It was my office to look after the Brothers. I dressed the ones who could still get out of bed, I fed them and washed them and helped them to the privy. Some were not able to get up, and for them I brought the basin and emptied it each morning and night. The old are a race unto themselves. Their bowels are second only to God and the privy second only to chapel. Indeed, they would sooner miss the chapel than the privy. Our privy was a model of good order, always clean, always efficient. It was built on an ell extending just beyond the riverbank so that, after the office of Prime and before the office of Terce, the Brethren shat into a branch of the gently flowing river. It is true that further downstream the dyers washed their wool but by that time the shit had dissipated and no offense was offered. This green river, the very life of the city, has always been hard used. Once the Brethren were settled for the morning, it was my task to go to market for the fish and game. I bargained with the peasant women over baskets of leeks and beans, with fishmongers for tench or carp or eels, with farmers for cheese and milk and eggs. I bought bread from the baker and meat pies when he had them and, on feast days, a cooked roast pig with a Mary apple in its mouth. Each afternoon I begged for alms. These tasks, plus obligatory prayer, made up my day and, to some extent, controlled my thoughts and desires. But at night, on my cot, I remained Fratello Luca of the busy hands.
Prato is not like Florence. The first business of Florence is money and, after that, rich cloth and fine sculpture, whereas the sole business of Prato is wool. Prato is a merchant city of little houses with foul alleys between them and the noise and smells of a slum ghetto, with not enough air and sunlight and too much of the muck that comes from living close and working hard. There are canals with fulling mills and dyeing sheds leaning into them and the stench of the dyes and sulfur and alum, but there are gardens everywhere and in spring they perfumed the air. The streets are often too narrow for a cart to make its way, and it is easier to get to market on foot than in a cart, which was well for me since our little mission house possessed no cart and no horse or donkey to pull it.
Cutting down back alleys and over canals, I had found a shortcut to market that took me through the tiny
campos
of the decaying Gualdimare quarter directly to the market square. In fact, that is not quite true. This route was not so quick but it was more pleasant since it followed the river where the children played along the banks, and took me past a world of kitchen gardens and backyard privies, and through the Camposino San Paolo where twice—my heart racing at the sight of her—I had seen the whore, Maria Sabina, drawing water at the well. The trip to market was my favorite duty.
It was May, a hot morning after a long spell of rain, and the air smelled freshly of green things growing, of primrose, lavender, tansy, and mint. Telling my beads, my mind wandering, I had passed the river and the kitchen gardens and was crossing through the Camposino San Paolo—not everything that happens is the will of God—when I heard a voice and stopped to listen.
“
Eh, Fratello mio
!” It was the low voice of Maria Sabina calling me. I had thought of her often, had summoned her image in the night as I lay on my cot, and now here she was, calling me in her low soft voice. I looked at her. A thin red scar ran from her brow to the corner of her mouth, but she was full-bodied and beautiful nonetheless.
“Signora,” I said, and nodded. “Signorina.”
She was leaning against the well-head in the Camposino, her black hair loose about her shoulders, and her hands folded modestly at her waist. She was smiling at me. A dirty white cat lay curled up next to the well and two speckled chickens were scratching at the sand near her feet. The scent of mint, thick and honeyed, hung in the air.
“I’ve seen you passing here before,” she said, and paused. I stood still, unable to move. I considered whether the reason I took this shortcut so often was the hope that one day she would stop me and say, “
Eh, fratello mio
!” If so, I was inviting sin. And it is true that at this moment I wanted to lie down with her, there, in the center of the Camposino next to the well. “You are much too pretty to be a Friar,” she said. “Yes?”
I could think of no reply and I knew I should leave at once but I stayed there, trapped by my desire. I had never lain with a woman.
“You should come with me.” She tipped her head to the right, toward the outside staircase that led up to the second floor. She came close and stood before me. “Don’t you talk? I think you would like to talk to me.” She looked at my face closely. “You are very handsome, very fair.” She put three fingers lightly on my chest. “And you are well made.” She let her fingers drift from my chest an inch or two down toward my waist. “Come with me,” she said.
