Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  Father Malcolm swallowed heavily. Then he rubbed both his hands vigorously.

  “It would be an honor.”

  “And perhaps a bit of a homecoming for you,” the Franciscan added compassionately.

  Father Malcolm turned back to the mirrors. Acutely self-­conscious, he tried to staunch the blood at his lips. The priest and Franciscan watched him carefully.

  Then, to his horror, Father Malcolm perceived, in his own image, the Face he had been running from all day. A burning, triumphant glint in his own eyes. In that brief glance, he saw all his own duplicity, vanity, lust, and rage.

  Father Malcolm bent before the image of vileness, shuddered, and broke into great sobbing gasps.

  Moved, the cassocked priest and Franciscan rushed to his side.

  “I was filled as the vessel of Christ!” Father Malcolm said in his degradation. “I ceased to exist but as an extension of His sweet grace! I flowered! I was in ecstasy! And Christ—the sweet peace of pure love—was in my hands and in my breast!” Father Malcolm wiped his tears with the terrycloth towel. “But now Christ has abandoned me! I am impure! It were better had I never been born.”

  The priest and the Franciscan laid gentle hands on their fallen brother, their lips forming prayers.

  Suddenly, Father Malcolm felt a great, inexplicable urgency. He pulled himself free and spun around toward the priest and Franciscan.

  “You miserable hypocrites,” he whispered hoarsely. “You spend your days in the dust of libraries and carrying tea for a bishop who cannot truly comprehend the mysteries of Christ, and you think you can protect me from evil!”

  The Franciscan and the priest backed away, unnerved.

  “It is not we who protect you,” the Franciscan reminded him, “but the absolution of your penance.”

  Father Malcolm heard fervent whispers exchanged at the dormitory door. He wound the towel around his fists so hard that the knuckles went white. He came closer to the priest and Franciscan.

  “What do you know of religious experience?” he sneered. “What can you even imagine about it? What would you do if the Antichrist came to you? Pray?”

  “But what else?”

  A rage at their bookish simplicity, their simpering superiority, blinded Father Malcolm. The very sight of their robe and cassock, the cultivated gentleness of their voices, nauseated him. It was fraud. They were people who could not cope with the real world, or with real religious experience, and sought refuge in the mindless routine of the bishop’s seminary.

  “That is what I did,” Father Malcolm hissed. “And Christ was not there!”

  The priest swallowed nervously.

  “Then you erred in your heart. You were not sincere.”

  “Oh, yes. Rationalize. Make believe.”

  “What possible explanation is there otherwise for your fall?” demanded the Franciscan, flushed and angry.

  Father Malcolm could not answer. In the silence, he heard footsteps in the distant corridor. It was the messenger returning from the bishop’s chamber.

  Instead of answering, Father Malcolm pushed past them into the corridor.

  The Franciscan grabbed his arm.

  “Stop!” he shouted. “You are under our authority—”

  Father Malcolm whirled the Franciscan from him, shoving him against the priest, cascading towels from the clothes hamper at the lavatory door.

  “I am not under your authority!” he shouted.

  The messenger from the bishop’s chamber rushed up to the Franciscan and the priest, wild-eyed. They conferred briefly, then, lifting the skirts of their robes, were running down the corridor away from Father Malcolm.

  “Christ was defeated at Golgotha Falls!” the Jesuit howled after them in a bitter, broken voice.

  As he ran, dodging shadows, Father Malcolm pushed through double doors, past the kitchen. Another cassocked priest rose from his chair at another door. With a terrific yell, Father Malcolm slammed into the priest, sending him sprawling among sacks of potatoes.

  Father Malcolm turned in rage and ran down another corridor. He fled through the coal basement and out an exit blindly, sucking frigid night air into bursting lungs.

  Father Malcolm stumbled into the bishop’s garden.

  The lights were on in the bishop’s chamber and silhouettes moved against the windows. Father Malcolm had the odd sensation that he was partially responsible. But he did not know why. Indeed, except for the frantic gestures of the silhouettes, there was no way to know that anything unusual had happened.

  He walked uncertainly toward the parking lot. The rage within him was gone. The great power of a foreign and controlling presence was gone. He hugged himself, trying to keep warm. Everything was normal again. He got into the Oldsmobile, trying to comprehend what had happened.

