The Body

by Richard Ben Sapir

  His name was correct, even at the door, and then the Jesuit there stepped aside, and a priest in long black robes, and with very formal pronunciations of English, speaking in an Italian accent, announced that the Americans should follow him.

  They rode up in a small, creaky elevator in groups of three. The priest guided them to a sparse, white-walled room with a giant black crucifix. There were folding chairs before a lectern.

  The priest took the lectern, and immediately shot down Jim’s theories of a computer foul-up.

  “All of your histories have been thoroughly studied. We are not going to need all of you. We are looking for one. We have, through the most helpful cooperation of your father general, been given access to all the current histories of Jesuits. I can only tell you I am from the office of Almeto Cardinal Pesci himself.”

  “He is the Secretary of State of the Vatican, right?” asked one of the Jesuits, with a Texas twang in his voice.

  The Italian priest smiled nervously, as though the man had to verify the most obvious fact of civilization. Did one ask “Jesus Christ?” when Christ was mentioned?

  “Yes, yes. Of course,” he said.

  “Are we going to meet our father general, Pedro Arupe?” asked Jim.

  “Please, please,” said the priest for the Secretary of State.

  “If we are not selected, can we meet him anyway?” asked Jim. The man was a hero of his and of many other Jesuits. A Basque, Father Arupe was in Nagasaki the day the atomic bomb was dropped there. He had brought change to the Jesuit order, the first in centuries. Jim was one of the new Jesuits.

  “I don’t know. Please, no more questions,” said the priest. “Now, are any of you in any state of emotional turmoil? Is anything bothering you?”

  “I don’t see how it’s possible not to be,” said the Jesuit with the Texas twang. He was identified as Dr. Robert Griffiths, of Stanford University, a Biblical archaeologist.

  “You may go downstairs now,” said the Italian priest.

  “That’s it?” said Dr. Griffiths.

  “Yes, you may go home,” said the Italian priest. He had a dark face, with even darker lips, and his skin looked so smooth, and his voice so soft, once Jim had to remind himself the man had just axed his first Jesuit.

  “Any others bothered in any way?”

  “I don’t like the way you just got rid of that guy,” said Jim.

  “And you are?”

  “Jim Folan, Boston College, New England Assistancy.”

  “Uh huh, and do any of you,” said the priest from the Secretary of State, looking at the entire group, “have current physical ailments that bother you, or any ailments that might act up again under severe pressure?”

  There were no answers.

  “I have been informed that you Jesuits have a discipline where you once a year confront each other on whether you can, as you call it, ‘make it on the outside.’ And in this you explore some of your worst possible motives for becoming priests. Your wrong reasons. If any of you would be too embarrassed to disclose them now to me, or the scrutiny of others, in writing, please go.”

  There was hesitation. No one moved. Then Jim’s old teacher from Georgetown got up and left the room.

  The six remaining Americans were given sheets of paper and notebooks to put them in.

  “In detail, please explain those reasons, those wrong reasons why you may have become a Jesuit.”

  Jim Folan clicked the cheap little yellow ball-point pen and, in the building that was the headquarters of his order, began with one simple sentence. It didn’t even need a verb.

  “Premature ejaculation,” he wrote, and then went on into his fears, and into what it was like for him before he entered the order.

  He had wanted to be a Jesuit for a long time, since he had gone to a Jesuit high school. But he didn’t feel he could make it. So he had volunteered for the Marines because at that time he had felt that second only to serving his God was serving his country.

  Many people later wouldn’t understand that, but he had been raised that way, even with a portion in the back of his Catholic Bible for military service, along with marriages, births, confirmations, first communions, and extreme unction of the family members.

  Only when he had been in the killing did he begin to question that. And yet after the war, seeing what happened when America lost, he still questioned. He had taken so many different positions on that war in his own beliefs that he had to come to the conclusion he just didn’t know, and neither did anyone else.

  And when he came back from the Marines he wanted the Jesuits even more, because after the pain, after the deaths, the only thing that made sense in this world was Jesus Christ. There weren’t any other answers after you saw an eight-year-old boy hand a bottle of poison soda pop to your buddy, and then watch your sergeant make the boy drink it himself under the threat of shooting off his testicles.

  Jim Folan had gone into the Marines believing that Jesus Christ was the only salvation of mankind. He left the corps knowing it.

  He had also gone in a virgin. He did not leave that way.

  A Saigon whore had taken that prize when Jim was so drunk he couldn’t even remember her face. He only remembered his buddies cheering him on, and him thinking he wanted to get it over with because he was not going to like remembering it.

  They had thought they were doing him a favor because no one should die a virgin. Even with the taste of rum and lemonade still in his mouth the next day Jim had gone to confession because he knew he shouldn’t die in a state of sin.

  At the cost of betraying his God, however, he had gotten his fighting brothers off his back. After the Marine Corps was a period of deciding.

