Necessary Sins

by Elizabeth Bell

  Dr. Moretti was still waiting. “You begin a new life today, Mr. Lazare—provided, of course, that you pass these tests. I think it is only fitting that you begin your new life as you did your old one. ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart…’”

  “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away,” Joseph continued in his head, “blessed be the name of the Lord.” The words were from Job, but they recalled that prayer of Saint Ignatius: “Take, Lord, all my liberty…”

  If Joseph revealed himself to this man, the liberty of his entire family might be taken away. Surely his father could not be re-enslaved now, but they could very well lose their freedom to live as whites. Joseph’s father would lose his paying patients; his sisters would have to marry colored men; Mama and Grandmama… How would they survive the shame? If Dr. Moretti learned the truth, he might tell anyone. He might mention it casually to some colleague, not even meaning any harm…

  On the other side of the desk, the doctor sighed. “Do you or do you not want to be a Priest, Mr. Lazare?”

  Joseph nodded haltingly. “I do.” But it was selfish and impossible, this dream of his; he must surrender it, for his sisters’ sakes, for Mama’s.

  No, he argued with himself, it was selfless: he was doing this to save souls. How many thousands of people would spend eternity in Hell if he didn’t rescue them? His family’s souls weren’t in danger, only their lives.

  Perhaps his lie about being part Spanish would explain his coloring. Joseph had never seen a real Spaniard, let alone seen one naked. Perhaps Dr. Moretti hadn’t either. If God wanted Joseph to be His Priest, He would save him. God would blind the doctor to this one truth.

  If God didn’t want Joseph to be His Priest…

  His breaths were coming faster and faster, yet none of the oxygen was reaching his brain. Joseph feared he might faint. Then Dr. Moretti would never declare him fit. Joseph stumbled over to the edge of the chair and sat heavily, tugging off his shoes and getting his head more on a level with his heart.

  Somehow he stood again and his fumbling fingers unbuttoned his trousers. Drawers next—all that shielded him from disaster. He wouldn’t look; if he didn’t look, he could imagine he was normal and that Dr. Moretti would see only a normal, colorless boy.

  At last Joseph let his drawers and his trousers drop down his legs together. Eyes determinedly closed, he stepped out of them into nothingness. It was June; how could he be so cold?

  This is the first and last time anyone will ever see me naked, he chanted in his head like a prayer. This is the first and last time anyone will ever see me…

  For the rest of his life, this most intimate skin would be safely veiled behind not only drawers and trousers but also soutane, surplice, alb, dalmatic, and chasuble, layer after layer of linen, broadcloth, and silk always protecting his secrets.

  “Thank you, Mr. Lazare. That is sufficient.”

  Before the last word had left Dr. Moretti’s mouth, Joseph wheeled back to the chair in relief. He snatched up his shirt and yanked it over his head. It fell to his knees and allowed him to breathe again. He heard the doctor’s pen scratching against a page. “Did—Did I…”

  “I see no impediment to your becoming a Priest.”

  Joseph didn’t even care that his shirt was inside-out.

  Part III

  The Man that Was a Thing

  1825-1835

  Rome,

  Paris,

  and Charleston

  So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!

  — Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto” (1855)

  Chapter 15

  However pure and sparkling the rills at which others may drink, he puts his lips to the very rock, which a divine wand has struck, and he sucks in its waters as they gush forth living.

  — Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman, on being a seminarian in Rome, Recollections of the Last Four Popes and of Rome in their Times (1858)

  In Rome, Joseph lived in a palace—the seventeenth-century Palazzo di Propaganda Fide. His own chamber resembled a monk’s cell, though it was for sleeping only, locked during the day. His desk was in a study room monitored by a proctor, who would pace the rows murmuring over his breviary until he noticed something amiss. Joseph had brought a few favorite books with him. Two were confiscated. He should have known better than to bring Donne.