  Had it happened in a dream? The violence, the blasphemy—it could not be his. There was a power in his body that was independent of him. Suddenly, he became terrified of the cathedral and drove out of the alley. Father Malcolm realized he was driving onto the long bridge over the Charles River, heading north. He was returning to Golgotha Falls.

  “Dear God, have mercy on my soul,” he whispered.

  The steering wheel wrenched sharply to the right, and he drove toward a gap of rail and steel cable in the bridge. A brief flash of Bernard Lovell throwing himself under a transport wagon shot through his brain and Father Malcolm understood: It was to avoid servitude. The Oldsmobile struck a concrete bank hidden under the snow, bounced, and came to a stop.

  Father Malcolm struggled to open the door.

  “Never,” he swore aloud. “Never shall I serve against Christ!”

  Slipping over the ice, he ran to the bridge railing. Down below moved the black, frigid, annihilating Charles River.

  A bright light paralyzed him. He turned sharply, and saw the red nose and moon-shaped face of a policeman under a blue earmuff hat.

  The policeman came closer, putting the flashlight into his leather belt.

  “Father,” said a Boston Irish brogue. “Are you all right?”

  Father Malcolm, unable to answer, stared at the policeman, perceiving in the man’s face a mixture of greed, lust, and deception. It was a sickening sensation. Father Malcolm looked away.

  Barely visible in the fog, the cathedral loomed like the bulkhead of a great ship going down in the hills to the south.

  “Which way were you going, Father, when you skidded on the ice?”

  “North.”

  “Are you far from your parish?”

  “Parish?”

  “Yes. How many miles?”

  The policeman stepped closer. The piggish, glinting eyes seemed demoniac, even sadistic. Father Malcolm knew it was a hallucination. He was looking into the Face of his own evil, the Master who ruled those absent from Christ.

  “Are you all right?” the policeman asked again.

  “Yes.”

  The policeman studied the Jesuit’s face. It was clear the priest had suffered some kind of psychological trauma, but it was not a result of the accident.

  “Maybe you should stay at the cathedral tonight,” the policeman suggested. “It’s the devil’s own night for driving.”

  “No. Not in the cathedral.”

  “What’s the problem, Father?” he asked gently. “Maybe I can help.”

  Father Malcolm felt the bruised lip. It tasted like vinegar.

  “Have you ever,” Father Malcolm asked delicately, “doubted the divinity of Christ?”

  The policeman was at a loss. Finally, he deferred to the authority of the Jesuit.

  “Never, Father. Not once.”

  “Then you are a fortunate man.”

  Father Malcolm involuntarily turned to look at the dark road to the north. An infinite blackness stretched out there, a twisted route into Golgotha Falls.

  The policeman clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Since you won’t go to the cathedral, you might as well go to your parish. Come, I’ll help you get your
car back onto the highway.”

  Father Malcolm numbly got into the Oldsmobile. The policeman used the patrol car to nudge the Oldsmobile off the sidewalk and onto the road.

  The ignition started instantly.

  “Can I do anything else for you?” the patrolman asked cheerily, pulling up beside him.

  “Only God can help me,” Father Malcolm mumbled.

  But the policeman misunderstood. He smiled.

  “God bless you, too, Father.”

  The patrol car moved off.

  As though of its own volition, the Oldsmobile began lumbering up the moonstruck ice patches, then into the dark forests toward the north.

  An icy chill flowed through Father Malcolm. His body was not his own. He was now afraid. Could Mario Gilbert, being violent, have perceived the buried violence that now ran rampant in him? Some psychological force was tearing his personality apart, as a dog shakes an old slipper.

  A pale figure stared at him with red eyes.

  It was the plastic Christ on the dashboard. The smash into the bridge rails had activated its batteries. Now the features of the Man of Sorrow gazed in sadness at an unfeeling world. The eyes bore into Father Malcolm. Strangely, it had suffered a small injury in the accident. Its back was twisted and humped. The red eyes glinted malevolently. The haggard facial shadows, the striated, dirty beard looked more and more like Christ’s opposite, glowing in passages of moonlight through the trees.

  With each passage under the trees into moonlight, the figure metamorphosed more and more.