  It was also a period of waiting. His veteran’s benefits and the bonus he had gotten for his extra work in Laos had put him through Georgetown, as the Jesuits had advised. They wouldn’t take him as a novice until he had his bachelor’s degree. This was the new way of Jesuits, no more seventeen-year-olds. He was talking to the Jesuits, he was talking to Western Electric, and he was also talking to Ginny Spaduto.

  She was a secretary with the Agriculture Department, and said she didn’t want to get married. She wanted her own life, she said. That was all right with him, he wasn’t planning to get married either.

  “I may become a priest,” he said.

  “You’re full of shit,” she said.

  “No. I am,” he said. “I’m taking philosophy, Greek, Latin, and some Hebrew.”

  “C’mon,” said Ginny. They were in her apartment, a small box of a place with some good white light from the windows, and plants drinking in all of it. She had one bedroom, which was the living room also. Two of them could not fit into the kitchen simultaneously. He was on her couch-bed. She was making hamburgers. He had brought a large bottle of red wine.

  “I am. I’m thinking about it, really.”

  “Wanna fuck?” she said sprightly.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “And you’re gonna be a priest?”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “I’m not a priest yet.”

  “You’re full of shit, Jim Folan. You just want to get into my pants.”

  “It’s not a ‘just,’ Ginny. That’s one of the priorities of our relationship.”

  “Jim Folan,” she said, pointing an accusing spatula, “you’re full of shit. I swear to God Almighty, you are full of shit.”

  He had laughed. It was a good dinner, and the wine was good because there was a lot of it, and while they were watching television he felt her lean into him, and she noticed he wanted her very much. He was hard. He had been like that through supper.

  What he didn’t tell her was that for most of their two dates he had been like that. She had those dark features that seemed so organically right for joining with him.

  He was burning as he sucked her lips, and then kissed her breasts, and when she pushed off her white panties he felt the intense moisture between
her legs, and knew she was ready too. He entered, smooth as oil through a valve, and then he exploded. It was over.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” she said.

  But the next time was the same, and so was the next. He even tried masturbating once before he took her out, but it only took him longer to get erect with her and when he came it was just as immediate as before, and had to be just as unsatisfying for her.

  The last time she didn’t tell him “That’s all right.” She asked him if he wanted a soda.

  She was the second woman he had had sex with.

  In Georgetown he had been meeting irregularly at a Jesuit formation house with a novitiate rector, and he told him about both women.

  “Are you sorry for it?” asked the rector.

  “The sex?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am.”

  “Do you intend not to do it again because it is an offense against God, a separation between you and God, a mortal sin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you are forgiven. Go in peace. What is your problem?”

  The problem was, and it came up at the end of his first year, at the long retreat, the suspicion that he may have chosen the priesthood because he couldn’t make it as a sexually active man.

  In the Jesuit Curia, with the notebook in front of him and only two hours of sleep, he organized and set down his reasoning for his doubts.

  “I had wanted to be a priest, but the above-mentioned problems may have been the deciding factor, that last mite on a balanced scale. It certainly was not the major factor. But it has lingered within me as a suspicious deciding factor in that very vulnerable time of decision.”

  And then he added one more necessary thought:

  “Since I have become a Jesuit and grown spiritually, that is not, to my deepest belief, a factor anymore.”

  A bell rang, and his group was led to an eating hall, but it was not the great hall he had heard about where Jesuits here ate their meals. It was like dining in a bowl of wisdom.

  Some men wore sports jackets like Jim, one wore a suit, most wore black suits with collars, but two wore the cassock. There were at least a half-dozen languages being spoken as they discussed exhaustive minutiae of archaeology, which Jim would not have understood in English, either.

  They seemed so monumentally concerned with trivia. Jim wondered if he dropped a plate here, would other men centuries later be as involved as his brother Jesuits in discussing the fragments?

  The luncheon meal was salad beans, lots of bread, chicken, and a white Chianti. They were served by priests Jim believed to be Jesuits. They had all been told not to discuss what was going on even among themselves, should they suspect what was going on.

  Half the seats in this eating hall were empty, with place settings sparkling clean in front of them. Jim estimated those were the ones who had already been sent home, thirty out of forty-eight. Might have been bad planning.

  There were eighteen men left from around the world.

  They lingered over their lunch, with no one coming for them. Finally, priests Jim assumed to be from the Secretariat came in with armfuls of the notebooks the Jesuits had written on.

  The priest who had conducted the first test returned also. He gave one notebook to a Jesuit and told him he could keep it or destroy it. He was free to leave. Only two Americans were left out of ten.

  He took Jim up to the small room where the testing had first begun.

  “Father Folan,” he said, “you are not engaged in any sexual affairs now, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Is that a weakness of yours?”

  “Since I became a novice, I have not had an affair with a woman, nor do I intend to.”

  “I see. Do you have homosexual affairs?”

  “No.”

  “Is there anything anyone could use to sully your name in any way? Anything? You do not have to tell us. But we must know.”

  “Nothing to my knowledge.”

  The priest smiled. “You know, in your case, perhaps God was working through your special problem to bring you to the Church.”

