Tomaso and his sister would by now be long married. They’d have the children married people have. The discord and the brushing feet in bed. They would kiss, or not kiss. In any case, they were no longer loose particles like Felix—unattached, orbiting, buffeted.
“You’re attached to our Lord Jesus Christ,” Mino said.
Felix blinked. The boy was at his side, fried dough in hand. “How’d you get that?”
“He said I was a poor boy for being shut away like that.”
“Obviously you’re not shut away.”
“I said I’d escaped. They’d be hunting me.”
“You’ll make yourself sick.” He took the boy by the arm and pulled him through the crowd of shoppers, most there just to salivate. Toothless, with holes in their clothes, the citizens of Rome looked like victims of an invisible plague. At least the lepers had a glow to their spotted cheeks. Felix had the purse tied to a belt inside his robes. Monks were not spared pickpocketing; the holier you looked, in fact, the more likely you were to have coins. This is what had happened to the rule of poverty since St. Benedict.
“Bones!” Mino cried, and there was the fine-jawed vendor from before, his wares laid out like a skeleton had taken himself apart for inspection, puffs of feathered flies between. He pulled his hat down low so he could look out more coyly.
“I’ve been thinking of you,” the man said. “I found a little something.”
“You know Brother Felix?” Mino said. “We have strict orders not to spend more than a relic is worth, and Felix can tell the real bones from the false because he sits with them day in day out, and we can also spot a saint from a non-saint just by putting our hands over something—it’s a God-given power, like finding water with a stick.”
The man held out his hand, and Mino looked at Felix for assent before extending his own.
“Mino,” he said.
“Brother Mino,” the man replied. “I can tell I’m dealing with a man who cannot be fooled. Would you care to see a little item I’ve been saving for you?”
The side of Mino’s mouth was still sticky from sugar, but he raised his chin like a professional appraiser.
The man pulled from a box a smaller box, and inside this was a bent piece of metal. Mino took it as his first challenge.
“No,” he said proudly. “Not human flesh or bone.”
“Good eye. What else might it be?”
With one ear tuned to their conversation, Felix scanned the rest of the man’s wares for the church’s lost items. Most of these were probably chicken bones, burned and studded with tiny holes to signify age. But when the Church began selling forgiveness, its parishioners learned to put a price on God. When he was out in the world like this, or really around other people at all, Felix would look at things—obvious things: the river, the gulls—and think, This is good and this is good. But then the thick-haired vendor would wink and he’d think, This is bad or Is this bad because I’ve been taught that pleasure is wrong? The abbot was good because he’d gotten his placement from the pope; the abbot was bad because a woman some nights came to visit him and her hyena noises kept the brothers up. Being alone was good because it kept him safe from evil, and he felt closer to God in silence and peace; being alone was bad because the evil was within him, and Jesus had intended us to walk among our fellow men with charity and love. If Mino ever asked for his advice, he’d have to confess that sometimes God lit the way, and sometimes he just laughed.
“It’s an apostle’s hook!” Mino bounced from foot to foot.
The vendor had taken off his hat and was ruffling his hair with the confidence of a likely sale. “Not an apostle, a martyr,” he said.
Felix bent over the little box and its iron tenant. “Whose?”
“The provenance isn’t certain, but it’s from a collection of items seized by the Roman guard from the properties of condemned Christians, roughly a hundred and fifty years after the death of our Lord.”
“Seems like just a fishing hook. Maybe it slipped from one of your flies.”
“There are lineages among the early martyrs, St. Peter of Rome, and our Lord’s disciples.”
“He said Jesus could’ve fished with it!” Mino had his hand on his throat in disbelief.
“I can’t claim that, of course, but there’s the smallest chance—”
“Seems more likely some farmer smithied himself a bunch of hooks, and then lost one.”
“But tell him which properties!”
“You’d brush aside even the slimmest chance that the hook hails from Jerusalem?”
“Is it responsible for any miracles?” Felix asked.
“It’s from the farms to the east!” Mino was getting desperate.
