When I’m loving Lisa, I don’t feel dead. I don’t feel dead at all.
I know I’m betraying my promise, insulting my Savior, putting another nail in his cross, as they told me in catechism, but in that moment, when my heart explodes with pleasure and my muscles tense up, I’m alive. Like her eyes, filled with desire, and her kisses, and her moans. Like my cock when it gets hard.
I didn’t feel dead with the girl in the homeless shelter either. No, not even a little.
And not with Dena, who made me come like nobody else: My sins are the life you bestowed on me, my Father who art in heaven.
As for death, I feel its presence at other moments, and every time it comes courting it wants to stay and stay. It caresses me, it smiles at me, it promises me peace.
It tells me to stop deluding myself: Nothing means anything. To grow is to understand, and to embrace death is a sign that one has understood everything, completely. There’s no need to be afraid of the void; it’s the only thing that exists. And it makes no sense to extend this voyage, which takes us out of nothing and carries us back to nothing.
I feel death when I no longer see you in the eyes of the person before me, my Father who art in heaven, and up there where you are, you can’t feel such things. Because during those moments, heaven doesn’t exist either.
I feel death when I administer the last rites and promise the sick person true life; the one that’s coming to an end is only a passage, I say. But in reality, sometimes I think there won’t be anything besides bodily decay and dust. And worms.
The last time I administered the holy oil, I found myself looking at the fingernails of a man who was still young. The sickness in his blood, having brought his body low, was finishing its work. He had little time left, perhaps only a few hours. Nevertheless, when that young man with the extinguished eyes breathed his last, his fingernails would keep on growing, heedless of his death. And so would his hair, which his disease, as indifferent as nature, had thinned out.
Lisa’s biopsy report had come on Good Friday, but I resisted making facile connections: There’s no day that’s not Easter and Christmas, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. There’s no day that doesn’t bring death and resurrection, mud and spirit.
I was in prayer on that day, on the Friday so dark there’s not even a mass. Churches without lights frighten me, I admit it; unlit churches make me think about the end of all things. My church is the only home I have, and it, at least, must always be full of light. On that dark day, there’s no miracle of the bread that becomes body and the wine that becomes blood. The entire Friday is petrified by the cry that makes my wrists tremble and fills me with anguish and fear: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
That’s what I too feel like crying out, every Good Friday and every day when I’m aware of falling. And I’ve never been nailed to a cross, nor have I ever saved anyone.
I prayed with my eyes closed, opening them now and then to stare at the crucifix. I’m on the lookout for miracles every waking moment; I was hoping it would speak to me, that wooden statue, hoping it would say something, hoping it would, as always, save me. And I also stared at the stained-glass windows: Without light I’m nothing, I said to myself.
The next day, I finally grasped the meaning of the Saturday before Easter, even though that meaning had been explained to me in the seminary; only pain can help us to comprehend the truth. That day, suspended between a cruel, desperate death and the Resurrection, contains our entire life. The meaning and the greatness of faith are in that day of waiting, of silence, and Lisa showed that she had a lot more faith than I did.