Advice for Italian Boys (18 page)

“Do you think it might actually be like that?” Zoe was saying. “Do you think there’s a bright light and then walking along, through a dark tunnel, and then, I don’t know, do you think that then there’s heaven?”

“Yes,” Nicolo said. “I do. I’m sure of it.”

N
icolo did believe in heaven. His image of it was vague, but if he had been forced to do so, he very well might have described something like the Italy that his nonna spoke of—not the Italy that was, but the Italy that should and could have been, if there hadn’t been the wars, if the government had sent doctors and trains as promised when votes were sought, instead of tax collectors, whose complicity could be bought, and unscrupulous police officers. This heaven existed overhead, somehow, suspended by unseen wires or forces in a separate layer, like a stratum in a wedding cake, above the visible sky but lower than black outer space in which bright stars and blue and red and gold planets spun in their orbits. Heaven had gravity, like Earth, and light, but
the gravity of rocks and dirt in heaven had less substance and the light somehow had more. Heaven had sidewaysslanting hills, deep-mounded earth that forced green shoots up through the soil after the afternoon rains, heavy grapes warm and sweet and so willing to be pressed into wine that they were already half-fermented and loose on their stems under a sun that glowed through the gathered clouds of a second, higher sky. In this heaven, sturdily built stone houses with sound roofs had people inside them who knew exactly where they belonged, a benevolent
padrone
in a
palazzo
overlooking the central, fan-shaped
piazza
where festivals were held—a
padrone
who took every pain to ensure that all wants were anticipated and met before they were felt—fat, gold grain carefully stored in the barns, sturdy milk cows in the fields, cheeses ripening in caves behind the village and turned daily by small boys, the rumbling noise of coffee being ground every morning under every roof, bread baking in hot, banked rows in the communal ovens—every family having no more and no less than what they required. Heaven.

Nicolo’s older brother Enzo went to a family Mass at ten o’clock on Sunday mornings with his wife, Mima, and their children, Zachary and Isabella. His parents went on Sundays as well, almost without fail, to the earliest service possible, anticipatory to their weekly sessions spinning in each other’s embrace on the dining room rug. Younger Enzo attended only funerals and weddings, and he did so in the manner of a visiting anthropologist—dispassionate, analytical and ironic, making mental notes of items that he could recount later to fellow unbelievers as evidence of the great
distance his rational mind had carried him from his superstitious upbringing. Only Nicolo still went several times most weeks. He had not fallen away from the Catholicism of his early childhood but had become over time committed to its familiar rhythms and routines. He had grown aware that the rituals and ceremonies of attending Mass worked a transformation on his brain waves, immersing him into a kind of waking trance in which his thinking was both slowed and sharpened. He became restless if too many days went by between visits; he felt the lack of it more intensely than he felt the need for it. Nothing—not dreaming, not working out, not sports—took him out of and yet socketed him into the world in quite the same way, although he was aware that there were certain parallels between going to Mass and working with the heaviest weights at the gym. It seemed to him that taking part in church was a kind of lifting up of weights too, but exercising his spirit instead of his muscles, and with the priest as his spotter. He hadn’t deciphered, or even seriously questioned why faith was important to him. (This was a puzzle he solved years later, in his late fifties, after his wife’s death, after many hours of talk with his brothers at the coffee shop, and it had to do with ballast. Belief had centred him then, saved him from the sin of wanting without cease to be at her side, first in her coffin, which was too wide and too long for her to lie in alone, and then inside the space into which she had been fitted at the mausoleum with the shadowed void at the left for when his time came—how hungry, how impatient he had felt, how sinfully, how unforgivably he had ached for their separation to end.)

Which is not to say that Nicolo was unaware of the many challenges and paradoxes and irrational demands of faith. Believers were called upon to think, but not to question, to worship without idolatry, to seek freedom in discipline, to speak routine utterances aloud and in unison in order to cement a fresh and personal and wholly interior connection to God, to make rote and ritual intense and personal.

