Conclave

by Robert Harris

One of her distant aristocratic forebears had been a member of the order during the French Revolution and had been guillotined in the marketplace for refusing to swear an oath to the new regime. Sister Agnes was reputed to be the only person of whom the late Holy Father had been afraid, and perhaps for that reason he had often sought out her company. “Agnes,” he used to say, “will always tell me the truth.”

He tried to pray. But God, who had felt so close only a few minutes before, had vanished again, and his pleas for guidance seemed to vanish into the ether.

As he removed each item from its cellophane wrapping, it exuded the sweet chemical aroma of dry-cleaning fluid—a scent that always reminded him of his years in the Nuncio’s residence in New York, when all his laundry was done at a place on East 72nd Street. For a moment he closed his eyes and heard once more the ceaseless soft horns of the distant Manhattan traffic. Every garment had been made to measure by Gammarelli, papal outfitters since 1798, in their famous shop behind the Pantheon, and he took his time in dressing, meditating on the sacred nature of each element in an effort to heighten his spiritual awareness.

Hanging up in his apartment were vestments he had first worn as a young priest more than forty years ago and which still fitted him perfectly.

Leaving the altar and passing St. Peter’s crucifixion for a second time, he tried to keep his gaze fixed on the door ahead. But the force of the painting was irresistible. And you? the eyes of the martyred saint seemed to demand. In what way are you worthy to choose my successor?

In a few days’ time, the television producers would be able to spool through their tapes of the ceremony and find the new Pope at exactly this moment, placing his hand on the Gospel, and then his elevation would seem inevitable: it always did.

Later, when the experts who were paid to analyse the Conclave tried to breach the wall of secrecy and piece together exactly what had happened, their sources were all agreed on this: that the divisions started the moment Mandorff closed the doors.

He shielded his ballot paper with his arm, like a candidate in an examination who doesn’t want his answer to be seen by his neighbour, and wrote in capital letters: BELLINI.

The Filipino had an attractive quality, he thought, not easy to define: an inner grace. Now that he was becoming better known, he might go far.

Thirty-four cardinals—more than a quarter of the Conclave—received at least one vote: it was said afterwards to be a record. Men voted for themselves, or for a friend, or a fellow countryman.

No modern Conclave had lasted beyond three days, but that didn’t mean it might not happen. Under the rules they were obliged to keep on balloting until they found a candidate who could command a two-thirds majority, if necessary for as many as thirty ballots, extending over twelve days. Only at the end of that time would they be permitted to use a different system, whereby a simple majority would be sufficient to elect a new Pope. Twelve days—an appalling prospect!

Others hung on to them for a last few seconds. No doubt they were trying to memorise the figures, Lomeli thought. Or perhaps they were simply savouring the only record there would ever be of the day they received a vote to be Pope.

Most of the cardinals did not go downstairs to the buses immediately but gathered in the vestibule to watch the ballot papers and notes being burnt. It was something after all even for a Prince of the Church to be able to say that he had witnessed such a spectacle.

The rules were centuries old and indicated how little the Fathers of the Church had trusted one another: it would require a conspiracy of at least six men to rig the election.

He struck a match, lit a firelighter and placed it carefully inside. Lomeli found it odd to see him doing something so practical.

The second stove, the square one, contained a mixture of potassium perchlorate, anthracene and sulphur in a cartridge that ignited when a switch was pressed.

When there wasn’t a Conclave, the Irishman was Secretary of the Congregation for Bishops. He had access to the files on five thousand senior clerics. He was said to have a nose for discovering secrets.

A security man watched them from beneath a fresco of the Battle of Lepanto. He turned his body away slightly, and whispered something, into either his sleeve or his lapel. Lomeli wondered what it was they were always talking about in such urgent tones.

“No leaks, I trust?” “None. The reporters interview one another.”

“La Repubblica believes his dramatic arrival is all part of the late Holy Father’s secret plan.” Lomeli laughed. “I would be delighted if there was a plan—secret or otherwise! But I sense that the only one with a plan for this Conclave is God, and so far He seems to be determined to keep it to Himself.”

So Benítez was in delicate health, or had been, as the result of a terrorist incident in Iraq? Perhaps that accounted for his fragile appearance.

This was the night when the real business of the Conclave started to be done. Although in theory the papal constitution forbade the cardinal-electors from entering into “any form of pact, agreement, promise or commitment” on pain of excommunication, this had now become an election, and hence a matter of arithmetic: who could get to seventy-nine votes?

The nuns who were serving the food could hardly help overhearing the state of play, and afterwards several of them were to prove useful sources for reporters trying to piece together the inside story of the Conclave: one even preserved a napkin on which a cardinal had jotted the voting figures of the first-round leaders.

If that force which the secular call momentum and the religious believe is the Holy Spirit was with any of the candidates that night, it was with Adeyemi.

If he were a white man, he thought, Adeyemi would be condemned by the liberals as more reactionary even than Tedesco. But the fact that he was black made them reluctant to criticise his views. His fulminations against homosexuality, for example, they could excuse as merely an expression of his African cultural heritage. Lomeli was beginning to sense that he had underestimated Adeyemi. Perhaps he was indeed the candidate to unite the Church. He certainly had the largeness of personality required to fill St. Peter’s Throne.

“Bellini seems to me—what was the phrase the Holy Father once used to me to describe him?—‘brilliant but neurotic.’

