Lasher

by Anne Rice

  And because I seemed so completely unsophisticated, so incapable of conniving, so childlike if you will, people tended to open up to me, to tell me things, egged on by my bright curious gaze. I listened to everything. Not a word was wasted. Imagine it--the great infant that I was, learning from people's smallest gestures and slightest confessions all the major truths of life.

  That is what was happening inside my mind.

  By night I learned to read and finally to write, and I wrote constantly, taking as little sleep as I could. I memorized songs and poems. I studied the paintings of the Basilica, the great murals by Giotto which tell all the significant events of Francis's life, including how the stigmata came to him--the wounds in his hands and feet from God. And I went out among the pilgrims to talk to them, to hear what they had to say of the world.

  The first year of which I knew the date was 1536. I went often to Florence, to give to the poor, to visit their hovels and bring bread and something to drink. Florence was still a city of the Medici. Perhaps she was past her great glory, as some have said since, but I don't think at the time that anyone would have said such a thing.

  On the contrary, Florence was a magnificent and thriving place. Printed books were sold there by the thousands; the sculptures of Michelangelo were everywhere to be seen. The guilds were powerful, still, though much trade had moved to the New World; and the city was an endless spectacle of processions, such as the great Procession of Corpus Christi, and performances of beautiful tableaux and plays.

  The bank of the Medici was then the greatest bank in the world.

  Everywhere in Florence men and women were literate and thoughtful and talkative; this was the city which had produced the poet Dante and the political genius Machiavelli; the city which produced Fra Angelico and Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli, a city of great writers, great painters, great princes and great saints. The city itself was made of solid stone and filled with palaces, churches, wondrous piazzas, gardens and bridges. Perhaps it was a city unique in all the world. It certainly thought that it was, and I did too.

  As my duties expanded, I soon knew every inch of Florence, and heard one way or another all the news of the world.

  The world of course was on the brink of disaster! People spoke continuously of the final days.

  The English King Henry VIII had abandoned the true faith; the great city of Rome was only just recovering from its rape by Protestant troops and Catholic Spaniards alike. Indeed the pope and the cardinals had had to take shelter in the castle of Sant'Angelo, and this had left with people a deep disillusionment and distrust.

  The Black Plague was still with us, rising every ten years or so to claim victims. There were wars on the Continent.

  The worst tales, however, were of the Protestants abroad--of mad Martin Luther, who had turned the entire German people against the Church, and other rabid heresies--the Anabaptists, and the Calvinists, who made great gains every day in the realm of Christian souls.

  The pope was rumored to be powerless against these heresies. Councils were called and called but nothing really was done. The Church was in the midst of reforming itself to answer to the great heretics, John Calvin and Martin Luther. But the world had been rent in half it seemed by the Protestants, who swept an entire culture before them when they broke with the authority of the pope.

  Yet our world of Assisi, and Florence and the other cities and towns of Italy, seemed splendid and rich and dedicated to the True Christ. It seemed, when reading Scriptures, impossible to believe that Our Lord had not walked on the Appian Way. Italy filled my soul--with its music, its gardens, its green countryside--it seemed to me the only place that I should ever want to be. Rome was the only city I loved more than Florence, and only perhaps because of its size, because of the splendor of St. Peter's. But then Venice too was a great marvel. For me the poor of one city were pretty much as the poor of another. The hungry were the hungry. They were always waiting for me with open arms.

  I found it easy and natural to be a true Poverello--to own nothing, to seek shelter wherever I was at nightfall, to let the Holy Spirit come into me when I was asked a complex question, or asked to declare a truth.

  I knew joy when I preached my first sermon, in a piazza in Florence, with arms outstretched, eschewing, as was our custom, all squabbling about theology, and talking only of personal dedication to God. "We must be as the Christ Child--that innocent, that trusting, that good."

