The Basilica San Paolo, also known as St Paul’s Outside the Walls, slumbers in marble splendour in an attractively shabby southern suburb of Rome. Graffiti-illuminated trains rattle and roar past its imposing cloister walls, and elderly harpies in heels goad tiny, furry martyrs — sometimes chihuahuas, sometimes husbands — into resentful motion across the wide common at its rear that runs down towards the Tiber.
Across the street in the direction of the Metro is a tote, beautifully positioned between God and Utility, where one may put a fiver on Lazio going 2-0 up against Barca next Thursday, or a tenner on 2007 as the year of Christ’s return: in that little shop, with the shadow of the cross falling across the Lucky Banana Vegas Million slot machines, neither seems more unlikely than the other. (Tighter odds are available on the four-horse Apocalypse race, the insider talk being that War might just squeak it by a nose ahead of favourite Famine.)
But not even the soothsaying savants in that establishment, divining the immediate future from the bottom of a glass or the fine print of a maintenance order, would have put money on their neighbourhood Basilica proving to be the final resting place of St Paul, as was revealed last week.
At least, the archaeologists who found the sarcophagus think it’s the apostle’s final resting place and, while one would hate to see them disappointed, one hopes they’ve considered other, more likely possibilities. For instance, that the remains inside the still-sealed box belong to Clive the Crypt-Cleaner, who ducked inside 1 700 years ago to enjoy a quick fag, only to have the lid slammed on him by a Holy Roman oxygen-fascist who had been warned by an augury as a boy that his doom would come either via the club of a marauding Ostrogoth, or by secondary smoke.
It would have been tragically easy for Clive’s disappearance to be overlooked. His wife, a boiler of fish skeletons for the local sausage maker, would have had more pressing concerns than the whereabouts of her husband — feeding her brood, for starters, on broiled rope stolen from the necks of recently hanged witches, Jews and talking dogs, or sprinkling magical herbs on her startling collection of buboes.
For his part, Clive would have hung on gamely in trying circumstance, eating spiders and drinking dew to save up energy for one weekly scream; but as ill fortune would have it, those screams almost always coincided with a pilgrim stuffing a rag through a tiny hole in the lid and into his mouth; and Clive would go back to the arachnid-munching drawing board.
Of course the possible existence of Clive raises awkward questions for the Basilica, Rome and Christendom in general. Is St Paul’s Outside the Walls really just the tomb of a Bloke Having A Smoke? How many other holy sites would be desecrated by banal death? From Westminster to Cologne, cathedrals and churches would be devastated by a wave of morbid rhymes: Dave Tripped in the Nave, Kyle Choked in the Aisle, Hestrie Vrekked in the Vestry —
But naturally some questions should never be asked, for the sake of the collective. For example, why open old wounds and recently emptied bank accounts by raking up details over Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka’s latest flight, this time apparently on a crop-duster pouring liquid platinum out of its nozzles? Why the ruckus about the Swiss aircraft with its Swiss pilot?
Indeed, one would suggest that it is only killjoys who would begrudge our country’s third most influential woman (after the deputy minister of health and the breathy spokesmodel who presents Brand Power slots, helping you buy better) the pleasure of travel on a Swiss aircraft. The seats made of cheese; the airsickness bags provocatively made of chocolate; the cockpit, a whooping, pinging carnival of instruments: witness the cuckoo that shoots out of the overhead panel wearing an oxygen mask, to remind one that things could always be worse.
No, it is best to let sleeping crypt cleaners lie. And is it worth putting a tenner on local politicians learning fiscal tact in the face of rampant deprivation? You’d do better to back Famine taking it by a length.