Book of Immortality

by Adam Leith Gollner

  Gervais’s one-room cell in the Jesuit residence on campus was filled with books and films. “I live not so much in a cell as I do in a celluloid world,” he liked to say. With that wave of silver hair and his star-studded extracurricular activities, he was as cosmopolitan as a man of the cloth could be. The other Jesuit teachers at school were uniformly stern, and while Gervais had a grave side, he was often humorous, speaking more about love than God. “The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful,” he’d repeat almost every class, quoting some Neoplatonist we’d never heard of.

  * * *

  I liked him from the start, even though Father Gervais and I weren’t exactly cut from the same swath. He lectured in tweed suits and ascots; I took my fashion cues from the Ramones. During those first years of university, I spent far more time and energy on my punk group than on my studies. My bandmates and I formed a small church of like-minded obscurantists who listened exclusively to garage music recorded between 1967 and 1978 and tried to ape that trebly sound in our own analogue recordings. Clear boundaries were demarcated at our all-night jam sessions between the very, very few bands we deemed cool and everything anybody else had ever heard. It was rock ’n’ roll fundamentalism.

  Where we were naïve, Gervais was idealistic. He believed that art’s main role is to connect us with the unseen. For him, watching films was the greatest form of prayer. “Through art,” he’d say, “one comes across the question of the sacred, of the ineffable, paradoxically expressing itself in a most dialectical and ambiguous manner.” Cinema helps us know ourselves, he’d say. But for him, knowing oneself meant knowing one’s connection to the divine. This mystical truth cannot be grasped by the mind, Gervais assured us in class. It enters our lives like a spring gushing from the earth. As he spoke about it, I didn’t even understand that I couldn’t understand.

  * * *

  After class one day, I asked him to clarify things. His closet-size office was decorated with stills from Murnau’s Sunrise and Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari.

  “You’re a musician, right?” he began, nodding as I nodded. Bringing up Stravinsky’s contention that one can never understand music, he spoke about how songs don’t need to be lyrically cogent to strike a chord. I could relate to the idea that music had transcendental powers, as I’d often felt them when improvising with my bandmates. Films, too, he continued, have a pulse and a rhythm that can take us beyond thought, into emotion, other levels of existence, other soul states. The sacred, he emphasized, cannot be properly expressed, but it can be felt.

  I felt confused.

  He put his palms together in a kind of horizontal prayer and pointed them in my direction. “Making art can be a religious activity,” he explained, winding his arms forward. “But it isn’t easy.” His serpentining hands came to a stop as he aimed them directly at my heart.

  They fluttered apart, and he started speaking about how life requires striving: “There’s meaning in the struggle. And there’s a name for the energy that impels us forward, that allows us to survive, to keep living, no matter how difficult it gets. It’s called the life force.”

  “Yes, but you believe in God,” I countered.

  “Being a Jesuit is my fountain, my well, but the life force applies equally to nonbelievers. You feel it through inner turmoil. It comes from not giving up, from confronting your suffering, from knowing you still have a ways to go. It’s a continual push. In Latin, this is called magis. It doesn’t end. And it’s not supposed to be easy. Just think of love; the joy and anguish. Love is an experience of the life force. You understand when you love.”

  I’d heard that line in class before. Even though, as a priest, he’d vowed to renounce ever being in love, Gervais often stressed the importance of love in his lectures. “You can see the universal life force at work in romantic comedies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” he told me, “when it starts raining and the protagonists kiss for the first time.” Water symbolized the idea of a grace, of an emanation from the beyond entering this world of mortals.

  He described the “gratuitousness” of grace, its flouting of reasonableness, the way a charge of renovating vitality can surge through us. Grace is an intangible booster-shot of spiritual energy, a sustaining substance, a form of assistance, un-asked-for, unmerited, unannounced, unpredictable. It’s a profound, life-restoring breakthrough. It gives us the strength to keep on living, no matter the shipwreck. Its regenerating intrusion carries us from darkness to daylight.