Nicolo was vigilantly, almost superstitiously, observant of the practices of faith and he had added to them some of his own. He always walked, when possible, on the left-hand side of the outdoor stairs leading up to the church doors, treading where the stone steps were not yet worn down. He pulled open the right-hand door of the heavy, panelled pair at the entrance. He touched the holy water with the tips of his third and fourth fingers. He made the sign of a cross with his head bowed toward the font, touching rather than tracing his forehead, his chest above his heart, his left and then his right shoulder. He sat in one of the pews at the back, close to the doors. Nicolo had occasionally been invited by the priest to come forward and read aloud from scripture, but he tried to avoid being chosen by keeping his gaze low, toward the tiled floor with its alternating pattern of burgundy
fleurs-de-lis
and yellow diamonds. He did not attend Mass in order to participate, but so that he could be ministered to; he wanted to arrive empty and be filled, with nothing more expected of him than his presence with an attentive heart. He preferred to sit quietly toward the back of the church, in a part of the sanctuary where two soaring columns had been placed close together, forming a kind of grove, a dim and sheltered recess. Here, the shadows never
lightened, and the floor and columns gathered and amplified the spoken words and the music so that he could feel his chest respond to the resonance of the solemn invocations of the priest calling on all of the collected celebrants to reflect on their unworthiness and sinfulness. Even if Nicolo were suddenly struck deaf and blind, he felt that if he were brought here and placed in this spot, he would know through the medium of his bones exactly where he was.

When Nicolo intoned the confession with the other celebrants, he spoke the words sincerely, confessing with right and proper candour that he had sinned in his thoughts and words, in his actions and in his failures to act. He sang the Kyrie—
Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy
—with a reverent and penitential heart. He recited the creed instinctively. Yes, he believed in God…Creator of Heaven and Earth, and, yes, in Jesus Christ as well…conceived of the Holy Spirit, born, suffered, crucified, risen again. He believed absolutely in the resurrection of the body, accepting that this was a mystery he would never penetrate, and he believed in life everlasting, those went without saying, but he had much less certainty about the promise of the forgiveness of his sins. The priest who had had the charge of the parish during the years when Nicolo was aged five to fifteen had spoken perhaps more strongly than he had intended, and he had left Nicolo convinced that the weight of a single boy’s transgressions might be more than even the most forgiving God could endure. Nicolo kept his eyes closed during the Eucharistic prayer and he felt, every time, even if he did not precisely understand the mystery it invoked, the substantiality of it, the consecration and transformation of the bread
and wine into the very body and blood of a sternly loving Christ, that he took inside himself in hope, every time, of enduring grace. He felt precisely and gratefully the moment when Jesus entered his being, and his body and soul were almost always perceptibly lightened. This sense of buoyancy, of weightlessness, carried over until the Mass ended and the congregation was sent out by the priest into the world, but after a day or two it would wear away, like the shine on a new pair of shoes, like the point on a pencil, like the crease in a pair of pants, and he would need to return.

In addition to the deliberate, purposeful service of the Mass, Nicolo liked the tidy, almost formulaic way in which the church’s teachings and obligations were enumerated and unambiguously conveyed so that it was possible to believe that they provided a certain road map to grace. What were the seven spiritual works of mercy? To instruct the ignorant. To counsel the doubtful. To admonish sinners. To bear wrongs patiently. To forgive offences willingly. To comfort the afflicted. To pray for the living and the dead. What were the seven corporeal works of mercy? To feed the hungry. To give drink to the thirsty. To clothe the naked. To shelter the homeless. To visit the sick. To visit the imprisoned. To bury the dead. There were seven of each, no more no less, finite and understandable and comforting—even though he knew that it was virtually impossible to accomplish them all and in fact the intent seemed to be to make them just slightly impossible to achieve in order to keep the faithful striving. And some of the works were metaphors. He understood that. He was unlikely to be called upon to physically clothe the naked or bury the dead, but he did make charitable donations
that covered most or all of his duties. He also instructed the ignorant, although he tried not to think of his clients using that expression. He knew that he bore wrongs well—he was forgiving by nature, willing to make accommodations for others and to accept excuses for why they might act badly. He didn’t counsel the doubtful or admonish sinners, but he felt about those works much the same as he felt about reading aloud in church—unskilled, not fit by nature or otherwise for the task, certain that God would arrange for others to undertake them in his stead.

