“I’m sorry,” he said into the silence. Even if the boy was better off outside, where he could taste all the secular joys, could relish an invisible future rather than staring daily into the fleshless sockets of his own inevitable end, even if his story was all for the good, Felix had lost his own innocence, again. Even now his weak heart hiccupped when he saw the vendor, hatless for spring, his peppery hair jaunty in the wind. What could that traitorous organ possibly still expect? [Son, if it’s not all good, at least it all feels good. Let me raise your hand up to touch that man’s face; come on, a little higher now.] He was motionless. His emotional asceticism had erased any earthly presence he might have had.
The vendor stopped flapping through his scraps of human skin and said with a glint of reprieve, “Have they given you any miracles? The relics at Santa Prisca?”
“There are parishioners who make the claim.”
“So you didn’t rub on a skull and ask for the boy to be spared?”
“I wouldn’t presume,” Felix said, uncomfortable.
The vendor leaned in close across the table and whispered, “Then what the shit is the point.”
Felix did not know what the shit the point was.
The vendor handed him a small glass vial. “Manna that exuded from the arm bones of St. Walburga. I could sell it for four shillings, or I could give it to you and tell you it’s water. Go give it to a thirsty sparrow, and you’ll have done more good than all the monks in this city combined.”
Felix squeezed the glass in his palm and felt ill.
“He’s staying with a friend of mine, a woman who sells flowers by the Pantheon and isn’t too proud to shelter a thief for a few days. Do you want to see him?”
He pulled the note from his sleeve. “If you would give him this.”
“What, an apology?”
“I’ve written down the way to my sister’s house.” His sister, who might be widowed, who might be dead, whose farm might’ve been requisitioned by the Muslims, but who had never failed to love him. What in Rome could say the same? [You expect love from this town? Try Paris, or Philadelphia. This is the city for hustle, for building permanent tokens of human transience, and then building on top of those. No one is remembered except the pulsing city itself, which—sack after sack—refuses to perish. You know about the floods that washed over this field you call a market, and Nero’s fire that set the dancers’ feet alight, and the quake that cracked the windows in St. John Lateran and will repeat its tremor soon, and the volcano that turned your countrymen into well-defined holes that scientists will fill with plaster—the only morbidity that trumps yours—and that tourists with telephones on sticks will stand beside and not weep but grin: for the camera. You know about the Visigoths and the Saracens, but what of the Holy Roman Emperor, who’ll eat this city like a snake eats its young; and the papal troops, who will stop by the house of pregnant Giuditta Arquati on the street where you met the eel seller, and she, waiting for Garibaldi and wielding bombs and crying Viva Roma, will watch her young son slaughtered; and worst of all, when in 2016 this sacred marble assembly begins drowning in the dung of a million goddamn starlings? Above their waste, another layer of tile—shh—until the city climbs so high the rising seas will bring it refugees in droves, and God will have to ask Himself: Is this a shrine to me, or another Babel?]
Felix took the vial of water back to the church. Alone in his cell, he placed it next to his whip and considered each in turn. If a sparrow had alighted on his sill, he would’ve fallen to the floor in tears, but that wasn’t the way the world worked.
He was asking Bernardo to help rid him of his bitterness, Bernardo whose cheeks were beginning to sag and whose flatulence now came in infrequent cannonades, when Lucius came down with timid steps, nose pinched, and whispered into the echoing crypt, “The Father is dying.”
Felix turned just enough on his stool to indicate respectful attention. “He was that ill?”
“We’re gathering outside his cell. The doctor’s come. It doesn’t seem long now.”
His thinness Felix had taken for guilt—the eating kind that’d turned his own chest concave—his pallor a proof he’d refused to do chores.
“Will you come?” Brother Lucius believed everything, he believed language was a conduit for truth; if you told him Jesus Christ had appeared in the sanctuary with a basket of radishes and was tossing them to monks in a game of radish-ball, Lucius would show up with open hands and a helmet.
“Of course,” Felix said. He patted Benedictus’s fresh knee on the way out.
