Pubdate: Sat, 02 Jan 1999 Source: Times, The (UK) Contact: http://www.the-times.co.uk/ Copyright: 1999 Times Newspapers Ltd GRACEFUL WITHDRAWAL Nestled in Italy's Tuscan hills is a monastery turned hotel where the rich rub shoulders with reforming junkies - and pay for the privilege. Alan Franks retreats himself Considering that I was the only guest, there seemed to be an awful lot of covert activity at the Convento di St Francesco. There were people vanishing like shadows across the cloistered courtyards, and raised voices behind the closed doors of the refectory. One explanation was that the legendary Padre Eligio was here. Present or not, the mere size of this man's reputation is enough to make anyone look lively. I went to my room. There is a lot of going to one's room involved in a stay at St Francesco, but in view of the rooms this is no hardship. Mine looked out beneath its medieval timbers across the winter hills of Tuscany. Below, in the wooded grounds that drape this fantastic summit, something was stirring. I knew that people came here for contemplative purposes, as they had for centuries. And I knew that the distractions were cut down by a complete absence of TV, radio, room kettles, sauna and other dispensable essentials of hotel life. What I had not expected was that the outward silence and apparent stillness would so sharpen the senses as to pick up the fall of a latch at 50 metres, or the quiver of a leaf on the far side of the helicopter pad. In my case the Trappist tendency, never very pronounced, got a shot in the arm from the language problem. Even if I had wanted to go round the entire place trying to strike up conversations, I would not have had the words. I did have a dictionary - a huge, hardbound Cassell which had pushed my rucksack over the eight-kilo ceiling for hand luggage and dented my image of frugal pedestrian. One of the first words I looked up was "timballo", as it made an appearance on the spoken menu of La Frateria di Padre Eligio, the monastery's famed restaurant: timballo di cavolo cappuccio con olio extra vergine d'oliva. The waiter announces it, and each of the other six courses, like high-born visitors (it translates as timbale). Other people do come into the restaurant, but they leave me alone. It is as if I am either very important or very contagious. A couple settle at the next table, which is several yards away. They look effortlessly rich and only have eyes for each other - and the wine list. Then the long table fills up and later in the evening a big, bearded man with good English asks me if I know of the amazing life and work of Padre Eligio. I offer half a nod, but an answer is not really required of me. I am, whether I like it or not, on retreat. I cannot tell you how much I hate that phrase since the affluent laity of the Nineties have got their hands on it and used it to spice plain leisure with spiritual correctness. So I prefer to take a heretical view of my few days here and regard them as a restful time in a beautiful old monastery. But this description falls short as well. True, the building is an astoundingly well-restored fastness with a nucleus that dates from 1212. Just 20 years ago a layer of caustic lime, applied to the church walls when it was in use as a 16th-century plague ward, was found to conceal a fresco of St Francis and his two companions, Berto Guido and San Leonardo. True, the route to dinner takes you by the grizzled remnants of a stairway where penitents of the order were chained and scourged, so the past does not so much sit patiently among the precincts as barge its way into the present reckoning. Yet for all this, it is circumstance rather than history which holds apart the parallel worlds of the Convento di St Francesco. On the one hand, the half-dozen hotel rooms (Pounds 150 a night), the sunken bath, the hefty art books, the boundless grounds, the breakfast terrace and the five-star restaurant. On the other, the bunk cabins that squat deep in the foliage, the unexpected buildings in the woods with grinding sounds and flying sparks, and above all that refectory where the loud babble is coming from. When the doors are opened and I go in, the noise stops abruptly and completely. Again, it could be importance and it could be contagion. I am surrounded on three sides by young men and women, all of whom have risen to their feet. I can feel my hand bashfully trying to motion them down again, but I am as impotent as minor royalty. While I shall be here for three or four days, these people will be here for as many years. One of them has already clocked up seven years and is charged with the task of periodically telling the rest what is going on in the world beyond. Another of them, no longer in a dinner jacket, is the waiter who last night was serving me with such rigorous courtesy. So the worlds are not parallel at all, but interlocked. By being here as a paying guest I am keeping them as much as they are keeping me by sustaining the hotel. They grow the food, do the cooking, make the plates and the furniture, and I handle the eating. I do not have time to ask each of them in turn what they think of Padre Eligio, but I am willing to bet the