The Son, The Sudarium Trilogy - Book Two

by Leonard Foglia

  “It’s him,” said one of the worshipers, standing near Mano, and what started out as a murmur, spread like a brush fire throughout the congregation. Mano grabbed Claudia’s hand and tried to dart down the aisle, but the crush of curiosity-seekers, already heading his way, was like an impenetrable wall. There was no passage. Hysteria was building in the crowd and the cries were growing louder. “Who is it?” “Let me see?” “You’re blocking my view.”

  Mano took the only escape route possible. Pulling Claudia along with him, he bolted toward the ambulatory, where the last of the procession was exiting and took refuge in the sacristy. Those, who instants before had been celebrating communion with God, were stunned. Mano came face to face with the equally astonished archbishop. “I just need to get out of here,” he said. He felt trapped. The archbishop commanded the altar boys to go outside and guard the door against unwanted visitors, who were already five deep and growing.

  “What’s going on?” Claudia whispered to Mano.

  “Claudia, I need you to do me a favor.”

  “Of course.”

  He handed her the key to his hotel room. “Get my backpack and things from my room. Here’s some money. Pay the bill. I need to get out of town.”

  “Why? What is it?”

  “I’ll explain later.” He redirected his attention to the archbishop. “I assume there’s a way out of here other than the front door.”

  “Of course, there is.” He tapped one of the deacons on the shoulder. “Show the Señorita safely out.”

  “Where do you want me to bring your stuff?”

  “You know the archway in the park, the one that is falling down? The ruin?”

  “Yes, I know where it is.”

  “I’ll meet you there. Thank you, Claudia.”

  The deacon escorted Claudia out a side door, while the archbishop asked those remaining to kindly clear the sacristy. Then he checked to door to the church itself. The crowd was building. When a few flashes went off, he quickly shut and locked the door. He rubbed a hand over his chin reflectively, obviously putting his thoughts in order. There was a minute of silence. Finally, the archbishop spoke, “So you’ve come all this way to perpetuate this hoax of yours?”

  Mano was flabbergasted. “How do you know about me?”

  “I may not be young. But I have a computer. I was sent this preposterous claim of yours on the Internet.”

  “Internet? What are you talking about? I have made no claim.”

  “Well, shall we say then, the claim that has been made on your behalf?”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about? I swear to God.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “What does it say, exactly?”

  “I don’t want to play games with you, young man. What is your purpose?”

  “I have no purpose, believe me.”

  “I presume you came all this way for a reason.”

  “I wanted to see the cloth for myself. I had no idea anyone knew of my existence outside of a small group of people.”

  “Oh, lots know. That’s evident. As you can see. Do you think we always have such mad throngs of people on Good Friday? And now everyone is talking about the cloth. You’ve made headlines in our newspapers with this ridiculous stunt of yours. Claiming to be the Son of God, indeed! What blasphemy! But little did any of us expect we’d get a personal appearance from the star attraction himself. So tell me, why are you doing this?”

  “It’s not me. It’s others who are saying these things about me.”

  “And do you believe them?”

  Mano paused, hung his head in confusion and embarrassment. “I don’t know what to believe,” he replied. “That’s why I came here. I really don’t. My parents told me just days ago that I was not their biological son.”

  “Then whose son did they say you are?”

  “I was told that this…this group of people had engineered my birth.”

  The archbishop registered his surprise openly. “Engineered?”

  “From the DNA of this cloth. My parents tried to keep the information from me, so I could have a life like everyone else. But these people came and found me and revealed to me the circumstances of my birth and what they thought was my destiny.”

  “You haven’t answered me. Do you believe them?”

  “That my birth was something unusual? Yes. Their ultimate claim? No. How could I? How could any sane person believe that?”

  “You must deny it then. Immediately. Before this insanity spreads and damages the church irreparably.”

  “But people won’t believe it, will they?”

  “People already believe it. You saw what happened outside this door. Trust me. I have spent my life in a spiritual search for a small understanding of a God none of us can see or touch. Every day I pray for just a sense of Him, an intuition of His essence. People spend their whole lives in preparation for the one moment when they will finally come face to face with Him. Millions around the earth ask for nothing more. What do you think their reaction would be if they thought the wait was over, the second coming was here? Christ has returned! Everyone wants quick and easy answers these days. And for many, you would be that answer. You think this story - this hoax - will just go away? Not when billions of people cry out for relief from their misery every day. You would be their hope, everything they have been waiting for. Are you ready to relieve their suffering? Of course, you aren’t. You can’t. And here is the sad part, even if you deny it, there will be those who are so desperate to believe, they will continue to do so as long as you live. No matter what you say.”

  “What do you suggest I do then?”

  The archbishop suddenly found himself bereft of words, not knowing himself what he should be thinking or saying. How could he decide the whole of a man’s destiny in the snap of a finger? The young man’s face was registering so many emotions, it was difficult to continue looking at him. It was like watching a film on fast-forward. Too much information, too much pain, too much searching - all passing by so quickly - it was impossible to process.