The vendor snugged his hat back on, prepared for a longer battle. “The collection comes from the handful of farms along the few miles east of town on Via Appia, by the catacombs in the Vallis Marmorea. Including the former homes of Hierax, host of St. Justin the Philosopher, and the child martyr Prisca.”
“Prisca!”
“You’re saying there’s a small chance this hook belonged to our church’s patron, and a smaller chance she got it direct from Jesus.”
“I’m not a mathematician. I can’t calculate odds.”
“It’s true, Brother Felix, I have a sense,” Mino said. “He let me touch it before he told me what it was, and as soon as I did, I thought, This belongs to us, I promise I did. We have to bring it back, because it’s hers.”
Felix rested an arm on the boy’s shoulder. It hummed with excitement. “You don’t think it’ll get stolen like all the rest?”
“I’ll watch it day and night, I promise. I’ll carry the shovel with me, and if anyone tries to—” He swung his arms. “It’s hers. I know.”
“Have you even asked this gentleman for the price?”
Mino hit away his own tears with an open palm. The wind was beginning to pick up, threatening a storm. Felix couldn’t decide if he preferred the silky, placid Tiber or this one, riled into whitecaps. He moved his hand to the boy’s neck and said, “Come along. It’ll be getting on to supper time, and Vitalis killed a rabbit.”
The vendor stood like a vulture over his box. “I’ll be here next week,” he called after them. What tricks had the dark-browed man used on Mino to so positively convince him? [There’s the face, to which you both fell victim. But there’s also a consanguinity among children. It doesn’t surprise me at all that a boy could touch a piece of iron and feel the aching flesh of a long-dead girl. They’re close to the fountainhead of innocence; they remember things. Time has not yet begun to seem to march.]
The hill to the church took longer to climb because Mino kept stopping to wipe his face and pout into the shrubs, but by the time they returned home, the bells for vespers were ringing, and Felix slipped them seamlessly into the evening chants. By supper, Mino was telling Sixtus a joke he’d made up about a dog who wore a hat and rode a horse to mass.
In the early morning, between lauds and prime, Santa Prisca was so quiet you could hear a candle burn. Below the nave, in the musty depths that were once the ballrooms of the fifth century, the terraces of the third century, the vineyards of the first, Benedictus’s dead mouth blubbered. At this week’s meeting of the Brothers for Monastic Temperance—a club composed, as it so happened, of all the brothers—Felix had given his necrological report, a rough accounting of the weather down there. Vitalis asked if there were some way to keep the odor from traveling up the stairs. Felix asked him what he thought the odor meant. Leo said maybe God made the dead stink to give form to our sin, and Henry argued it was to protect the living, so we wouldn’t get so close as to catch their diseases, and the abbot said how about a solid door over the hole to the crypt.
Could they but visit, what marvels they’d find: cycles of decay invisible to most, a handful of bodies freed from the dark erasure of the earth and coffin to live again, creating sounds and yes, ripe smells with caprice and personality. A fly had planted its eggs in Bernar
do’s cheeks, and the sprouting larvae fed in delicate lines from his eyes to his chin, so he appeared to be always weeping. A collapsed right hip had him tilted enviously toward Benedictus, who was still erect, the general of the assembly, the liquids behind his lips bubbling with indecision. Proud purple lips. The parishioners would call this devilry, but the Devil had no part in the creation of Man; we slip away on the same celestial boat we were sailed in on. What has the Devil done to match that? [I have brought you knowledge, and choice, and emotional range. Unlike your Lord, who sits and does not move, I am your kindred venturer, I assay, I too prize courage over dull omnipotence. I search you out and treat with you and stroke your fine-haired arms; I send no minion. Not once have I forced your hand—I ask what is it you want, then rationalize it. The fall you blame me for? That felix culpa, that fortunate fall? Oh elderly son, who spent a lifetime sitting on his brimming love, it was named after you.]