  Of course this had been the very wish of Francis, that we be true beggars and vagabonds speaking from the heart. But our Order was much torn by matters of interpretation. What had Francis truly meant? What kind of organization should we have? Who was truly poor? Who was truly pure?

  I avoided all decisions and conclusions. I spoke aloud to Francis; I modeled my life upon him. I lost myself utterly in good works, and I cared for the sick with good results.

  It was no miracle. A man would not drop his crutches and cry, "I can walk!" It manifested itself first in a talent for nursing, for bringing the dangerously ill through the fever, back from the brink. It may have been what men call natural. But I began to feel its power in a way; to learn from little things how to enhance it--that if I held the cup myself for the sick one he would fare better from the drink of water than if I let this be done by someone else.

  During these early years another form of knowledge came to me: that many of my brothers in the Order did not keep the vow of chastity. Indeed, they had mistresses or went into the legal brothels in Florence, or bedded down with each other under cover of the dark. In fact, I myself was noticing beautiful boys and girls all the time, and feeling desire for them, and waking sometimes in the night with sensuous dreams. I had been fully grown by the time I reached Italy, with dark hair around the genitals and under my arms. I had always been as other men in these respects.

  I remembered the words of the Franciscan in Donnelaith. "You must never touch the flesh of a woman." I thought about this a great deal. Of course I'd come to realize that coupling led men and women to create children. And I concluded that I had been given this severe warning for one reason: so that I would not father another monster like myself.

  But what sort of monster was I? I wasn't sure anymore. My birth and origins became a torture to me in memory, a disgrace that I could not confide to a soul.

  At this time too--during those first few years, as my personality formed--I began to think that certain persons were watching me, persons who knew about my imposture and would someday reveal me for what I was.

  Often in the streets of Florence I saw Dutchmen, recognizable by their distinctive clothing and hats, and these men seemed always to have their eyes fixed on me. And then once an Englishman came to Assisi and stayed there a long time and came back day after day, simply to hear me preach. This was the beautiful springtime. I was telling the stories or exempla of St. Francis; and I remember the cold eyes of this man gazing upon me as I spoke.

  Always I confronted these spies. I would stare at them. Sometimes I would even turn and start to walk towards them. Always they fled. Always they returned.

  Meantime the question of chastity was torturing me--the question of whether or not I could do it with a woman, and whether or not a monster would be born.

  There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to do what was right in the eyes of God. It seemed a very simple matter to take a mistress, to take a lover. It seemed an immense challenge to enjoy no pleasure of the flesh at all. To live without knowing the answer to the mystery.

  I chose the path of the saint.

  I allowed no fire to kindle in me, and consequently there was never a blaze.

  I became well known for my purity, that I had no eye for women whatsoever, and my healing became more and more accomplished, though still I did not know if it was miraculous and thought it was perhaps a matter of skill.

  Another passion meantime swept me up. It was the simple idea current at the time that singing could bring the faithful to Christ, as easily per
haps as evangelical preaching. I began to write my own canticles, simple poetry which I made up, using much rhythm, and to sing these songs at informal gatherings. I much preferred singing to preaching. I was tired of hearing myself promulgate simple truths. But I never got tired of singing.

  Soon people knew that when I appeared, there would be music from me--a brief song, sometimes little more than a poem recited to the stmmming of a small lute. And I played a little game of which no one else was aware--I tried to see how many days I could go with no speaking, only singing, without irritating anyone or attracting notice to my little sport.

  Ten years after my arrival in Italy I was ordained. It would have come sooner if I had wanted it but my study for Holy Orders was deliberately meticulous and slow. I was all the time traveling, walking the roads, and meeting with people and greeting them with the word of God. Time did not seem important. In fact, I had no sense of hurrying towards any destiny at all.

  I had become by my ordination utterly fearless of disease. I sang to those who were past all need of physical comfort. I sat in many a room where others feared to step.

