by Tal Bauer
A scowl marred Cristoph’s features as Alain asked about the team, bringing out the Germanic of his Swiss-German heritage in the play of shadow and light. “S’alright,” Cristoph mumbled.
Alain reached inside the plastic shopping bag he’d dropped at his feet from the Annona, Vatican City’s supermarket. He usually made his rounds at the Annona at the bitterly last moment, when he was reduced to ketchup and stale bread, his milk long past its due date and his fridge and cupboards bare. He would circuit the market once, throwing odds and ends in his basket as the nuns stared and the priests doing their shopping crossed themselves before hurrying away.
Today, he’d gone inside in the sunlight, not skulking in the dark just before it closed. He heard three Hail Marys as he walked the aisles and caught several nuns hurrying out of his path.
Alain tossed Cristoph a bottle of Fanta. “Heads up.”
Cristoph fumbled but caught the cold soda and managed not to slice himself with his hatchet either. He stared, first at the bottle, then at Alain. “Aren’t I supposed to be suffering on bread and water alone?”
“That’s the Navy. Here, you’re supposed to meditate on your failings before God in fast before you accept the Eucharist in contrition. Take in the Lord as you admit your sins, and your transgressions will be forgiven.”
Cristoph stared.
Alain unscrewed the top of his own soda. He grinned as he held up his soda in a salute. “Breaking down old uniforms is hard work. I know.”
A flicker of interest sparked in Cristoph’s eyes.
“I’ve been in your shoes. Exactly where you are standing, in fact.” Alain sighed, shaking his head, smiling despite himself. “Inside these walls, the Vatican is a world removed from everywhere else. The air is different. Even time moves slower. But just over the gate… Rome.” He winked.
“‘There’s sin in Rome’,” Cristoph droned, repeating an old line given to the recruits from the Swiss Guard chaplains through the years. “‘Enough to bury your soul.’”
“Chaplain Weimers really likes that line. I’ve heard it for thirteen years.”
“What did you do?”
“If I share, am I going to be corrupting you further? I should be shepherding you to better choices. Not guiding you to more sin.” Alain winked, but the words stung his soul.
Cristoph rolled his eyes. He hefted the hatchet into the wood and grabbed his soda, sliding down the block until he was sitting on the floor. “Teach me the good ways.”
Alain laughed. He leaned back, propping up on his palms on the cool stone floor. “There was a good wine bar in the Campo Dei Fiori, a decade ago. Lunch spot and café by day…” Alain shrugged. “Thrilling place after the sun goes down. I may have enjoyed myself there a night or two.” He grinned, even as the old pain sliced through him, right up his gut.
Memories assailed him. Him and his lover, sneaking out of the Holy See to blow off steam, to shake off the darkness and try to recapture a bit of normalcy. Lotario helped them, driving them to the Campo and dropping them off, winking at them both to have fun and admonishing them that, if they were going to sin, to sin boldly, to sin well. His lover had always loved Lotario’s quirks, his sarcasm. Back then, Lotario hadn’t been quite so bitter. Quite so haunted.
They’d always staggered their return to the Vatican to try to avoid being caught together. One night, his lover had returned first and was waiting at the barracks’ door for Alain to sneak back over the border, creep back into their shared quarters. He could practically feel his lover’s body beneath him, taste him on his lips. He’d been clumsy. He hadn’t been cautious.
The guards had caught him, and he’d been marched to the major’s office, Best’s office, then. Thirty days of punishment detail fell around his shoulders.
His lover had sneaked in to see him every day, bringing sodas and company and his smiles, his laughs. His share of the punishment, lightening the load. They had been together in everything, had thought they’d be together for all time.
That old pain was dulled, now. Dead, Alain whispered in his mind. He’s dead. Everything we had. It’s dead. Every time he repeated the truth, the rip in his soul seemed to wither, the tears frayed almost to the point where the cut was no longer distinguishable. It was just a wind-worn flap of decay and ruin inside of him, roughened edges where something had once been, but was no more.
