‘Picasso,’ said Father Guido, looking around at the owl-jugs bulging on the table, and at the bullfight taking place within the arena of his own plate and, as the food was served, the dancing figures and the heavy-uddered goats and serene women’s faces and the men’s profiles, like the heads on ancient Greek coins, that gradually emerged from beneath the platters of green beans, pomegranate, feta, rare beef and grilled fish. Was he falling into Epicureanism? Was it sinful to feel such delight, surrounded by these exuberant ceramics, in this magnificent garden, with the sea glittering through the drifting Calder and the best wine he had ever tasted flowing into his glass, as if he were a guest at the Wedding Feast at Cana? Although he was not at Mass, he suddenly felt that all wine was sacred; in fact, that if anything was sacred, everything must be. Was he falling into the Error of Pantheism? He didn’t care! If he was, he had been driven to it by Lagerfeld, a Cardinal who had ordered a special Cruciform MRI machine to be made so that he could watch pictures of poor Ignatio’s brain lighting up as nails were driven into his hands and feet; a bully who had ordered him to steal another man’s property.

Marcel explained that Picasso’s Communist leanings had inspired him to mass produce pottery at Vallauris, a nearby town, in order to make ownership of his work more accessible to ordinary people.

‘Communism is practical Christianity,’ said Marcel.

‘I suppose it is,’ said Father Guido, who was by now on board for more or less any heresy. ‘To Communism!’ He clicked glasses with Marcel again and drank another gulp of the splendid Spanish wine.

Marcel showed him photographs of his ceramic armour and told him that the design had been inspired by snake scales.

Father Guido found himself wondering why the poor serpent had been selected to carry the burden of emblematic evil. Were snakes not also God’s creatures?

‘To serpents!’ he said. And that was the last toast he could remember making.

When he woke, Father Guido was thoroughly confused. He had so seldom left the monastery it was fundamentally bewildering for him to imagine himself anywhere else. It was already night, and yet a pulsing green light suffused the air outside his windows and an eerie, amplified voice was counting slowly in German: ‘Fünf … Sechs … Sieben … Acht.’