“You’ll have to make space,” Lucius said. “Is the oldest one in there ready to go?”
He wasn’t convinced the abbot could be so close, but in fact, no, the oldest corpse was not yet down to clean bone and would cause a hellish stink if shut up in the sarcophagus too soon.
“Could you squeeze two together on one seat? Matthew was awful skinny.”
The hall outside the abbot’s cell was full of somber men in brown woolens. One flinched when he saw Felix, as if he brought death with him. The doctor was allowing them in singly to share a final blessing. His face suggested a serious illness, but doctors often carried such faces to prove the gravity of their profession. Felix had known monks who’d done it too, resembling martyrs on the rack when singing in the choir, but who in the cloisters would scamper after one another with tickling quills stolen from Sixtus.
The cell was no different from Felix’s; the abbot was beneath the same wool blanket on the same rickety bed, his arms over the covers like he was only half a man. His face had a greenish wash, as if he were underwater, and his eyes were wet and weepy and looked past Felix up to the surface of the sea, where something seemed to flicker at him through the waves. His upper lip was damp, and if he’d tossed aside his blanket to reveal a mass of tangled seaweed where his organs should have been, Felix would not have been surprised.
He knelt by the bed and kissed the abbot’s hand. It tasted of brine.
“Bless me, Father,” he said.
“You keep the crypt,” the abbot said.
“I did not know you were sick.” That is to say, would not have cursed your name for the lies you told about Mino, for how you tied me to his fall, for the thefts you alone were responsible for, for the funny bow-legged way you have of walking that caused me briefly to think you’d been riding the Devil’s donkey. “I have sinned against you in thought,” he said.
“I would sin against you,” the abbot said. “I’d wish you not to take me there.”
“Oh, I’m not the ferryman, sir.” He sat back on his heels. The abbot’s chin, slightly stubbled, was like his father’s; the morning he was supposed to depart, Felix woke early and crawled from mattress to mattress, studying the sleeping forms of his family. His father had looked strangest, the face smaller in sleep and nearly innocent. It had been enough to imagine he’d be sorry to see him go—or rather, after priding himself on having acted righteously and with masculine stoicism, his father might find himself on a balmy evening twice a year experiencing some brief wistful thought of his oldest son. Would wonder where he was.
Felix took the abbot’s hand again and put a gentle pressure on each middle knuckle in turn. “You know of the soul, Father. I have no keeping of that. It flies on soft winds to Christ’s lap. This body is merely skin on fat on muscle on bone. It was only here to get you through this world, the business of walking and speech. You never loved it, and you won’t need it. You have nothing to fear. This is a relief. This is your reward.”
The abbot had closed his eyes, but his brow wasn’t smooth; his lips opened dryly, but he made no sound. Felix felt something spoiled roll off his heart and waddle away, perhaps to find a home under the bed with the other purloined bits of flesh.
“I thought they’d cure me,” the abbot said.
Felix pressed into the bones of the dying man’s palm, felt them shift among the veins and tendons. What person’s remains first birthed a miracle? Was it the Jew Elisha, into
whose tomb someone tossed a body and the body then came to life? [Or was proximity to the dead always just a game of chicken, coming that close to one’s ultimate fear a guarantee of adrenaline, that sweet chemical that makes earth’s certainty bearable? You and I have more in common than I thought. Let me set your own timer now. I’ll turn your mutating cells to the five-minute mark—there’s the telltale tick.]
But the stolen heaped relics hadn’t cured him. He’d snuck through the nave at night with a robber’s sack to no avail. He’d hoodwinked his own brotherhood, robbed the catacombs, sacrificed a novitiate, and cheated a congregation, and here he lay in that inevitable watery in-between, a single fish, alone.
The doctor touched his shoulder and indicated that his audience was complete, and Felix left the room without hearing the abbot speak again, and a senior monk replaced him to perform the last rites, and it was all real—the Father was really dying, and this drama was for nothing, and even as it concluded it had no conclusion. His only job now was to shift the corpses below to make room. He understood mortality but had no answer for the living.
