“What would you do to a man who took a body from its resting place?”
“Cut off his hand.”
“Who taught you how to bury the dead?”
“Allah sent a raven to scratch at the ground by the body of Abel, showing Cain what to do with death.”
“So we hide the bodies to hide our shame?”
“We hide the bodies. You prop them up on toilets.”
“When you were a child, did you ever play at sainthood?” Father Peter crossed to the door of his study, and Felix had no choice but to follow him out. Only one other monk was in the hallway, but he pivoted when he saw them and headed back toward the garden. Felix had reported on his trips to the market, apologized for the continuing lack of St. Ethelberta, and promised that the recent acquisition of Prisca’s fishhook would be making an appearance that day in one of the vacant reliquaries. The abbot, whom recent months had made pale, was dreamy in the eye, twitchy in the hand.
“I certainly did not,” Felix said, though he recalled his sister’s archangel costume: wings from dead branches and a rope halo.
“Perhaps you did not have the calling.”
“I would’ve thought true saints—”
“Oh, son,” and the abbot pushed open the door to the sanctuary, where Brother Vitalis trudged around the chapels with his willow switch, as menacing a guard as Father Peter had chosen to appoint. “There are no true saints. Only men and women who happen to die before they disprove their holiness.”
He stopped in front of a niche with an empty shrine.
“You see how this makes us look.”
“Father,” Felix said, unsure what tone to adopt.
“You know Santa Prisca is my only concern, heaven bless her. And the church these days is only worth what it’s worth. You saw what they did to Formosus.” One shoulder writhed.
“Do you know her story, Father? We were wondering—”
“Arrested for stealing bread. Stealing bread to save her family.”
“That doesn’t seem—”
“You wouldn’t blame her. The chosen must also survive.” The abbot leaned against the font and trailed a trembling finger in the water. “There’s nothing to blame.”
Through the closed church door they heard the toothless woman blaspheming the crows.
“Where is it?” Father Peter said. “The hook?”
Mino wasn’t with the brothers doing the laundry or the brothers mending the robes or the brothers rebuilding the arbor for spring. He wasn’t in his cell and he wasn’t with Sixtus, who had successfully turned an ink spill into an armored rabbit at war with a dog, to accompany Psalm 144. He was below, in the room Felix so often had begged the others to visit. Benedictus was ripening so fast, the stench was nearly visible. The boy was perched on the ledge of one of the seats, his back turned to Felix, squeezed beside the corpse of Bernardo. Felix paused in the doorway, admiring Mino’s neck, how unlike Tomaso’s it was, and how odd that a son of theirs should really take after neither. He felt a solidity behind this love that outshone his youthful ardor. (It took being sixty to admit this.) Being a father touched not just the nerve endings but the stones, the weather, the rampaging Arabs; the world was becoming Mino-hued.
In this room, where the skeletons in their haunting cloaks let their disease seep from their pores—what pores were left—and the afternoon smelled not of incense but of sulfur and rot, Felix hadn’t accounted for any danger. A thin scraping interrupted his reverence. Noises down here were usually soft, a rounded gurgle. He called Mino’s name. The boy turned fast, his blond hair haloing, his fist clenched around an object.
“What,” Felix smiled, “are you auditioning for my job?”
He neither shook his head nor blinked. Walking closer, Felix saw the robes Bernardo was slowly fouling had been torn at the chest. His pale skin within was exposed—skin Felix had never seen, not in all their years of friendship. Mino was standing now, backing away. Felix leaned in to touch and was struck by the gray streaks in the torso.
“But what—”
“You said there were answers here.”
Bernardo’s white chest, the hairs around the lavender nipples still spronging, had been torn into. Inexpertly, brutally. Like a rat had grown a beaver’s teeth and dragged his mouth down vulnerable skin. The cuts produced no blood, only furrows into gray tissue. Felix shuddered. He felt a coldness in his own bones, like the violence had been on his mortal flesh. His mouth was dry, and he could smell nothing.
