Barbara could’ve let the time pass harmlessly, here in her kitchen.
The priest, if you could still call him a priest, went on to explain how he’d tried to sustain his faith by his work with the homeless and the illegals. “I believed that among the lost sheep, the least of His children, I’d hear Him plainly again, my Christ. I hoped and prayed that out in the streets, I’d hear it again. Clear as a shout.”
If this man knew how he got to Barbara, how raw he scraped her, he wouldn’t have these doubts. “Father…”
“And it’s not as if the Christ has gone anywhere, don’t you know. He’s still out there, isn’t he, calling for our hands and hearts. If anything, these days—”
“Cesare, please. You talk as if you’ve turned into Silky Kahlberg.”
Something of his former tartness returned. “Well, signora. If you don’t see how the Holy Roman Church can seem as perverse and greedy as NATO, you’re something less than the bright woman I’ve taken you for.”
“Did I say Church wasn’t — wasn’t perverse? Sometimes? The Church and NATO, they’re both of them the Mafia, sometimes. I know that. You should’ve gone to some of the fundraisers back in Brooklyn, Cesare.”
“No, I shouldn’t have. I’ve seen too many abuses of Christ’s teaching as it is.”
Barbara’s hand had dropped from the table, the fight gone out of her. Quietly, she admitted she’d always wondered about the priest. “But still, whatever we talked about — we always talked about Jesus.”
“Witchcraft. Incantations. One speaks the name hopefully.”
When the man turned a phrase like that, his look displayed something a lot like righteousness, and Barbara told him so. “Really, Cesare, what does it matter if you sound like Che Guevara? Better that than Kahlberg’s thing, playing the saint to line his pockets.”
The old man, too, appeared to be softening. He revealed that the last vestiges of belief had left him only a day or so before Barb had first stopped into his church. “It was that pair of refugees, don’t you know, the clandestini down in my cellar.” A day or two before the mother showed up, these two young men had come banging on the door, off-hours. “Banging, yes, quite literally. The bruises on one of them, bruises all over his knuckles. I found him some ibuprofen.”
For Cesare, to have a couple of shadow-citizens come begging for help was nothing new. “They know how to find me, to be sure. Word of mouth, word of the insatiable Neapolitan mouth. Do you realize there are miracle stories about me?”
His smile was like the vein in a dead leaf “Stores about your ‘chosen priest,’ yes. A woman comes to the prete coi Settebelli—the priest with the condoms, don’t you know — and then her brother in the Ogaden eludes the search-dogs. That sort of thing. Some of their stories, you’d think I walked the streets draped with ojetti.”
But Cesare supposed that there must also be talk that was closer to the truth. “Some of them must have some idea what I’m doing in there. Or should I say, what I’m not doing. There must be some who’ve noticed how I avoid saying prayers.”
Barbara figured it was time to risk slicing up the onion. She had the thought that the man might reveal some way to keep him out of Aurora’s clutches, and so return to God. The priest meanwhile explained that, though he’d wound up allowing these two clandestini to bed down in the church, they hadn’t come to him looking for a roof over their heads. They hadn’t come for food or some other kind of handout, either. “Signora, they were there seeking Christ.”
Again Cesare rearranged his knees and elbows. “They were seeking absolution, no less. These two actually believed that a few words, words alone, and out of my own unclean mouth…” The old man needed a moment, his baggy fingers extended towards his face. “That I could wash them clean.”
She waited, her knife in the middle of the white bulb on the cutting board.
Cesare firmed up his expression. “They’d committed a crime, you see. Nothing so terrible really, not in this city. Your classic scippo, come up behind someone and hit him. Take his money. In this case, it did sound as if they’d hit the man rather hard.”
“But you’re saying, these two had faith? And that’s when you knew, you didn’t?”
“You understand, signora, there are things about these two I can’t reveal. I no longer believe in the sacraments, but I daresay you know better than most, I still have—”
Barbara didn’t want to hear any more posturing. “Cesare, what? What’s the big secret? They got a little rough on their latest victim, okay. So, what, were they hustlers too? Hustlers, I mean, the sex trade? One of them had AIDS or something?”
His face screwed up in a wizened and approving pout.
“So, okay. There they were, dying and ashamed. Hey.” She shouldn’t talk like Jay, it made her sound shrewish. “And once you heard that, everything you’d lived by was gone. These two were the thing in the street, not Christ, not your call, but just a pair of crooks. They were full of disease and, and looking for a saint to kiss them.”
He’d never heard about her vision of Naples either.
“You could even say this killed your faith. Just another hit in the street, and for you, it killed Christ. Am I right?” She sounded far too much like Jay. “Okay, Cesare. Okay, for the sake of argument. But, I mean. What has all this got to do with Aurora?”
The man’s hands startled up. “Signora! Surely you can see.” He sketched coils in mid-air. “I’m a man losing every least thread of light and meaning, and then your mother laid her hand on mine.”
“She’s not my mother.”
“Boh. My apologies, I’m sure.” His hands dropped back across his knee. “Signora, are you a woman of faith or aren’t you? A woman of faith should have no trouble at all understanding what I feel for your Aurora.
“Now, let us say, my church had collapsed around me,” Cesare went on, “and an angel reached down through the rubble. It’s a radiant energy your Aurora has, nothing short of numinous. And don’t you go getting all shifty and uncomfortable on me, Mrs. Lulucita. Don’t you go fishing out some expression you learned in therapy. That woman laughs at our puny ideas of personality, don’t you know. We fish out a word like ‘neediness,’ so threadbare in its concept of the soul, and she laughs. She puts her fingers to her neck, the base of her lovely neck — I do love to see her touch it, signora. She touches her neck and she lets loose that chuckle. A dart of purest joy.”
“Cesare, give me a break. You talk as if she was Paul.”
He shrugged. “About the boy, as ever, I refuse to speculate. But that woman, her laying-on of hands, it’s a power beyond any cheap attempt at psychoanalysis.”
“Cesare, how can you say that? Whatever power Aurora’s got, it’s money.”
“Signora! Surely you can see, money isn’t the point, for this woman. Money and the comforts, that’s not it at all. Rather she herself is the comfort, the cup that runneth over. She’s the very embodiment of abbondanza.”
Barbara got back to work on the onion, noisily.
“Signora, I’ve never met anyone like her.”
“Maybe not, but you’ve read about them. Caligula, Nero.”
The priest gave his first real smile of the visit. “I believe I know better…”
“Cesare, don’t. Father. How can you fail to see that Aurora is the worst kind of bourgeois? How can you fail to get it, she’s one of the ones who’s keeping down the two poor creeps you’ve got stashed in the church?”