John the Angelic: A Chronicle of Pope Joan

By A.P. Andes and James T. Egan

What is history, a faithful accounting of events or a carefully crafted narrative, edited and reshaped by the powerful to manipulate and undermine the powerless? John the Angelic,

• Language: English
• Publisher: A.P. Andes
• Release date: Oct 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9780986318337

A.P. Andes

A.P. ANDES is an author and attorney who lives in the Chicago area with his wife and twin daughters. Successive volumes of his quartet, The Latecoming West, will follow, starting with Volume III, Falling through the Roof of Hell, in 2024.

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JOHN

the

ANGELIC

A.P. ANDES

JOHN

the

ANGELIC

A Chronicle of Pope Joan

Volume I of The Latecoming West

This work, on occasion, ventures into moments beyond the boundaries encountered in traditional fiction. For this reason, any unusual images or type formatting you experience on your reading device or see in your printed copy are neither in error nor accidental; rather, they were crafted to offer brief sensory events and an enhanced reading experience beyond the static TV screen of the ebook. Likewise, as the series title, The Latecoming West, implies, this work embraces both the Old World of Africa and Eurasia and the New World of the Americas across many millennia, so the English employed and spelling of words will vary depending on the locale and time of the narrative.

Finally, the derivation of Pope Joan’s name is one on which this story departs from the more widely cited versions. A few of the essential facts comprising the Pope Joan story contradict common sense; one of those is that someone who was born in Mainz, Germany and spent her childhood there should come to be known as John the Englishman. Therefore, both in terms of common sense and imagination, the earliest spellings of Johannes Angelicus, or John the Angelic, found in several accounts of Martinus Polonus’ narrative, felt the most authentic. Further searches revealed the much more common spelling of Johannes Anglicus, but, in harmony with the stance against consensus this novel embodies, the former has prevailed here, as a far more organic and plausible appellation. Surely, few would deny that John the Angelic seems far more evocative of Joan’s actual nature and appearance.

Copyright © 2014, 2021 by A.P. Andes. All rights reserved.

Cover design by James T. Egan at Bookfly Design

Book interior design by Booknook.biz

ISBN 978-0-9863183-2-0 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-9863183-3-7 (epub)

Acknowledgments

This book’s creation has spanned close to forty years, and I have many people to thank, without whom you would not be reading this; there is not room to thank everyone, but they must surely know how much their presence and encouragement in my life have helped. Numerous people deserve mention by dint of their extraordinary grace, timing and generosity, some for many years, at a time when I had little else in my corner to sustain me beyond the call of my imagination.

I must first thank Kellie Schruhl, a coworker back in the early 1980s, who passed on my interest in Pope Joan to a cleric friend of hers, who generously wrote back with key details and facts to get me started. Also, a huge debt of gratitude is owed to Dr. Matthew Lippman, a mentor and dear friend, who lent his expertise and critical sources on the Nuremberg Trials and the Holocaust to my development of the Rahel storyline in later volumes as well as feedback on key scenes in this series at a most difficult time of his life. Thanks also to fellow lawyer Susan Russell, who provided the motivation for me to complete the work I’d started some four decades before.

I will always be eternally grateful to my guiding lodestar, lover of literature and loving mother, Pat Andes, who has passed on, my sister, Alison McClaren, and brother-in-law, Bill McClaren, who have always supported my writing and creative life far beyond the level of polite endorsement you sometimes encounter in families. In countless ways, they kept me going and provided support in every way a person can. Alison and Bill even gave me a laptop to use when my old one self-destructed. Alison has been a tremendous and insightful yet enthusiastic beta reader for this work.

Much praise, gratitude, and admiration goes out to Sonya Kamell for being a fabulous beta reader for this first volume. Her insights and enthusiasm for the work and its less conventional passages were extraordinary. Two old friends and fellow writers, Ulysses Smith and Chris Rabot, have contributed in different ways to sections of this work with their own unique insights and feedback, and I am deeply grateful to them. Thanks also to Kara Lang Guminski, Krista Harms, and Maggie Kohls, friends and colleagues who have supported me from afar in this project, and to Daliah Saper, who generously donated her legal expertise on some questions I was working through.