  The Palazzo housed a hundred seminarians who spoke twenty-five languages. After Ordination, they would return to their own dioceses and celebrate Mass in one tongue all across the Earth—truly “one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” There was even an African student, a boy of fourteen with skin as dark as jet. He came from the colony of Saint-Louis in Senegal, so he knew French. His Latin was minimal—his Italian, nonexistent. The African sought out Joseph their very first week, since the prefect told him Joseph spoke French.

  Joseph tried to be civil. But he saw how the other seminarians stared at the black boy, how they stared at him when they were together. Joseph had been stared at all his life because of his mother. This was supposed to be a fresh start for him, an opportunity to become someone new, to escape his African blood and “vanish into Christ.” If the other students realized that Joseph shared more with the black boy than language…

  Their lives were ruled by the bells, and there were few times during the day when the students were permitted to speak, so Joseph could prepare. When the African approached him between classes, Joseph would have an excuse ready, or he would simply pretend he hadn’t heard.

  He was keeping his distance for the African’s sake as well as his own, Joseph told himself. Hadn’t their professors warned them that they must not form friendships? They must surrender their love for their families and never again become attached to another human being. They must remain aloof from this imperfect world. All their attention must be focused on God.

  Joseph first noticed the African’s absence in their music class. The boy’s voice had already deepened to a rich bass, and their polyphony was markedly poorer for its loss. Their choir-master told them the African had returned to Senegal and said no more about it.

  Sacred music was Joseph’s favorite subject, but he could no longer concentrate. When they filed into the chapel, he stared at the painting behind the altar with new eyes. King Balthazar’s white turban and black skin stood out distinctly against the blue sky—he was the only one of the Magi not yet kneeling before Virgin and Child.

  Had he done this, Joseph wondered? Had the African left because of him? What would happen to all the souls in Senegal that the boy would have saved? Hadn’t Joseph doubted his own decision to come here? Those first terrible nights, hadn’t he lain awake in the cold dark, fighting back tears and feeling as though the loneliness would drown him?

  He might have been kind to another lonely soul. Instead, he’d been selfish.

  Joseph had known seminarians lived liked monks, but he hadn’t understood what that meant. At the College of the Propaganda, they ate in silence while the older seminarians practiced homilies. Some were interesting. Others seemed interminable. During the silences, the Priests and students communicated through simple hand signs. Joseph longed to teach his classmates how to truly talk with their hands. Then he reminded himself that such desires—to circumvent the rules, to form a bond with the other boys—only showed his weakness.

  With his teachers and classmates, Joseph explored every permitted corner of St. Peter’s and the Vatican Palaces, and he admired a thousand other marvels of stone, paint, and mosaic. But his favorite place in Rome was a small convent church not far from the seminary, unassuming outside but so ornate within: Santa Maria della Vittoria, consecrated to Our Lady of Victory.

  In the vault over the nave, the Queen of Heaven vanquished Heresy. Holy Mary, give me victory over doubt, Joseph begged her on his knees. Blessed Virgin, give me victory over temptation. Somehow she made him feel closer to his own mother, who remained in his prayers every day. No matter how hard Joseph tried, he could not conquer his a
ffection for his mother.

  In addition to the high altar, Santa Maria della Vittoria possessed eight side-chapels. For the altar-piece of the Cornaro Chapel, Bernini had depicted the Transverberation of Saint Teresa of Ávila. Large as life, at once fluid and frozen, this magnificent sculpture was the reason Joseph returned to Santa Maria della Vittoria. Only Bernini could make marble shudder and float.

  Joseph wished he could witness this miracle every day. Instead, he had to wait several months between visits, which made every moment more precious. Seminarians weren’t permitted to leave the college alone, and Joseph’s walking companions didn’t share his fondness for Saint Teresa. One student dared to criticize Bernini: “That nun is far too young and beautiful. When she experienced this vision, Saint Teresa was nearly fifty. The angel’s instrument of Divine Love should be a spear, not an arrow; and both should be ‘afire.’”

