The Everlasting

by Katy Simpson Smith

  Sixtus continued his patient inking. “You do have small features,” he said. “Though as Felix will tell you, your ears will keep growing long past you being alive, till five years after you’re gone they’ll reach down to your waist.”

  Mino stared at Felix, who had taken a seat by the window. “Sixtus never lies,” he said, shaking his head. One of the hens in the yard was once again attempting to climb the alder; she used her beak and claws as three separate hands to scrabble her way up, but she hadn’t yet been able to reach the fork, where she might rest.

  “My pa didn’t like the dresses.”

  “Not much difference between a gown and a robe.”

  In the cup of water Sixtus used for washing away his errors, Felix watched a tiny seed snap around the surface. Impossible to tell if it was the offspring of some aquatic creature from the well, or if it was drowning. He plucked it out. “I’d say you fit well here,” Felix said.

  “Did your father send you away?” Sixtus asked.

  Mino nodded. “Is it much longer till supper? I’m half-starved.”

  “If you were helping the cook, we probably wouldn’t eat till tomorrow. Go see. Let Felix get back to his bones.”

  “You take good care of them, don’t you.” Mino stood and stretched his arms above his head, resembling an old painting Felix once saw of St. Agatha on the rack. He dropped his hands to his head and patted his wispy blond hair indecisively. “He did her in before he sent me off. So I’d see what I’d done.”

  Sixtus stopped, his rag half-dipped in the water.

  “Deus in adjutorium meum intende.” The abbot’s voice was girlishly small.

  “Domine ad adjuvandum me festina.” The brothers made up for it.

  When they gathered that morning for the terce liturgy, the abbot’s hands fidgeted so much he ripped a page in the psalter. Lucius whispered to Vitalis, “It’s the pope,” and Vitalis, whose faith in the pope, any pope, was unwavering, dourly shook his head. Standing behind them, listening to the monotonal reading of the day’s psalm and the halfhearted antiphons from the brothers, Felix studied the backs of their heads, wondering why Henry’s hairline was such a neat scoop at his neck while Leo’s looked like a wheat field gone to seed. There was only one monk who barbered them; they ought to look the same. Once dead, they’d match up better.

  Instead of reading from the martyrology, the Father closed the books before him and peered out into the crowd of standing men. “It is a difficult time,” he said.

  Leo turned sharply to Henry. The last time the abbot broke from the liturgy was during the famine two years ago, when he’d asked weakly if any of the monks were hoarding bread.

  “A great servant of the Lord has been dragged from the ground like an animal.”

  Felix wondered how the abbot considered his own brethren below, who, far from being humanely in the ground, were sitting up in chairs and posthumously farting.

  “Our Pope Formosus, deceased eight months, sought to save our territory from the dueling emperors, from the Lombards, from the Saracens.” He paused. “He had weaknesses too, but the Lord does not create humans without them.”

  Lucius murmured an amen.

  “Augustine tells us of the city of God and the earthly city,” he began.

  Sixtus leaned over to Felix. “Augustine, quoting Apuleius, also said the souls of men are demons. But good demons; the kind that mediate between heaven and earth.”

  “Oh, your books. What mischief won’t they—”

  “And Rome now is ruled by a man of earth,” the abbot continued, “tangled in material concerns, vindictive and empty of peace. Stephen, who calls himself pope. From political rivalry he has unburied our Formosus, a body put to rest, and sat his bones on a throne of judgment. You have heard of this in the streets.”

  The few monks who had recently run errands nodded—the exhumation and trial of the deceased pope was a petty battle over bishops, French kings, the Spoleto men, brothels, and the whereabouts of the Holy Spirit. Felix heard of it from a woman selling eels in a Trastevere square, on one of those sunny January days that had lured him across the river. She was tossing water over her fish while a man strolled to and fro, keeping an eye out for officials. It had been more than two days since the eels were caught, and trading in foul flesh was criminal.

  “Do you get a vote in the trial?” her partner had asked.

  Felix confessed his ignorance.

