The wick in his candle had inched down to its nub, and the wax puddled in his brass saucer. He carried it gingerly up the stairs so it would last through the darkness, but it guttered at the top step. Benedictus was gone, and the nave was a void. He knocked into a table and banged his knee, that pucker in the knee to which banging causes a debilitating shock, the funny bone of the leg. He staggered. There was an echoing flutter in the back of the church, and Felix turned to catch a shadow moving. Another truant child snuck in, perhaps, or a woman who’d lost her means. Felix didn’t hear the creak of the big wooden door; the shadow must have been a bat, or a fancy, or a ghost.
This church was a cake of corpses, the current stone sanctuary built where a clumsy brick one once was, which in turn stole the site from a Mithraic temple, which claimed the sanctity of the original dirt because some lustful god once tricked a virgin here, one or both in the shape of a heron, or was it a stoat. So while elsewhere in this stackable city people came and went, moving unpredictably through homes and shops and streets, here at Santa Prisca they appeared with the bells, confessing their most perverse sins while their dead piled up, knowing just where to find them.
Once Brother Lucius claimed a spirit kept him up at night sucking his toes, and swore this was because his cell was above the crypt. Father Peter told him all the cells were above the crypt, and any other room he entered in this city was above some other crypt, and no other monk had complained of wet toes.
“It’s not a sucking so much,” Lucius had said, now alert to the eroticism, “but a licking, as of a friendly dog.”
“Do you giggle?” Father asked.
“I am in too much fear.”
With a prickle on his neck, Felix returned to the cloisters with his saucer of wax. This time of year, his cell’s small window didn’t afford enough light to cut the room’s chill. Stone walls lead to stone bones, that’s what his father said, who built his first house from wood and two years later shook his head as he watched it burn. Cursed family; Felix had brought them no ease. Even up on the bed and wrapped in wool, Felix believed the pine legs soaked up the cold from the floor and conducted it to his aging joints. It was a reminder. He crawled back down and knelt on a cushion his sister had made and began his count of sins. First always was his secret, which he never named but passed over with an encompassing I am sorry for myself, and then the daily litany of slights, cowardice, impure thoughts, haste. He would repeat all these to a confessor, but forgiveness is a private creature, born at home.
Once the sins were named, the gratitudes began, and this was almost his happiest time of day, to think back. Brother Vitalis losing a tooth in his soup; the goose that landed in the courtyard and pattered around in circles until someone realized it couldn’t fly out, and Brother Leo wrapping it in his pudgy arms and carrying it outside, tossing it in the air like a gift back to God; the mysterious settling of fluids that led dead Brother Bernardo’s pinky finger to suddenly crook, making Felix feel as if he were being summoned, or offered a private promise; the salt on the bread at lunch, rougher ground than usual, its sharp edges jolting his tongue.
The final formal prayers were accompanied by Felix’s ragged whip, a careful homemade thing that beat the time on his back, the knots serving as emphasis, as Amen. He was careful not to treasure this, not to harbor pride for his bloody devotion, but merely to keep time, to remind himself with a red drumbeat that his body was not his own, and to offer its impermanence with humility to his Lord. The only lasting thing about Felix was his soul, and this no one on this earth could see or judge. Amen.
The brothers were in a flurry: the collection box had been stolen. The abbot asked each monk to consider which of the parishioners from the previous day might be called squirrelly.
“There was the one who was gnawing on a chicken bone,” Lucius said.
“I saw that,” said Marco, “and I had another ask me to pray for his departed wife, and when I asked when she’d deceased, he said tomorrow.”
“What about the child hiding under the font who wasn’t a child at all but a very small man?”
“I gave him a roll of bread,” said the youngest brother, Mino. “He looked hungry.”
“If only we’d taken the chicken from the first and given it to the small one.”
Father bowed his head in defeat. He must have been a poor kind of noble to have wound up at Santa Prisca.
