FSF, March-April 2010 (31 page)

Then sounds did begin to echo. Footsteps. I stared into the shadows of the Basilica, where the sounds seemed to originate, and watched as one of them, a very small one, broke away and moved toward me.

When the shadow became a beggar child, a boy my own age, I assumed that I was dreaming a fever dream.

The figure approached slowly, his face hooded, one hand out as a beggar's would be, his feet shuffling on the marble floor and hidden by the rags he was wearing.

When my eyes, despite their blinking, could not make him go away, I startled at last, my heart leaping with fear or excitement or both. He was not a dream—he was not a shadow on the floor I had mistaken in half-dream for a beggar child. He was indeed a boy like myself, though a beggar, and how he had entered the Basilica without being challenged, I had no idea.

He was nearly to me when I said:

"Blessings upon you, my child. Who are you?"

Was I afraid? Of course. A beggar child, and, given how he walked, probably sick, wandering somehow into the Basilica—should I not be concerned about contracting what ailed him? Did the child even know where he was? Did he, in his sickness, even recognize me, dressed though I was in my vestments? When he finally realized where he was, he might be more afraid than I, and what might he do then?

And yet behind the vague fear—for it was only that, a vagueness—was another thought, the kind I often had when I was young:

What if this were a miracle—the kind my uncle spoke of—the “miracles that illuminate our lives, whether we are saints or sinners"? Do the scriptures not tell of Christ and his disciples traveling as beggars? Does Christ himself not speak for the meek and weak and poor—of how we must look in their faces to find Him if we are to forget the lies that riches and fine clothes and the body itself are, blinding us as they do to the Truth, which needs no finery?

Was this beggar perhaps not mortal, but His Son returned? Or if he were indeed just a beggar, did he not carry with him a child's innocence and therefore grace?

Head still bowed and hidden by his cowl, the beggar child said:

"I am a Drinker of Blood."

I did not know what to say at first. I was shocked by the child's words, and yet they made a strange sense to me.

"All who seek eternal life through Him are drinkers of blood."

The child laughed, which shocked me, too. To laugh at the solemn words of a Pope, even if he were a boy?

"I am not sure I am comfortable with your laughter, my child."

"I am no one's child,” the boy answered, and it was not with hostility, but sadness.

At that moment D'Orgoglio, one of my attendants, appeared in the doorway just behind me to check on me.

"Your Holiness!” he exclaimed, seeing the child.

"I am fine, D'Orgoglio. The boy and I are simply in conversation."

The child had not turned to look at my attendant, and this made D'Orgoglio even more concerned. He was thinking (as I had thought and should still be thinking): How had the child gotten past the guards? How had the child even known where the Pope would be?

"A conversation at this hour, Your Holiness? Are you—"

"Please do not worry yourself, D'Orgoglio. I will call if you are needed."

D'Orgoglio seemed attached to the floor, unable to move his feet. How could he leave and at the same time obey my uncle's orders that he watch over me with his life?

"Your Holiness—"

"This boy is my guest tonight, Pier. We will be speaking of spiritual matters and so need privacy. As I said, I will call for you—I will ring the bell on this chair, in fact—if I need you."

After what seemed an eternity, D'Orgoglio moved at last, nodded once, stepped back through the doorway, and closed the door. He would send for a Papal guard or two, of course; and when they arrived, though they would all respect my wishes, they would also all listen, out of fear for my safety, on the other side of the heavy door. The child and I would need to speak
sotto voce
if we wanted privacy.

I turned back to the boy.

"Step closer, that we might converse quietly."

The child took two steps and stopped.

"You are
someone
'
s
child,” I answered him.

"I was
once
,” he said, and, as he did, glanced at the doorway. Seeing that the door was shut, he let his cowl drop at last, so that I could see his face.

I jerked back. He was a boy, yes, but not a normal one. His skin was paler than the whitest marble inlays on the floor. His eyes were sunken, his lips thin. The dark slit of his mouth glinted with teeth, and not in a way that teeth should glint.

