She gaped her mouth and picked herself up and carried herself away, like a crone in a basket. She was headed in the direction of San Saba, where the friar would be sure to give her a good crusty roll and probably a carnation. There was a sense of injustice about the recent popes sprucing up San Saba—adding marble furniture to the chancel, building shrines to a handful of lesser-known saints—while Santa Prisca gradually saw its population of the dead surpass its living. Who knew how popes picked their projects.
“So where’d they get their saints?” Mino said, his head resting on the open door frame.
The woman had turned the corner and vanished. “Was I speaking aloud?”
“San Saba. They have to get their bones from somewhere too.”
Felix would’ve left this door open all day if he were in charge. Imagine having such an entrance to the crypt, with sun and sparrow song and river stench tickling through the seated bodies. He’d keep one eye on his charges and one eye toward the day, and wouldn’t that be the best kind of reminder of God—the lively chirrup of a swift on a draft, and the gassy funk of Bernardo’s bile exiting his body.
Mino knocked on the open door. “You think they’re sneaking over and nabbing ours?”
“You can’t be sure of anything until your dead arse is on a stone seat.”
Bernardo’s head was lolling at an ever-increasing angle, and a sore had opened up on his forearm that suggested the presence of some foreign nibbler; Felix washed it with vinegar to prevent any larvae and hoped there weren’t rats. There was no greater hindrance to a peaceful putridarium than rats. Oh, Johanna, what romps she’d have here! Serving nobly the cause of pest removal, earning the affection of the brothers, soothing their loneliness with her throaty purr and silken ears. Love is an exchange, he thought, where neither partner would mind if the other provided nothing at all. He took a penknife to his friend’s fingernails.
With Bernardo’s abundant corpse, the crypt had taken on a new scent, a rankness deeper than the usual smell of bad fruit and manure. Descending the steps each day, Felix swam into the overpowering sweetness—he’d wrap a kitchen rag around his nose and mouth, but after half an hour its dark and pungent undertones became less repulsive, and he found himself actively sniffing to see if he could determine its component elements. The shit smell had an obvious locus, but that gagging tang, as if a rat had been boiled in cabbage, did that come from the fermenting sweat on Bernardo’s feet, or from his sweet heart’s walls exploding into his spleen? [You don’t remember, but when you were a child, five years old, you fell in the pig slops; when your father found you he yelled for your mother, and when your mother came she gagged, and though it was your sister who dragged you out, cementing your love, I was the shape standing between your filth and the ravenous hogs. I preserved you to be a preserver. Less than a mile from where you now sit in your Roman crypt is another five-year-old, a ball-cheeked perfumed girl, Marozia, who never fell in slops and instead will grow up to rule Rome, progenitor of six popes, armed—like the great Caterina Sforza—with both sex and sword; the bodies she’ll study are the bodies she kills. They’ll say she has the stink of whore on her, but I’ll say that’s a slur, not a smell.]
Though it felt disloyal to his friend, he was grateful for the more advanced bodies, the ones whose juices had dried up and whose vestments smelled only of the lavender sachets Felix packed in their armpits. Brother Timothy’s flesh was down to patches, and Felix looked forward to when his bones would be bare and he could whisk away his robe, gather what remained of the man, and carry him like a babe to the next room over, where open sarcophagi waited to be filled. He’d heard of monasteries that turned dry bones into fanciful tableaux, and given a more liberal-minded abbot, he would’ve liked to try his hand at this. Imagine fashioning a little vegetable garden with sprouting leg bones, pelvis lettuces, finger bones arranged in rosettes, the shoulder blade a crow come to inspect the produce. And of course it would be God’s garden, that would be the theme.
He should be paying closer mind to Bernardo’s concaving chest, finding some parallel for the way God pulls the faith out of us despite our efforts at secrecy, but secrecy made him think of Mino, who kept awkwardly trying to spill whatever upset was in his past. He could’ve told the boy about his own youth, when he too believed that anything concealed was lost. Thoughts couldn’t remain real in silence. His sister’s hair that day as she dangled on the alder branch: like pale seaweed, lifted from some grotto to float in a tree. He’d asked if she thought Tomaso handsome (he didn’t say painfully so).