“I saw a shadow,” Felix said. “It was after I’d come up from the crypt, just before last prayer. It moved along the back wall, and I thought it was a ghost.”
“We’ve gone over this,” Father said.
“If it wasn’t a ghost, it was either a very large bat or a medium-sized man.”
“Either of which could’ve carried off the box,” added Marco.
“But it didn’t have a handle for a bat to grip with its claws.”
“I imagine it would wrap its wings around the box and then scuttle off on foot.”
“Have you ever seen a walking bat?”
“Brothers,” Father said. His upper lip carried a habitual twist, as if he were bitter, or trying not to sneeze. No one minded that the abbot was cold and told no jokes and sometimes had noisy visitors at night who could not have been monks because they were women. An abbot was like a statue with a pointing finger: there to remind you of duty, not to be judged by human laws. “Brothers, the box is lost. Dominic, you have permission to find us another. I would request you all take turns watching the new box when it has been installed.”
“Ought we to lock it to its post?”
“There’s an idea!”
“Then someone would take the post.”
“And we’d be out a post.”
“A new post costs less than a new collection box.”
“And Brothers,” Father said. “Try to remember the value of silence.”
Felix carried the slops out to the chickens, who didn’t understand the morning’s delay. The day was foggy and cool, and the farm of his childhood seemed painfully far. A rusty-crowned chicken chuckled as he bent to offer a crust. You couldn’t pet a chicken the way you could a cat. Oh, that soft spot at the base of old Johanna’s ears, all silk, undisturbed by the fleas that burrowed in the fur beneath her chin or between her shoulder blades or in the open plain of her lower belly. He brushed the chicken’s tail feathers with the back of his hand; the sensation wasn’t the same. If he’d been a farmer, he could’ve kept all the cats—traveled the country looking for crones dangling sacks off bridges and saved the writhing kittens within—but he couldn’t be a farmer.
The day he left, his sister had handed him a wrapped cheese and said something to the effect of “We’ll always love you,” or “Behave,” or “I’ll love you if you behave”—he wished he could remember the wording—and it wasn’t until the donkey cart had rounded the bend, the curve of the road obliterating the village of Fara in Sabina, that he thought of how he should’ve answered, but then to leap off the back of the cart and go dashing home, hay flying from his bottom, seemed too absurd, even for him. So he’d sat placidly for most of the day as they tumbled down the evenly terraced Lazian hills, past women in smocks leaning on fences, through loose herds of goats that barked at the driver’s whip. Felix had left the figs in the bucket by the back stoop. There were at least four people he hadn’t bid farewell to. He wanted to learn to draw, but never had. Nor had he fashioned for his parents any sincere apology, and now, barring Methuselah, they were surely dead. He could’ve jumped from the cart in a tumble of courage—at this moment, or at that moment, or, wait for it, this moment—but he sat there, watching the road pass under the back wheels until he became queasy and turned around. The driver, son of some other language, never spoke.
Rome appeared on the horizon like a vast looted quarry—the city of devils, of scam, of holy Peter the fisherman. Behind one of those hills was the basilical bulk of St. John Lateran, golden. Why wasn’t he bound there? [Because you were born with the twin vices of poverty and unfortunat
e love. The mother church is not for you, though its sanctified ground was once divoted by pagan hooves; the emperor’s mounted guard had their barracks here. And then your Jewish carpenter spread his gospel and they built their admiration for him obscenely high, the faith too becoming obscene, until this jeweled palace had to shelter Jews because those Christians called Nazis got blood behind their eyes. You’ll never step foot inside. Next year an earthquake will shatter it. In 1,500 years, its columns will be rolling underwater. But I know of ill-fated love, young Felix facsimile. I too had a boy scorn me, spurn me, send me to hell.] The cart left him at the Porta Flaminia and he picked his way through streets that twisted left when he thought they were going right and down alleys that ended in a wall of blue flowers. He pushed at them with both hands, searching for the door, touching only vines.
