An Inquisition
short story #47
Huffing and sweating, the priest arrived at the parish office to see the old woman, the familiar veiled fixture in the pews of the parish, standing in front of the glass doors of the conference room with her arms folded and her face slightly raised in an expression of cold and holy triumph. Past the glass doors the priest recognized the frail figure of the boy, the acolyte who assisted in the Friday and Sunday evening masses, seated by himself on a monobloc chair behind a monobloc table, his hair disheveled, his head bowed to his chest.
Before she had even said a word to him, the priest could somehow already intuit that it had been a false alarm. A sanctimonious exaggeration.
At once the rush and panic of an incipient desecration calmed to a short-lived relief before working up to a slight irritation. It was a hot Philippine summer day and he’d have rather stayed working in his office in his parochial residence so that he wouldn’t have had to put on his stiff, stifling roman collar which he still hadn’t got used to. There had been hot days when he was still studying theology in Pamplona but it never got as humid as Manila. In this tropical country he would start to sweat as soon as he stepped out of the shower.
“I caught him, father,” the woman said as the priest approached. “Caught him right at it in the sacristy. The little satan,” she said, turning her head and pointing to the captive boy with outstretched, accusing lips.
“The Blessed Sacrament,” the priest said. “Were you able to recover it?”
With a victorious, pompous gesture she put her hand into her purse and handed to the priest a sealed plastic bag. It contained stacks of white circular wafers stacked neatly in rows.
“He hid them under his shirt,” she said.
“These are new hosts,” said the priest.
“Yes, father. And it’s a good thing I saved them before he opened them up. God knows what blasphemy he would have done with them…” She crossed herself.
“You called me up and said there was a sacrilege.”
“And may the Lord vouchsafe his mercy for such irreverence,” she said, looking up to the heavens.
“These hosts are unconsecrated.”
“Unconcentrate… What?” she said. She screwed one eye and turned her head slightly to him in a rehearsed, critical look as if to say the young generation should learn to enunciate words more clearly.
He frowned and sighed. He regarded the boy through the panes of the glass doors. The boy had looked up and watched the priest since he’d come into the office but quickly brought his head back down as soon as he met the priest’s gaze. The priest could not help but be moved by a harrowing sense of distance — a paralyzed and helpless isolation. It could have just been the glass.
“Let me talk to him,” he said, moving past the woman.
“Wait,” she said. “Shall I fetch you the missal, father?”
“What?”
“The rite of exorcism.”
“What? No.”
“The holy water?”
“What? No. Please, ma’am. I only wanted to talk to him.”
The old woman clenched her fists and quivered. “Father,” she said, “I hope you understand the gravity of this situation. Murder, rape, lechery? Why. These are but trifles compared to desecrating the most holy Body of God! I’d expect nothing less than an excommunication. If I were you, I’d give him a good beating too, while I’m at it.”
“Please, ma’am. Let me hear his side of the story first. How does that sound?”
“Father,” she said, smirking, sighing. “I understand that, by virtue of your youth, you are eager to shepherd the flock with a tender pastor’s hand. I find that admirable. But I think my many years have endowed me with the realism, if not the wisdom, to see that endless leniency is but a disservice to the wellbeing of Christ’s sheepfold. Remember, God is not only merciful. He is also just.” She looked at the priest with bemused pity, her eyebrows raised so that her forehead crumpled in myriad wrinkles.
The priest kept silent. He could feel a warm prickling under his stiff collar. He turned away to look at the boy again. The woman lost patience.
“Father Federico would have done things differently,” she said. “He would have — “
The priest turned to her violently. “But I am not Father Federico,” he said. “Has that ever occurred to you?”
His lips were trembling. At once a regretful confusion settled on his face. Such an outburst was out of character for him and he knew that even she could see it. He thought that this probably made her more uncomfortable than the upsurge of exasperation itself.
Her lips wavered in an abortive attempt to say something. She diverted her glance from side to side and she wrung her purse in her hands.
“Please,” he said. “I will talk to him.”
She didn’t say anything as the priest moved past her to enter the conference room, but nonetheless he felt the tension of her cowered and indignant body. He paused with his hand on the open door. He would have wanted to say something else to her but it was all too strained. He continued walking in instead, letting the door glide back behind him.
As the priest took a chair across the table in front of the boy, the boy glanced up only once, keeping his face down. The priest studied him. He saw that, aside from the tousled hair, the tip of one of the boy’s ears was red and swollen and an arm was mottled with the lunarlike crescents of fingernail indentations. The boy’s eyes, staring coldly at the floor, were dry, a calm and resigned guilt fixed in their gaze. He had not cried, and this made him all the more pitiful.
The priest placed the package of hosts on the table. They were silent for a while.
“She got you good, didn’t she?” the priest said.
The boy didn’t reply, didn’t even look up.
“If you wanted it so badly, you could have just asked.”
The priest saw the boy’s body tense up. The ceiling fan whirred.
“When are you going to exercise me, father?” the boy finally said, still looking down.