  Mano broke the silence in the sacristy. “May I ask something?”

  “Of course,” replied the archbishop, relieved not to have to pontificate for a while.

  “Is it possible – conceivable even – that someone actually did take blood samples from this cloth?”

  The priest guided Mano to a table in the center of the sacristy, where the cloth lay on a table, before it would be returned to the Camara Santa. The reddish-brown stains were more visible up close. But there was no pattern to them, no coded message. They were like a Rorschach test: a person could read into the blots and smudges whatever he chose. Only one simple truth seemed incontestable to Mano: These were traces of the blood of a man who had lived and died. It could have been the blood of a farmer or a soldier. The blood of anyone. And because of that, for the first time, he thought of Jesus as a simple human being, a creature of flesh and bone, both penetrable, both perishable. The stories in the Bible always seemed apocryphal to him, compared to this homely cloth that said a man, some man, was born and suffered and died in agony two thousand years ago. Perhaps no more than that could ever be known.

  The priest pointed to a corner of the cloth. “See this here. A small piece is missing. It is a long story, but I will be brief. Twenty-seven years ago today, Don Miguel Alvarez was putting the cloth away in the Camara Santa, as he did every year after the service. Because he was a very devoted man, he was allowed a few moments alone with the relic. In fact, he died that year, while praying before the cloth. That was the story the media carried – a devoted priest who died of a heart attack with the blood of Christ in his hands. How fortunate, he was! How blessed, we all said.

  “The guard who accompanied Don Miguel and waited outside until he had finished his prayers had a different story to tell. Minutes passed and Don Miguel had still not emerged from the Camara Santa. So the guard went in and found his body on the floor. Fortunately the cloth had been
unharmed. Or so we thought. So it was locked way. I was a young priest here at the time. But when we checked on the cloth later, we found this small corner missing. The cardinals came and the decision was made not to make the information public. For many years, we did not display the cloth, fearing that the missing piece would we noticed. But people desperately wanted to see it. So the decision was reversed and we started exhibiting the cloth again. When older photographs were compared with newer ones, the difference was apparent. The official explanation was that we had allowed a small sample of the cloth to be taken for scientific analysis. And that was that. No one ever challenged the explanation.”

  Mano was riveted to the archbishop’s words. “But how could anyone get in?”

  “Yes, we wondered that ourselves. The guard was a trustworthy man and we believed him when he told us that Don Miguel had been alone in the Camara Santa. Then just before his death - in confession - he admitted to me that he had abandoned his post for a few minutes that night. After locking up the church earlier, he realized that he had left someone inside – a woman. American, I recall. He ushered her out. But for those few minutes, the Camara Santa was left unguarded. We have long since speculated that this woman was a diversion, but we will never know for sure. If the guard knew more, he took it to his death soon after.”

  “May I ask if you believe this is the blood of Christ?”

  The priest sighed. His impatience with the young man was growing short. He had already devoted too much time to him. “What I believe is my private business,” he answered crisply. “Belief and fact don’t always coincide. All that matters is faith. In God and His church. Understand me when I say that it is my job, above all, to protect the church.”

  Mano examined the missing piece of cloth again. “My mother was a virgin when she gave birth to me?”

  “What?”

  “She was a surrogate mother. The egg was implanted in her. She was 19 years old.”

  “Sweet Jesus!” the priest exclaimed vehemently. “This story just gets better and better.”

  “It isn’t a story,” said Mano, raising his voice in anger for the first time. “It’s the truth. My truth. It’s the reality of me!”

  “Think of the billions who would be led astray by such a heresy,” the archbishop riposted. He was getting flush in the face and his right eye had begun to twitch. If his displeasure had not been so apparent, Mano would have thought he was winking. There was no levity in his voice, however. “Because that’s what you are, a walking, breathing heresy,” he shouted. “Every element of this story may be true, but there is one thing I can tell you with utmost certainly. It is not the work of God.” He paused, trying to gather his composure, but his pulse was racing too fast by now and his eye twitched with what under any other circumstances would have been comic regularity. Then without further hesitation, he grabbed Mano’s head in his thin hands, stared him straight in the face and thundered, “You are the work of the devil. The devil at his most creative!”

  Mano fell back, as if he had been punched in the stomach. The breath went out of him and it took him several moments to regain his equilibrium. But when he did, he extended his hand toward the cloth. The archbishop stepped forward to stop him, but before he could, Mano placed his palm directly on the cloth. The archbishop was paralyzed with fright at the harm that might come to the precious relic. But Mano merely held his hand on the cloth, as if he might somehow absorb the blood on it and his mysterious parentage might become clear. He had felt at one with the atoms of the earth. Why could he not co-mingle with the blood of the cloth, if it was indeed his, as well?