  “They dug up the old pope,” the eel seller said. “Put him on trial in St. John Lateran. They’ve got a man stands next to him and answers in his dead pope’s voice. ‘Did you anoint false bishops?’ ‘Why, yes, I did.’ ‘Why’d you take the papacy after we’d thrown you out of the church?’ ‘Because I’m the Devil’s left hand.’”

  “They wouldn’t exhume the body of a pope,” Felix said, with the confidence of a corpse connoisseur.

  “In my father’s day, they were good men,” the lookout said. “What’s happened to all them since? Poisoned, stabbed, beaten on the head with a hammer.”

  “I’m telling you, son, they dressed him up in purple robes and all. You remember the tremors last week? That was earth and heaven shuddering, both.” She flipped an eel over to its fresher side, glossy eye up. “Don’t think they won’t do what you think they shouldn’t do.”

  “And have they—” He didn’t know quite how to ask. “Reached a verdict?”

  “Can’t be too many questions left to ask,” the woman said.

  The man whistled, and she threw a sheet over the bright ribbony fish and laid several pages of parchment on top. “Holy psalms for sale!” she cried. “Sweet psalms for a penny!”

  Since then the monks had pooled their gossip and confirmed the outcome: the half-rotten body of Formosus had been judged guilty of perjury, heresy, and serving as the bishop of two territories simultaneously, and his three blessing fingers were hacked off and the rest of him was stripped, buried, thought better of, and tumbled into the Tiber. None of them knew how to speak of it; they were the children of a series of imperfect fathers.

  “Know from this that all men are fallible,” Father Peter said, his dismay ringing like a sour bell in the open nave. “If you place your trust in authority, the day will come when you are torn between obedience and conscience. Look only to yourselves, my brothers, and struggle to perfect what is there. Do not cease to be appalled when men act despicably, but have no conviction that they will live up to standards that you yourself cannot meet. We are all failing.” He stopped and pushed a finger across the bottom of his nose.

  Lucius bent his head and seemed to weep.

  “Dominus vobiscum,” the Father said.

  “Et cum spiritu tuo,” the brothers said.

  They took up their labors somberly, and for an hour after terce they all were silent, until Vitalis belched loudly in the orchard and Mino fell upon his spade in laughter.

  The portents kept arriving. Farfa had been taken. The Saracens had sacked the abbey, expecting and finding treasure, and while they camped amid the gold and silver, the chalices and altarpieces, the monks there systematically hid the manuscripts. The Arabs weren’t interested in words; they had their own. The news was told at breakfast, and Felix wondered if the abbot of Santa Prisca would cling first to his library. The theory that their own night thief might be a Saracen gained new converts. Whoever he was, he’d now accumulated two fingers and a shard of shin, and Felix wasn’t certain that Eupernia had safely made her way to a chapel casket.

  “You were almost there,” Brother Marco said to him in the hall on their way to the garden.

  “I was there,” Felix said, “and then I wasn’t.”

  “My father took me as a boy, but he didn’t have enough money to sell me as a novitiate. A beautiful place, Eden in stone.”

  Felix’s father had decided Farfa was too near. In the aftermath of his humiliation, a church was found in Rome—their numbers were dwindling, and their standards were low. A week after the kiss—seven days during which he
’d been kept inside, Tomaso invisible, his response to the touch horribly unknown—his mother packed his belongings: a loaf of bread wrapped in his winter coat. There was no lock of hair to keep. His father knew a man carting hay who’d haul Felix in exchange for a coin. He would come to think of it as his dowry.

  “Your father must’ve owned his land,” Marco said.

  The garden held no sun today, and the quiet of nature, usually a relief, with its rustles and twitterings and shakes, now seemed careless. Had it no news of his family? [The leaves are not the ones to ask, who get their gossip from the cherubs and the wind; you should be talking to the grubs instead. The closer you get to the underworld, the fewer lies you’ll hear.]

  “A man on the make.” Marco took his rake without complaint, though in the evenings he relished showing his blisters, which Felix would compare to the open sores of the dead.