  “But the other nuns who witnessed Teresa’s death reported that it was equally miraculous,” Joseph argued. “They said she became young again. I think Bernini is combining that moment with her Transverberation.” The sculptor had captured Teresa’s soul, her “mystical union” with Christ. Teresa had died not of infirmity but of love—she had perished in ecstasy.

  Sometimes, Joseph’s meditations at the chapel were interrupted by visitors with even less respect for Bernini’s genius. Two separate men had peered into the altar niche and sniggered at Saint Teresa and her angel. Once, a grey-haired woman had glanced at the statue with disapproval, at Joseph with censure, and then scurried from the church.

  He didn’t understand why. Was it because Bernini had sculpted a nipple on the young angel, where his robe fluttered low? He did look somewhat pagan; that smiling face surrounded by curls seemed more appropriate for a faun. The visitors could not find anything indecent about Saint Teresa herself. The nun was so swaddled in her habit that only her feet, hands, and face were uncovered. In-between, she hardly seemed to possess a body at all, or at least it had become weightless, her head back and mouth open in rapture.

  Saint Teresa inspired him. Her own patron had been Saint Joseph, and Teresa even had tainted blood. In her time and place, sixteenth-century Spain, that meant she was the granddaughter of a converso, a Jew who had converted to escape the Inquisition. Teresa too had been tempted in her youth—again and again in her writings, she called herself a “broken vessel” and a “wretched worm.”

  Yet no saint he knew had given herself so completely to God. Teresa wished she were all tongues, so that every part of her could praise the Lord. How He rewarded her, what visions He granted her: of Hell, yes, but also of Heaven. What must it be like to experience such ecstasy, to be freed from your body and find union with Someone greater? Saint Teresa had made herself so empty, so open to God’s love, she had actually levitated.

  In Bernini’s sculpture, Saint Teresa seemed like a bridge between Heaven and Earth, just as a Priest was supposed to be. She hovered behind the rail and above the altar of the chapel. Joseph longed to reach out to her—to touch that exquisitely shaped bare foot. What might such contact transmit, what glimpse of the divine like a lightning bolt through his soul?

  In the streets of Rome, Joseph’s thoughts were rarely directed toward Heaven. His explorations of the city became gauntlets to run, tests he always failed. The College of the Propaganda bordered the Piazza di Spagna, and his walking companions frequently wanted to climb the Spanish Steps. Joseph dissuaded them whenever he could. Perhaps the other seminarians could pass that way without sinning, but Joseph could not. On that wide sweep of steps lurked pairs of lovers and beautiful models hoping to catch the eyes of artists.

  Joseph met thousands of pilgrims come to this center of Christendom. He would direct the visitors to St. Peter’s Square, St. John Lateran, or St. Paul Outside-the-Walls. The husbands and fathers would pretend they hadn’t needed any help, while the daughters and mothers would smile with relief and bless Joseph. The mother would pat Joseph’s hand and tell him he would make a fine Priest. But he would know the truth: he hadn’t offered to walk with them because their destination was close or because he was going that way already—he had lingered because the daughter was pretty.

  More than once, a girl had leaned close and confided, “We would have been lost without you!” His pride—and another part of him—would swell at such feminine attention. Before Joseph could stop himself, he would imagine how that flushed cheek might feel beneath his fingertips, even what a few opened buttons might reveal. He could not control these thoughts any more than he could keep his voice from becoming baritone, like his father’s.

  Whenever he could, Joseph visited the Scala Sancta to do Penance. The antithesis of the Spanish Steps, the Holy Stairs had been brought from Jerusalem by Saint Helena. His head bowed in shame while he climbed the twenty-eight marble stairs on his knees, Joseph would remember his Hélène. He must imagine that each of those lovely pilgrims was his sister.

  Joseph would meditate on Christ’s Passion, how He had ascended these very steps on the way to His terrible death for Joseph’s sins. Christ had been a man once too; he had had a—

  He had also been tempted, but He remained pure. When Joseph’s knees started aching, he would remind himself what he purchased with this pain: nine years’ indulgence for every step he climbed.

