The prayer I said every day was a request that I would no longer be a symbol, a reference point. That I wouldn’t be forgotten. But the prayer was wrong, as I well knew.
As soon as I returned to the rectory, I notified Jorge that I wanted to go away. “Like Andrew, my fellow seminarian. And like many other brothers who have devoted their lives to those who suffer. If the Lord has given me any talent, it’s not in the words I speak from the altar, it’s in my actions: I’ve worked on buildings a hundred stories tall, defying and glorifying heaven.”
And Jorge smiled at my arrogance: He knows the world because he knows pain. He’d lost a lot of weight, but I’d never seen him so strong in spirit, so alert. He said he’d talk to the bishop about my request; in the meantime, however, I would have to continue to perform my everyday duties. “We do good even against our will, Abram, and even when we don’t know it.”
After our conversation, I went into the church. All the lights had been turned off, and I tried to pray. I can never find the words when I need them, and the only thing I kept thinking about was the question of whether death was light or darkness. Inside the church, there were only a few candles burning.
The moment when I made my choice crossed my mind, the moment when I prostrated myself before the altar. How many congratulations I had received that evening! I’d become a model to be emulated; the world seemed happy to celebrate someone who had chosen not to be a part of it. And at that moment I was ready to challenge it—the world—and to defeat it, because I was certain I could defeat myself. I remembered the aroma of the incense, the Latin words that made me feel part of an eternal story, and the bells, ringing out in jubilation because among the many who had been called, one had been chosen, one had followed the right path.
Si vis perfectus esse.
How far off that goal is now. But how lovely it was to dream of it, to desire it.
Even strength is a mirage, I thought, and so are promises, choices, even courage: All we can do is learn to be less weak. And to grow less attached to our weaknesses.
I wonder what my father would say about me. I wonder why our Heavenly Father didn’t want me to know my own. And why he didn’t want my father to be by my side whenever I needed him. I wonder what the woman who wanted to denounce me would say at this point. I wonder why she hasn’t turned me in. I wonder if she ever will. I wonder what my uncle Nicola, horrified as he was by my decision to renounce the world, would say now: He’d smile, probably, because I have remained most thoroughly in the world. Or maybe not, because this world is scary as well, and maybe, deep down inside, he’d like to renounce it too. And I wonder what my mother would say, she who needs neither a habit nor promises to have a dialogue with God. And Father John, and Andrew, and Luis, who had lost the love of his life. And the lady in the Amish country who thought I was a rabbi.
In the back of the church, in the pew where the homeless sometimes lie down, Father Harrigan was sitting, and he was having no difficulty praying. Bobbing his head slightly, he talked directly to the tabernacle. He’d recovered, but he was well aware that he didn’t have much time left: a year, maybe two, or maybe much less, a few weeks, a few days. He seemed, however, neither frightened nor resigned; tired, if anything, and in fact, after a short while, he began to snore.
I left without making any noise; I didn’t want to wake him. I stared at the dark stained-glass windows.
Later, in bed, I imagined myself in the mud-walled stilt huts on the outskirts of Manila and in the rust-and-aluminum shacks of Johannesburg. And then in a cold desert, where no one had ever heard of Christ. I felt a need to humble myself, to obliterate myself. To flay myself: My body should serve only to do good to others. I prayed to be sent to the most destitute place in the world, and to have the strength and simplicity of Andrew, whom I had admired and forgotten as I do everything that compels me to look in the mirror. I wanted to feel the weight of life on my flesh: I was spoiled and full of vices and nothing else, inadequate to cope with the reality of our littleness, of our frailty.
The greatest destitution is the destitution of the soul. As I pondered that truth, which I’ve always known, I thought of Lisa, who had been reduced to ashes before me: She would have laughed at these fantasies of mine.
“You’re a romantic,” she often told me, “and you’ve always denied it.” And I wouldn’t say a word, because she knew all my defenses.
It was Sunday evening—I realized it only then—and someone, somewhere, was watching The Honeymooners.
That your joy may be full, I thought; the Gospels help you and frighten you. And I’ve been searching for that joy ever since I was born, but I’ve actually caught hold of it for only a few moments: when I felt I was doing good, and when I betrayed the promises I made. If God is a mystery, so too is happiness, and I’ve never hated him, the Heavenly Father who created me, so much. And I’ve never felt a greater need to beg his forgiveness.