“I have no money,” I said. “The money I have is for market.”
“Come with me,” she said, taking my hand.
I followed her up the staircase to a little gallery with three doors. All three had been left ajar, and she turned to smile at me as she pushed open the middle one.
Inside it was dark, with a low ceiling and only one tiny window covered with a wooden shutter. Two narrow cots stood end to end beneath the sloping roof and there was a small table with stools for sitting. I could smell the stale scent of frying oil.
I pointed to the two cots, questioning, and she said, “My sister. She is at the market.” She slipped a wooden peg through the latch of the door. “Now,” she said, “we are alone, my little Brother, and I will make you very happy.”
In seconds she had removed her surcoat and her gown and then her kirtle underdress. She stood there, gloriously naked, her arms open and extended toward me. I was slow about this new business. My scapular lay on the floor already but I was still fumbling with my cowl and hood. I stared at her. She seemed to shimmer in the dim light. Her breasts and her belly and the dark smudge of hair between her legs. She came to me and placed the back of her hand against my thigh. She moved her fingers lightly on the cloth, feeling for my
cazzo
. It pulsed hard against the gentle pressure and she took her hand away. “Good,” she said. She smiled and kissed me softly on the lips. She helped me lift the tunic over my head and then the undertunic and then she laughed. She had not imagined Friars wore undershorts. She tugged at the cord around my waist. It loosened and my undershorts fell away. “
Eccolo, che bello
!” she said. She put her hand around my
cazzo
and led me to her bed.
She lay down on the narrow cot—it was of feathers, not straw—and pulled me to her. And then, suddenly, it was as if I had always known what to do. I felt that I had entered another world where there was no sin, where everything was natural and right. I lay beside her and caressed her breasts. I let my hand explore her body, the tender spot at the base of her throat and the tiny line beneath her breasts and all the hidden places I wanted to seek out for my hands and my tongue. I gave myself up to her, easy, unashamed, and before it was too late, I entered her and expelled my seed.
The entire world went white. I thought I must be having one of my spells. When I came back to myself, I looked at her and she was smiling. There were no mysteries for her in what the body can achieve but she seemed pleased nonetheless. She arched her back, tossed her hair from side to side, and stretched, languorous, satisfied.
And so I had congress with a woman and it was good. This could not be sin. This was just us, a man of seventeen and a woman not much older, lying together because it was good to pleasure one another. How could this be sin? Suddenly I saw the waste and folly of all those years spilling my seed in secret, my hands hot, my body frustrate with desire. How perfectly we fit together and how easily. Only God could have found such a seamless way to join man and woman together, to reconcile Adam and Eve, if only for these few moments of perfect union. How could anyone ever have thought this sinful? I lay there praising God.
“Now let me,” she said, “
fratello mio
.”
“Luca,” I said.
“Luca
mio
,” she said.
She pushed me over on my back, and I felt the gentle weight of her great breasts as she leaned across me to trace the lines of my face. “You are too beautiful to live,” she said, and with her forefinger touched my brow softly, moving from the line of my hair to my eyebrows and then to the sockets below, her fingertips upon my eyelids, barely touching me but filling me again with desire. I took her hand and moved it down between my legs, but she said no, not yet, and returned to my face, the swell of my cheekbones and the straight line of my nose and then my lips. “Like silk,” she said, “like a baby’s lips.” She caressed them with her finger and caressed them again with her tongue. And once more I took her hand and said, “Let me do this to you, let me touch you like this, I want to touch you.”
“Later,” she said. “This is for you to remember.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t wait,” and I had her again, this time—with her assistance—slowly, patiently, prolonging the gentle agony of penetration.
