the ochre walls, still the shadows ran black through the alleys, still the windows and doorways had for Dominic the sinister aspect of the portals to the inner recesses of human skulls.

And then the obvious struck him. If his room was spooked or haunted in some way (the word poltergeist had already come into his mind some time ago) then the solution lay close at hand. There was a young priest in his pensione; they had said good morning right outside his room. He’d go to him and ask him to carry out an exorcism or whatever might be required. The young priest would know what to do. When in Rome …

As Dominic made his way up the stairs he realised that the priest’s room must be on the same corridor, on the same side of it even, as the room in which he’d seen … The thought made him smile. Then, supposing it was the very room? In spite of his very real state of anxiety, by the time he was knocking at the young man’s door there was a grin on his face which he could not remove.

Until, that is, the door opened and he was confronted by the attractive face he’d seen that morning but without the black soutane. Instead, the young man was naked to the waist, barefoot, and dressed only in the faded blue jeans that Dominic had seen from the window. He looked just great. Polite Italian formulae deserted Dominic. “I think I need your help,” he said in English.

“Come in,” said the other.

Ten minutes later they were drinking an incautious quantity of grappa out of tooth-pastey glasses. The young man was not yet a priest (if he ever would be) but a student for the priesthood at the Luca College. A few of the student rooms had not been ready at the start of term and he and a dozen others had been farmed out to various pensiones for the first week or so. His name was Alex. He explained all this in faultless English, though he was in fact from Luxembourg and had an Italian mother. (That explained the raven hair and deep brown eyes, thought Dominic.) Alex listened attentively while Dominic told his story and was silent and thoughtful for a moment after he’d finished it. Then he said: “I’m not sure if I can help you as much as you would like me to, or deserve. As I said, I’m not a priest. But even if I were, the responsibilities of exorcism are not undertaken lightly. Usually, each diocese (that’s the area under the jurisdiction of a local bishop) has one priest appointed as official exorcist and specially trained, though obviously it’s not their sole responsibility. And they don’t shout from the rooftop about that aspect of their work either. I’ve no idea who the official exorcist for Rome might be. And if any other priest wants to carry out the rite they need special permission from the bishop.”

“Don’t you know a priest that you could get hold of quickly and then ask the bishop yourselves?” asked Dominic.

Alex paused and smiled. “I think even you know who the Bishop of Rome is.”

Dominic thought for a moment. Then, “Yes, I see what you mean. It wouldn’t be all that easy to get hold of the Pope.”

“So, as you see, I can’t be much help from a sacramental point of view,” finished Alex. “But I could try to be a friend. Would you like us to go and take a look at your room together?”

Dominic was touched by the fact that, in his concern for his new friend’s welfare, Alex didn’t stop to put on shirt or shoes but walked up the stairs with him, bare-chested as he was. He wasn’t a big fellow but lithe and slim and Dominic, having spent some time enjoying the sight of Alex’s naked top half, couldn’t help wondering about the rest. He unlocked his door and the two of them walked in together. All was as he had left it, including the bedside lamp which was still in its capsized state on the floor at their feet. “Shall I?” offered Alex, and bent down, picked the lamp up and placed it in its usual place on the bedside locker.

“Thank you for that,” said Dominic. “But do you mind if we don’t plug it in just yet?”

They strayed towards the window together and looked out.

“You can see your bed from here,” said Dominic. Perhaps it was the grappa making him flirtatious.

“Oh yes,” said the other. “So you can.”

“In fact…”

“In fact what?”

Dominic’s next question was meant quite seriously.

“What’s celibacy supposed to include - for you people - and what not?”

“Celibacy just means not getting married,” said Alex. “But we’re supposed to be chaste as well.” He smiled - a bit teasingly, Dominic thought. “That’s a whole lot harder. It’s something we’re supposed to be aiming at, but not everyone gets there all at once.”

“What about wanking then?”

“What’s wanking?” asked Alex.

Dominic gaped at him in astonishment. Then he realised that, though his new friend’s English was pretty faultless, he might not know all the colloquial words to do with sex. Rather than wade embarrassingly into a verbal explanation Dominic did a high-speed mime with hand and wrist.

“Oh no!” said Alex, laughing, but blushing furiously at the same time. “How much did you see?”

“Only from there down.” Dominic drew a line with his finger across his own thigh, halfway between crotch and knee.

“Well that’s a relief at least.” Then Alex reached forward with one of his hands and gently took hold of one of Dominic’s. He looked into his eyes a little diffidently and said: “Now you’ve made me embarrassed.”

Dominic returned Alex’s gaze steadily and then there occurred that seismic moment when two people of the same sexual orientation look into each other’s eyes and learn from them He’s like me, and, a second later, the message’s perfect anagram He likes me, too.

There was an unmistakeable outline now in Alex’s jeans, straining against the fabric. With his free hand, which trembled, Dominic reached forward and undid studs to give the pent-up form release. He was not surprised now to find Alex’s cock unencumbered by any underwear as it came popping smartly out, framed only by a small neat triangle of shiny black pubic hair, while his jeans slid down his legs. Alex was cute-cocked rather than well-hung: something Dominic found reassuring – he was not such a very big boy himself. He watched as a clear droplet began to form at the tip of Alex’s foreskinned penis like a dewdrop on a budding rose.