"You are God's child,” I finally said, struggling for words. “And you will always be."

"I think not."

At that he raised his arm. The sleeve fell from it. His arm was as pale as his face. And then he did the most amazing thing: He bit into his own flesh. He raised his forearm to his lips, opened his mouth, and bit into himself.

It felt for a moment as if he had bitten
me
. I squirmed in St. Peter's chair from the sensation of it, looked down at my own arm, and calmed only when I saw no mark of mouth or teeth on my sleeve.

His
arm was of course bleeding. He had bitten himself more than once, and his teeth had both punctured and torn his skin. Blood oozed from the wounds.

And then he did something else.

He licked the blood from his arm, paused as if to taste it, licked his lips to clean them, and looked back at me again.

"Would God have His child do this?” he asked bitterly, and I could see that his eyes were not what eyes should be. The pupils were too large, occupying all but the white. There was no color to his eyes, only the pupils’ darkness.

He laughed again, amused at my astonishment.

"You still do not know what I am?"

He was correct. I did not. What could he have been, other than a child who seemed to have no blood in his body—pale as marble—and yet could bleed and drink his own blood happily?

Then the most disturbing thing of all occurred; and as it did, I stood up from St. Peter's chair, ready to rush from the Apse.

As I watched—and as he held his arm out to me so that I might do so—the wounds on his arm began to heal. They tightened, puckered, and slowly began to fill with fresh, smooth skin, until soon there were no wounds at all.

For a moment I thought of His Son again. Perhaps (I told myself, wanting to believe it) I was witnessing the kind of healing spoken of in the Holy Book; that I had been right—this was His Son come again, disturbed perhaps, doubting God, but had he not been in this same state, for a moment anyway, on the Cross of Golgotha?

But then the child said:

"It is not what you think, Your Holiness."

It was, yes, as if he had heard my unspoken thoughts; and was this not proof, too, that he might be the Son come again?

"All of us—the Drinkers of Blood—can hear the thoughts of mortals, like voices in our skulls, if we wish to,” he said, performing the miracle again.

"But that does not mean,” he continued, the bitterness there again, “that we are holy."

"I—I do not understand."

"We heal so that our damnation is ensured,” he answered.

"But if you heal, you are immortal in flesh as well as soul."

"That is our damnation, Your Holiness."

"How can this be?"

He paused and the pause was like damnation itself.

"Because,” he said at last, “we do not exist in God's grace."

"Everyone exists in God's grace—simply by being God's child."

"Not those cursed by the bite of the Oldest Drinker and his children, grandchildren and great-great-great grandchildren. The Oldest Drinker is the son of the Fallen One, born to graceless starvation, misery, and eternal damnation."

I remembered something from my eighth year of life: Adults speaking in a corridor, their voices low. My uncle and two others. Phrases like “those of the Dark Communion” and “a thirst that never ends.” When one is eight years old, the words of adults belong to adults, for adults to understand, and I had thought nothing about them. And as I remembered the event, I remembered the fear in the whispers—and the mutterings of prayers that had followed. Later, when the Drinkers began to take the Holy City, I would learn what these phrases truly meant; but at that moment, faced with a beggar child who could heal from his own bite, I remembered only the whispers and the fear of that corridor.

"I am not old enough,” I said at last, “to know of what you speak, my child."

"Nor was I,” the figure rushed to answer, his voice made brave by what was clearly anger and despair, “until I was bitten three years ago and my body told me, as it changed, what I now know. As I met others like me, damned as well, I learned the words to describe it. The Curse. The story of the Oldest Drinker, who has lived for fifteen hundred and seventy-six years when perhaps he should have died in another man's place, on a cross, on a hill that day. Had I not learned these things from others like me, but older, I would not, at ten years of age, stand before you able to speak of anything other than my own misery."

"I still do not understand. But you are here because you wish something of me. This I understand."

"I do wish something of you, Your Holiness, and yet I do not know whether you understand enough of the world to grant it."