“We were specifically told not to go to the Campo.” Cristoph chugged his Fanta and grinned. “Very specifically.”
Alain shrugged, snapping back to the present as he smoothed his trousers, the wrinkles formed from his long days and nights. “I’m certain that has nothing at all to do with me.”
Was this history repeating itself? Was he playing the part of the friend—the lover—in coming to ease the burden? No. Cristoph was too young. He was too angry. There was too much fight in him, and he’d break Alain, split him in two, if they ever crossed that line.
He was just too broken. He’d broken twelve years before.
Cristoph was a force Alain couldn’t fight.
He couldn’t fight the living.
Besides, he was Cristoph’s mentor. He was just trying to show him some grace. Some compassion in a world that seemed to have desiccated and fractured under the weight of history and time.
“Tell me about our football team. I hear we’re somewhat decent.”
“The Vatican fire brigade has won the Vatican championships for four years in a row.” Cristoph capped his soda and stood, grabbing the axe before he went back to hacking away at the uniforms. “We’re the Vatican’s army. We’re soldiers. That’s an embarrassment.”
Alain smothered his smile. The Vatican championship was the ragtag competition between the various football teams in the Eternal City. Firefighters, gendarmes, Swiss Guards, seminarians, a few teams made up of the younger members of brothers from the dozens of religious orders scattered throughout the Vatican. The World Cup, it was not. Skinny priests’ legs, blindingly white from never having seen the sun beneath a cassock or a suit, raced pell-mell across a pitch tucked into the Vatican Gardens beneath the topiaries and the flowers tenderly arranged into the papal coat of arms beyond the pope’s private vegetable garden.
That the pope’s soldiers, the Vatican’s military might, weren’t number one was an embarrassment. The firefighters were burly Italians, generations of Romans whose fathers had been Vatican firefighters, and whose fathers before them were as well. A few Greeks were thrown in, too, Eastern Catholics, strong as bulls, built for barreling through the opposing team.
Shame rang like a bell in the Swiss Guard barracks and the canteen whenever football was brought up.
“Tell me. Who is playing this year?”
“Zeigler and Muller are the strikers.”
“Friends?”
Cristoph sent him a steely-eyed glare.
“They could be friends.”
Cristoph snorted.
“Where have they put you?”
“On the bench. I’m on punishment. I’m not allowed to play.”
“Do they have any idea how good you actually are?”
“How do you know how I play?”
Alain demurred. He pursed his lips, smoothing out another wrinkle from his trousers over his knee. His suit was starting to wear thin. He’d need a new one. “I can tell.” His eyes flicked up. Met Cristoph’s.
Corded muscles clung to Cristoph’s frame, long, lean lines of legs and arms, the hint of abs when his white undershirt rode up. A body carved in the gym, yes, but honed to perfection through physical action. Running. Fighting. Football. Fucking, even. How would Cristoph look, spread out on his sheets—
Alain swallowed. “I looked up your military record in Switzerland. You formed a pickup league in your spare time on your humanitarian deployment in Africa. There were commendations in your file. Community outreach. Civil service. Building a semblance of calm in the height of the crisis.”
Cristoph flinched and turned away. He hammered at the old
uniforms again, shredding them to pieces with brute force instead of slicing them.
Alain stared. “The football? Or Africa?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it.”
Alain stared at the stones on the far wall. “Captain Ewe is the captain of the team, yes?”
Cristoph grunted again. His axe slammed into the wooden block, shredding a uniform to ribbons, red, yellow, and blue fabric tumbling to the dust around his feet. He was ruining the perfect squares he was supposed to make. Luca would be furious.
“You’ll get your chance to play at the next practice. Show them who you really are.” Alain cocked his head. There was something else, an extra line of tension between Cristoph’s shoulder blades. “Something on your mind?”
Whack. The blade slammed into the block. Cristoph ripped a red strip of fabric from the edge of his axe. “What you said. About people like us, here. How they deal with it.”
Alain swallowed.