  Suddenly, with an inarticulate yell, Father Malcolm rolled down the window and threw the figure out. He heard it bounce, tumble and twirl, cracking on the hard shoulder of the road.

  “That’s better—much better—” he said, in a voice that sounded strange even to himself. “Christ, have mercy on me!” he whispered.

  Fishtailing, pounding onward over the twisting and ice-crossed highway, the Oldsmobile raced toward the cancerous moon high over Golgotha Falls.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Cardinal Bellocchi crossed the vast spaces of St. Peter’s Square.

  Over the campaniles and domed churches of Vatican City, a moon of saffron yellow sailed among stars. The sewers had broken, and puddles on the cobblestones shivered in a dusty wind. Far away, a dog howled under the aqueduct. Carabinieri patrolled the peri­meter of the city within the city of Rome.

  The Tiber smelled sluggish and dank. Olive trees within the Vatican gardens were fragrant. Cardinal Bellocchi stepped out of the square, into the columns and shadows, and down the garden pathway, moving toward the Borgia Apartments.

  Seven Jesuits followed in close ranks, carrying leather cases from North America. Their shadows passed down the moonstruck marble columns, and fell into the oblivion of the darker shadows of the Basilica. Cardinal Bellocchi moved faster, as though the ghosts of former enemies pursued through the midnight.

  Cardinal Bellocchi’s Jesuits, breathing hard, tried to catch up with him at the broad marble steps. They staggered like uncertain vertical shadows in the moon-gilded perspectives of domes, distant fountains, and basilicas. Inside the Borgia Apartments, the Jesuits carried their briefcases down the frescoed corridors, past desks manned by private chamberlains, deeper and deeper, farther from the metropolis of the restless streets.

  Cardinal Bellocchi lowered his head, passed down different corridors, past shadowed faces in white cowls, under low-burning lamps, until his footsteps echoed like the Jesuits’ on the swirled marble of the papal living quarters.

  The Vatican was dark, a place of oblique whispers behind Baroque pillars. Distantly, the midnight bells of Vatican City and Rome began, deep-voiced iron, brass, and melodious steel resonating within seconds of one another in the night.

  A superior of the Benedictines came white-faced down the corridor. Cardinal Bellocchi grabbed his elbow.

  “He waits for you.”

  “And?”

  The Benedictine removed his arm.

  “That’s all, Your Eminence. He waits. For you.”

  The Benedictine left. Cardinal Bellocchi and his Jesuits resumed their rapid march into the interiors.

  Of late, His Holiness had undertaken night-long vigils in the minor basilicas of Rome. He prayed at midnight in the dank catacombs, where thigh bones and skulls decorated the vaults of friars and monks long passed unto Christ. Surprise visits had been paid to the Vatican Observatory, where His Holiness displayed an extraordinary expertise on the configuration of the heavenly motions.

  Twice in the month, incognito, with a single Jesuit assistant, he had traveled to Boulogne for the midnight mass, and once to his hometown of San Rignazzi in Sicily for services in the abandoned caves there.

  Last Friday dawn, it was whispered, the white candles of the papal chapel in the Borgia Apartments had self-ignited, sending sweet fragrance toward the gilded ceiling.

  At Friday midnight, two carabinieri swore they saluted the silhouette of His Holiness on the balcony of the private chambers. Yet His Holiness, returning from San Rignazzi, had slept that night at the Castel Gandolfo instead.

  Cardinal Bellocchi left his Jesuits holding their leather cases, faces half shadowed, half sallow from the dim lamps at the walls, and pushed toward the inmost antechambers. As he approached the gilt door he felt the pressure of the Pope’s imminent presence.

  In the antechamber of the Borgia Apartments, Cardinal Bellocchi paused briefly in front of the frescoed landscape, rimmed in exquisite gold leaf, wherein Saint Jerome crushed the rock against his breast in the spiritual wilderness.

  Of late, behind the charisma, deeper chasms of Francis Xavier’s strange and powerful personality had been revealed. A communication of a nameless dread, insomnia, doubts, and moodiness, and yet nothing deterred or even slowed his headlong rush toward an Ecumenical Council on the subject of the Resurrection.

  Under the lighted candles, in a white embroidered chair, sat Francis Xavier.