  “A man on the mend,” Felix said.

  The monks from Farfa, with stainless childhoods and reasonable purses, scattered to churches in Rome, Rieti, Matenano. They brought stories of the invaders, though who by then had not seen an Arab. The people invented new prayers, in case it was monks who attracted trouble. Mothers sacrificed small game to pagan gods in hidden pits behind their homes. They closed no doors.

  There was no news yet of the villages. When his sister and Tomaso—elderly now, like him—opened the door of their minor farmstead, did they look out onto burned fields, slain cattle? [You don’t want to know what’s happened to your home; you want to imagine the two of them, your kin and your kindred, in that cozy one-room house with the smoky hearth and—wait—is that a cradle in the corner? Is your cat Johanna, rickety at some supernatural age now, rubbing her side along the spindles of the crib, purring loud enough to drown out the baby’s coos? In your honor, will she pounce into the bed and come to a curl atop the infant’s face? Is it the future you want to destroy or just the past?] Johanna. She’d be long dead. Like Felix, she’d been transported, and would not again return home. If death was a ladder from his mother’s lap to the Lord’s, he wondered what rung he was on.

  “You’ve let the rooster out,” Marco said, pointing his rake.

  “What would happen if you loved a boy?” he’d ask the imaginary Muslim who was barracked in his father’s house, his foreign brown eyes scanning the patchy walls to find the draft, his dry elbows on the table by the bread too coarse to eat.

  “I would tell him so.”

  “I mean in your church.”

  “They would shake their heads at the folly.”

  “Is it forbidden?”

  “Ask the Córdoba caliphs, with their harems of boys.”

  “Or despised?”

  “Ask Ibn Hazm, who says, ‘Every heart is in God’s hands.’”

  “How harshly do they punish you?”

  “The Qur’an says if they repent, let them be.”

  “We must do penance for a year, which is less than for priests who go hunting.”

  “And your Christian scripture, what does it advise?”

  “Barnabas says thou shalt not eat the hare—it grows a new anus every year—so thou shalt not be found a corrupter of boys.”

  “You’re saying a five-year-old hare has five arseholes?”

  “And what of your scripture?”

  “The prophet says, ‘He who loves and remains chaste and conceals his secret and dies, dies a martyr.’”

  “What is a secret love?”

  “As Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi sang of his boy, ‘Love has put fetters on my heart, as a herdsman puts fetters on a camel.’”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  The answers came in a dream, so God sent them.

  “Can I show you something?”

  “It’s almost time for prayer,” Mino said.

  “Come. We’ll be a little tardy.”

  The boy balked at the top of the stairs leading down to the crypt. “I can smell it from here.”

  “It’s your own fright you’re smelling. Be a brave boy.” Felix held out a hand. “I’m here to stand between you and the ghosts.”

  “You’ve seen them?”

  “They manifest as kittens—the worst part is all the ankle rubbing. You’ll get used to it.”

  They descended hand in hand, and Felix wished the staircase went on forever, just kept unfolding into the mineral depths of the earth, because once they reached the bottom he’d have to find something wise to say. How to be happy, indeed. Felix had no answers; it seemed constitutional rather than philosophical, though this was not a comfort. The boy wanted a string in the labyrinth, and Felix couldn’t even say what the maze looked like. His only certainty sat in this putrid room.

  Mino put a hand over his face. “Sixtus calls these Satan’s toilets,” he said in a muffle.

  “Sixtus is uncharitable. Here,” he said, pulling over a stool. “Let me introduce you.”

  The benches lined three sides of the room, and but for the holes in the seats would’ve resembled the Mithraeum next door. The seats were filled by men in robes. Calling them men might be generous. Bodies in robes, the garments of the brotherhood largely withstanding the decay occurring within. Some sat proudly; others slumped. The two in the corner had collapsed toward each other and seemed to be conspiring. The head of one particularly corpulent monk had come closer and closer to his knees as his belly deflated. Sometimes Felix imagined he was laughing, and other times that he was the most devout. Below the open holes on which their bare bottoms perched, a sewer ran, carrying the effluvia past the groundwater and out to the river, though every time Felix peeked, he only saw still puddles, oily.