  But things were not perfect. They were not right. From time to time I remembered my birth with startling effect. I'd wake, sit up, think, Ah, but it's not possible, and then lie back in the darkness, realizing of course it was possible, for I had no other mother, father, sister, brothers! I was not what others believed me to be. I would remember the Queen and the river and the Highlands, as if they were elements of a nightmare.

  And sometimes it seemed that after these tumultuous moments, I would see those people following me, spying upon me more than before. Of course I faulted myself for imagining it, but the longer I thought of all this, the more strange my life became.

  Then there were times when I betrayed my nature in a particular and spontaneous way. I loved the taste of milk. The Devil was always tempting me with visions of women's breasts. Even during Lent I had to have milk, and I could not endure the fast, and the breaking of the fast for milk was my worst sin. I sometimes grasped handfuls of cheese and ate it. Any soft food was delicious to me, but the craving for cheese and milk was especially bad.

  Once I wandered into a field filled with cattle. It was sunrise and no one was about. Or so I thought. I went down on my knees and drank from the udder of a cow, squirting the warm milk out of the udder right into my mouth.

  When I had drunk enough I lay in the grass, staring at the sky. I felt bestial and ugly for what I had done. An old farmer came. He was in worn clothing, though neat and well mended, and his face was darkened from working in the sun.

  He whispered something to me, full of fear, and ran away. I got up and ran after him, lifting my robes so that I wouldn't trip.

  "What did you say to me?" I asked him.

  He then whispered something hostile, a curse perhaps, and fled away.

  I was overcome with shame. This man knew I wasn't a human being. And gradually from that day forward my deceit of those around me began to prey on my mind.

  I saw the farmer again in the city. He saw me. I could have sworn I saw him with others, and that they were whispering, but this might have been fancy. I let it go. Then one morning I came out of my cell in the cloister to discover a great pitcher of fresh milk there. This froze my soul. For a moment I did not know where I was, or who, or what was happening. I knew only this was an offering, and that it had happened before and before and before. The glen, the little people, and one single giant among them walking down to the edge of the circle, and the offerings of milk. My head swam. For the first time in many many years, I saw the circle of stones, and the circles of figures, so many circles of figures, each wider than the other, and going on so far that I lost count.

  I picked up the pitcher and I drank it down greedily the way I always did milk. When I looked up, across the monastery garden, I saw, in the shadows of the cloister, people moving who then darted away.

  I think some of the monks saw this. I didn't know what to think of it. I didn't dare tell anyone about it. I dismissed it. I told St. Francis, I was his instrument, and I cared only for serving God.

  That night for sure a Dutchman was following me. And in the morning I went back to Assisi, to talk to Francis, to renew my vows, to cleanse my soul.

  In the days that followed, many people came to me asking to be healed. I laid my hands on them and sometimes with startling results. There was no doubt that the peasants were whispering about me. And offerings of milk began to appear for me in strange places. I might come up a street alone and at the top of it find a pitcher of milk sitting there on the stones.

  A certain fact also began to cause me pain. Perhaps I had never been baptized! Unless we can assume the terrified midwife and the ladies-in-waiting had done this. I don't think so. And now as I brooded on this, as I began to try to remember all the details of the northland where I had been born and exiled, I realized that if I had not been baptized, then I could not have received Holy Orders, which meant that when I changed the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ it was nothing of the sort.

  Indeed, nothing that I had done could bear fruit. I fell into a state of melancholia. I would talk to no one.

  And then it became very plain to me that I must have imagined this birth in England! That nothing of that sort could truly have occurred! Donnelaith. I had never heard mention of a cathedral there, of monks of our Order. But of course for years Henry VIII had persecuted the Catholics. Only recently had Good Queen Mary restored the true church.

  If my fancies were true, I had been by my own reckoning alive just over twenty years. Unless my lost childhood was just that--a history lost to the memory, buried experiences, something which I could not call back. But it didn't seem so; and the more I brooded, the more everything about me began to look suspect to me, and the more tormented I became.