“You talked about the soul,” Mino seemed to be saying. “And the answers.”
Felix tried to pull the rent tunic back over the wounds.
“That I’d see my mam. I wanted to see what happened.”
“What happened?” He looked at the boy for the first time.
He was holding in one shaking hand the hook. Prisca’s hook, or Christ’s, or a hook dredged up by a drunkard from the Tiber’s bank. “Brother Henry wouldn’t give me a knife.” He took a step toward Felix, then a step back. “They’re dead, you said that, just bodies. But the soul isn’t in there, is it? I thought if I could find a hole, something not there, so I’d know the soul of her was up with Jesus, like you said—”
“Why would you hurt my friend?”
“He isn’t, it’s just the body!”
Felix snatched the fishhook from him. To defile a corpse with a relic— What do you say to your son? [You tell him you too would’ve worn dresses as a child if dresses had been offered you; you too had lost love. You find the darkness in him and mirror it with the darkness in you, so the boy knows there is no aloneness, not in all this world, because your ancestors came out of the garden sweating with guilt, and the blessing of this was that no one henceforth could stand sole on a mountain of purity, and the valleys below were crowded and dank and merry with sinners: you and he and his mam and your pap and Christ himself, for Christ himself took human form, wore that body like a flag. Tell him this.]
But he had already slapped the child. He didn’t remember it, but Mino’s face was shocked and rosy, and Felix’s hand stung.
He didn’t speak to Mino the rest of the day. He stumbled over the responsorial at vespers. His anger was short, but his love took a woeful long time to reconstitute. He couldn’t forgive him until he’d forgiven himself, and this even the nighttime whip was slow in solving. He tried to focus on the image of the cheek, the wronged innocent cheek he’d burned, but saw instead his sister’s, with the scratch of the stick, and Tomaso’s, with the flush from his lips, and his own, beaten by his own hand until it bruised. Confession would provide no relief; there was no discrete sin to be revealed, but a whole inadequate life. His shame burned through his chest so sharply he thought the boy’s phantom was dragging the ancient hook down his own skin, the furrows his father’s furrows, the blood still lively running. His teeth ground together as his back opened up in stripes of pain; the whip was louder than the compline bell. It wasn’t his old self he was punishing—the knocked knees, the aching neck, the scabs that wouldn’t heal, the bladder that betrayed him, the rheumy eyes, the caterpillar that munched the nerves in lines across his hips—it was his young self, who hadn’t tried-and-failed, but hadn’t-tried, and failed.
“Tell me about your Devil,” he’d say to the Arab who was barracked in his father’s house, his soft brown feet on the straw mattress, his bare hand on his own silken shoulder.
“Iblis. Al-Shaytan.”
“Satan.”
“When you kneel to pray, he is a fly in your hair.”
“A honeybee.”
“No, something without purpose. He gets between you and your spoon. You and your cup. You and your woman.”
“Does he not believe in women?”
“Women are the crown, and the quicksand.”
“And men?”
“Men are the armor, and the snake.”
“Is his voice sweet?”
“Sweeter than Allah’s, because he speaks no truth.”
“Does he answe
r your questions?”
“In all his words I find the justification for myself.”
“Then why don’t you believe in him?”
“Because I am the least of God’s creatures and should not be justified.”
He needed to ask Brother Henry for some vinegar to put on his wounds. One on his shoulder refused to close up, and he worried it would attract an infection. Brother Leo was hands-deep in peas, and two others whose duties lay elsewhere didn’t want to leave the warmth of the hearth and the proximity of snacks, so the kitchen was cramped. Felix bent to the bottom shelves and poked through the jars of pickles. Some of the oldest vegetables had turned entirely white, making him think of organs. The heart, never seeing sunlight, was probably a white muscle. Mino would’ve found out.
Leo sucked a pea loudly from its pod. “Have you seen the boy since he got taken in?”
“Where’s that?” Felix said.
“I figured since you two are always about.”
“He’s doing good work in the chapels,” Henry added.
