He’d only picked up a basic literacy since coming to Santa Prisca, and was still in awe of the cleverer monks. Sixtus’s hand seemed a machine, fingers and quill one single-jointed organism. His eyesight had gotten so poor he had to hunch over the paper: hand moving, rounded pellets of letters emerging on the parchment, the word of God duplicating itself. Their brotherhood hadn’t been engaged in much copying work, but Father Peter said they needed to modernize (or was it monetize), and there was a small but reliable class of laypeople who’d pay generously to have their own prayer books. Sixtus was told to start with the psalter and if things went well, they could one day graduate to Bibles. But Felix wasn’t certain Sixtus would complete the psalter before his knuckles gave out. First the black ink, laborious and error-free, then the gold, then the red and green and only-for-the-rich blue.
He rested his bottom on the stool set there for Sixtus’s apprentice, who had never materialized. The literate novitiates never seemed to pick this monastery for their indenture. It wouldn’t be long before the cook took the stool back.
“How much do you mind the finger?”
“Mmm,” the scribe said, carving out the scoop of a T like he was an ancient with nothing but clay and stick. His table was messy with Armenian bole and fish glue and honey, a cup of eggs, a lion’s tooth strapped to a handle for burnishing, camphor and cloves to keep the color bright. Cinnabar, ochre, white lead.
“Are you much for relics?”
“I had an hour shift after terce, but no one comes then but the biddies in black. Where are their husbands? Where’s their income?” Sixtus couldn’t look up or he’d lose track of the line.
“You think it’d catch a fair price?”
“Find a church in Rome without a chunk of Ethelberta.”
“A private devotional, then? But no man that devout would stoop to stealing.”
“Inside job? Sorcerer? You’re thinking too hard.”
“What, someone collects all the parts and builds a whole holy skeleton?”
“The skulls are the hardest to come by, of course. It’d have to be a real low-level saint. Oh, blast it.” Sixtus grabbed a damp rag and blotted at the spill on the page’s corner.
“You can turn that into one of our bats.”
“They’ll wonder why he has such a great black belly.” He blew on the drying spot. “Haven’t you better work than sleuthing?”
“Keep an eye on the boy Mino, would you? He’s a fiddly little rabbit, and I can’t tell if he has any friends.” Felix slid his hands into opposite sleeves and scratched at his elbows, which were dry from the cold. “We’re such a bunch of old fools here.”
“No one’s lonely who has Jesus in his heart.” Sixtus stuck his pen into the corner of his smile.
“That’s the way.” He slid off the stool. “Next time you’ll teach me to write my letters, yes?”
“F for Felix, C for Christ, a heart around them. Amor sempiternus.”
“You don’t watch out, it’ll be your knees stolen next.”
He was sixty years old. The routine of the church had smoothed away most of his memories’ terrain. His parents had become featureless, though sometimes a smell of burnt rosemary brought their voices back to him, and though he knew his sister had been his nearest friend, he couldn’t name what pastimes had led to their shared hilarity. But having a young boy in the monastery again brought color to some of the cobwebs—Felix too had once possessed such thrumming limbs—and a glance or graze was enough to cast him back to an age when he’d still been blind to God. That afternoon at sext, Mino had run in late, pivoted on his back foot like a dancer. Flights of Tomaso had nearly dizzied Felix, causing him to miss a versicle’s response. Mino was just a boy, daft and winning; what about Tomaso had so embedded him? Whence came his own monstrous yearn? [To yearn is not a monstrance. It’s the brand God seared you with on your expulsion—it means, paradoxically, you’re whole. Compare our hearts to His, the omniscient, whose puny half-baked love is conditional. (He’ll say it isn’t, but has He forgiven me?) Don’t sit on your memories like eggs, but don’t let them scramble either. I’ve seen who now shares Tomaso’s bed, and there’s no need for you to know. There’s my finest torture.]
