Maatstaf. Jaargang 36

[p. 46]

Bruce Benderson
Stations of the Cross

The priest awoke with a feeling of uneasiness. From far away, last night's occurence winged toward him on the tones of a ringing phone. But he brushed it aside. Who could be calling? A satin-skinned boniness, whom he liked to call his spiritual son, had the new number. But the boy was passed out, at peace beside him on the sheetless mattress. Who else? Dazed as he was, he tried to remember exactly when it was that he had changed the number. It was when the calls got out of hand. When the plug was put back in the wall, rings would rattle the phone, and when the receiver was lifted, curses and threats pierced the eardrum.

The priest pulled himself from the bed and faced the arid day through a funnel of dizziness, light sifting through olive trees into the window. For a few seconds he convulsed into the customary sobs, the overwhelming plight of the human condition. His mind soared past a brief vision of agony in a garden, the snowy dome of a forehead with drops of sweat turning to blood. He saw a phone ripped out of a brown-skinned hand, then relaxed with a yawn into the familiar feel of his eternal damnation. From the open doorway to the other room came the waxy smell of dates and the stench of the old man asleep in his cane chair. His rosary would be sprawled obscenely across the floor, no doubt.

The priest stumbled to the bathroom - saw the rosary on the floor just as he'd imagined. The old man had, of course, dropped it. Curled up in a corner was the younger brother of the one now lying in the bed. Last night he had wept softly, but now he slept, with blackened feet pulled up against his thin thighs. He looked in better health than his brother, the priest remarked, and he'd be an attractive lad some day.

Numbly he cuffed aside a spasm of shame at these thoughts, leaned his great bulk against the sink and nearly drank water from it as he had when a child. Then he remembered that the water was impure. He decided to go out. He would get some of the old man's change to buy bottled water and fish. Today he would borrow the old man's clerical collar once more, also - and take one of the crucifixes for good luck. He'd do it before the old man woke up and realized he was trapped in his chair for the rest of the morning, with only one or another of the brothers who might happen to feel like helping.

Thus he moved spiritedly back toward the bedroom, his mind divided between telescoping shame and a pulsing anticipation

[p. 47]

of roaming the streets - perhaps with this boy or that - got up in clerical garb, for all the world to see.

But the sight of the wiry, satin-skinned body sepulchered in shadow on the soiled mattress temporarily drove the thought from his mind. It reminded him of last night's torturous dialogue. How had it all begun? He had been explaining to this sullen, street-surviving child, who apathetically sat smoking on the bed, how well he understood the indignities and exploitations suffered by children. Why he knew them well. He had portrayed in imagery, for his benefit, a young friend succumbing to these deprivations in a deplorable manner, years ago, in another land. The boy had been someone of breathtaking charm and beauty. The priest explained how he had tried everything in his power to elevate the child's situation, how his obsession to help seemed only to plunge the lad into further misfortune...

...But his companion did not seem to be listening. The bored, heavy-lidded youth kept pulling on his cigarette, his potential for learning still glowing so fixedly before the priest... but still so unrealized... For instruction was the deed that the priest desired to do most of all...

So he had gone on with his story, mournfully describing how the long-ago boy, at barely seventeen, had been sent to the purgatory of prison. And during this incarceration the priest spent every waking hour on his knees praying, but to no avail. He found himself stumbling into the blackest, deepest despair. To make matters worse, he soon learned that this trodupon flower had fallen ill. No one could say whether his fever and increasing intestinal pains were the result of the abuse of older prisoners... and no one was to guess that the infirmary would prove more diabolical than the cell.

Soon the other prisoners in the sick ward recovered and were released, and all that remained was the frail though still magnetic youth. His gleeful nurses and orderlies, all members of a different race than their tearful charge, expressed their delight in being able to devote all of their time to his case. But it was their serial penetration that caused the boy's peritonitis and sent him on an agonizing journey to his maker.

Thus did the priest reach the climax of his account to his young interlocutor - a climax, he explained, that was meant to be instructive. But he had not accounted for the bottomless apathy of the present object of his affections. He was stunned by the boy's absence of reaction, which may have stemmed partly from the fact that he happened to come from those peoples who play culprits in this tale of incarcerated woe. His only response to the story was to find in it an explanation for his passionate cultivation by the priest: at least you're getting back for what they did to your boy, he suggested.