A cobbler was sitting outside his shop with a boot and a last and a mug of beer. Felix only stopped because he mistook the last for a real human foot.
“Don’t like you how one makes it?”
Felix squinted. He’d met Romans he could mostly understand, but this man came from somewhere south, where the garble only sounded halfway to his own tongue. “I’m looking for the church of Santa Prisca?”
“South keeping,” the cobbler said. “Hill the Aventinus.”
The summer was hotter here without nature’s interference—no drooping branches or clouds of gnats or lone hawk eclipsing the sun in its lazy swoop. Just buildings with angles and more people than he’d ever seen. He was conscious of his clothes, mother-made from wool so rough it seemed to have part of the sheep still in it. A young man passed on the street, shielding his eyes with his hand, and Felix imagined he was looking into a mirror of himself, his Roman self: handsomer, with proper garb, with a stride that disregarded the pace of others, with a hand blocking the sun in a way that said, I have no need of trees, or your poor hawk. I am my own engine.
“You monksing?” The cobbler’s hand licked in and out of the leather boot like a snake. “Close door, talk all the God?” He gestured toward the sky. What an expressive hand; now it looked like he was playing an upside-down lute.
“My father sent me,” Felix said, though it was more accurately his mother, or rather it was a family decision that arose from a lengthy private confabulation that was eventually reported back to him by his sister. “I’ve no dowry, though, so they might not have me.”
“Money in the Christians.” The cobbler shook his head. “A story telling themselves, all’s that. A story just. My prayers?”
Felix stayed out of politeness, not because he was afraid of the monastery.
The cobbler put his left hand, his free hand, up to touch his eye, then slowly moved it to his heart, then dropped it to his stomach, and finally used it to pat his groin. He smiled at Felix.
“You mustn’t forget also to pray for others.”
“No needing comes when death.” And having lost the smile, he turned his attention back to the shoe, which he slipped onto the last and pinched around the edges, his brown fingers looking little different from the hide.
Felix passed the bricks and stone alike with equal awe, the triumph of the Forum in its exhausted collapse as impressive as the crowded apartments, dingy and rich with foreign smells: African spice and fruits he’d never seen. A garden appeared through the rungs of a gate like a prize, and the greenery struck him, only gone from his home a day, as exotic. The trees were not lush but spare—faded pines, dusty and bunched at the top—and the river was not blue but brownish green, the color water should be at its very bottom. The Circus Maximus was less a field than an abandoned cemetery of broken benches, pierced by obelisks. It was as if the countryside had been fed poison. Climbing the final hill brought him to fresher air, and when he saw the vine galloping out of the cracked cloisters abutting the church—his church—he took it as a white flag from God. He was nineteen years old and believed his spirit was being pulled on a lead by a benevolent hand, saved from his worse self.
On the Sunday of Andrew’s feast day, Felix fell asleep at his post in the crypt, his stomach packed with two helpings of stew and a wing of quail. Naps were an increasing pleasure, a gracious preview of obsolescence. He feared his adoration for the buttery bird had eclipsed St. Andrew; he really should give up fish and fowl, like Jerome. So when he woke to a stick poking him in the armpit, his brain translated it to a roasting spit, himself the sacrificial bird, and apologies came bubbling up: to God, to the fauna of the earth, to his fellow brothers whom he allowed to accompany him to this culinary damnation.
“Pardon, pardon,” he cried before his eyes were open, and the boy named Mino cried “Pardon!” and took two hopping steps back with his stick in hand, the other hand protecting his mouth from the stench.
Felix clutched his ribs. “What’s this?”
“I didn’t know!”
“Are you attacking me?”
The boy was twisting his body in such contortions Felix assumed he needed to urinate.
“The outhouse?” he said.
“It’s the bodies!”
“You wanted to see?” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “It’s beautiful, really. Imagine God’s fingers working through the flesh, pulling it back in pieces to his own kingdom.”
“No, it’s them keeps me out,” Mino said. “There’s a man above.”