Scenes came at him fast when he took up his half whip, on those nights when the ice in his joints wasn’t punishment enough. He spurred himself on by counting sins; recently they’d been the most distant kind, ones long since forgiven. But he could not clear them. Here, as he beat his back, was the afternoon in Fara in Sabina when his sister’s friend Donella reached to kiss him.
He was two years older, enough to allure, and when he walked past the gathered girls at their spinning they burst out in giggles like starlings from a tree. He took care with his appearance, but only because adolescence was intent on wrecking it. (He would later learn how much richer was a body abandoned to itself.) In his war against pimples, he washed his face daily in the cold stream; he rubbed herbs beneath his armpits; he twisted the ends of his dark locks with olive oil so they’d retain their shape and lie neatly against his head. He did nothing about his feet, which were immune to myrtle or mint. Knobbly they were, tufted with black hair and ridged with tendons, the bottoms scaly and dark. But his sister’s friends never saw his feet.
Donella stayed over when spring winds or nightfall kept her from riding the donkey back to her father’s farm; she could be finicky about ideal travel conditions. She and Felix’s sister would share a stool at the supper table, share a bowl, take turns mopping up the beans with their bread, and whisper obscene secrets until his father coughed loud enough to frighten them. On their shared mattress at night, they’d play a game where one would scoop a number of pebbles from a jar and the other would examine their shape and color and number to determine her friend’s future. Dark stones meant stormy times ahead; little ones could be counted as babies. The pointier the largest rock, the more hateful your husband would be. They’d refill the jar frequently so the fortunes were never the same.
Once during this insufferable game, Felix left the sleeping room to ask his father if there were more chores to be done, and being told to go back to bed—no one listened to the subtext of children—he instead slipped into the night and was happily contemplating his solitude beneath an alder when he heard the telltale prancing steps. He hoped it was dark enough for his seated form to resemble a shrub.
“Felix?”
He was quiet.
“Felix, it’s dark!”
These were the things girls said.
“Are there snakes?”
He raised a reluctant arm and waved at Donella. She yipped.
“I hate playing those games,” she said, curling herself so close beside him their folded knees touched. “I’d much rather be in nature, doing things. Like this.”
“I’m not doing anything, particularly.”
“Have you got a girl?”
“I’m looking for cows. There’s a sick one needs to be brought in.”
“Are you already promised, then?” She brought a hand up to his face—or rather to his nose, which she must have hoped was his cheek—and caressed it abruptly. And then she drew herself closer, and her breath was fogging in his face.
“No, that’s—” he said, and he felt a soggy pair of lips fumbling at his chin, and he didn’t care what his sister would say, no one could expect him to put up with such a clumsy assault. Felix raised his arms in defense and retracted his head to ward off Donella’s ardent forays. When she understood her prey was not becoming any less unenthusiastic, she paused.
“You think I’m ugly.”
“Oh, no,” he said.
He heard her blinking eyes grow wet. She pulled her knees up again and wrapped her arms around them, becoming a hedgehog. He patted her wrist.
He couldn’t tell her she was beautiful, because he didn’t find her so; he couldn’t tell her she was too young, because two of his sister’s friends were already betrothed. Nor could he just bear his bad luck and kiss her, which
he should have done. Felix had inklings already that love was impossible to untangle from wrongdoing. The safest thing, probably, would’ve been to tell Donella she should wait to fall in love until she felt no anguish in her heart, for that would be a sign of the right time. And this would’ve puzzled her for so long she would’ve joined a convent, because no moment of earliest affection or longing or lust was anguish-free. But he’d been silent instead; he’d caged her out with his arms.
Now the whip could exact the penalty. Donella’s tears pattered as he beat his back, once, twice, thrice—again and again until her face was dry.