We rested, wet now from our efforts, lying side by side. “Now me,” I said, but no, she was not done, and this time she caressed my arms and shoulders, my legs and my privy parts, the swell of my buttocks and the small lump of my navel, and again it was good. “
Now
me,” I said, and she said yes, and I began to explore the endless mysteries of a woman’s body and the special points of hers, the sweet and tender pink about the nipple, the fineness of the skin within the thigh, and the low mound of Venus, the soft hair, the tender rippling flesh that stands guard there. We made love once again, exhausted now but determined, and her flesh was like fire. In the end, it was time to leave.
“Why me?” I asked as I said goodbye.
She smiled, and adjusted my cowl and hood, and kissed me softly.
“It must have been the will of God,” she said. “Besides, you are very fair.”
The bells began to ring for the Angelus as I was about to leave the Camposino. I stopped where I was and made the sign of the cross. “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary. And she was conceived by the Holy Ghost.” I was in a kind of daze, my mind reeling, but I said the Magnificat and the final Ave and blessed myself. Numb still, I watched while the white cat sat up, scratched beneath its chin, and settled down for another nap.
I leaned against the wall to void my bladder and, from old habit, said the Gloria to keep my mind away from sin.
CHAPTER
4
F
ATHER
A
LFONSO LISTENED
to me, running his beads through his parched fingers, nodding now and then, but listening. He was an old man dying of some withering disease that had left him little more than a bag of bones held together by his leathery yellow skin. He gave off a vinegary smell that was not unpleasing. His eyes were clouded—he could scarcely see—but he listened with care to what I said. He leaned on one elbow and supported his bald head with the palm of his hand as I knelt on the floor by his side.
“I have been unkind and impatient and negligent in my prayers, Father,” I said. “I have eaten an oatcake out of the time of meals. And I have been hard in my heart against one of the older Brothers.”
“Yes.”
“For no good reason.”
“There is never a good reason to be hard of heart.”
“I kick against the goad, Father. I have not been a devoted Brother of Saint Francis.”
He said nothing.
In the silence the sharp smell of the oil lamp pricked at my nose. Outside in the dark the birds had begun their night murmuring. It was the hour after supper when we were allowed to read the lives of the saints or, if we were so inclined, the works of the Latin Fathers.
“What is it you want to confess, Brother Luca?” He knew me well.
He had grown tired of waiting and now there was no way but to say it straight out. “I have had carnal knowledge of a woman, Father,” I said, “Three times.” I paused, awaiting his response. When he said nothing, I was emboldened to speak honestly. “But I cannot see it is a sin. How can it be a sin when it is what we were made for? Here,” I made a gesture. “Why did God give us this and fit us so perfectly to a woman and not intend for us to use it? How can this be?”
Other priests—almost any other priest—would have struck me for such defiance of God’s law. Father Alfonso only shook his head and I was made more bold by his silence.
“It is not like touching myself. To lie naked with a woman is to have nothing—as Father Saint Francis preached we should—and to give everything.” I had thought this through carefully. “It is a going out of myself. I do not see how it can be a sin.”
“Oh, little Brother, what can I say to you? Children who grow up with no one to love them are often confused in this way. You reach out. You are hungry for love. And you confuse it with the movements of the flesh. It is not love. It is lust. It seems natural and therefore right, because it is so easy but, as we know well, the descent to Avernus is always easy . . .”
“But is it not better than spilling seed alone? In the dark? Shamefully?”
“Listen to me now and remember what you are. You are a Brother of Saint Francis. You have a vow of chastity that prohibits carnal acts of any kind, alone or with others. You cannot choose one kind of death over another and say this is a lesser death.”
“But this is not death at all.”
“Fornication is a sin. For every moment of pleasure there will be an eternity of pain in the fires of hell. Think on God’s punishment. Beg for His mercy.”
In the silence I could hear one of the Brothers cough. He was very old and his lungs had dried out, so that he spoke with a rasp and his cough was hard. Everyone around me was dying and I wanted to live. I lowered my head further and thought of hell. And then I thought of Maria Sabina. There was a humming in my brain and my heart beat faster. My voice, when I spoke, seemed to come from somewhere outside of me.
“I cannot ask for absolution, Father.”
“Then I cannot give it.”