  But he felt nothing. And the one emotion he had not yet experienced in his strange odyssey finally overwhelmed him: despair. He wailed. He wailed like a wounded animal. Then he began to weep. The archbishop watched helplessly, as the young man’s body became racked with sobs. Tears flooded his eyes, then ran down his cheeks, his chin. Then to the archbishop’s horror, several tears fell on the cloth itself, where they mixed with spots of the dried blood, changing their color from dull brown to bright red.

  Mano pulled his hand from the cloth, as he would from a scalding stove, and without looking back at the priest, ran blindly from the sacristy.

  2:40

  They were prisoners in their own home again. What had begun as a handful of curiosity seekers with the YouTube airing had grown steadily so that at any given time of day or night, at least fifty people waited outside the house on Venustiano Carranza for a glance of the new savior. Failing that, one of his family members would do - proximity to sanctity being almost as noteworthy as sanctity itself. Every time Jimmy opened the door or Hannah cracked a window, a flurry of excitement surged through the crowd. The vigil continued after dark with the lighting of candles. Sometimes there was singing, broken by wails of faith.

  The press was back in force. After all, what better story for Holy Week, the Second Coming! It not only dwarfed all the earlier accounts of Mano’s survival in the mudslide in the Sierra Gorda, but it lent them an authenticity in retrospect. Old footage of Mano limping down the hillside was aired alongside the YouTube video. Together they were taken as irrefutable proof of Mano’s divinity.

  Jimmy closed the store until further notice, screened all the phone calls and finally disconnected the doorbell when the continuous ringing became impossible to ignore. The police came by once and dispersed the crowd, but two hours later, it had reformed and the police didn’t bother a second time.

  Hannah found the safest way to observe the crowd was from their azotea, the roof garden that overlooked Venustiano Carranza. If she stood far enough back from the edge, she could still see and not be seen. A block away, the procession of silence was already underway and groups of hooded penitents were making their way down Cinco de Mayo. The sharp retort of the drums sounded like gunfire to her. She had always viewed the procession as ugly and barbaric. It was made up of ordinary people, some of them probably her neighbors. But barefoot, dragging chains from their ankles, lugging heavy wooden crosses on their shoulders, they seemed to belong to a different species, a species whose zeal scared her. Some of those very people, were now clustered in front of her house, she was sure, waiting for the chance to see her son and clutch at his body. All of them in their way were desperate for the same thing: redemption.

  Her eye was attracted by two middle-aged men at the back of the crowd, one slender and nattily dressed in a cheap beige suit; the other, burly and thick-featured, more a worker type. They shared a certain coldness that set them apart from the others. She tried to place them. Then it came it her. The man in the beige suit had threatened Mano after the mudslide, warning him not to meddle in local politics, and his burly companion had backed up the warning with simian grunts. They had returned. What would they do to Mano now, if they got hold of him?

  The drumbeats from Cinco de Mayo punctuated the dread she felt. There was no way their son could come home. He would be expected here. People were already waiting. He needed to be with someone they knew, someone trustworthy, someone faraway who would keep him safe. There was only one person: Teri! Even though Hannah hadn’t seen her in twenty years, certain friendships were forever, resistant to the erosions of time.

  She went downstairs eager to share her thoughts with Jimmy.

  “Dad just slipped out to check on the store,” Teresa said. “He’ll be right back. He said not to worry.”

  But Hannah did worry. Time mattered. On an impulse, she picked up the phone and dialed the old number in Fall River, Massachusetts. After several rings, the familiar voice picked up.

  “Who’s calling and what you got to say?”

  “Teri?”

  “Ya. Who’s this?”

  “It’s Hannah. Remember me?”

  Teri drew in a deep breath. “Good Gawd Almighty! Hannah Manning. Hon, you are not someone easily forgotten.”

  She stood in her kitchen in Fall River, the phone in one hand, a can of oven cleaner in the other. For a second, it seemed like
yesterday: her best friend calling to chat. But it wasn’t yesterday; it was twenty years later - twenty years during which children had grown up and left home and whole lives had been led. Just hearing Hannah’s voice was enough to make her realize how long there had been an empty spot in her heart.

  “Imagine hearing from you after all these years!”

  “I’m sorry, Teri. You did so much for us and it’s been so long. I don’t know where to begin. So much has happened and it’s so hard to explain.”

  “You always said that.”

  “I think of you often, believe me.”

  “Well, I should hope so. Are you still in Canada?”

  “No, we never went to Canada. That was something I wrote you to throw those people off our track. We’ve been in Mexico all this time. I figured it would be easier for you, if you didn’t know.” It occurred fleetingly to Hannah that she was using the same argument her son had made just before leaving: What you don’t know, you can’t tell. Events seemed to be repeating themselves.

  “Well, you were right. Because those nuts showed up in the diner, not long after I got your postcard. I played ignorant. Guess I didn’t have to pretend, after all. In fact, I never told anyone what happened back then. Oh, once, I tried to clue Nick in, but he thought I was just exaggerating things, as usual. He never really considered me a serious person. Oh, good enough to put some bread on the table and keep the kids dressed. That was about as far as it went.”