consensus is that they owe him their lives. Almost to a man and woman these people are ex-drug addicts, and their open-ended times at San Francesco are the demanding alternatives to an even harder fate. Up at 6.30am for prayers, work till lunch then through to 6pm, then study, dinner, prayers. No smoking or drinking. No talking in a private huddle at meals, but all conversations to be open and accessible. No love affairs. Family contact once every five months. No leaving without democratic approval. No drug substitutes - eg, no methadone for retired heroin users. To put the juxtaposition at its starkest, a sleek American industrialist and his wife will be capping their gastronomic bliss with parfait oli noci in salsa barbagiaola a stone's throw from where a wasted junkie is being helped through his cold turkey by a confrere. There are apparently huge sums of money on offer from the Italian government to help fund this programme, but Padre Eligio turns them all down for fear that acceptance would bring conditions with it. Once you glimpse the size of the gulf between him and the government, his refusal of help is only a case of consistency. For his belief is that drug addicts are people marked out by God as visionaries; they have broken their ties with family, institutions, love, money, human relations and so face the mysteries of the world naked and without baggage. Because they are trading in turmoil rather than in the distracting pursuit of material ease, they are the only ones in a condition to bear significant messages to humanity. There is much more where this came from. Padre Eligio is indeed here, and I am lucky enough to catch him before he goes off to his next monastery. Like the eponymous Francis from nearby Assisi, Eligio is a radical itinerant from a good family. And just as Francis founded his colony of outcasts on Mount Subasio, so Eligio started a nationwide community known as Mondo X - the letter signifying the unknown potential of his latter-day lepers. In his own way he is as much at war with the world as a practising addict, although palpably at peace with himself. As we sit to talk beside the vast, open fire in an otherwise dark room, he kicks off with a swipe at Signor Agnelli, the motor tycoon with a great house (or retreat) on a neighbouring hill. I now feel my identity starting to split: I may be a patron of his project through the hotel bill, but I'm also a nuncio from the fat and filthy press. America is next up for a kicking: the "tragic revolution" of drug addiction was imported to the West by GIs returning from southeast Asia. Just as they tainted the innocence of sex in that quarter of the world, so they set in train an epidemic of self-destruction back home. The fire snaps and flings out glowing wood. It lands on our jerseys and there is a smell of burning hair. The tongues of flame light the face of God's Hotelier, and on he goes. Cardinal Hume sings Arthur Scargill. There are any number of establishments where the boss exercises a sort of conversational droit de seigneur, entitling himself to go hectoring around the tables on a free-range basis. This is the strangest variation imaginable, with the big difference that Eligio has so plainly put his money where these 30 mouths are. In fact, there are several hundred mouths, for Mondo X, started in the Sixties from a telephone helpline, now runs 30 communities throughout Italy. When the time for leaving arrives, almost all the residents have acquired marketable skills. I wonder if Eligio is amused by the world he has created, and by its little paradigm of social justice - the fat cats feeding the penniless seers without knowing it. But by this time he has left for Como and the terminal Aids community there, and it is too late to ask him. However, there is a painting on the wall, a magnificent work by the school of Caravaggio, which helps. It shows the figure of Gabriel, bounded to his right by a sheep and to his left by the Nativity. Perhaps Eligio is performing a similar act of conduction between his two worlds, leading the one to the other as effectively as Gabriel is linking the Old Testament to the New. What I do know is that after just a couple of days here the time becomes a different shape, and the subtle dependence on unfolding stories of censure and extradition recedes. Cetona, a modest town down the hairpin road, takes on the size of a metropolis. A trip there will be a big thing. I can quite understand the solidarity of a community which shuts its face to the damaging world and sees true importance not in the impeachment of a president but in the crisis of a member. Having said all that, I can also see how far I remain from such a place in having come superficially so close. The habituations came back, all the stronger for having been suspended. I forgot how much I enjoyed, or perhaps just needed, the clutter of my day, the disorder of my journey, an unexpected phone call, the ragged excess of things still to be done. I had also got completely out of kilter with the night instalments of the Ashes. I should have stayed away for years. Convento di St Francesco, 53040 Cetona (SI)Italia (0039 0578 238261) - --- MAP posted-by: Rich O'Grady