I am blessed beyond words to have had the expertise and diligence of Christina M. Frey at pagetwoediting.com, who copyedited the book before you with mastery and aplomb, yet always with humor, warmth, and tremendous patience. An effusive shout-out has to go to James T. Egan at Bookfly Design for a heart-stopping cover design that far exceeded even my most indulgent fantasies, as well as Bookfly’s Kira Rubenthaler, whose penetrating questions on my tastes and preferences gave James substantial intel on what would work well for me. They are both a joy to work with, by the way. I must also thank Kimberly Hitchens and the fine folks at Booknook.biz big-time for their stellar wizardry in the ineffable realm of digital technology, and for their superb conversion services (and patience!), both to e-book and print on demand. This book’s format is far more complex and digitally challenging than 99% of the novels you’ve seen or bought in the past few years, and your seamless enjoyment of it is wholly due to Hitch and her expert staff.

The preceding years have been difficult for my wife and me with the economy, and her parents, Bob (who has also now passed on) and Jan Takushi, provided financial and spiritual support without which this work would not have been completed, and I am forever grateful. Most of all, I owe everything and more to my extraordinary wife and partner in life’s adventure, Alicia. This entire process would have sent a lesser soul raving into the night, but her belief in me and in this project has been unwavering, and without it this work would not exist. She has always been there with a word of encouragement and one more leap of faith that things would turn out in the end. Here’s hoping, my love, that indeed they will! Last but not least, kisses to my two loving twin daughters, Micaela and Nila, who have for their daddy the animation, voltage and adoration to resuscitate a walking cadaver back into an energized human being.

A.P. Andes lives in the Chicago area with his wife and twin daughters. His writing has been published in The Iowa Review and is informed by his love of philosophy, postmodernism, and especially European literature, cinema, and history. His four books of historical fiction, John the Angelic, Uproar and Heresy, Falling through the Roof of Hell, and The Annihilating Hero, form the genre-bending quartet, The Latecoming West.

The Japanese language has a character, Mu,

which, when uttered in response to a question,

has the effect of erasing the very being of

the question itself—and with it the being

of the asker’s mind in that moment.

Western language has no equivalent of the Mu

because the Western mind has no fear of or respect

for the authority of the question, only for the

authority of the answer.

Ornament One Ornament

Papal Bedchamber, Lateran Palace, 18 August 855

I hear a light knock at the door and pull out my fingers. It is my personal assistant, Rafaela. Being caught in flagrante by her yields a shudder of pleasure, perhaps because I pass for a man.

I keep my hair short for Rome only. ’Tis a pity, in the early days I was proudest of my blue-black hair and its sheen of oil on water at night; it could lead a man anywhere, through hidden archways, soaked in grimy light, the slap of bare feet on wet floors, groans issuing out of the tunnel like something dreamt or imagined—until you see their bodies slicked in sweat, her fat, dark tit in his mouth, her strong thighs coiled about his slender waist, and her eyes, huge in their moment of capture, both devouring you and guarding their space from your approach. Your own gaze drops, lingers over her teats, over the soft, glistening folds of her belly, and her eyes shake off just a flake of surrender, and then you see it isn’t a man at all she’s with, it’s you, and we’re outside, I’m in the grass looking up at her where she has me pinned like her little pet. We’re in a radiant, Hellenic meadow with pines catching fire just past the crown of her midnight-in-bloom tresses… Alcippe, O Alcippe, why cannot I bid thee farewell—

The rap at the door a little firmer now, and the thin voice comes through the door. ‘Is everything all right, your Holiness?’