Nicolo thought as seldom as possible about his sexual sins, but when they did compel consideration, he found that they fell readily into two categories. The first was his irregular habit of touching his sexual parts in bed or while showering, and occasionally at other times when he was alone. There was no way to deny that he enjoyed the way they felt inside his hand: the always surprising textured softness of the skin over muscle and blood vessels, the warmth of them, like ripe fruit in the sun, their purposeful arrangement, as useful as new and well-constructed machinery, as satisfying to manipulate as an efficient lever, as capable and finely balanced as fishing tackle. These parts of his body seemed almost to have been calibrated exactly to his touch, being located where his hands fell naturally, and providing a combination of satisfyingly contradictory sensations against his hard thighs and firm stomach—downy, ridged, warm, cool, loose, tight, at ease, urgent, hard, soft, light, oddly counterweighted. (The first time he ate dim sum in a restaurant, he was astonished at how closely the warm, salty little dumplings filled with shrimp and bamboo shoots that were presented to him in
a bamboo steamer-basket resembled the twin bundles that upholstered his penis in colour and texture and even temperature; he placed a dumpling in his mouth with equal parts anticipation and trepidation and was taken aback by their almost muscular resistance to his teeth and tongue.)

When Nicolo was a teenager, Father Xavier had collected the boys of the church together once or twice a year, in the same basement reception room in which coffee and tea were served on Sundays—had gathered them on chairs arranged in semicircles in ranks that became decreasingly ordered over the course of the hour, to caution them that touching themselves and all the rest were as dangerous as having anything to do with girls, and perhaps worse because God had at least designed girls for a purpose. The boys needed to take every care possible to avoid this kind of behaviour; any deliberate exercise of sexuality must be reserved to a regular, approved, sacramental relationship—holy marriage in short, ideally to a faithful girl who understood this too: that the pleasures of the body were to be postponed, suspended and safeguarded for the future and then turned only and always to their proper use. Nicolo had thought, listening to this lecture at age twelve or thirteen, of a brilliant blue and green beetle he had seen on a school trip to the museum. The iridescent insect had been trapped and preserved for the edification of future schoolchildren, intact, immobile and changeless, in a sleek candy-like globule of translucent amber.

Worse than this sin, which was one he could at least contemplate with an endurable level of regret since the weight of it was not overpowering, was the second category—his list of sexual encounters. There had been six of these acts
or sequences of unchastity since the age of seventeen. He accepted that they were the consequence of having, on each such occasion, wilfully turned away from the route God wanted him to follow. He had confessed most of these to the younger of the two current parish priests (and he knew that his avoidance of the other, older priest was yet another category of uncategorized and unatoned-for sin, related to sex although not in itself sexual) and had been, in response, exhorted to strive to live a life of the spirit and to resist temptation by means of devotion to the Virgin Mary, regular confession and frequent attendance at mass.

“Evil doesn’t exist in and of itself,” Father Bem told him. “God wouldn’t permit that. No, evil grows out of our inadequate consciousness or mindfulness of God. Evil comes from ourselves alone.”

On the night after he had agreed to go with Patrick on his trip to Las Vegas, Nicolo lay in his bed after turning off the light and reviewed in turn these six events of active sexual transgression.

First, a week or two after his seventeenth birthday in the shower of a hockey rink in a more northern suburb—he had avoided playing there ever since—with a soft-skinned boy whose long halo of blond curls almost entirely concealed his face and whose name he had not known and had not been at the time concerned about. This memory made him burn when he considered it, but, on the other hand, he had been taken entirely by surprise, and the interaction was over before he could come up with any thought of, or plan for, demurral.

Second, about two weeks later, in the washroom of a bar, after another hockey game, with someone dark, short and
slim whom he assumed the first unknown boy had told since he was approached with such open and ready confidence, and although the boy had departed instantly, he had done so without furtiveness. This second boy had even kissed Nicolo’s cheek as Nicolo rezippered his pants closed. A quick, guiltless, efficient kiss on a spot that had prickled ever since whenever Nicolo placed his fingers there. He had time, but only barely, to contemplate violence—a knee to the groin, fingers into eyes, an elbow to the throat. What had held him back was the silken thrill that he remembered from the time before, like being jolted by electricity and then, almost simultaneously, enfolded in satin.