“Of course.” She swung her legs. “I wouldn’t have agreed if he were a leper.”
“But you never touch.” He stood at the base of the tree, rubbing the back of his hand along its bark. It was dry in the fertile season, and dry still in drought.
“He’s not a doll.”
“You’ll have to, one day.”
“I might go to Farfa.”
“Not if you’re a girl.”
“You doubt?” She yanked up the hem of her dress, exposing a dusty snarl of undergarments. The abbey sat one hill over from Fara in Sabina and was as big as the town, though cleaner, and men from all over came to out-holy each other. If Felix and his sister threw food at dinner, or stole flour and wax to make toy ponies, their father said he’d send them there, which was like threatening to send mongrels to a palace.
“If I went,” he said, “I’d be chief in a year.”
“They don’t have chiefs, and you wouldn’t leave Johanna.”
“She’s my very own child.”
“Virgin cat birth.”
“You don’t love Tomaso?”
She threw a handful of shredded leaves at him, which floated up on their own breezes. “Every time you two come back from swimming, your face looks strawberry-stained.”
“It’s not fair to him if you’ll marry and not touch him your whole life long.”
“Splashing around without your pants, that’s a boy thing, right? Is he so different down there from you? Has he a golden penis?”
The stick he threw at her was too sharp; it cut a line in her cheek.
Later his sister said nothing to defend or damn him, and so he was sent outside while the others ate supper, alone in the cold night without a coat, listening for the howls of the hounds that would surely come to drag him to hell. His sister was the best person he knew, and she didn’t love. So then this surging heat inside him was unnatural—when Jesus spoke of it, he must’ve meant something else. Fraternal, familial, spiritual. Love incorporeal. A chicken ran at him in the dark, loosed from its pen, and Felix shrieked.
On their shared mattress that night, his sister whispered, “You can have him.”
“I don’t want anyone but you.”
“We all want Jesus.”
“Not Auntie Mary.” Auntie Mary was a witch, if not yet confirmed.
“Not Johanna.”
“Not the alder.”
“Not the hen in my belly.”
“Though now it’s in your belly,” he said, “mustn’t it share your religion?”
“Linsey Hen, the first Christian chicken.”
When they fell asleep, his fingers were stuck in the ends of her hair.
Bernardo sighed, one of his adorable gassy exhalations. He loved Felix’s stories. Someday, Felix worried, he’d forget when he was speaking aloud and when he wasn’t, and wouldn’t he put his foot in a hole then. He finished shearing the pinky nail on the corpse’s left hand. “All trim and true,” he said, brushing the filings into his palm and tossing them into the hole of the neighboring seat. He was still humming his sister’s bedtime ditty when Brother Sixtus called from the top of the stairs to say Brother Benedictus hadn’t woken up from his post-nones nap, and it looked like he was going to have to make some room down there.
A monk’s funeral was a lonely affair. God was present, of course, and the brothers themselves, somber in brown wool. The body was laid out in a pine coffin, and the family was informed
and invited, though no one came. A cluster of men would sing a hymn, and Father Peter would give the mass, followed by a sentence tailored to the actual dead body rather than the theoretical ascending soul. On this wet Sunday, with an anonymous widow snuffling in the back, the Father said, “Heaven watch for Benedictus, who walked slow but ate heartily, and never once admired himself.”
Sixtus turned to Felix with a look of some doubt.
“I believe he means,” Felix whispered, “that he didn’t comb his hair.”
“Ah,” Sixtus said, satisfied. “Though once after a Christmas bath I saw him crimping his toes playfully, as if he thought them more nimble than the average man’s.”
“You think he had foot pride?”
“I wouldn’t speak against a dead man.”
The widow began to wail.
“Let’s take him out already,” Sixtus said, “before he begins to stink up the box.”