  A white, gold-embroidered robe and slippers set off the handsome figure of the Sicilian. The broad, intelligent forehead, the deep gray eyes now almost black in the candlelight, piercing Cardinal Bel­locchi as he entered the private chamber, the knotted, strong hands that gripped the armrest in regal and restless assurance, seemed but the exterior manifestations of the indwelling charisma of the Holy Spirit Itself.

  Cardinal Bellocchi knelt and reverently kissed the gold Ring of the Fisherman on Francis Xavier’s hand.

  “How goes Christ’s work?” Francis Xavier asked.

  “I planted the seed where I could, Your Holiness. Sometimes the soil was rough.”

  “The strongest trees grow from rough soil.”

  Cardinal Bellocchi sat in a plush velvet chair opposite. The Pope’s kindly voice belied the deep gravity of the eyes. Francis Xavier looked strengthened, confident, from his recent vigils.

  In the corridors beyond his Jesuits, Cardinal Bellocchi heard the personnel of the Vatican carrying leather suitcases, ornate and silvered boxes of personal effects for the great journey to North America.

  Francis Xavier heard it, too, and seemed to awaken from a mild dread.

  “Our whole endeavor in Quebec,” he said, “must be to prepare, as a fundamental mission of the Church, for the Second Incarnation.”

  “We have a full calendar, Your Holiness—many matters of political and social natures to attend to.”

  Francis Xavier frowned. Cardinal Bellocchi was his chief obstacle to the Quebec conclave.

  “Yes, I know. And so, according to their worth, shall they receive our attention.”

  “John XXIII,” Cardinal Bellocchi insisted, leaning forward, “in calling Vatican II, was also moved by the Holy Spirit. And yet, without prior organization, what really changed? Almost nothing.”

  A whisper of the night breeze disturbed the candles, and delicate puffs of smoke rose, twisted, and then, smoothed upward from the pure white flame.

  “You are a Roman, Cardinal Bellocchi,” Francis Xavier said.
“You understand the workings of institutions. You understand politicians. But the believing world is not like Rome.”

  “It is more like Rome than Your Holiness wishes to think.”

  Francis Xavier settled back against the floral stitchery of the gold and white chair. He shook his head vehemently. Then he leaned forward impulsively. The hands, flexed together in his lap, looked knotted and bony, like a peasant’s.

  “No. When I go down to San Rignazzi, I visit my relatives. I go back to the old house of my parents, my old friends, the stone church where I was baptized. I walk through the olive groves where my father worked. My uncles and nephews still work there. Do you know what they demand of me?”

  “No, Your Holiness.”

  “They demand: Baldoni—they still call me Baldoni—when? When is Christ coming?”

  Francis Xavier remained leaning forward, eyes flashing, hands apart now, gesturing, and he was smiling happily.

  “You understand, Cardinal Bellocchi?” he said. “Not if. When?”

  Cardinal Bellocchi wiped his forehead with a linen handkerchief, briefly glanced at the grit of Rome that left pale impressions there, and put the handkerchief back into his pocket.

  Francis Xavier wagged a formidable finger as he grinned.

  “And I tell them I don’t know when, Cardinal Bellocchi. But it will be soon. Very soon!”

  Cardinal Bellocchi tried to smile. Francis Xavier jabbed the cardinal’s knee for emphasis.

  “Because in San Rignazzi, you can feel Christ! In the sky, in the rocks, in the stone houses! He is a few minutes away, Bellocchi—you can sense Him in the air you breathe!”

  The declaration had no effect on the cardinal. Francis Xavier settled back against the chair. As he studied the Nuncio, he tapped his finger thoughtfully against his lips, and a gentle twinkle came into his eyes.

  “I will send you to San Rignazzi,” he said. “It will take the Roman cosmopolitanism out of your soul.” Francis Xavier flexed his fingers, lacing them together, smiling. “Yes. A year among the hard-­working and the poor, Cardinal Bellocchi. It would rekindle your spiritual expectations.”

  The cardinal was not certain if Francis Xavier was joking. Was a purge being contemplated against the nonmillennialists? Cardinal Bellocchi felt his heart pounding as he tried to picture the catastrophe of a year’s banishment to Sicily, among the banality and superstitions of peasants.