By the Temple of Hercules Victor on Wednesday mornings a small market sprang up, some vegetables and wool but also religious artifacts and packets of herbs sewn with spells guaranteed to ease heartache, schizophrenia, and mystification. Housewives and country travelers browsed the stalls, hiding their sense of wonder behind a carefully manufactured cynicism. You’re asking five pennies for that artichoke? Is it made of rubies? A stout black pig with whiskers was usually tied to a column of the mushroom-shaped temple, and whoever made an offer for it was refused. On this brisk morning the crypt-like stench of the river was subdued—there’d been no recent rains to stir it up, no humidity to lure out its flavors of decay—and the stalls smelled only of manure and lime wash. If Felix slipped out of the haggling crowd and began a slow hike north, back up the low hills and past the roaming goats to Fara in Sabina, Farfa Abbey in the distance still sparking thoughts of chastity in every local boy and girl, no one would come chasing him. He’d simply take up the plow and keep his eyes focused on the sprouts in the rows and swear to never again look at another creature with love.
But his task was to sniff around for bones on sale.
“How will I recognize Ethelberta?” he’d asked the abbot.
“You’re our expert on the dead.”
The men who sold relics looked particularly shifty to him, their beards somehow scragglier than their comrades’. He wasn’t allowed to touch the wooden boxes they kept the parts in, but he could point and they’d lift and reveal.
“Mmm,” he said, contemplating a scrap of scalp with a few strands of hair attached. It would raise an alarm if he too obviously knew what he was looking for. “Perhaps.”
There were bones, and bones claiming to be fingers, and fingers swearing to be from ladies, but none quite looked like Ethelberta’s; even the laziest thief would know to sell his contraband farther from its source than the Temple of Hercules.
“I can get you something grander, Brother,” a vendor said. “My cousin’s now in Jerusalem.”
“I’m not looking for a Muslim trinket.”
“Oh, but they don’t care for our saints and are happy to pass along what they find. Students of history, they are. You want a head?”
“Our budget is small, I’m afraid. They call us the church of knuckles.”
“Ah, well, I should pay my respects,” the vendor said, nodding as one poor man to another.
Another relic stall trafficked also in painted icons and fishermen’s flies. Felix looked from a crude image of John the Baptist on wood to an elaborate ruffle of feathers and red wool. The merchant was completing a trade but beckoned Felix with a smile.
“A religious man,” he said when his previous customer had left with a one-eyed portrait of Mary. His black-and-gray hair swooped from beneath his hat.
Felix’s fingers were already nestled in one of the fancy flies.
“You’re not for graven images, understood.” The man had an accent that turned his Rs gentle and slurry. A white egret feather spronged out of his hat, creating a likeness between him and his wares. “You fish too?”
Felix should’ve removed his hand and been on his way, but the merchant’s eyes were syrupy dark. He tried to imagine his sister beside him, tugging his sleeve. The sweat along the back of his neck was there, and the dry throat, as if the moisture in his body was fleeing outward. He grabbed his hands from where they were fiddling on the table.
“There’s some fine fishing not too far from here. I wouldn’t recommend the river, not for beginners, but if you were curious—”
“Just looking for bones,” Felix said. If only he could redistribute the sweat so it cooled his fluster.
The merchant’s seductive tone was temporarily checked. “Fish bones?”
“Human bones,” Felix said and turned so fast his robes whipped up behind him far more dramatically than he would’ve wished. He didn’t look back. Self-control was supposed to be an old man’s gift.
A few more booths and Felix came up empty. But the wind off the river, not entirely unpleasant, made him linger. For this one morning, he was a farmer visiting from Lazio. His cauliflower had been sold, his few pennies spent on a bracelet for his daughter. Where had he gotten a daughter? [Shh, keep dreaming.] Before he hitched up his donkey to carry him home, he’d picnic on the Tiber with a loaf of warm wheaty bread and a canteen of beer and watch the boats drag their wares out to Ostia and the sea. He’d promised his daughter he’d take her there, to see the sand. What a vision: bread and beer. Could he not fulfill this fantasy right then? [It’s not the bread, or the cauliflower, or Lazio.] No wonder he was studying dead men in a monastery. He’d had no desires, no vision. If he didn’t wish for anything, why should he be given anything? [It’s the child, the family.] And anyway, he couldn’t have pretended to be anyone else in these terrible brown robes. He turned back to the Aventine Hill.