The monastery only had one coffin, a display coffin as it were, because of course the men weren’t buried. But the abbot believed these open masses helped convince the public that the monks were ordinary men, not witches or mystics, and that their bodies would dust-to-dust just like theirs.
Six men lifted the coffin on their shoulders and carried it through the side door to the cloisters while the woman subsided into sniffs. Once it was dark and the parishioners were safely home with their roast lambs and impure thoughts, the same monks would come back to the open courtyard and pry Benedictus out of his box, sneaking him diagonally down the stairs like a battering ram and propping him up on the next available seat.
But first Felix had to dispose of Brother Timothy.
“It’s time for your great transition,” he said in what he hoped was a soothing tone. These were the climaxes in a job that revolved around tiny changes. He should be given at least a day to really contemplate what it meant to hurl Timothy’s bones into an old tub and set up in his stead a new man, with all his muscle and meat and nails and lashes. He was afraid he wouldn’t pay attention to the right thing, that the following morning he’d kick himself for not running a finger along the spongy circles of Timothy’s eye sockets, or pressing his ear to his sternum to listen for a residual heart. He regretted not attending more to Timothy, who’d died before Felix’s tenure, was an inherited corpse, and didn’t have the personality of the others. Or was mortality not about memory at all, but about the quick whoosh of a life as it passes from the known to the divine? And if so, what business did Felix have to contemplate their bodies, he who had lived such a paltry life, who was so close to the grave himself? Shouldn’t they be tossed tout de suite into a dark hole as a reminder that the body is no firmer than a flame (and less pleasantly scented once snuffed)? Was he breaking God’s law to cradle Timothy’s bones so sweetly in his arms? Was he committing the sin of lingering? [Take a deep breath, count to four. Exhale. The sin, if anything, is hoarding. You’re getting a better sense of my kingdom than any of your brothers, who’re half as prepared and twice as afraid. Invite them down. Proselytize a little more for the flesh. The young one, Mino—stick his hand in the septic wound on a dead man’s side. Ask him whether he still doubts.]
The room with the sarcophagi was dark. Felix rubbed his forearms along the tops until he found the open one, and clattered Timothy in as gently as possible.
“I did not know you, but I loved you,” he said. “May the Lord embrace and shield you as he did on the day of your birth. May your time in my attendance not have any bearing on your worthiness to sit by the angels.”
He put a hand down to pat the pile one last time and felt the smallest jolt, as if a breath had flickered from the bones to his living thumb. A sacred touch sent from God to his servant, like a mother spelling This is what it means with her finger on the back of her sleepy child—but then the cockroach scrabbled over the side and hit the floor with a dry rustle. Felix jerked his hand out of the tomb and instinctively pressed it against his back, last night’s wounds from the whip. He didn’t receive messages; he was a worm, not a saint.
In the room behind the room where the old bones were dumped gracelessly after their sinews dissolved, the floor was a foot and a half lower than the floors elsewhere. Old monks were kept away, because they had a tendency to swear the drop wasn’t significant and then crumple like daisies when they misjudged it. But Sixtus liked to visit this room, and he and Felix would shout across the distance until someone thumped a staff above, the sign that worshippers were present and were becoming disturbed. The glory of the room was the floor, a careful puzzle of tiny square tiles that spelled out black borders, curving blue tails, bright gold horns of plenty with grapes scattering like marbles, the head of a sun god in opus sectile. A big fish swallowed a smaller fish in each corner. Determining any sort of storyline was futile, other than that the world was messy and filled with surprising things.
This lowest part of the church had been a house, this just a regular floor that regular people crossed. When some ancient person had become fired with religious zeal, it was converted into a Mithraeum, where, from what Felix understood, believers didn’t pray so much as feast—benches lined the walls on either side, and Sixtus told him the cultsmen would feed the slaughtered sacrifice to the immobile stone idol in the niche and then stretch out and devour a picnic they’d brought. It all seemed very relaxed. This particular graven Mithras was a noble fellow, his cape sweeping out to his right as he straddled a bull—or knelt on the bull’s neck, or kicked the bull in the stomach; parts of the statue had been knocked off when the Christians came. Sixtus liked to sit on the benches and sketch the god. He wanted to add human figures to the margins of his psalter, but he had little experience and no willing models. He’d drawn Felix once and made him look like a bulbous carrot.