  “That’s theologically impossible, since fornication outside marriage is a sin, and whereas God will use the result of sin for good purposes, he does not use sin itself. You see, theologically that’s impossible.”

  The Italian priest fluttered his hands as though Jim Folan were talking trivial nonsense.

  “That’s basic theology. It’s the law of God,” said Jim.

  “Yes, yes. Thank you. Would you please send up the other Jesuit who was in our little group?” The priest pointed to his watch; apparently he felt this was a waste of time.

  Jim went downstairs to the dining room and sent up the other Jesuit and sat down to another cup of coffee. He had assumed in Italy the coffee would have to be good. It wasn’t. He had a glass of water.

  There were now seven men in the room. The other American Jesuit didn’t come back.

  The seven men were taken to a single room, where they were all given glossy lined papers and pens.

  “You have until dinnertime. Answer this question as thoroughly as you can within the time limit,” said the priest. “Why do you believe Jesus Christ is God?”

  Jim Folan clicked the cheap little yellow ball-point pen and made a scratch on the glossy lined paper. The pen worked. He thought of stating Thomas Aquinas’ five proofs of God, and then going on to establish the proofs that Christ was God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father. There was scripture and tradition and supportive evidence for both. It would be neatly organized, easy to finish by supper, and would take roughly ten good essay pages.

  And it would be the wrong answer. The question was, why he believed Jesus Christ was God.

  And he wrote down his answer. It was brief:

  “I believe Jesus Christ is God because I spoke to Him this morning in my prayers and have known He was God since childhood. I cannot ever remember not believing Jesus was God, and not knowing He was my best friend, even though I have not always been His.” Jim Folan handed in his paper and left as six other men simultaneously looked up from their papers.

  “Is there nothing you wish to add?” asked the priest from the Vatican Secretariat.

  “Nope. That’s it,” said Father James Folan, S.J. It was all there. The rest of his life, and all his studies, had only been an embellishment.

  He was taken back down to the dining room, where he waited, and dozed off to sleep, hoping that in his lifetime he might find out what this was all about. There was no guarantee that whatever transpired here would be made known in his lifetime, or anyone’s lifetime, or even if the result of whatever this mission was for came to light internationally whether he would recognize his little part in it as being one of those considered.

  Through the centuries, especially during those times when the Catholicism of nations was threatened, the Church had called upon its Jesuits for crucial, often desperate missions.

  Most people thought of Jesuits only as great scholars, but their first calling was as soldiers of Christ.

  They were the Pope’s men for times of crisis.

  Some countries even banned the order. Often Jesuits would be killed, with the Church so careful of its privacy of motive that never a word was spoken from Rome to protest or even acknowledge the deaths.

  During the early 1960s scores of oriental scholars disappeared from the order without a word ever being mentioned publicly, where they went or where they died. The order itself did not speak of it, but J’s knew they were just no longer among them, and word inside the order was they would never come back.

  Jim was sure the Church was now looking for something in the Middle East, something ancient. This would explain the archaeologists and the Semitic scholars.

  But it would not explain him. What was he doing here?

  Jim did not think about this long. He wa
s tired and the chair was soft, and he wanted to give himself up to sleep. He was sure the next round of clerical cuts would eliminate him. He shouldn’t have gotten even this far. Unless, of course, this mission was something beyond anything he could imagine.

  And if that were so, he wasn’t going to waste one moment awake imagining. The chair was soft. The room was warm and he went to sleep with all the comfort of a warm bath in a familiar tub.

  Suddenly someone was tugging on his arm. Jim woke. It was a man. He spoke in a British accent.

  “Yes?” said Jim Folan.

  “Dinner,” said the man.

  “Are you serving?” asked Jim.

  “No, my good man. I am dining. With you.”

  Jim looked around the large room. They were alone. Only two plates were set out.

  “The others have gone home,” said the British Jesuit, and then he introduced himself, and when Jim said who he was, the man confessed he had never heard of Jim Folan.

  “I’m not known for archaeology or ancient history. I don’t think I belonged in this group. I’m waiting to go home.”

  “And I’m waiting to be called,” said the British Jesuit. “Frightful, I just knew it would be me. I don’t think it’s pride, do you, if you know the level at which you operate? The only question I had was whether these fellows would know. They’re from the Secretariat. All Italian, you know.”

  “Peter should have thought of that before he moved the shop here,” said Jim.

  The British Jesuit laughed. Supper was lentils and little bits of ham followed by a custard dessert that had a promise of sweetness that kept Jim eating. The promise was never kept, and Jim didn’t know why he finished it.

  “I guess we’re going to sleep here,” said Jim.

  And then one of the priests from the Secretariat rushed into the room in a flurry of yellow paper. He was followed by another priest in a black cassock, trying to keep his yellow papers in order. There was fine red piping to his cassock. He was a monsignor.

  Romans, thought Jim, used red to show rank too, and he wondered if the thin piping of the monsignor had come from the Roman rank of knight or horseman, with the large amounts of red going to cardinals, just as the Roman pagans had used larger amounts of red to show the higher rank of senator.