“One of my roommates says he gets five hundred euros to strip naked in front of a bunch of priests. Some of them jack off. Others just look.”
Closing his eyes, Alain hung his head between his shoulders. His hands gripped each other, knuckles going white. “I’ve heard of things like that happening. Some of the guards earn money on the side.”
A burst of air blustered out of Cristoph. “Am I in here because I’m gay? Or because I was too public with it?”
“You’re in here—” Alain jerked his chin to the closet, the axe, the pile of old uniforms. “—because you pissed off Luca. You flouted the rules to his face.”
“So I should hide? Like everyone else seems to?” Cristoph screwed up his face, shaking his head.
Alain tried to smile. “This is the Vatican, Cristoph. Secrets are our bones, our blood. Our currency.”
Cristoph frowned.
“Luca… is not against you for that,” he said carefully. “This place, it does strange things to your mind. Your soul. The only advice I can give you, Cristoph, is to be happy with yourself when you’re alone. It’s what everyone has to ask themselves, square themselves with. When you’re in the dark, can you stand to be yourself?” Alain’s heart, his soul, screamed at him, calling him a liar in thirteen languages, modern to ancient, even runic incantations blazing in his mind. Take your own advice.
Maybe a priest would have phrased it differently, would have asked Cristoph to consider his soul, who he wanted to be before God. But Alain couldn’t go there.
Cristoph paused. His arm, mid-swing, sagged, and the axe blade embedded in the edge of the chopping block. He exhaled, his shoulders slumping, his fingers rolling over the threads ripped free from the shredded uniforms. “Is it worth it? Staying on? Keep going?”
Alain looked down. He scraped his sole against the dust-covered ground. They were in a corner of the barracks untouched by time, save for the droning lightbulbs piped in during World War II. Other than that light, they could be anywhere, any point in the past from 1506 to now. History stretched forward and backward, waves of time riding up around Alain, cresting higher and higher on Cristoph’s barely uttered words.
Is it worth it?
Nights spent wading through blood, hip deep in it, the stain impossible to erase. Nights facing down dark creatures, ghouls and wraiths and revenants, dead things that didn’t stay dead. That came back from beyond, that crawled out of nightmares. Creatures of darkness that stained his soul with doubt.
Nights alone, standing on the edge of nothingness and forever, like a gargoyle perched on the very edge of a cathedral. No, clinging to the tiniest edge. But did he want to let go, or did he want to hang on?
He was so achingly lonely, deep down in the marrow of his bones.
Is it worth it?
He’d been Cristoph, once. On the cusp of being a man, on the cusp of the rest of his life, certain that an assignment in the Vatican, in the heart of Rome, was the grand adventure he’d been waiting his whole life for.
He would have been a good halberdier. He would have served with distinction, moved up the ranks. He would have made major, he knew it. All he wanted was to serve, to do the right thing.
If only everything had been different.
Is it worth it?
What would he have become had he turned his back on it all? If he had he left the morning after his world had ended, the morning after everything had shattered and he’d been drenched in every drop of blood that had once pumped through his lover’s veins? After he’d held his dead love in his arms and watched the life fade from his eyes? He’d have gone back to Switzerland a disgrace, a failure from the Swiss Guard. Sworn to secrecy by the Holy Father himself about his true role, giving up would have meant being quietly excommunicated as well. He’d have been no more than a shade, a shadow like the ones he hunted.
Would he have even lived through the rest of the year? Without Lotario, without their duties. Would he have held on to life at all?
But what life was he living now?
Is it worth it?
The weight of a blade falling on his shoulders. An invocation in Latin. A sacrament. A blessing… and a curse. His memories intruded into the present, warm and full of grace. He’d only wanted to serve, always and only to serve. To save. To do the right thing.
He’d been able to save everyone except the one who had mattered the most.