Forty votes, that was all the Patriarch of Venice needed: forty votes, and he would have the blocking third he needed to prevent the election of a detested “progressive.” He would drag the Conclave out for days if he had to.

I believe he sensed his death was approaching and his mind was full of curious ideas. I feel his presence very strongly, don’t you?” “I do indeed. I still speak to him. I often sense he is watching us.”

Later, it would be obvious to Lomeli what he should have done next. He should have dressed immediately and knocked on Adeyemi’s door. It might still have been possible, at that early moment, before positions were fixed and when the episode was undeniable, to have a frank conversation about what had just happened. Instead, the dean climbed back into his bed, drew the sheet up to his chin and contemplated the possibilities.

Lomeli woke with an impending sense of doom somewhere at the back of his mind, as if his anxieties were all coiled together ready to spring out at him the moment he was fully awake. He went into the bathroom and tried to banish them with another scalding shower. But when he stood at the mirror to shave, they were still there, lurking behind him.

Just before he left the room, he caught sight of himself in the mirror wearing his choir dress. The chasm between the figure he appeared to be and the man he knew he was had never seemed so wide.

He watched the nuns as they moved between the tables serving coffee. To his shame, he realised he had never bothered to take any notice of them until now.

Yet the late Holy Father used to make a point of eating with a group of these sisters at least once a week—another manifestation of his humility that made the Curia mutter with disapproval.

To think that whoever was elected Pope would never be able to wander around the city at will, could never browse in a bookstore or sit outside a café, but would remain a prisoner here! Even Ratzinger, who resigned, could not escape but ended his days cooped up in a converted convent in the gardens, a ghostly presence.

it's interesting to compare with american presidents. Some are retiring, but T.Roosevelt was the exception

Lomeli sensed that he was expected to speak first. But he had learnt long ago not to babble into a silence. He did not wish to refer to what he had seen, had no desire to be the keeper of anyone’s conscience except his own.

He clamped his arms around the shoulders of both and hugged them to him, leaving Lomeli to trail behind, wondering if he had imagined things, or if he had just been offered, in return for his silence, his old job back as Secretary of State.

In 1978, Karol Wojtyła brought a Marxist journal into the Conclave that elected him Pope, and sat reading it calmly during the long hours it took for a total of eight ballots to be cast. However, as Pope John Paul II, he did not accord the same distraction to his successors. All electors were forbidden by his revised rules of 1996 to bring any reading material into the Sistine Chapel. A Bible was placed on the desk in front of every cardinal so that they could consult the Scriptures for inspiration. Their sole task was to meditate on the choice before them.

It was only as he checked his calculations for a second time that Lomeli noticed another small surprise—a footnote, as it were—that he had missed in his concentration on the main story. Benítez had also increased his support, from one vote to two.

The Sistine seemed to be emitting a low-level hum. Along all four rows of desks the cardinals were comparing lists and whispering to their neighbours.

He turned to go back to his seat, a husk. It was one thing to dread becoming Pope; it was another altogether to confront the sudden reality that it was never going to happen—that after years of being regarded as the heir apparent, your peers had looked you over and God had guided their choice elsewhere.

While the cardinals voted, Lomeli passed his time in contemplation of the ceiling panels nearest to him.

Without noticing, he allowed himself to become lost in the painting. And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and upon the earth distress of nations in great perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken…He felt a sudden intimation of disaster, so profound that he shuddered, and when he looked around he realised that an hour had passed and the scrutineers were preparing to count the ballots.

Even if Tedesco somehow managed to reach forty on the next ballot and deny him a two-thirds majority, the blocking minority would crumble quickly in the following round. Few cardinals would wish to risk a schism in the Church by obstructing such a dramatic manifestation of the Divine Will. Nor, to be practical about it, would they wish to make an enemy of the incoming Pope, especially one with as powerful a personality as Joshua Adeyemi.

Observing it, the Vatican experts on the main television news channels continued confidently to predict a victory for Bellini.

He had done himself no favours, Lomeli thought, by trying to win over a worldwide electorate with a clique of Italians.

In a moment of terrible clarity, he knew what must have happened. But still—how he reproached himself for this afterwards!—still his instinct was to ignore it. The discretion and self-discipline of a lifetime guided his feet towards the nearest empty chair, and then commanded his body to sit, his mouth to smile a greeting at his neighbours, his hands to unfold a napkin, while in his ears all he could hear was a noise like a waterfall.

He looked up to refuse, and for a fraction of a second she looked back at him—a terrible, accusing look: it made his mouth go dry.

“We don’t know, Dean,” said Nakitanda, “but clearly something is wrong and he has to tell us what it is. And we need to hear from the sister before we go back to the Sistine to vote. What exactly is her complaint against him?” Zucula seized Lomeli’s arm. For such a seemingly frail man, his grip was fierce. “We have waited a long time for an African Pope, Jacopo, and if God wills it to be Joshua, I am happy. But he must be pure in heart and conscience—a truly holy man. Anything short of that would be a disaster for all of us.”

It was many years since he had been inside a kitchen, and never one as busy as this. He looked around in bewilderment at the nuns who were preparing the food. The sisters closest to him bowed their heads.

The nun was sitting on the same chair Benítez had occupied, next to the photocopier. She stood as he entered. He had an impression of a woman of about fifty—short, plump, bespectacled, timid: identical to the others. But it was always so hard to see beyond the uniform and the headdress to the person, especially when that person was