Within a minute they were both stripped naked and all over each other on the floor, busy with hands, wet tongues, and wet and glistening cocks. Then, before they’d even negotiated who would do what to whom, they’d done it anyway, coming simultaneously in floods, pressed hard and pulsating against each other’s bellies.

They lay still together for a while. Then Dominic got up to get a towel.

“I’ll have to go in a minute,” Alex said, sounding suddenly flustered as he mopped himself down. “College supper.”

“Couldn’t you skip it just for once? I was rather thinking of checking out Trastevere, do a few clubs or bars. It would be nice if you came too.”

Dominic could see prudence struggling with desire in Alex’s eyes, but only for a second. Desire quickly won. “OK, I’ll come. To hell with the consequences.” Then his face fell. “I don’t think I’ve got the right clothes.”

“Come as you are,” suggested Dominic to his still naked friend. “You’ll be a sensation. No, but seriously. Your jeans’ll do just great. And I’ll find you a nice shirt. We’re about the same size.” He tweaked Alex’s waning erection playfully, to point up the double entendre.

They explored the bars, they wandered the streets, they saw the city’s lights reflected in the Tiber like stars, they drank and danced, they exchanged the stories of their lives. Alex told Dominic the tales he had heard about exorcists and demons and possessions. “Even the very experienced exorcists have to be careful. The spirits are full of tricks.” He told one story about a priest who had successfully carried out the exorcism rite, as he thought, then found himself breaking into a sweat. Reaching in his pocket for his handkerchief, his fingers had encountered … “not a handkerchief but a lump of human shit.”

It was after one o’clock when Dominic and Alex returned, a little unsteady on their feet but very happy, to the pensione. The duty receptionist gave them a discreet nod and they made their way up the dimly lit stairs. “We’ll check your room out first,” said Alex in a businesslike tone. Dominic had almost forgotten there was a problem with it.

They didn’t need to turn the light on when they opened the door. They stood in the doorway and gazed, appalled, at the scene before them. The bed, Dominic’s bed, was illuminated from within like something in a religious painting. The table-lamp was inside the bed, mounding the bedclothes and shining, glowing, through them. In the very place where Dominic should have been. Would soon be? Not on his life. For the light was not the only sight they saw. Dominic’s clothes were strewn across the floor. “Jesus Christ,” he murmured, almost without breath. The chest of drawers was a substantial pile of firewood, of jagged, broken planks that leaned at awkward angles against each other and against the wall. Involuntarily Dominic and Alex clutched at each other.

“You’re not sleeping in here tonight,” Alex said firmly. “You’re coming to bed with me.” They kissed each other fiercely as soon as they left the room, and Dominic locked the door on whatever had taken control within.

***

John got the room number from reception and went up to find his friend. Although it was ten o’clock, Dominic had not been out yet, they told him at reception, or even been seen. Still, it was a Sunday morning.

John knocked and waited. He knocked again. Waited some more. Knocked harder the next time, and louder. After five minutes he gave up; people would be coming to complain. He went back to reception. A handsome young man was talking earnestly to the receptionist. He was tall and muscular, as was John himself, with a healthy tan and the strawberry blond hair and blue eyes of northern Italy. What a waste, thought John, noticing – you could hardly help noticing – that he was clad from shoulder to shoe in priestly black. Only then did he begin to register what the new arrival was saying.

“… didn’t appear at supper … breakfast … morning Mass. … not answering his door …”

“He returned very late last night,” the receptionist said. He looked up and caught sight of John. “With the young man that our friend here is looking for.”

A minute later, escorted by the duty manager, John and the blond young man in black were climbing the stairs together. They reached Alex’s room first. After a quick courtesy knock the manager opened the door with a master key. They walked in. And froze. They were unable to utter a word, any of them, though their gasps of shock and distress were as audible as cries. John’s fingers sought and clutched spontaneously at the other young man’s hand.

The bedside light was on. Its improbably long, strong flex was hideously tangled around the necks of the two young bodies that lay – limbs caught by death in desperate flailing motion, their two heads drawn together by the wire – among the dishevelled and thrown-back sheets. Somehow their two heads were raised a little above the pillows and the light projected their two shadows – so black they were, it seemed to John that they made two real holes, like the pair of eye sockets in a human skull – against the bright ochre wall.

It was many hours later, as the two of them waited in an arid waiting-room to be seen by yet another police official, that John and the blond young man – who’s name was Antonio, he said, and who wasn’t a priest yet (if he ever would be) but only a student for the priesthood – found their fingers interlocking, almost involuntarily, for the second time that day. John and Antonio looked into each other’s eyes and through the pain and hurt there John saw something else. He thought: He’s like me. And he likes me, too.

This story © Anthony McDonald

Anthony McDonald's novel; Adam was republished by BIGfib in 2006. Buy it <here>.

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