“No fingers?”
Felix stood in the Father’s study, his hands tucked into his sleeves. A shelf beneath the narrow window held three books. Beyond the Bible and the book of prayer, he couldn’t guess what the third one was. There’d been rumors the Father hoarded gold, trinkets from foreign wars, the rings off dead parishioners, but this cell seemed as sparse as the others.
“None I could swear were Ethelberta’s,” Felix said.
“The bastard’s probably set up a shrine for himself somewhere.”
“One hopes it aids him in achieving closer communion with God.”
The abbot appraised him as if he were a hen whose clucks had begun to sound vaguely human. “You may be in charge of the bodies below,” he said. “But remember who here holds the care of their souls, who tends to those diseases.”
“The cura animarum,” Felix nodded. “I am the patient, and He is the cure.”
“I am the cure. I am quite literally the curate.”
Mino was supposed to be learning how to dust the art, but the boy was so fidgety Felix did it himself, saying, “Like so,” and “Downward, so the dust can then be swept,” while the boy nibbled on his thumbnail or gazed at the ceiling or chattered on about his pet cow he’d had to leave behind.
“Myself, I had a cat,” Felix said. “A nicer one you couldn’t—”
“Nobody understands. They think cows are for eating, they never believe what good listeners they are, or how Nipsy was the best of all and can’t be replaced with just some any old milk cow.”
“Animals really are very—”
“And here there’s no room for one anyway, I asked the Father. You’d’ve thought I was asking for a throwing axe. Just there’s not much liveliness here sometimes.”
Felix folded his cloth between the golden points of a reliquary box, brushing out a month’s worth of whatever dust was made of—simple grime, or floating sweat, or the droppings of invisible flying beetles. If he ran a rag down Bernardo’s forearm, the man would be flayed.
“What was it like, the market?” Mino was sitting on the arm of a heavy chair now, his legs swinging beneath him.
Felix paused, shook the cloth out. “The world is a busy place. Until one can sort the bad from the good—which, actually, one never can do properly—there’s some value in this private life. I most enjoyed seeing all the faces, which we can just as well see when they’re standing here with us. And admiring the river with its wild islands, and of course the gulls. I don’t know what you’re imagining, but there aren�
��t circuses or young people running about with candies.”
The boy kicked the chair. “I don’t need circuses, just an old cow.”
“You can think, I suppose, of Christ as your cow.”
Mino looked up at him, startled, and then beat his chest with laughter. “You’ve never had a wrong thought in your whole life, old man.”
Felix bent to sweep the fallen dust into a pan. Monks had no fewer wrong thoughts than Nero. But they let those thoughts go, like pebbles at the bottom of a sack of wheat. These pebbles belong to me, but I have no use for them. Let me toss them so my bread when it’s baked is soft and hurts no one.
Mino took the rag and drew it lazily down the sides of the columns. His robes, inherited from some prior monk, fell past his feet; someone ought to hem them. “You did this sort of thing at home? Women’s work?” When Felix didn’t reply, he added, “You came on your own, or someone sent you?”
Behind the altar now, his arms raised rather blasphemously, Mino resembled a toy archangel.
“You seem like a boy who was sent,” Felix said. Whenever Mino asked these questions, the boy would get such a blush on his face, as if Felix were the one prying.
He opened the main doors of the church to toss his pan of dirt into the street, but a toothless woman was sitting there, her gray braids wrapped atop her head in a pink ribbon.
“Pardon,” he said. He flung it as far from her as he could without letting go of the open door, but the wind was having none of this game and blew a goodly portion back into the woman’s face. She pawed at her eyes. “Oh, pardon,” he said again. He raised his robe as if to wipe at her face, but then remembered his wool spent most of its time with rotting flesh, and pulled it back. But the gesture of pulling back ended up being more emphatic than the initial charitable reaching out, and with one eye cleared she looked at him like he was a monster.
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