  Even though much of it went over my head, that talk with Gervais had an effect. Before then, I hadn’t ever thought of immortality, or the life force, or the meaning of art, but for the rest of my university years, I wrote essay after essay grappling with those ideas, trying to understand something I’d never experienced: the divine.

  * * *

  Now, ten years later, I needed help navigating that paradoxical ambiguity. Gervais would know how to steer me right. But a week went by without any response. I dialed the number again and left another message on that nameless answering machine.

  The department secretary didn’t know how to reach him, but suggested I try the university’s chaplaincy. I sent an e-mail. The response was disheartening: “I am sorry to be the one to tell you, but Marc is unavailable. About 18 months ago Marc was transferred to the Jesuit Infirmary and his health continues to decline. He is, at this time, incapable of any consultation or collaboration. It is highly probable that he may not remember you at all. At last report a transfer to the ‘full-care’ section was imminent. He was not in great shape the last time I visited.”

  Filled with sadness, I asked the chaplaincy if they knew any Jesuits who’d be willing to chat about Gervais’s teachings on the life force. Nobody responded.

  “Good luck talking to a Jesuit!” scoffed one of Gervais’s friends and former colleagues at Concordia. “That’s like talking to the CIA. Marc was different. He carried a lot of magic in him. I’d often forget he was a priest. Sure, he performed baptisms and heard confessions, but he was also such a little boy, kooky and out there. It’s so sad the way they just shipped him off to that infirmary.”

  “What happened to him?” I asked.

  “Dementia. Alzheimer’s. The last time we spoke, he described it as a dark force descending on his mind—‘a terrible blackness.’ I’ve thought of going out to see him, but it’s just too depressing.”

  The university announced a new Marc Gervais prize for undergraduates. “He’d put on accents and do Cary Grant impressions in class,” explained the brochure. “He was a colleague, a mentor, a friend and confidant.”

  He was. Everyone spoke of him in the past tense.

  It felt wrong. Even though the university told me not to contact him, I couldn’t imagine he’d be bothered by a visit from a former TA. After all, he did love talking about the life force.

  * * *

  The only infirmary for Jesuits in eastern Canada is located in Pickering, Ontario, not far from Toronto. When I called, a nurse named Felicitas picked up. I told her that Father Gervais had been my professor. Was he staying there? She put me on hold. A few moments later, Gervais himself picked up the phone.

  “Helloooo?” he said, undeniably cheery.

  I hadn’t expected to get ahold of him so suddenly, or to hear him in such high spirits. I introduced myself as a pupil who’d taken six of his classes.

  “Poor devil! And you called to brag that you survived somehow?”

  “The only way I survived university was by taking the courses you offered,” I said, laughing. “And I was wondering, do you ever have visitors?”

  Infrequently, he said, but he enjoyed seeing friends.

  Then maybe I’d stop in to say hello, I suggested. I almost said something about paying my respects, a phrasing usually used for wakes, but caught myself. I hadn’t described my project to him, yet he sensed some ulterior reason for my call.

  “Well. This is a journey you are on of enormous importance—so we must make it possible. I’m about fiv
e hours from Montreal, but outside of that, it’s reasonably simple. Anytime is good. I’ll be here, as long as I don’t take a huge trip to . . . the next chapter in my existence.”

  “That’s precisely what I wanted to come and speak with you about.”

  “Aha. Presuming that nothing—how should I put it?—dramatic happens, to either of us, you can come whenever is convenient for you. I look forward to this, shall we say, extremely, um . . . oh, I can’t find the words. Anyways, barring the much . . . I don’t know what . . . I’m here.”

  * * *

  1. At the 1968 Venice film festival, Gervais headed a jury that awarded Pasolini’s Teorema the International Catholic Cinema Office’s grand prize. His decision created an uproar. The film, despite its religious overtones, clearly conflated sexuality with divine truths. The Vatican formally denounced it, the Italian government charged Pasolini with obscenity, and Pope Paul VI rescinded the award. Long after the scandal, Gervais defended the film’s spiritual profundity. “I’ve always felt that it really says everything,” he once told me. “Everything that can’t be said.”

