After a long ecumenical journey involving every known type of public transport, Daphne steps down in a distant village square dominated by a huge edifice as squalid as a seminary. (Yes, I know very well it is a seminary, and I know when it was built, et cetera; I’m just channeling my character’s point of point of view.) She slips into the sterile entry hall and glances mechanically at several crucifixes. For a moment she’s tempted, although after the trauma with the Minotaur she had vowed to collect no more. (Human beings and their best intentions are not worth the paper they’re written on, as they say.) Then she decides she’d rather get it over with quickly.
Down a corridor that smells of Catholic soups she passes a stocky nun with the yellow eyes of a panther, a type to be feared, she knows. She knows nuns like the back of her hand; she could draw up a taxonomy with a dichotomous key to distinguish the various species of hypocrisy, perfidy, and sexual frustration.* She tells the sister why she’s there, and the woman immediately drops her Counter-Reformation benevolence and examines her from head to foot, as you do with a shoe that’s stepped in some dog shit. Unable to find any good reason to throw her out, she turns and heads down the corridor at a fearsome pace. After various turns and penitentiary staircases, she knocks on a door and pokes her head in with pious deference, whispering loudly as only Catholics can. From inside, Daphne is invited to enter; the nun seems indignant, scandalized.
* If there’s a theological question, just one, on which I’m completely in agreement with my beloved (I allow myself the expression since this is merely a footnote, of the kind usually skipped over), it is this.
The room has a window facing the river and a hospital bed that cranks up and down. On the bed, there’s a gaunt old man. He’s wearing a perfectly ordinary cotton T-shirt with long sleeves but Daphne can see right off that he’s a priest. She sees it—even without taking note of the various clerical frills on the night table—in his nosy, shrewd eyes, his sunken yet imperious cheeks, the contradictory tension of his shoulders, the ostentatiously devout position of his hands, in everything. A priest with the pinched face of a Protestant, he’s very pale, his skin that porcelain white that shades green in certain rather macabre paintings. His arm is attached to an intravenous line and his nose has tubes in it. He’s clearly very ill; you might say death is written on his face. He’s a dead man with just a pinch, a tiny pinch, of life in him. And a lot of death.
The not quite dead man has his predatory eye on her and is making small involuntary grimaces of pain, as if even looking at her is an effort beyond his energies. He seems pleased to see her, though. Struck by her appearance, almost frightened, but invigorated. In what is perhaps meant as a gesture of tenderness, he signals to her to sit on a chair beside the bed and with his eyes invites the nun to leave them. The sister goes out, aiming Daphne a look of hate. The unbeliever coughs, embarrassed; she detests priests—especially when they try to act humane.
With someone in this state, you could at most discuss coffins or questions of inheritance; she should have come sooner if she meant to tell him about her string of bad luck and ask for his help. Even supposing that if he were well he’d be in a position to do something, and would wish to. She can’t think why she listened to that wreck of a human, his brain fried by lysergic contact with the Great Universal Consciousness, the guy who’s never got it right in his life, her stepfather. But now she’s in this crappy situation, and she can’t very well beat an immediate escape. Fine, she’ll stick around for a few minutes. Anyway, she’s too weary to run; it feels like she’s got three bags of cement sitting on her chest; it’s hard to breathe. She needs to get some strength back, and some clarity of mind.
The moribund priest stares at her without speaking, wheezing like he’s run a mile. He’s revving his engines for his last gasp, she thinks. His voracious gaze never ceases nipping at her, testing her, trying to find out what stuff she’s made of. He’s serious, grave, a man who’s about to buy something way out of proportion to his means and wants to be sure the merchandise on sale is worth the sacrifice. He stares at her for what seems like eternity, there in that monumental priest-factory so unnervingly silent, the good earth all around it nurtured by polluted water and smelling of bovine excrement.
By now he’s scanned every inch of her body, except, for ballistic reasons, her ankles and her feet. Still, he continues to train those exhausted eyes on her as stubbornly as before. He’s burning up the last specks of life that remain, and he knows it, but he doesn’t lower his eyelids, he doesn’t give up. It’s the strangest thing, though: she’s beginning to find being clutched by that macabre magnet doesn’t bother her so much. No, the more the light from the window facing on the river begins to fade, the more she finds it normal, salutary. It’s almost restful, a relief. Another few minutes and I’m out of here, she says to herself.