I couldn’t get to sleep that night, and at six in the morning I broke the bread and poured the wine: Our community entrusted the work of salvation to me. And at the end of the mass, Sister Lorraine and Sister Beatrice blissfully sang “The King of Love My Shepherd Is.”
That day I took a long, aimless walk. Eventually I reached midtown and headed east on Fifty-Seventh Street, all the way to the river. I sat on a bench and stayed there until evening, waiting for the lights of the Queensboro Bridge to come on. It happens suddenly, when the sky isn’t yet dark, and the water of the East River assiduously refracts the lights on its way to the sea: It’s a spectacle that has always moved me because it’s produced not for pleasure but by necessity. And it makes me see why I love this city of solitary, energetic people.
Jorge didn’t talk to the bishop, and even though he would probably have listened to me, I didn’t either. And after a few weeks passed, I realized that I never would.
I was put in charge of the umpteenth boiler repair, and one day Jorge called me into his office to tell me that if we were to raise the price of candles to thirty cents apiece, we’d make enough to pay the whole cost of installing the Nativity scene, and there would even be something left over to put toward repairing the organ.
I told him I thought that was a good idea. We should announce it during the masses, I said; our parishioners would be happy to make that little sacrifice.
He asked me to remain personally in charge of the parish administration—I had done such a fine job in his absence, he said. Then he suddenly changed his tone and said he had to speak to me about a matter that had been on his mind for a long time: He wanted me to celebrate his funeral mass, or more precisely, he wanted me to promise to do so. “In all probability, I’ll pass away before you do,” he said, adding, with a smile, “and they tell me you’re good at funerals too.”
I figured he must be sixty years old, maybe a little older, but he was neither elderly nor sick: No telling why he was thinking about death, and no telling what he saw in me. The current rumor was that he’d started drinking again and that he was hiding wine behind the big Bible in his library, but that was just some evil-tongued parishioners’ gossip: He seemed perfectly sober to me.
“We all need young priests like you,” he concluded. “Priests immersed in the world.”
I thought that life is full of irony, even more than mystery, and I gave him my word with a smile, unable to add anything more. Then, that very evening, I began to devote my attention to the parish accounts, and at the end of every mass I explained the reason for the rise in the price of candles.
I’ve spoken no more to Jorge about my desire to go away, and I’ve often gone with him to visit Blanca, the little Ecuadorean girl. We never speak during those visits, but we return home through the park, where he describes to me the provenance of every tree. We clamber over the granite rocks as if we were out in the country, and then we lose ourselves in wonder at what man has built around that enormous garden, whose plants come from every part of the world. Once he pointed out a hawks’ nest on the roof of a Fifth Avenue building. “This city is still wild,” was his only comment. But then he added, “And that’s its appeal.”
Then one day, all of a sudden, he asked me to call Raj back. “It wasn’t him, Abram, and we have to apologize to him.” He didn’t add anything else, there was no need to, and I for my part had been rendered speechless, but that evening, right after dinner, he did some talking for a change, and he quoted a meditation he always returned to, a proposition stated by one of the Desert Fathers: “Both God and the Evil One want you to become a saint. Only the devil wants you to become one right away.”
We all fell silent until Sister Beatrice got up to clear the table and I instinctively followed her.
Then, the next morning, when Raj came back to resume making sandwiches for the homeless, I knelt down before him for all to see. The poor Indian boy couldn’t understand the meaning of my gesture.
That day I felt trepidation at all I had done and then suppressed: I asked myself when I would find the strength to atone. God is merciful, I know, and it may be that my littleness deserves laughter and nothing else, but the role I’ve chosen to interpret is more important than I am.
A few weeks later, I felt a new desire, hot and strong, for a woman who came to make her confession. Nina was her name, and during the evening mass I couldn’t drive a fantasy image of her naked body out of my mind.
I had dinner with Jorge, the nuns, and the old priests. Marlon suggested we see some movies together, he and I; we have to understand how the world expresses itself, he said. A couple of films about the war in Vietnam have come out, and we decided to see them in the following days.
After we finished dinner, Sister Beatrice switched on the television. It was quiz-show night. I stayed and watched for a little while, and then, before retiring to my room, I thanked the Lord for my frailties, my desires, and my fears, which remind me that I’m a man. And I thanked him for my shame, which has never disappeared; that too is a grace.
Later that night, in the solitude of my cheerless room, I got down on my knees, knowing that I would fall again. And again.
And then I tried to sleep, defying the sleepless city.