  5

  To Sea and Hear

  Do you think the holy ghost

  has all the answers? What

  does he know about love?

  That great ghoul of a butterfly

  living for the eternal moment

  —Vladimir Mayakovsky, “A Cloud in Pants”

  It is tangible yet immeasurable.

  —Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander

  THE TRAIN rushed past a spot on the riverbank where I once stood, years earlier, watching ice floes break apart after visiting a family member who’d been hospitalized for months. Toward the end of his institutionalization, I spent three days at the hospital learning about his illness and how to help him adjust upon release. The ice floes, white rectangles crackling in the blue rapids, mirrored his own return to health, the melting away of his frozen state. His recovery depended on finding faith in a higher power. Now I was returning to the patch of earth that helped heal him, searching for my own beliefs.

  When I booked the trip, I made sure to tell Father Gervais as well as the nursing staff about the time of my arrival, in case he’d forget. They recommended I take a bus from the train station. It dropped me at the corner of Finch and Liverpool Streets. I followed their directions to the end of the road, where a sign said NO EXIT. For a moment, all the existentialist confusion of his classes came rushing back.

  A smaller signpost affixed to the closed fence read VISITORS ARE ASKED TO RESPECT THE PEACE AND QUIET OF THIS HOLY GROUND. Behind the gate was a spiritual retreat center for Jesuits. To my right, I noticed an arrow and AMBULANCE ENTRANCE HERE.

  I signed in at the infirmary and entered a large room with sofas arranged around a fireplace. At the reception desk, Feli, the nurse I’d spoken to on the phone, greeted me warmly. Daily mass had just ended, she informed me, and everyone was eating lunch. She went off to find Father Gervais. As she walked away, I peered into the chapel.

  Light was cascading through a stained-glass skylight. The walls were pure white, with a few pews facing the pulpit. Just across from the doorway, a crystal vial of water was perched within a recess in the wall. I moved in for a closer look.

  “Loyola water,” said a woman standing behind me. She had long, stringy white hair and wore a raincoat. The water had been taken from a source in St. Ignatius’s hometown, she continued. It had miraculous powers, such as making barren women pregnant.

  “Do you work here?” I asked.

  “No, no.” She laughed. “I come here for mass, and to walk around the property. This is holy land. You can really feel it out there.” Her name was Vie, the French word for “life.” She told me a story about God being a raindrop she kept in her freezer’s ice-cube tray. One sip and you’d never thirst again.

  * * *

  “What madness is this?” Father Gervais asked, standing up, arms open for a hug. He looked the same, down to the suit and tie, but he clearly didn’t recall our phone calls. He hadn’t been expecting me and I wasn’t sure if he remembered me, though he did seem to realize that I was a former student of his. “What brought you out here—to the moon?”

  “I wanted to see you again.” I laughed, emotionally. “I heard you were out here and wanted to speak with you.”

  “You hear that?” he said, turning to the two elderly Jesuits at the table beside him. “This lout says he wanted to see me! Right. You came to cadge a free lunch, didn’t you?”

  Each of the cafeteria’s half dozen tables was encircled with aged priests. Many of them craned around, curious about the unexpected visitor. It was just like my grandfather’s old retirement home, from the vinyl-covered tabletops to the overboiled vegetable medley on each plate. But this building radiated a distinct intensity. It felt like a spaceship bound for infinity.

  “So,” I said, sitting down, “what do you guys do out here on the moon?”

  “We circle the sun,” Gervais replied, immediately. His two dining companions chuckled to themselves. One of them, wheelchair-bound and serious-faced, had been a high school principal. “He was known as the Strap,” said Gervais, cupping his hand over one side of his mouth.