“You’ve had compliments from parishioners?”
“Oh, I’m sure they don’t notice. If the tables have an inch of filth on them, it’s cleaner than their house.”
“What’s this about Mino? Taken where?”
“The Father fetched him,” Leo said. “Looked like he would’ve dragged him by his ear if there weren’t an audience.”
“Boys are mischief. We old poots could take a lesson in it.”
“So you don’t know?” Felix asked.
Henry stooped down and pulled out the vinegar he couldn’t find. “There you are. Bring it back before lunch. You don’t need more than a dram?”
“They said the abbot, or someone who told the abbot, found one of the relics in Mino’s room, I don’t know which—the thing of Prisca’s. Did he think he’d be going home one day, where he could sell them? Which of us ever goes home?”
“That’s a boy without a proper father.”
Leo continued to split the pods into boats, and Henry speared pigeons on an iron spit.
The night before, in the early hours after matins when the brothers were safely returned to their beds and dreaming of salt, Felix had crept down the hall to Mino’s cell and left the hook, wiped clean, in a pouch by his door. His apology.
As the monks were lifting their spoons for supper, Father Peter stood at the head of the table and tapped his chest twice as a call to silence. Two brothers at the opposite end were stuck in a conversation about the faith of the Moors, and whether it was impolite not to recognize Mohammed when the Muslims recognized Jesus, and which held greater sway in religion, tolerance or veracity; the abbot beat his chest a third time and sharply cleared his throat.
The boy wasn’t there.
“In every orchard is a sickly tree,” the abbot said. “A tree whose branches are weak and hollow.”
Brother Lucius peered over his shoulder toward the window into the garden.
“We tend it with love. We are led by Christ’s example with the prostitutes.”
A few brothers began to murmur. There was an unspoken agreement in the church that it wasn’t one of Christ’s finer moments.
Felix smelled something bitter.
“But if the tree continues to weaken, it threatens the orchard. Its roots will snarl the others. Its dropped leaves will rot in the soil, spreading its disease.”
Sixtus leaned toward Felix. “I didn’t know the Father was such a horticulturalist.”
“Did you see Mino after he came out of the abbot’s study?”
“Before we pray,” the Father continued, “I must inform you of the departure of one of our brotherhood. Not all are called to give their lives in service, and not all are worthy.”
“None of us are worthy,” someone said.
“The child called Mino will not be continuing with us.” No one spoke, so the abbot sat, white-faced. “Let us pray,” he said.
Felix had gone to him that afternoon and explained; he’d left the hook, the boy had admired it, nothing had been stolen, the hook would be in the reliquary by the evening.
“There were other bones in his cell,” the abbot had said.
But this couldn’t be true.
“I could do nothing else.”
Felix, in his brief anger, had ruined the child. Was it impossible to parent? [Yes. We were broken from the start by a creator who withholds His love, who knows not how to communicate it, who can be petty and unyielding. This is our model. His son would teach you to forgive; if you learn this art, or if Mino does, give me a lesson, because my veins are on hellfire, and eating your unanswered prayers has ulcered my stomach.]
After supper, the monks congregated in pockets, three behind a column here, a cluster by the chicken coop, Felix and Sixtus there in the side chapel, contemplating the fishhook restored to its reliquary. Felix should go look for him. The child would be on the streets, lost, parched, and he couldn’t go home.
“Should it have a label?” Sixtus asked. “It’s such a strange-looking thing, I wonder that people won’t know what to make of it.”
“I should go after him.”
“Is there any evidence it’s performed miracles?”
“What’s the opposite of a miracle?”
“He’s not the first boy to be kicked out of a monastery. You have no money to give him. You’re not his father. Do you want to take him an egg? Give him the advice you haven’t already shared? It wasn’t your fault, the hook. The abbot would’ve pinned the theft on one of us eventually. He needed no cause.”
“But I made sure it was him.”