“What? Exercise you?”
“Exercise me. She said you’d have to cast out the demon in me.”
“She did, did she.” The priest turned around and looked behind him. The woman was standing by the glass door. Now her back was turned but he knew that she had been watching.
“Do you think you have a demon in you?” the priest said, turning back.
The boy looked up at him. “How do I know?”
“Was it the demon that made you do it?”
The boy thought about this. He shook his head. “We were just hungry,” he said.
“We?”
“My three sisters and my brother at home. I’m the oldest.”
“You stole it so you could give it to them… to eat?”
“I couldn’t think of anything else. I couldn’t stand to see my brother so hungry. He’s only four.”
“Wouldn’t they have known what they were eating?”
“I was thinking I could crush them up, the hosts… Besides when you’re hungry you stop caring what enters your mouth. As long as you can eat it.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t take the wine, too,” said the priest after a while, grinning. He meant to say this to lighten the tension, but the boy’s eyes widened in fright.
“No, not the wine, father,” he said. “Not alcohol. My mother said that’s what got us into trouble in the first place.”
“Does she drink?”
“Not her. My father did. He’s left us now. Right after he got my mother good. She couldn’t go out of the house for days.”
“And it didn’t ever occur to you to ask for help?”
The boy shook his head. “We’re getting by alright, father.”
“Getting by alright? You were about to feed your siblings mass hosts for lunch.”
The boy looked down. “Just a few days more. My mother says she’ll find work soon.”
“You should have told me. You didn’t have to steal. I’m sure we at the parish could scrape up some funds to help.”
“We’re getting by alright,” the boy said. He said it so stiffly. As if he’d repeated it to himself many times before.
The priest slid his chair back and stood up. He walked to the bookshelf at the back of the conference room. Stacks of catechetical manuals and musty prayer handbooks. Cheap illustrated children’s bibles. He picked one of these up. On its purple cover was a crudely drawn orange-skinned Jesus surrounded by likewise orange-skinned children.
“Is it true I’ll never be able to set foot into any church again?” the boy said.
“No,” the priest said, turning to him. He nodded toward the woman standing behind the glass door. “She said that to you, too?”
“Yeah. She said there’s no sin in hell worse than what I’ve done, stealing the body of God.”
“You didn’t steal the body of God. The hosts were not yet consecrated.”
The boy turned his neck to look sideways at the priest. “Consec… what?”
“Consecrate. That’s when the priest lifts up the host and the wine during the mass,” in demonstration the priest put his hands together, palms facing him, and held them up, “so that they become the body and blood of Jesus. Until then the host is just bread. What you tried to bring home is nothing more than flour and water.”
The boy’s look softened. “Oh,” he said. He turned back on his chair and kept silent.
The priest thumbed randomly through the pages of the children’s bible. His thumb caught at one colored illustration. In it a herd of swine, inhabited by a legion of demons cast out by Christ, are running off of a cliff, a handful of screeching pigs already in freefall into the sea. Jesus, surrounded by his disciples, stands inclined comforting the man from whom the demons had just been purged. Nearby, the townsmen and the owners of the swine stand by in outraged horror, their jaws hanging and their hands clasped to their temples.
The priest closed the bible and placed it back on the shelf.
“Listen,” he said. “I can let this pass with a warning for now. I think the old lady has given you enough of a fright. I think you’ve had enough for the day.”
“Thank you, father.”
“Now listen. Why don’t I go down with you and buy you and your family something to eat. In some bakery nearby perhaps.”
He grinned at the boy.
“No thank you, father,” said the boy, shaking his head. “Very kind of you. But that won’t be necessary.”
“It won’t be much trouble,” said the priest.
The boy waved his two hands in refusal. He looked very humiliated. “I insist, father. It will be alright. My mother will never let us eat it if she finds out how I got it.”
“Why not?”
“She always says the moment we accept someone’s pity is the moment we’ve given up.”
“You won’t have to tell her where it came from.”
“No, father. I’d rather not risk it. We’ll be alright. Thank you for your kindness.”
When the boy walked out of the parish office to leave, he continued wearing the humiliated look on his face. He tried to dissimulate it by keeping his head down and avoiding meeting the eyes of the priest as he walked past but this only served to make him look all the more mortified.
The boy never returned to the parish to assist in the services or even just to attend Sunday mass and the priest did not see him for almost a month. At one point the priest decided to visit the boy’s family, having gotten the address from one of the acolytes, to find out what had happened to the boy. But when he knocked, he only heard the weary voice of a woman shouting from inside telling him she did not feel well enough to accept visitors. She would not relent, even when he told her who he was. When the school year started, he finally did see the boy sometimes, walking in his school uniform and backpack with other schoolchildren, but the boy would always look quickly away and pretend he had not seen the priest. The priest never approached him. He could not think of anything to say.
This is a rewrite of one of my previous short stories (#30), one I wasn’t so happy with. I revised it so heavily that it ended up becoming altogether different, I decided to count it as an entirely different story.