‘Yes, yes, I am coming. I was napping.’ It is late morning, perhaps halfway between Terce and noon. I bind my breasts down and change into my tunic, my fingers smoothing out the folds out of place.

On the other side of that door is the very incarnation of Waiting; she will not speak again if the next half hour passes in silence. She knows better; she has taken well to my instruction. She is a young thing from Verona, with a mouth as full and vigilant as a wound, and in spite of my lifelong indifference towards the female form, I have ached to draw her aside, to teach her how to kiss. I am told she is the first female ever to occupy this post at Lateran, but I insisted on it. I have had too much bad luck with men in positions intimate to my own who were suspicious of my manhood.

I open the heavy door. She is so slight it feels as if the air itself spirits her in. She holds her hands together in front of herself. ‘Good day, your Holiness. My apologies for having interrupted your nap.’

‘Come on in, then,’ I say, gesturing her inside. A small twinge from below invades the rhythm of my words. Her eyes leap from the window to the bed. There is something restive here she cannot identify, and after a moment it passes out of her, but my heart is pounding from fear, and from more than fear. I want to cover my breast with her hand, watch the knowledge flood into her eyes—she is far more perceptive than she knows, and she will be my undoing if I am not careful. And in my current state, that is dangerous. Desire is always about undoing. For a period of time, I stand before her without moving, enslaved by fear, unable to advance a thought. Can she read my mind or is this all in my imagination? After all, who would ever think the person on the other side of this door was a woman? Still, she can see she has caught me out of sorts, and I realise in that moment, as I ease a single toe into the tide pools of those large, shy eyes, there are remote places of wilderness that girl has been to and returned from the entire time she has been standing there talking to me, without so much as twitching a muscle.

I peruse the room for any damning items and breathe a sigh of reli | Curtis took his own life on the eve of Joy Division’s first American tour. Although epilepsy tormented Curtis, the music world’s | ef at finding none. But all the tasks of the new day begin to line up in my mind: approving the rubrics, meeting with the | sense of him remained oblivious beyond the commercial hook of the band’s elegiac charm. And yet from the beginning, Curtis and | bishop over the new plans for the Lateran garden, overseeing the revision of the hymnbooks and scripts for Vespers, meeting the new | Joy Division were about nothing if not the infusion of ecstatic grieving into the macho culture of pop music. Their sound revealed Hopelessness | archbishop to discuss the assignment of Father Terrari to the bishopric of Genoa, sitting through the tedious late-day meeting over inventory | itself as a wild and primal pathway to self-love, a sanctuary for the preparation of all beginnings; no one but Curtis | and then sitting down to letters, which would carry me well into late evening. It is all more than I can bear and makes me shudder at the mere prospect of so much to do before the night’s | could have penned words lamenting the limits of suicide as a means of release.

Fleuron

What if it were possible to be beautiful

in a way He could not leave, like the one

work an artist must always have about Him?

And supposing I were thus dropped and broken

in that clutch, who would tell my story then?

Fleuron

After my ninth birthday, I made the acquaintance in Mainz of a boy my age, Adolfo, who stole my sanity. He had a sweet smile, but his mouth looked upside down; his upper lip reminded me more of a lower lip. After we had known each other over a year and had kist, first in secret, then everywhere we could find and, in the end, not at all, he told me the day before his family moved away that we would be married and would love each other always. I laughed at his foolishness and never saw him again. All of which could not have mattered less.

But on the day we met, I was seated outside, enjoying the warm sun, when he walked up to me without saying a word and plucked a pinch of hair off my head.

‘Ow!’ I yelled, standing up and rubbing the sore spot. ‘What did I do to deserve that?’ I might have been taller than he, and bigger, with my arms stiff at my sides and my hands balled into fists, but Adolfo shewed no concern in the least. He stared down at the strands between his fingers for a moment, then looked off towards the cemetery, squinting as the wind blew his thick blond curls down into his eyes.

‘How many hairs do you think that was?’