Alain licked his lips. Dust from centuries past ground over his skin. “It is worth it. Don’t turn your back. Don’t welcome the darkness into your life, Cristoph.” He cleared his throat. “You can have friends here. You can make a life. It’s all kinds of topsy-turvy inside these walls, and sometimes nothing makes sense. Sometimes you tie yourself in knots, just to jump through hoops for everyone else. But there is good here, along with the human.” And, sometimes, the demonic. He shoved the thought away. “The Vatican is a very human place, subject to all the falls and foibles of man. If you wanted something more heavenly…”
Cristoph shook his head.
“It’s up to you. This place won’t save you from whatever you’re running from. But you might be able to save yourself, if you give yourself a chance.”
Cristoph peered at him from under his eyelashes, across the shadows. Hesitation shimmered the air around him, questions thrumming the silence. What had he gotten himself into?
Alain could see, as if he’d laid out a deck of cards, how Cristoph’s life had unfolded. Always being slightly at odds from the world, never quite fitting in. Trying to hide all the wrong parts of himself. Trying to make an impact, make a difference, and do something good. Trying to apologize for his existence through the brashness of his fists, the boldness of his attitude. Fuck the world, and everyone in it, his spread would say. Crossed with, I’m so alone. I don’t know what to do.
What would Alain’s say if he read his own cards? Would they look the same as Cristoph’s? Aching loneliness? Heartbreak at the center of his soul? His would undoubtedly reveal the hermit’s cross, the recluse’s turn away from the world. Let the world pass me by. Let me turn into a stone gargoyle as the years roll on and on.
What did Commandant Best see in putting them together? What in all of the earth, all of the heavenly glories, did he possibly see?
They were two broken men, outcasts from the world, from the Vatican, even. If Cristoph was looking to him for advice, he was asking the wrong man about what choices to make for a good life.
How had Cristoph ended up in the Vatican? From the bloody streets of West Africa and his humanitarian deployment during the Ebola outbreak to the Eternal City? Who had put the thought in his head? Why the Swiss Guards? What was he searching for here? Why not London, or Paris, or New York? Why had he thought he’d find his answers here?
“Do you play?” Cristoph finally asked, breaking the silence. His hatchet slammed down on the block, shredding red, blue, and yellow fabric again. “Football?”
“Not for many years.”
“Do you ever watch the games here?”
“I haven’t
. I’ve been busy. There’s always something going on,” Alain said, stretching, trying to work out the kinks in his back, his neck. He saw Cristoph, saw his expression shutter, close down, the heavy frown curl back over his forehead. “When you play,” he said softly. “I’ll come.”
Finally, Cristoph smiled.
* * *
Fifteen days into Cristoph’s punishment detail. Alain sipped his espresso and checked his morning emails—all quiet on the gendarmerie front, notices from Luca about maintaining decorum at all times; ‘A Swiss Guard is a Swiss Guard whether on or off duty,’ yes, thank you Luca, and two dispatches from overseas. A revenant rising in Brazil, and a plague of hungry ghosts in Egypt.
And one from Captain Ewe.
Sergeant –
Halberdier Hasse displayed exceptional skills at last night’s practice. You’re right – he is meant to play football! Thank you for sending him to the team! We’re looking forward to trouncing those fire jockeys this year, and with Halberdier Hasse, we have a good chance.
God Bless +
CAPT Ewe
Alain smiled.
That afternoon, after checking with Lotario and Angelo on an attack in the Campo the night before—human, not supernatural. The victim was sky-high on something, but that was for the carabinieri to figure out—Alain headed for Cristoph’s shift at the punishment closet. He had two bottles of Fanta with him, and there was a spring in his step.
Cristoph was a chatterbox, almost vibrating with his excitement. He was like a weed given sunlight and fresh air, a chance to grow. Alain tossed him his Fanta and listened, smiling at all the right places.
He stared at the curve of Cristoph’s grin, watched his lips forms words that Alain longed to taste.
“What about you?” Cristoph finally asked, throwing his gaze to Alain. “What have you been doing while I was schooling these priests on how to kick a ball?”
“None of the guards are priests,” Alain corrected. Cristoph shrugged, too giddy and goofy to care. “And I’ve been… busy,” he finished lamely.