July 20, 2003, 12.56pm • No comments (be first!) » • 762 Views

Maybe you’re right

The hot bus spat us in Forio, which promised little to anyone but German tourists. On the sea with the dirty beach and lacking amenities like Lacco Ameno.

We touched down in a quiet square which did not resemble the piazzas we had become accustomed to. Yet people still went about their business, locals and tourists. This had the feel of Cuba or South America. Hot and grey and me grumping.

She talked me out of the malaise and we find Forio has a heart which beats like the other charming Neapolitan nights. We walk in an on through this amazing little place, familiar because it’s only subtley different from the others.

“Shall we go in?” to the Chiesa di San Vito, a giant, dark, ancient but anonymous building in some street. It could resemble a libeary, but it’s clearly a pillar of the community - locals are performing the four-postered cross movement on their chest as they pass and I realise this is important for her as much as it is to them.

Small, I wasn’t prepared. Inside, cold, dark. Sixteenth-century paintings. Pews, a giant, cavernous place of worship that I have never subscribed to or even given it the respect it is commanding of me. I linger in the wings as she kneels before sitting, bowing and praying (for what?).

I had always believed believers were deceived and duplicitous. But she looks beautiful.

Silenced in silence, the purpose and prizes of organised religion flood in to me like a drug I’ve never encountered. Life. And death. Are here. And have been here and there and in every country and most humans around the world - for centuries. Roman Catholics form a network of faith and glass-half-full philosophy to which I had chosen never to subscribe.

But life. And death. Are here. And pluck at my emotions. The purpose of religious faith is faith in the afterlife. Is confidence that death just isn’t that bad. It’s a faith I had privately ridiculed, and I’m humbled here by the billions of believers converging ahead of me at the alter she cannot look at through a shared deference.

It shocks. I’m confronted with my utter arrogance and inaccuracy because, in the recent months, I’d desperately tried to believe. She gave me faith in memory, faith in the future, faith… in faith. Because the alternative was that James was merely dead and now nothing, I’d come a long way. It was always going to happen. Because, in that house, in his and our house, he still walked; our space - so he was still around for me.

But I never really believed that.

And this was the first time I had been confronted with such emotions since we all said goodbye to him in a peaceful, incredibly tearful cremation home outside Bridgend in November.

Forio’s Chiesa di San Vito is not quite the same - it’s a lot more, forcing me to be humble and I stumbled with deference to the screen in the lobby then, tears welling, I had to escape it entirely and left to sit on the steps, where the olive locals are obvious because they mark their body crosses as they pass - often even without looking at their icon because it’s already deep within their eyes anyway - and the shopkeepers opposite me sitting stand and twirl crucifies.

They know. And one or two spy my eyes starting quick twinkles in realisation.

She joins me stooped on the steps, stopped in my tracks and floored by her faith; agrees that was a remarkable experience - but she doesn’t know yet. So we talk about my arrogance, about how - for the first time - I realised that your small-town big organised religion has completely humbled me. Once a non-believer, I have struggled and tussled with my own beliefs and arrived somewhere in between now atheism and The Other - The Other, embodied here in this massive monastery.

Tears trickle from her. “I know”, she says, as I tell her how billions of people are in this brick I’ve entered and run from, how I entered this decade a strong man and left this church a weakling. What would have made me thought that I was right?, I say. Why not you and so many like you? And, therefore, sure; shy indeed is James not still alive in some sense?

I don’t care about the Ischians passing and noticing the crying couple of the church steps with her arms around his. Emotion is a wonderful and ghastly thing. Come on, she says; and we do need to eat. So we get up and I don’t take a picture of this sight because I know what it did to me will stay in me forever, what a bitch.

Bruscietta, paracetamol, explore, read, café culture, intellectual talk, about café culture and the world of geopolitics; forget about that and show my strength in this amorphous bubble of not-pinned-down speciality. Explore the castle ruins, feet in the sea, her and me and what belief.