“Do you know who else has died?” Sixtus asked while the abbot was still in the long act of perishing. “The pope.”
“Another pope?”
Sixtus leaned against the door to the crypt, his sketching paper beneath his arm. After months of study, he was finally drawing animals that appeared to be vertebrate. Felix was calculating how he’d make the shift in bodies, whether the abbot’s presence in the putridarium would make the other bodies clam up, quit their dead-person gossip. Bernardo was just entering that magic state between human and skeleton when the recognizable becomes otherworldly.
“Does it make you question your pledges to the church?” Sixtus asked.
“Wasn’t Stephen already in jail? Poisoned?”
“Strangled,” Sixtus said. “A twist.”
“The pope isn’t my god.”
“Shouldn’t he be a translator?”
Felix took a comb to Benedictus’s hair—Benedictus, who was feeling left out. “God knows what’s afoot. I like to think he’s reminding us of the challenge he set.”
“We’re soldiers in the wilderness, is that it?”
“We’re wilderness in the middle of war.”
Sixtus scratched his chin with his stylus. Two weeks before, it had been Mino in this room, carving into the mysteries of the world with a poor-repaid innocence, asking all the questions. At least the tears wouldn’t have lasted long. He didn’t have a monk’s patience for misery, that lost son, and was all the more blessed for it.
“What sorts of things did he ask?”
“I don’t seem to know when my mouth is closed. Was I speaking of Mino?”
Sixtus stuck the pen behind his ear. “I only stand the stench down here because you get so lonely.”
“I’ve never been lonely!” He smiled when he said it. Felix had nearly mastered the art of self-containment; only a friend without ego could have spotted the cracks.
“He’d ask why they keep farting.”
“Of course,” Felix said. “But also whether they’d still look so ugly in heaven, where all things should be perfect.”
“And will they?”
“Augustine says no—we’ll all be smoothed over, our blemishes unblemished, our hair and nails trimmed. Only the martyrs will keep their scars, which are holy prizes. But the fat will be thin, and the skinny will be given lovely curves. Infants will age to the height of their potential, and the elderly will lose their years. Everyone will be thirty. Everyone will look like Jesus.”
“Sounds nice. This is what you told the boy?”
Felix set the comb down and took in the grotesque lineup of his charges: heads askew, hands flopped, lips pulling back over empty gums, a few tongues lolling, everyone’s bottom bare. “No. I told him my little sacrilege.”
“You think we rise up to the Lord like this.”
He looked over at his friend, the man who without show or emotion had been steadfast far beyond Felix’s own family or first love. There were dark nights when even his happiest self thought he had nothing. What folly. So he would never have a wife or a child, never have a kiss or a fumble, so he had been banished from them who’d raised him, so he’d taken on his own heavy sins. Still God provides.
“I think we rise up to the Lord with every mark of life blazoned on us,” he said. “It’d be an insult to give up anything he gave.”
“Rolls of fat included.”
“And a knocked nose, and all our teeth gone lost, and the hair on our scalp half-missing and frizzed, and our toenails yellow and thick.”
“Our pimples full of pus, one failed hip, ears that droop to our chins, an arse still stocked with shit.”
Felix smiled. “What a glory.”
The Paradise
[ 165 ]
The bearded man did not survive. Hierax, and Justin, and Chariton, and whoever else the prefect dragged in made their confessions. They said yes to are you a Christian, and when it was asked who taught you, Paeon said his parents, and Euelpistus said his parents, and Hierax the bearded man said his parents, and to the follow-up where are your parents, Hierax said what all the others wished they’d been smart enough to say: “Christ is our true father, and faith in Him is our mother.” Earthly parents were a disappointment, again and again. Christ was her father. Faith was her mother. The prefect asked the men to sacrifice to the idols, and they refused. Were their teeth chattering? Did they glance sideways at one another? Did they think of all the tangible treasures of this world, which are not guaranteed to exist in heaven? [I slipped into their skulls and squeezed out their tears. In a few months, they’ll arrest Felicitas and her seven sons, killing each of the boys before their mother’s dry gaze—there Januarius is broken beneath the strap with nails, there buckles Philip’s head under the club, there goes Silvanus’s body off the Tarpeian Rock; after each, she merely adds a prayer to her litany. Her models will not be these bearded men.] A burly man with a thick leather whip beat them until their skin split open and then—
“Prisca, the eggs for dinner,” her mother said. The men in the room turned with surprise; she’d been hiding under the table by the door. Their beards hid how pale they’d become.