  He put a hand on Bernardo’s shoulder, which rattled. “This is my dear friend who you never knew.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  Felix slapped Bernardo’s back and a tooth tumbled out of his mouth. He stooped to rescue it from the folds of the cloak and popped it back in between his friend’s lips, like a pearl fed to a lizard. “Will you think me foolish if I tell you not to be afraid of what happened to your mother?”

  The boy looked horrified.

  “Her life was blessed with you, and now her soul is stretched out on the slowest bank of time, with one hand in Christ’s. The only pain is that one small thing.”

  “That my pa done her in.”

  “That your pa done her in.”

  “On account of how she fashioned me.”

  “Which was another word for her love, which no one could have asked her to contain.”

  Mino’s head turned to take in the whole compass of the room. “This seems very wicked.”

  “We think death gives rise to ghosts and bogeys and all sorts of sneaky phantoms, but that’s magical thinking, and not worthy of a brave Christian who knows that a corpse, while still the property of God, is no more spooky than a bucket or a bowl.”

  “But Sixtus says you talk to them.”

  Felix took his hand off Bernardo’s shoulder. “I want you to come and shake hands.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s start with Benedictus, whose hand is still quite plump and inviting. It’ll be just like shaking mine. Come, take his hand and tell him your name.”

  Mino’s face teetered somewhere between laughter and tears.

  “There, that’s it,” Felix said as Mino slipped a finger into Benedictus’s limp paw. “Do you feel his warmth?”

  “No.”

  “That’s because his hand is really in Christ’s, and this is only a sheet of canvas, or a comb.” He moved one seat down to Bernardo, whose knuckles were just beginning to peek through his skin, like the first crocuses of spring. “Try my dear friend here. I think you’ll find it a genuine wonder, what the body does when God lets it loose.”

  And one by one, with increasing boldness, Mino made his way around the putridarium, shaking the hands of the last nine monks that had perished at Santa Prisca. When he got to Giuseppe, on whose finger bones only some loose shreds of flesh hung, he grasped the dead hand like he would a companion�
��s and looked back at Felix with pride.

  “And you say the soul isn’t inside—the best part? The thing we loved?”

  “The thing we loved is safe above.”

  “How do you know for certain? You’ve checked?” He pressed his hand against Giuseppe’s robes.

  “If it’s a spark, you can tell just by looking. See? There’s nothing left that’s warm.”

  “But if the spark is so tiny. And is hiding.”

  “When I think of a beloved dying,” Felix said, though he’d never experienced a beloved dying and had only his imagination to wonder over the breath and heartbeat of his family and his cat and not-his Tomaso, “I think of these friends and am cheered. Because how much longer is the eternal life than this one?”

  “How do you bury your dead?” he’d ask the Saracen barracked in his father’s house, his fingers ringed with gold, his soft hair’s perfume mingling with the must of horses.

  “In the ground, like you.”

  “Facing east, like us?”

  “You line them up like they were arrows pointing at where the sun will rise. We bury them on their right sides so their faces look upon Mecca. The dead are still human; they aren’t arrows or symbols.”

  “We put them in fabric or wood.”

  “We put them in stone.”

  “Are you brokenhearted to lose your beloved, or do you staunch your tears because they’ve achieved paradise?”

  “We believe that we are supposed to believe there is joy in death. Still we wail.”

  “Then we’re both sinners. Don’t you do anything strange?”

  “We lightly beat the fresh grave with our sandals.”

  “Do you close the eyes of a Muslim after he’s died?”

  “We close the eyes.”

  “Do you wash him with tenderness?”

  “We wash the body to take the stain of the world away.”

  “Do you build churches over the graves of your holiest?”

  “Bodies are not to be worshipped.”

  “You scoff at my crypt. Do you not believe the body has fluids?”

  “Abu Bakr said the shroud is for the body’s pus.”