“You know St. Prisca was Mithraic,” Sixtus said, one eye squinched shut.
Felix was circling the room with a broom—a rag attached to straw tied onto a stick—pushing dust around the tile spirals. “I thought she was Christian. Was this her house?”
“They forbade her from singing hymns, whipped her when she spoke of Jesus.”
“Wasn’t it her own father killed her? Rejected her love, banished her to the Alps or something?”
“Isn’t that Ethelberta of the famously nabbed finger?”
Felix frowned at what appeared to be tiny pellets of rodent dung caught in his dust pile. “In seven hundred years, will our god seem silly?”
Sixtus put down his bit of charcoal. “What makes you call him our god?”
He’d have to issue himself double lashes that night for having devised a question so heretical. Imagine, another man with another broom in the 1500s, dusting out the rubble from this basilica, on which his kind had built a golden shrine to a god with the head of a horse.
Sixtus rolled up his paper and stuck his charcoal behind his ear. As they passed his seated friends in the putridarium, Felix raised a hand in greeting. The new man, Benedictus, looked ghoulishly pert. He’d have to get a hood to pull over those eyes, which hadn’t yet begun retracting. The pop and seepage—this was the musical accompaniment Felix had come to enjoy best.
Upstairs the sanctuary smelled absent of life. In Sixtus’s cell, the psalter was open to his latest doodlings: two giraffes wading in a lake.
Felix made a noise of appreciation. “Very whimsical,” he said.
“Whimsical? You think there’s too much shrubbery?”
“Shrubbery?”
“It’s Adam and Eve. In the garden, of course.”
Felix bent closer to the page. “Ah! And this? Yes. Mmm.”
“It’s not very like, is it. Look, this is what I wanted to show you.” He handed over a piece of parchment, but the script was too elaborate for Felix to parse. “A contract from the family that ordered the work done. We give them a beautifully written psalter, no mistakes, no marginalia too obscene, and an indulgence—”
“For what sin?”
“—and they give us seven pounds.”
“You don’t find that troublesome?” Sixtus said.
“The amount? Seven pounds. So it’s a year’s wages; script work is expensive. You’re spending hours on it, and—” He gestured to the scene of giraffes. “Probably more hours.”
“What do you think the abbot’s doing with seven pounds?”
“How else do monasteries survive?”
“Where’s our roast beef, then?”
Felix poked a finger into the web, so gentle, and the wobble sent the spider to its far edge. “You ought to ask Mino to pose for you,” he said. “He’d be a fine Adam—would have neither bull nor cape—and he could use a lesson or two in standing still.”
“Secluding yourself downstairs, old friend, isn’t an excuse for remaining naïve.”
Felix crossed to the door, hoping to catch the first scent of supper being cooked; he couldn’t have stomached roast beef anyway, its fleshiness and man’s fleshiness so alike. “I think I know most of the things you know,” he said, “but I’d rather wonder about them than convince myself they’re fact.”
An unexpected December thaw warmed the Tiber, which released a heady scent and let its winter-tossed bodies bob up again, nudging the shore like calves at the teat. No one in Rome had the job of pulling the suicides in, so they ballooned about until their gases dispersed and then slipped back to the bottom of the river, where they became nests for fishes.
Mino wasn’t one for water-gazing. “The living people are that way,” he said. He’d wanted to hold the purse too, but Felix knew better. The vendors with the frittelle were a sore temptation; Mino stood at the edge of their cart with more patience than he’d ever shown in church. It could seem cruel to keep a youth in a monastery. What had saved Felix was not necessarily what would save this boy.
The Everlasting Page 11