Читать книгу Sacred Bones - Michael Spring - Страница 6

THREE

A few days after the coronation, the Pope’s enemies were banished to Gaul, a punishment worse than death, and I went back to my daily duties at the church. Life, like the Tiber, drifted on. Our emperor returned to his palace in Aachen. He seemed very far away.

I passed quickly through the minor orders—from lector to acolyte to subdeacon, where I continued my education for the priesthood. One of my earliest tasks was keeping watch over the secretarium, where vessels and vestments are stored between services. Once, finding myself alone, I slipped into a priest’s cassock, uncovered the gold chalice that holds the Precious Blood, and, raising it high, cried out, “Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.” I had done wrong, and to expiate my sin, I flogged myself and fasted for three days and nights.

Among my other responsibilities was ringing the bell for the morning office, the ancient office of the dawn. More than once the primicerius had to storm into my dorm and throw me out of bed. Disheveled, bloated with sleep, I would rush off to prepare the wine for the sacrifice of the Mass, and light the sacred candles on the altar. After the service, I helped clean up. When no one was looking, I licked drops of sweet wine from the priest’s gilded cup, and chewed the blackened candlewicks, which were holy. I also swallowed the hot wax, blistering my throat and tongue. I asked God to know my pain, and to forgive me for being me.

Pilgrims arrived daily with offerings from every corner of the world. One of my jobs was to sort through these gifts and set aside whatever was perishable—eggs, say, or snails. Non-perishables I stored in separate boxes allocated for the clergy or the poor.

Visitors, hoping to be rewarded with miracles, showered us with everything from liturgical vessels to embroidered vestments, flowers, clothes, sandals, wax, coins, chickens, sacks of grain, and beans. We accepted everything. No gift was too large or small.

As an acolyte, one of my favorite chores was cleaning the crumbs from the altar after the celebration of the Eucharist. Priests ate leavened bread then, which they broke and shared with the faithful. It made an awful mess.

One day a bishop named Saturninus developed an unleavened bread that could be pressed into a kind of crude wafer and placed directly on the supplicant’s tongue. This disturbed me to no end. I had always thought of the Eucharist as a reenactment of the Last Supper, a breaking of bread at a communal meal. Suddenly, with the introduction of this hard round wafer, the priest and I no longer sat together as a loving family at the supper of the Lord. I had never had a family. I had hoped the priesthood would give me one.

Psalms, songs of praise: In a more spiritual age, in the days of the early Church, we would have recited them all in a day. Now we struggled to get through them in a week. My favorite service was the night office, shortly after midnight, when the only light in the world came from the tapers in the chapel where we prayed, enveloped in darkness, and the cross above the altar branded us with the power of Christ’s love. My heart danced as the tiny flames licked the sweet air, heavy with the cloying, comforting smell of cheap oil. I felt a wonderful blind intimacy with my brothers as we sat chanting together on those hard, unforgiving benches, holding the devil at bay with our pale perfumed voices.

Lauds, however, was another matter: How I dreaded being pried from sleep a few hours before dawn and forced to sit shivering in the pre-dawn chill. The devil owned the night then, he made the candles sputter. I was certain he would tear me apart if I fell asleep, and feverishly I prayed for cockcrow and the ordinariness of day.

My elders assumed I would go through major orders and become a priest. I knew though, even then, that I was unworthy. One day, for instance, when I was suffering from a toothache, I brought the Host home from Mass, hidden against the roof of my mouth, and pounded it into a powder which I drank with a few drops of wine. It worked. The evil spirit fled. But I had committed an unforgiveable sin, and the next Sunday blood flowed from the Host when the priest placed it on my tongue.

I also saw Christ in a way that was anathema to many in the Church, not as a king but as a shepherd tending his flock. To my contemporaries nothing mattered but the divine prerogative: the Father, not the Son. Alone with my heretical thoughts I wandered along the Appian Way, the road on which Peter, the Apostle of the Gentiles, entered Rome, and, finding myself a stick, scratched pictures in the dust of a sweet young Jesus with his slender staff and his seven-stringed lyre.

I was tormented by my own unworthiness. When the primicerius lectured me on Augustine, he sat me on his lap and stroked my closely cropped hair; and as he contrasted the perishing Roman state to the heavenly City of God, I felt an unholy stirring in me.

When he left for Lyon—there was a commentary on the curative powers of pain he wanted to consult—he kissed me hard on the lips, with the sound of clapping hands or thunder. And during his three-month absence he flooded me with letters.

“I think of your friendship with such sweet memories,” he wrote, “that I long for the time when I may be able to clutch the neck of your sweetness with the fingers of your desires.”

Another time he wrote: “If I could be with you, how I would sink into your embraces, how I would cover, with tightly pressed lips, your eyes, ears, and mouth, every finger and toe, not once but many times. I ever lick your breast and wish to wash, beloved, your chest with my tears.”

I was touched, roused, punished, and tested by his words. I counted the days until I would see him again. When at last he returned he was a mere shadow of the man I once knew. He looked tortured, possessed. I hardly recognized him. For days he lived only on water. His condition deteriorated. At night he slept in the frigid church or on a bed of nettles. Once, I’m told, he passed the night with a corpse in a grave. That he ignored me, that he sometimes failed to recognize me, I attributed to his illness. But one day, finding me alone, he instructed me to burn his letters, and spoke with such reproach in his voice that I could almost hear him whisper, “Get behind me, Satan.”

Later that day I removed a small pile of letters from under my mattress, wrapped them in a plane tree root, and went in search of him. I found him alone in the chapel, rolling on the floor below the altar, grinding his teeth and foaming at the mouth.

“Mark tells us that prayers can save us, even from the jaws of death,” I told him. He looked up but couldn’t find me. “The letters,” I said, placing them before him. “I didn’t have the heart to burn them.”

I turned and left. He died that same day. Possessed by the devil, he was denied a proper burial and set on fire. I could say he disappeared from my life, but that wouldn’t be true. Many years later, on one of my business trips across the Alps, I found all of my teacher’s letters to me in the Lyon library, collected under the name of Charles’s court scholar Alcuin. The primicerius must have copied them on one of his visits to Lyon and passed them off to me as his own. Not that it matters. If all comes from God, how can anything be called our own?

I had a final encounter with the primicerius a year later. He visited me on a moonlit night, wakening me from a deep sleep. I had to scream to make him go away. Sitting up in bed, I tried to understand what I could have done to defile him. All I knew was that his eyes bound me in chains from which I’m still struggling to break free.