Felix paused to consider the religious reference.
“I found a stick. For to get you. I can’t wake the Father, and I heard him walking and I was afeared for the box, for it’d be my neck if it were gone, but you’re here with the bodies and I knew no other way, given you were snoozing. I’d’ve shouted, but he’d’ve heard me and taken the box and scrammed. Holy Christ, the smell. Please come, or it’ll be my neck.”
Felix pulled at his cheeks, and as they climbed to the nave he took the stick from Mino so the boy wouldn’t trip on it with his clumsy growing limbs. Above, the church was empty, silent. A quick whir interrupted—“There!” Mino shrieked—but it was a small, rafter-high noise; a legitimate bat, or a mouse with wings.
He confirmed the presence of the collection box while Mino loitered in the side chapels. It was eerie how the windows of the church, alabaster and glass stained with random color, filtered light through their honeycombs even in the black hours. Each speckled mote he passed through had come direct from a star. He was waving his hand through one of those faint reflections, like an ember in the eye, when Mino called out again.
“Are all the relic boxes meant to be full up?”
Each chapel’s reliquary had some shard of a saint—a half inch of leg bone, or a gnawed fingernail, or a lock of hair that had been pin-straight until the saint’s death, when it curled like the hair of our Lord—and though the bits’ origins were murky, Felix acknowledged there were many saints, and each saint could be broken down into many parts, and he himself had witnessed and mourned the disregard for deceased mortal flesh.
Mino was standing next to a gold-rimmed terrarium in which a hump of red velvet couched nothing at all.
“I don’t remember which it was,” he said. “Do you think there really was a man here? Or did the Father take it out for polishing?”
Did bones need polishing? [You’d be surprised by what a good spit and rub can do.]
“How certain are you it was a man?”
“You think it could’ve been a girl?”
“As opposed to your imagination.”
“I haven’t got an imagination.”
Felix grasped the air with empty hands and turned back to bed. “Where did you come from?”
“Should I not have fetched you?”
“Tell the Father in the morning, when all good men are awake.”
“Do you remember what it was?”
The clouds must have crept over the city, carrying snow in their pouches; the colored windows were now dark, starless. The door out to the cloisters sat on squeaking hinges, and not for the first time Felix was glad the other inhabitants of his home were
mostly old, mostly hard of hearing, and mostly unconcerned with the supernatural.
“Probably a finger,” he said. “Go to sleep.”
He tossed Mino’s stick in the cloisters’ hibernating rose beds. His candle he’d left burning below, but it would gutter soon, and Bernardo would be glad for the extra few minutes of flame. Light was a conduit for the spirit world, an incarnation of the dead’s breath and thought. Was this too romantic a notion? [If romance is the same as fancy, which is to say philosophy, which is to say idealism, it’ll doom you every time. Humans aren’t built to hold anything more precious than dirt and shit. No need for the whip tonight.] His bed soon became warm, and when he remembered the nightly penance he’d failed to perform, he didn’t leap out onto the stone floor but stayed perfectly still and said in a whisper in his head: I’m already asleep. I would, but I’m already asleep. Mino was a trouble, but a sweet one, a son. His bright cheeks like Tomaso’s, if Tomaso had never aged and had left his wife and come from the fields to the city’s chaos to remind his former friend of the intimacy of joy. Oh, Christ, don’t you listen to this twaddle. He wondered what the thief would come for next, or if he’d already run off with Felix’s discipline.
The Father confirmed it was the finger of her High Holiness Saint Ethelberta of the unstained robes, who had preached to the barbarians, been assaulted by a troop of soldiers, and eventually perished on a mountaintop when she refused to touch any food that was once touched by men. Two of the brothers wept at the discovery of this loss and could not finish their breakfast. Felix’s own morning continued on its regular path—chickens, washing, weeding, corpses. Brother Sixtus had been given the task of copying out a psalter, and after lunch, Felix asked permission to stand behind his desk and watch him at work.
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