I managed to go back to the church and my room without attracting notice—it was late. And before going to bed, I personally washed the bloodstains off my habit.
Sleep never comes when it should. And that night, not even weeping helped: I felt only the anguish of one who doesn’t know how to oppose the evil he causes. And who sees that the mud we’re made from soils the spirit too.
Sister Beatrice and Sister Lorraine rushed to help me when they saw me the next morning. I claimed I’d been mugged on the street, and they preferred not to say anything.
Jorge, on the other hand, was worried by what had happened. He asked me if I wanted to file a complaint.
“No, indeed not,” I said. “It was just two boys, two dopeheads.” That detail added to the sum of my shame.
Jorge said he had good news: Father Harrigan was getting better, and they were going to release him from the hospital in the course of the following week. The tough hearts of the Irish, he added, and then started talking about parish-related matters that needed to be dealt with: We had to make an appeal to our parishioners for the restoration of the church organ; we had to find a way to fund the repair of the electrical system; we had to discuss the preparations for Advent and Christmas; and there was a lady who wanted to donate a genuine Neapolitan presepe, a Nativity scene, but setting it up would involve significant expense.
I went to the hospital in layman’s clothes, not my priest’s habit. I felt sure that any remark the sight of a battered priest might elicit would strike me as the wrong thing to say. At least as long as said priest was me.
The physician on duty told me that my nasal septum was broken, and that from then on I would have a boxer’s profile. He seemed amused; maybe he too had figured out who I was. His manners were brusque—he routinely dealt with cases a lot more serious than mine—but he had an easygoing way of displaying his political preferences. A campaign button left over from the last election was pinned to his white coat: Gimme Jimmy.
“Your jaw, on the other hand, shows no sign of fracture,” he said, and then he added, smiling, “Father.” Who did I think I was fooling, I asked myself, while the doctor was explaining that the bruise on my face would gradually disappear.
He told me goodbye and hurried off to examine a black girl who’d been stabbed in the neck and was looking around with wide-open eyes: She couldn’t believe that such a thing had happened to her, of all people.
I waited all day to call Lisa. Before I did, I asked Jorge to let me take his place on confession duty; I always do that when I’m feeling bad.
The misery of the world never changes, but that afternoon Rosa Estrada came to see me. She wanted to tell me she’d managed to break off her relationship with Raul. She’d done it for her little girl, she said, but she felt as though she’d had the wind knocked out of her, because her affair with Raul had been about more than sex. However, she knew she’d made the right choice, and now she only needed to find the strength to love her Sam, and she wanted me to pray for her: Maybe the reality is that she’d never loved him.
She added that my severity had been what convinced her; she’d never known a priest who talked to her so forcefully, and for that she thanked God.
Now she was asking me to pray that she wouldn’t fall back into sin, because she thought about Raul every day, every hour, every second, and she remembered all the things they’d done, things she was dying to do right then, at that very moment.
She stopped talking for a moment and then apologized: You don’t talk that way to someone who represents Jesus on earth.
I thought back to her words later, when I called Lisa on the telephone. She immediately asked me how I was; she’d been worrying about me.
“No, I’d rather hear about how you are,” I replied, but she limited herself to telling me that we’d talk on the weekend, after Arthur’s departure.
Before hanging up, she said softly—her brother must have been there—“I miss you.” She’d never told me that before.