“You think he would’ve been happy here forever? He was like a fox in a cage, already tearing his claws into the corpses.” Sixtus opened the glass lid of the gold box and stroked the hook with one finger. He said a quick prayer, then held his finger in the light, as if expecting some perceptible change. “No,” he said. “He deserves to be a worldly boy. As did you, perhaps.”
“Who wouldn’t want to see inside a body.”
Sixtus closed the box and wiped his prints off the glass with the edge of his sleeve. “I suppose you couldn’t put a label on this that wasn’t partly a lie. In fifty years, no one’ll remember its history, and it’ll be curing palsy.” He started back to his study, to his profane psalter.
“So where are the rest of the bones? Are we meant to keep looking for the thief?”
Halfway across the nave, Sixtus turned, his robe flaring like a dancer’s skirt. “Beloved Brother!” he said. “Your mind is like a new rose. The abbot’s had the relics. Those bones are as good as coins, and the kingdom of heaven on earth only opens with a golden key.” The light from the door to the cloisters briefly washed the gloom, and Felix was alone again.
He knelt before the silver ciborium that canopied the altar and its instruments of eucharist. For all his conviction, he didn’t often speak directly to God. He relied on the structure of formal prayer, on the tangible offering of his own flayed skin, and on his close study of the mortal metamorphosis. But this evening, as his faith in his own decency drained away, he could not help himself. “Let me not be a new rose,” he said. “Let me see it all, the bright and the foul, and let me still believe.”
Rome shone in the spring. The borage and violets were waking up in the parks and through the ruins, and the old stone columns looked cleaner now than in any other season, as if a caretaker had come through in the night and scrubbed them all with lime. The farmers’ stalls were fat with the first artichokes. Children who’d been taught to trudge behind their parents now skipped ahead. No one who died in this season could fail to be reborn.
A week after the expulsion, Felix had asked the abbot’s permission to return to the market. Some of the relics were produced after Father Peter’s false accusation, but others remained in a sack under the Father’s bed and were still claimed missing. By now, everyone knew. Silence was a game they were playing. After Mino left, they continued to guard the nave in shifts, un
sure which lies were still in favor. Felix suggested the relics might still appear for sale, and the abbot, his cheeks as cadaverous as Brother Giuseppe’s, dismissed him with a nod.
Sixtus had helped him write a note, in case he found the boy; he assured him Mino had learned enough under his tutelage to piece together the letters. With the quill in his hand, awkwardly pushing through the loops and bends of the fashionable minuscule, Felix regretted he hadn’t acquired more talents along his journey of existence.
The boy wasn’t curled on the steps of the church, or sitting at the table of the nearby baker, watching the bread rise. He wasn’t racing stones down the Aventine Hill with the other urchins. His white-blond hair wasn’t wisping by the bridge over the Tiber, and his coiled nimble body wasn’t wrestling a pig in the market. The streets were empty of him. Felix was too embarrassed to call his name.
In the busy sweep of commerce between the Temple of Hercules Victor and the squat church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, the relics vendor looked at Felix as if the monk was somehow complicit.
“So he’s been here?” Felix asked.
The stock was diminished, and one foot bone, attributed to St. Marcellinus and half-hidden under a scattering of fishing flies, had obviously come from a roast chicken. The vendor polished a porphyry case with spit. “You couldn’t have spared him?”
“He was gone before I knew.”
“It’s a rank injustice. You monks build your walls and grow heavy with all that pheasant and cream. There’s no charity to your name.”
“Where’s he staying?”
“Very fine of you to accuse me of swindling when it’s your kind who’re so rabid for miracles and money they’d trample over a babe to hoard a few ribs.”
“Is he still in the city?”
The vendor put down his box. A woman in a shawl had stopped to peer over the oddments, but looking at their faces, she hurried on. One of Felix’s faults was this antipathy to others’ disappointment in him. It made him feel sick, never angry at the accuser—sometimes angry at the accuser—but like some maggot in him was curling, beaten back, nauseous. He was the Lord’s shrimpiest servant. This was what the whip was for.
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