No, the Devil led him to wrong wanting, and he’d been found out. Through the gaps in that summer, he still saw his father’s arm raised, his mother with her hands stretched out, his sister in the corner, scrubbing the inside of a bowl with a cloth and sand, around and around and around. Then it was his father at his mother, then his sister at his father, and Johanna, who’d tiptoed in to see if the fuss meant supper, fled—flat-backed, tail down. His parents were mild people, farmers.
He wasn’t the first boy to love a boy—some men in the cities even almost-wed, with vows of adoration before a priest, like Sts. Serge and Bacchus—and he certainly wasn’t the first to get caught with the beloved in a secret touch, so why the fury? [It wasn’t you, it was the drought. It was the pinch. It was the future fear. It was the nausea of change. It was the not knowing. It was the dry wheat and the rumor of plague and the black mark on the hen’s egg found that morning. This is the cycle, this is how the lungs of civilization expand and contract. You are welcome; you are not welcome; you are welcome.]
“They want you out,” his sister had said, quiet in bed. And then, as if prepared for defiance, “Do you think he might love you back?”
The dark hid how his face mottled. His sister would never fail him, cheat him, befuddle him, use him; his dearest friends would never lie to him, beat him, outgrow him, abandon him. Sacred love is a rosebud floating in consistency. Romantic affection is a warm cave with a wolf inside.
But Lord above, Tomaso was a beautiful boy, the way his dark eyes would affix on you—he’d be thinking about something else, but he left his eyes behind, left his eyes on Felix’s face, and it was like nothing harmful could ever happen while those dark eyes stayed steady. Felix allowed himself to imagine leaving, and his insides began to rupture, a line searing down the middle from his throat to his knees—it stopped at his knees—and his face twisted up like a rag. His mouth opened, his eyes shut. He couldn’t make the sound come out. All the blood was in his face, though it came out as tears, and he couldn’t make a single sound. His lungs stopped. Now his sister’s arms were properly around him, and everything melted and he was gasping, his sobs coming as high-pitched chokes between the long spells of paralysis. He was newly aware of his organs; he could feel them breaking.
“Shh,” she said. “Shh. After a while, you won’t feel it so. I promise.”
He would’ve been good. He would never have done anything that wasn’t good; he would’ve shrunk over the years into a hard kernel of pain. The hurt felt so wickedly good, he wanted never to be sane again.
“Oh, my brother,” she said. “How did he answer you?”
He could go to Farfa, just on the other hilltop, and between prayers could stand on the rampart with his hand over his eyes and watch for the specks of his family. They’d teach him to read and write, to handcuff his demons and bury them in an iron box. He dragged the side of his hand across his upper lip, wiping away the sweat and snot and salt. He wanted to wipe his whole face away.
“He didn’t answer,” he said. “I didn’t tell him.”
“But how did Father—”
“His father saw. I don’t know. I just said one day he’d be my brother.”
“But you kissed him.”
“His cheek,” Felix said. “Where any brother would. It was just for too long.”
She was quiet for a few moments, rubbing his back—circle, circle, pat. “But what did you wish for?”
“Nothing.” The first he’d lied to his sister since he told her fishes grew legs at night and strolled. He wanted Tomaso to take his face in one hand and pull it back to center. To meet his lips with his lips. It needn’t have been out of love, just to see. The way children kiss behind hedges, just to see. He wanted to linger in that vale of touch for as long as it took him to feel human. He wanted Tomaso to grab his hand and pull him into the poplars and tell him every racing thought and ask him all the questions and look at him with real wonder, like he was a treasure, like he was the only one of his kind, and promise he wouldn’t for all the castles in Christendom unglue himself from Felix’s side. That he’d keep him in his heart the way he kept Jesus. Rooted.
He began to hit his own face.
“Stop it.” She pulled his arm away.
His tears were made of sulfur. He yanked his hand back and slapped himself so hard his sight went briefly starry. The pain was on the outside now, and felt so much better there. So much clearer. He hit himself again.
Now his sister was crying. “I’d give him to you if I could. I’d give him to you.”