I stared at him for quite a spell before I could get my mouth to work. ‘I beg your pardon?’

He looked at me, training his eyes on each part of my face, one after the other, as if he were classifying some animal by its markings. ‘I said…’ he began in a slow voice, to make it plain he had lost all patience. ‘How many hairs do you think that was?’

‘I am sure I do not care,’ I said, meeting his gaze with my own. ‘However, I can tell you it does hurt.’

‘Yes, well, I am sorry about that. It happened before I could stop myself.’ For a moment his body halted midturn between impatience and hesitation, but before I could respond, he leaned forward and shewed me his trophy up close. ‘Have a look, then.’ I had thicker hair than I imagined. I stood back and folded my arms.

‘Twenty.’ Standing there, I tapped my left foot, all my weight on the other leg. I had not the slightest idea what to do.

‘Oh, no, you’re short.’ He sighed, disappointed. ‘Far short.’

‘I see. And, pray, how short am I?’

‘I should say there are at least a good thirty here.’

‘You’re an idiot.’ We fell into the grass, counting hairs for the longest spell, twice through in all. Thirty-two hairs. I fell silent, and he told me his name and asked for mine. He told me a lot about his family. His father worked as a tanner outside of town, and his mother earned money as an alewife steps from where we were. She enjoyed the work but liked the drink too much and would come busting into the house in the middle of the night—with everyone asleep—wearing some lush round her neck, breaking things and stumbling into the common area and having her way with him right under her husband’s nose. We had just met and already I felt sorry for him, but his stories fascinated me, and I took odd solace in his company. His family was the opposite of my own in all ways. Every gesture, every action of my life at home had been predetermined generations in advance—or so it seemed. My mother did not permit me to attend school. Four different scholars were overseeing my private education at home, and at an age when most boys could not do figures, I had read the relevant parts of my mathematics tutor’s copy of Boethius’s First Geometry, the Roman senator and philosopher’s florilegium with excerpts from Euclid’s Elements, and I could speak, read and write at an intermediate level in Latin and Frengisk. My mother pushed my liberal arts tutor to start me on reading Virgil.

‘What is the hurry?’ I remember him saying. ‘Ey God, the child is not even ten—would not her time be better passed enjoying the pleasant weather or making friends?’

‘She will have a lifetime to make friends,’ she snapped, ‘but only one chance for a proper education. Besides’—and at this her eyes shot in my direction but the light in them was dead, as if it were a sketch, a drawing of her daughter she beheld in that moment—‘you know the child, you know her mind, there is no question of her ability—’ He objected, but my mother dismissed him with a wave of her hand. ‘I pay you to teach the girl Letters, not to question how I raise my child. We are finished for today.’ And with that, she turned and left the room.

And so I cradled a copy of The Aeneid (as yet unopened) that day when Adolfo and I met, which he asked to see. To my surprise, he had heard of it.

‘Is it worth reading?’ I asked.

‘I said I had heard of it, not that I had read it. You should learn to listen better.’ He had begun to flip through the pages, when something caught in his throat and he slammed the book shut. He turned to me, and his entire demeanour changed—anxious, breathless.

‘Do you know the page count of this volume?’

‘The page count? Why, no, I…’ And all at once laughter seized me up, and I fell back into the grass, spasming like a creature possessed until I could no longer see through the cascades of tears, until I thought my head would burst right in front of him. A parade of the most absurd images made their way across my mind, ending with a boy pointing at every thing that moved: how many feathers on that bird, how many stitches in this tunic, how many eyelashes on that girl, how many spots on that horse’s rump, how many notes in the key of C in Joan’s laugh—

When I looked up at last, Adolfo astonished me, his face unchanged in its expression, as if nothing but a moment or so had passed, and this started the whole cycle of delirium all over again. By the time I could speak, an immense gulf had arisen between us, and I fumbled at a response.

‘So, this is a sort of game with you, then, this guessing at numbers?’