  “I only used a strap on very rare occasions,” he protested earnestly.

  The other priest, with bristly white hair and sparkling eyes, told me he was a former math teacher from Nova Scotia. “He mighta been a math professor,” added the Strap, “but he doesn’t know his own age.”

  “Bullshit!” said the math teacher, waving his fist threateningly. “I’m ninety-three.”

  “He’s quite intelligent,” added Gervais. “Or at least he thinks so.”

  He turned his fist toward Gervais.

  “Oh-oh, if you don’t watch it, you’ll get his vocabulary,” said the Strap.

  “Or his math,” I ventured, trying to participate in the repartee.

  “Yes! I’ll use math on you.” The former teacher laughed, dropping his fist and adjusting his wool sweater.

  The Strap asked what I was doing with my life. When I said that I’d become a writer, Gervais demanded to know how I paid the bills. As an act of charity, he offered to give me a copy of his book about Bergman, which I hadn’t yet read. A young nurse came over to ask what I wanted for lunch. I said I’d take whatever Father Gervais was eating. He told the nurse I was one of the worst students he’d ever had.

  “Oh, we like Father Gervais, don’t we?” She smiled at me. “It’s very nice of you to come visit your teacher.”

  “I don’t like these people,” he stage-whispered. “They beat me every day.”

  Some friends show their affection by insulting one another constantly, but I hadn’t expected this level of irony in a nursing home for deteriorating priests.

  “I’m starting to see a pattern here,” I said.

  “You’re slow, by Jove, but you’re getting there.” He laughed.

  Over lunch, the ribbing continued, but we also managed to speak seriously about the films he’d shown in class: Fellini, Hitchcock, John Ford. At one point, he remembered that I’d become his teaching assistant for the final couple of years. We discussed Pasolini’s Teorema, how it shows the sacred entering people’s lives. “What our world needs so desperately is to be reminded that there is something beyond,” Gervais said, “and Teorema is filled with that message. It really goes after the depths.” Pasolini, an atheist, felt that we’re detached from the divine—but that we have the capacity to reconnect with it.

  “You see, I showed them films full of Christian iconography,” Gervais said, turning to his fellow Jesuits. “All those films have shots of the cross, in window frames or telephone poles. And the hero walks up the hill. Sacrifice and all that. I kept trying to rescue a few of these poor students. It didn’t always work. I ruined you, right?”

  “You made me think, a lot,” I answered.

  “Impossible,” he declared, jutting his chin out comically.

  The other priests ha
d never seen any of the films Gervais loved. As we spoke about them, they grew uncomfortable. “You wouldn’t appreciate them anyway,” Gervais muttered. They nodded in assent.

  When lunch ended, the cafeteria emptied out. Gervais and I stayed behind, chatting openly. “This is the best place I’ve ever lived,” he confided. “There’s a very nice spirit here. People like people. I’m the youngster, eighty-one years old, and I’m so happy here. You’d think—a bunch of crotchety old priests, everybody must be so cranky—but, no, we all like each other so much. The word for how everybody treats one another is love.”

  I smiled, unsure what to say.

  “So tell me,” he ventured. “What is it you came here to speak about?”

  “I want to ask you about immortality. And about the life force.”

  “Mmmmm, yes, you’ve come to the right place,” he said, spreading his arms. “That’s my area of expertise. And it brings up an interesting thought. As a writer, you might wonder what the question of belief is like for a priest. You know, in films, priests are always nice priests. . . . Now, how did we get to this? What are we talking about again?”

  Alzheimer’s. He’d forgotten his thought midsentence.

  “You were speaking about priests in films.”

  “Of course, yes, yes. Nice priests. They’re always in a parish, they smile benevolently, and they sprinkle holy water on your head—but are they ever shown as being afraid? The spiritual dimension of their lives, the problematic of it, is something writers today never get into. It’s incredible, given the stats of people who still believe, whatever that means, that there aren’t more stories dealing with this question.”