"We do not need to understand everything to do what should be done."

The child laughed again, and, though perhaps a little less bitterly, with the same despair.

"Those are the words of a man, not a boy,” he said. “Where did you learn them?"

I saw no harm in answering, and, in fact, felt that only honesty would take us both where we needed to go this night. “From my uncle, the Cardinal Voccasini, and from the holy texts I studied under his guidance long before I was elected Pope."

Tears had appeared suddenly in the child's eyes, and I did not know why. He had been bitter and hopeless before, and angry before that, but the tears told of something else.

"I am not accustomed to the caring your honesty implies,” the child said, sounding like a man even older than my uncle. When you were cursed in his way, did you become old before your time?

But the question that possessed me more than any other was this: Why would God curse a child when His Son had so loved children?

"I do not believe,” I began, “that God has damned you or those like you."

"You do not know,” he answered.

"I believe that you have damned yourselves by choosing to believe that God has forsaken you."

Where these words issued from, I do not know. They were almost heretical, and certainly not my uncle's. They were not from any holy text I could remember, and yet they felt very much like the word of God. I sometimes think that they were the first words I
truly
spoke as Pope; and by that I mean that they were the first real words of the Holy Spirit speaking through me; and that, had the beggar child who drank blood for reasons I did not understand not appeared before me that day, I would never have truly become Pope.

More tears had appeared, and the child was now embarrassed by them.

"How could God,” he asked, “not have forsaken us if we are so miserable? Is it not God's wish that we suffer for our sins, though our sin is only that we are the children of the Oldest Drinker?"

"You are damned only by your bodies, just as I am,” I heard myself say, a voice somewhere telling me to say it, “and bodies mean nothing, for they are a lie. They tell us that we are not eternal, when we are. They tell us that God must want us to suffer, when of course He does not. We suffer simply because we are here in this world and in bodies for but the briefest moment, after which we will return to Him."

Again, whose words these were, heretical as they sounded, and yet true, I did not know.

"We will certainly
not
return to Him,” the child said.

"You will."

"But we are damned."

I sighed. What more could I say?

Fighting tears, he said, “Do you wish to hear my request or not?"

"Yes."

"It is this: Will you give me communion? And confession?"

My breath stopped. To grant communion and confession to one about whom my uncle and the other cardinals had whispered in fear should have been unthinkable; but as I looked into my heart I saw that it was not my love of God that made it “unthinkable,” but a fear of what might be “Godless.” And as my uncle had taught me, there is nothing that is Godless. And fear, as my uncle also taught me, should never be the reason for a Pope's action. A love of God should be; and if the words I had just spoken to the child—my first real words as Pope—had indeed come to me through the Holy Spirit, I should listen to them and not to fear.

"Why do you wish this, my child?"

"Because...,” he began, but seemed unwilling to finish.

"You must tell me, if I am to decide whether to grant your request or not."

"Because I want to
know
."

"To know what?"

"Whether I am damned."

"My words of assurance to you as your Pope are not enough?"

"I wish that they were, but how can they be?"

It was true. How could they be, when I was but a child, too, and they were conversation, not sacrament.

"Did you also think,” I asked, “that because I am a boy, too, you might persuade me more easily?"

"Yes."

"That I would be weak and so persuading me might be easier?"

"No. Only that because you are a child, too, you might understand and have more compassion than any priest, bishop, or cardinal."

He was speaking the truth, and I was moved.

When I rang the bell to call D'Orgoglio, it was not without doubt. What if what I was about to do was wrong in a manner I could not foresee? What if the child were playing me like a musical instrument for his own purposes, or, worse, the purposes of a greater darkness, the Oldest Drinker's? What if my performing the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation, with Communion, provided strength to Darkness?

What if, even if the consequences of my actions were not so grand, I nevertheless compromised the Voccasini family position by doing this? A Pope must remain sensitive to politics, too, that faith not die from the onslaught of worldly matters.