‘No, it is not a game,’ he said, his eyebrows knitting as he pulled out a clump of grass with his hand. He said nothing else, but I guessed a great deal more lurked behind those words, and more still in the quiet yet pained gestures attending them. Disappointed I had misjudged him, he let it pass nonetheless. I am sure I comprehended little of this at the time, but on some level at that moment I grasped I had found someone for whom the world was as awkward a fit as it was for me. I knew we would come to know one another completely.

I apologised for calling him an idiot. He had begun to recount a story to me about his brother, and I interrupted him because I could no longer bear the thought of having it on my conscience a moment longer.

He sighed. ‘Pay it no mind. It happens all the time.’ A demure smile crossed his face. ‘My opinion of you was worse, I assure you.’

Over time I saw Adolfo’s preternatural advancement in terms of maturity and experience, but this had come at great personal expense to the integrity of his childhood at the hands of his mother. For she took to beating him, often for no good reason, and he would run fleeing from the house, his back and buttocks so raw he could not bear to pull up his drawers under his tunic. One of the neighbour’s children, a classmate, had caught him in this state of dishabille, crying and crouching in the bushes, with the result he became stuck with the nickname Red. As the seamy details of his domestic life and his mother’s drunken sexual indulgences became more and more a topic for public consumption, the children turned merciless in their taunting. Not until many years later—long after the two of us had fallen out of correspondence—did I grasp the profundity of poor Adolfo’s suffering, not just from the children at school but from his own mother as well, for she didn’t always take her fists to him in the wee hours.

Once he tried to tell me about a time after she beat him, when she came to him very quiet and closed his door. She soothed him in a way she never had before, not just with words but with her hands and even with her lips, with touch and in a place he did not expect. I recall the furrow in his brow when he said this, and I should have enquired further about this matter, yet decided against it. I was too busy receiving a private education and committing Ennius to memory. I knew nothing of ‘touching’ and had no desire to discover this contact my own mother withheld from me. If anything, I imagined the answer could not but disclose some failing of my own which would support the unbending coldness she shewed me at every turn. Adolfo never spoke of the incident again, but thereafter he began to court me as a lady, enquiring if my father would grant him an audience so he could ask for my hand, and other such inanities. Whenever we were out together in public, his carriage became stiff, formal and almost protective of me. He conducted himself with me as though we were married. About this time he also became taken with the notion of kissing me on the lips—in private at first but then over time with increasing indiscretion. I had never been touched or shewn affection by anyone, least of all by my parents, and despite my natural curiosity about kissing, I regarded it more as a matter of humouring him (or so I thought), of acceding to some unspoken yet presumed next step in my friendship with this boy—something which in my deprived, housebound state I imagined as a progression typical of all such alliances within the talking world. Still, my lower instincts guided my conduct and conscience in a way always this side of Adolfo’s desires, for, as with the counting games, it became clear the significance of these rituals reached far beyond the surface gesture. To that end, he took matters well past their initial puerility into a demesne that, save a compelling invention on my part to an adult witness who intervened in our ‘amorous’ behaviour, would have spelt a hasty end for us both.

Not until much later, as a woman myself, did I understand the cause of all of this: two young souls struggling to discover themselves within the wretched definitions of love and self-worth their respective families had foisted upon them. For, in truth, the absence of my own mother’s caresses led me to be seduced by Adolfo’s overtures, just as he was condemned to repeat those committed by his mother upon his person, on me.

Fleuron

And the elder said to the younger: Our father is old, and there is no man left on the earth, to come in unto us after the manner of the whole earth. Come, let us make him drunk with wine, and let us lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.

And they made their father drink wine that night: and the elder went in, and lay with her father: but he perceived not, neither when his daughter lay down, nor when she rose up.

And the next day the elder said to the younger: Behold I lay last night with my father, let us make him drink wine also to night, and thou shalt lie with him, that we may save seed of our father.

They made their father drink wine