The hens were not laying as much in the drought, but she found four speckled eggs and one the size of a fat marble, still rubbery in her hand. The coop was warm and dusty, and her head ached. How much easier to be an animal. To pee in the straw, and sleep in the field, and have no thought but for hay or milk or sex. (Yes, Prisca knew.)
After dinner, her mother finished the story. “Beheaded,” she said.
She wanted to think entirely of them, of their last moments, as she lay in her bed staring out at the cooling night and the smatter of stars, but Crispus kept rising in her like bubbles. Her body, her mother told her, now had a purpose. The blood was a gift from Ceres. She was being welcomed by an army of women into this wombiness, and even her sober mother got wet in the eye when describing how the inside of her was ready to play hostess.
“But to get that baby I’d have to lie down with someone,” Prisca had said.
“No,” her mother had said, biting a thumbnail. “You have some years yet. That’s not to be thought of.” And she quickly switched to talking about the mare in the stables that was full with foal, and how Prisca should watch when the time came, making birth seem like a lovely secret pact between a girl-thing and a child-thing.
Oh, but the lying down was to be thought of. She had two small wooden cows that she used to bang together, bottom to bottom, to produce a calf; there was nothing romantic in it. Nor was she impressed when she and Servius stumbled upon a pair of male slaves crouched behind a mausoleum on the road to town, tunics hoisted up and pale thighs quivering. Her brother had stuttered back and turned red and laughed and walked ahead very quickly. The body was a source of smells that needed masking, a place for grime to collect. Why would people want to put them so close together? [Because huma
ns are cold, cold, and cannot feel their own heat. And oh, the silk of the underside of an upper arm . . . Sometimes I think God made bodies for me— Am I dwelling? Would you tell me, mini-saint, if I needed to move on?]
But in the past few months, her curiosity had outpaced her disgust. Even her unclothed mother rising from the baths made her twitch, made her want a body that someone would find desirable, made her desire. Idiocy. Her own breasts like toy pyramids. Her interest in the lying down, the things people did to make the twitch stop (or to make the twitch worse?), this had the same gruesome fascination as the disemboweling of a goat—it was a dark horror, a secret she couldn’t touch. The thought of her body having a purpose was natural and pleasurable, but the purpose that was proposed—spitting out another human, and having a foreign object stuck into it along the way—seemed inadequate. To be poked into and pushed out of, like something static, something without legs, without a brain.
Yes, she replayed the kiss like it was a single hieroglyph painted again and again, with small variations: this one had his tongue against her lip, this one had his hand on her arm—no, her waist; in this one there was no watery space between their hips, but his bones were against her bones, and it got to where she couldn’t remember what had actually happened, maybe it was a hallucination. And she didn’t want to be thinking of him, pagan, but of the better men whose souls were now floating up like holy smoke to heaven. Did the white-sharp cut of the blade on the neck bring any perverse pleasure of its own? Did it jangle the nerves, sear the deep unscratchable twitch in the groin, make the eyes pop with a yes? [Oh, chickie, there is no line between pain and want.] That was purpose. That’s what she wanted to believe in.
She didn’t believe in a nameless girl-child on a nameless farm following her curiosity to a brushy grove where she and a nameless boy-child shed their tunics and figured out how to place their skin against each other to stir pleasure, and after the pleasure burst and the warmth subsided and the boy-child snuck away, the girl-child being left with seeds inside her to sprout into more nameless children, who would grow up to find other bodies to be terrified of, to be hungry for, so that in a few generations, when all the nameless souls were underground, no one would remember anyone.
The Everlasting Page 28