The Paradise
[ 165 ]
The pond exploded. A barn-high geyser, and the brown floppy bodies of boys. Prisca was crouched behind a yearling olive, honing her lurk. Her brother looked absurd, that big ugly mouth, but the others had nothing misplaced about them; the same basic shapes—four limbs and the wobbly bits—but fresh with mystery. They didn’t pinch her bottom or dunk her face in the milk pail or tattle. They didn’t pay her any mind at all.
The slave boy tangled his arms around her brother, and the other one stood on the edge, his toes hidden in the weeds, and she held her breath to watch him stretch and dive, the plume falling over the wrestling boys like a veil. Their shouts were no different from her shouts. Like the world was hitting their chests in a steady beat, expelling joy in bursts.
She let out a high whistle. The boys didn’t look. She gave a series of grunts that turned into a cackle, like a wild dog. No one noticed. The grasses were burnt golden with summer, and she was just an old stone, chucked from the fields—who’d want such a thing. She looked down at her stomach, what used to be such a firm big pooch, a drum, now wasting into a waist. She dug her thumbs into her skin to find her bones. A fly was flipping around her head, whizzing in at her ear, across her lashes. She snorted like a horse, tossed her hair. Opened her mouth wide to swallow it. This always scared them away. She lifted a foot to scratch, balancing in her squat on one shaky heel. Her feet seemed bigger now than the rest of her, or that’s where all her old sturdiness went, gravity dragging it down to her ankles. She used to sprint across the farm, dodging cow pies like a rabbit, jumping rabbits like a hound, chasing hounds like a man, but now she couldn’t open a door in the house without hitting herself in the face. She tripped when nothing was in her way. Her elbows were sharp as knives.
She brayed again, but the boys were too deep in their game, so she scooped the pebbles around her into a pile and wrapped them in hazel leaves and tied the leaves closed with strands of dried grass she braided and knotted and when the boys were out and collapsed on the bank, their bodies probably tickling with the water drying off their skin, Prisca tossed her rockball from one hand to the other, wondering which to aim for. Not her brother Servius, the snitch. Not the slave, who’d show his bruises to the overseer. The sun was low, spread out over the fields like a fire. The third boy looked like the bronze Dionysus that stood welcoming by the door. His dark hair in a flop across his forehead, his round brown shoulders, the twist of his hips. He had one arm raised, the other scratching in his armpit, feeling for t
he growing hairs there.
With a battle cry, she stood and hurled the rockball at the lounging boys. They leapt and scattered and the ball smashed into the grass, but the pebbles burst out of their binding, and one skipped up and with its sharp edge grazed the calf of her brother’s friend. Crispus glanced down at the white line, and before her eyes it turned rosy and then keen red and then the red began to drip, and he yelled, “Damn Prisca is a eunuch!”
She fell to the ground again behind the olive. A eunuch is what she was. A body without a sword. Yet did she not know how to draw blood? [Preach, baby warrior! God will tell you violence is devilry, but who slaughtered his own son?]
The wheat was drying out. The tufts on top were shriveling. The men talked about drought in low tones, while the women cooked and spun and invented games for the children and dragged buckets from the river. The air in the house tasted bitter, and Prisca got some strange nourishment from it. She liked her courage to be pushing right up against a wall.
Her mother spent more time by the shrine in her temple, and Prisca sat behind her to braid her thick brown motherly hair. Surely invisible beings had better things to do, like helping cows have babies and giving new spears to men in battle whose spears have snapped. Her mother murmured to Isis Fortuna, and Prisca lay down on the cool marble and ran the ends of her hair across her mouth, tasting for summer. The ceiling was vaulted white stone, and just past it was all the riot of reality, and nothing ever quite explained why the one should have to be blocked by the other. Morning after morning they came here, and day after day the gods sat on high, arms crossed, dribbling a strand of saliva down, just to see how far it could go, and sucking it back up again. Rain? they said. Who said you deserved rain?
The Everlasting Page 12