  Finally I decided I must know a woman. I must know if I was to that extent a man. I was burning to do it, of course. I always had been! And now I knew this was my excuse. Find out.

  It was as if in a woman's arms I would know if I was animal enough to have an immortal soul! I laughed at the contradiction, but it was there, and it was true. I wanted to be human, and had to commit a mortal sin to find out if I was.

  I went into Florence, to one of the many brothels I knew, where I had in fact brought the sacraments to women when they were dying, and once gave Extreme Unction to a poor merchant who had the misfortune to die in a woman's embrace. I had often visited this brothel in my priestly robes. It was not a shocking thing to do.

  So I entered it now on a silent rampage. And the women came to greet me, "Gentle Father Ashlar!" for they talked to me always as if I were an idiot or a child.

  It disgusted me for the first time. I walked out and into the piazza and down to the Arno and across the nearest bridge. It was crowded with shops, very busy, people were coming and going, and when I happened to look I saw a man watching me and knew again that it was a Dutchman just by the look of his clothes. I went towards him, but he fled into the crowd, and I couldn't find him. He was gone in the snap of my fingers. Just gone.

  I was then very weary, and finally I threw out my arms and I began to sing. I was on the middle of the bridge, and mad with fear and grief, trying to reconcile my memories with my devotion to Christ, and I began to sing. It wasn't so unusual really, the streets were crowded with all kinds of distractions at such an hour in Florence. One crazed Franciscan swaying and singing was not peculiar at all.

  Gradually some people took notice, as they are wont to do. They stopped their tasks and a little crowd gathered. I was rocking back and forth, holding myself with my arms and singing, and when I looked up, very lost in my song, I saw a beautiful woman staring at me, a woman with green eyes like those of the Franciscan priest in Donnelaith, and long fancy blond hair.

  Then the most astonishing thing happened. This woman lowered her veil and walked away! And I realized that the face which had been peering at me was turned to the bac
k of her body, as if her head was put backwards upon her neck. I was fascinated!

  My passion was unbearable, but another even more evil excitement leapt in my heart. This is a monster like me.

  I let the song die away, and spurned those who would have given me alms. Take them to the church, I said, to those who deserve them. And then I went after the woman, who had waited for me in a side street. Once again, she revealed the face, then walked off. Soon we were in a small alleyway. I was clearly staring at her back when she lifted her veil and revealed her face again.

  Finally she spun round in a blur of black garments, silks, satins, velvet and jewels, and rapped hard upon the door. It was opened in the wall and as I rushed up to catch a glimpse of her before she disappeared through it, she grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside.

  It was a narrow, crowded garden, like many a courtyard in Florence, with old peeling ocher walls, and bright flowers flourishing in the sheltered sun. Three other women sat there, together on a bench beneath a tree. All wore wide and beautiful skirts, rich sleeves, and had high bosoms which began to drive me mad. And the one who had brought me in, I saw now she was an ordinary woman! Her face was on the front of her body, like that of anyone else. It had all been some kind of illusion with the veils she pulled from her hair. Some little trick.

  She confessed this to me, and this set them all to laughing so much I thought they would never stop.

  I was dizzy. Suddenly these women were crowding about me and saying, "Father, take off your clothes. Come, stay with us in this garden." And the blond one, who bore the famous name of Lucrezia, said that she had bound me with spells to make me come, but not to fear, they weren't witches, rather their men were gone off to hunt in the country, and they would do as they pleased.

  Their men gone off to hunt? This sounded bizarre. But I perceived the truth beneath it. These were whores, but whores free for the day, and I was the object of their desire.

  "We are proud to initiate you, virgin child," said the eldest of the women, who was as beautiful as all the rest. They drew me across the tiles and into the bedchamber. They took off my sandals and removed my robes; then they flung their dresses this way and that, crying out in jubilation, and they danced about me, naked as nymphs, singing some little song. It was all a joke to them! It was all a game. They were shocking the young Franciscan, who though he had a full beard still had the expression of a child.