  He spent only a few minutes in the company of those pilgrims. He would have many more occasions to sin against female parishioners. He’d been an arrogant fool to believe he could achieve purity. Not with this black blood coursing through his veins, the very color of sin. In one of Saint Teresa’s visions, when a demon appeared to her, he resembled “a horrible little negro.”

  At seminary, they received the Sacrament of Penance face to face; he could not hide in the anonymity of a booth. Now Joseph’s confessional was often a garden. During the summers, to escape the heat in Rome, the students stayed at the Propaganda’s villa. His confessor, an elderly Tuscan named Father Verchese, had managed the grounds there for almost forty years. But with every passing day, the Priest’s arthritis made it more difficult for him to do the manual labor.

  So Joseph became the old man’s hands, as he would soon become God’s. His confessor warned him to take utmost care and wear proper gloves. “To lose the use of my hands after a lifetime of service, that is one thing,” Father Verchese explained. “But if you were to damage your hands, my son, you could never be ordained. Those hands will perform Sacraments. They must be without blemish.”

  Joseph promised he would remember. But sometimes, when he was alone, he willfully disobeyed. He could not resist the temptation to remove the hot, restricting gloves and trace his fingertips up some tender shoot, across the satin petals of a blossom, or even through the richness of the earth.

  At home, Henry had done the hard work in both their kitchen and ornamental gardens. Now, Joseph found he enjoyed teasing life from the soil. Even the way the labor drained him was a blessing. In time, perhaps he could work out his salvation and exhaust his lust by hauling water and carting manure. He could be a gardener in a monastery too—where he would be safe from women altogether, and they from him.

  As he watched Joseph turning the soil, his confessor reminded him: “You attend the College of the Propaganda—for the Propagation of the Faith. Four years ago, when you accepted a place here, you agreed to become a missionary, not a monk.”

  Joseph frowned at the disturbed earth. “Sometimes they grant dispensations, don’t they?” In a monastery, he could even change his name.

  “My son, you must ask yourself: ‘Why do I want to join an order?’ A monastery may be a fine hiding place, but cowardice is a sin. A desire to disappear into Christ is laudable. A desire simply to disappear is not.”

  Joseph remained on his knees, listening to the trickle of the fountain behind them. “I can do a great deal of good in a cloister, with my prayers.”

  “You can do more good in the mission field, and you know it.” Father Verchese tapped his shoulder.

&nbs
p; Though it was difficult with his gloves, Joseph accepted the mustard seeds from his confessor’s gnarled hand. He accepted the truth more slowly, as he sprinkled the seeds. One of his other professors concluded every class with the cry: “Souls are waiting!” Souls who would truly be lost without him.

  “Didn’t you promise your Bishop you would return?”

  Immediately Joseph felt the stab of guilt, and he nodded. He was here only because of His Lordship. Joseph could not betray him. But Bishop England did not have to battle black blood. Joseph stood, grasped his hoe, and hacked too hard at the soil to cover the seeds. “I’m not strong enough to live in the world, Father. I don’t want these impure thoughts. I beg God to take them away, but—”

  “Do you doubt Our Lord?”

  “O-Of course not.” Joseph stopped hoeing.

  “He is refining you, my son. We all endure that refinement, and it makes us strong. When you are ready, at your Ordination, He will reward you with His grace—like a suit of armor. Remember what Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians: ‘God will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able; but will make also with temptation a way to escape.’”

  “How do I escape from my own mind, my own body?”

  “You must stop thinking of them as your mind and your body. They are God’s; you are returning them to Him. You must make yourself empty so that He can fill you.”

  Like Saint Teresa. And remember that prayer of Saint Ignatius, Joseph berated himself as he watered the mustard seeds. Surrender yourself wholly. Not “mostly.” He was trying…