Getting back? had the priest heard right? The idea was so monstrous and such a perversion of intention, that for a moment he gazed at his sullen companion with genuine distaste. To

[p. 48]

cradle a soiled vessel in tender arms, to recover it the caresses its own mother had denied it - getting back? Certainly the boy had to understand and appreciate some day, given time and prayer...

An image of wood weighing an already scourged shoulder was eclipsed by darkness, as the priest noticed that the boy seemed hardly concerned with the discussion. The conversation had not touched him at all. Already he nonchalantly held a small square of paper curled in his fingers into which he tipped the mouth of a jar filled with tobacco, shavings of hashish, and free-based cocaine. Whenever the lad made up his mind tot flee feeling and sense, there was nothing anyone could do. In fact, he rarely bothered to eat these days, so taken was he by his cursed, damning drugs.

Grim anticipation coiled in the priest's belly. As much as he loathed drugs that stole intelligence, skewed emotions, and could even kill, so was he well aware of sudden swoops of grace, opportunity. Perhaps the child was too thick-headed and stubborn to listen to reason - to what the priest in his confessions was trying to implant; then reason had to be forced upon him. And what better state of mind for this could there be than one in which the subject was hypnotically open to influence? Influence can only enter the mind as a drop of water will enter a moist sponge. So saturated with self-loathing at this reasoning was the priest, that he made up his mind for a swift solution: he would take the drug, too.

Gazing at the human hand whose shape mirrors that of the one nailed to wood, but which was attached to his own body, the priest had seen himself reach for the smoking concoction rolled in paper, take it from the young, brown-skinned hand, and inhale it deeply. Was there any use in going over what happened next?

Perhaps not. The priest shrugged wearily, resting his eyes on the boy's sprawled form struck by ever-brighter pebbles of light from the window. He heard the old man moan from the next room, trying to call out, but too weak. Well, today he could wait until the priest was good and ready.

Then the tones of the phone lashed out again. It was strange that the boy did not wake up and lunge to answer it as he usually did. Instead the priest stumbled to it, determined once and for all to rip the cord from the wall permanently; but he fell, and moved on his knees to pick up the receiver.

There was silence at the other end of the line, and the caller hung up with a sharp click. The priest heard this sound with a delicious irony; it was like the sting of a whip. Then he remembered last night's call, when the boy had gotten to the phone before he had. Someone - the boy or his brother - had plugged it back in.

One of the tormentors was calling - one of the boy's perverters or whores. Although the boy had been warned over and over

[p. 49]

never to give the number out, callers had become legion. There was always an excuse. Either the crude voice supposedly had work for the boy, or the female voice was a cousin with news of his mother. Until finally, a single voice returned again and again. It haunted the priest constantly. It was a nameless voice that the boy denied knowing each time. He wanted to make the priest believe that it was many people. And the voice rapidly changed from distant politeness to cooing irony to acid threats.

The caller coveted the boy. The priest even had reason to suspect that he was a pimp, that the boy worked for him when he could get out. And then, there was the jewelry, the watch, that had suddenly disappeared from to house. Could it be that the boy was stealing from them and funneling it to the voice on the line? It was an idea that filled the father with helpless rage. Didn't the boy have everything he needed right here: food, shelter, understanding? He had to get him away from the phone, rip it out of his hand, pin the slender body against the wall.

Once released from the priest's arms, the child said nothing to defend himself. Passively he marched back to the bed as if he agreed with his accuser. He lit a cigarette. The priest looked on fascinated through the merciful buffer of the drugs.

The boy got up and started pacing. Then movement through space extended into writhings, he clenched his fists and hunched his shoulders; suddenly the arms were flung apart and backwards as if nailed there, and a stony look transfixed the eyes, as the boy halted inches from the priest, staring in a convulsed manner into the face of that one who would dare seek imprint in his psyche.

The priest's arm swept out and the gaunt face became a vibrating blur. When he was finished, the priest was filled with horror at the sight of his own handiwork. The pouting mouth and aquiline nose were obliterated in a sea of blood, an eye had become gleamingly raw. The priest fled to the bathroom and wrung his hands, gazing into the mirror with disbelief and self-loathing. Then through the door he watched the boy lurch to the bed and fold like a released spring.

Now was the time to move, he realized. For at this moment and at this moment only would the will of the shattered boy be open to what was most vulnerable in the priest himself. An intensely pure tenderness welled up inside him and swept him to the bed, where the youngster lay, wings folded in a swoon.

And the rest must be left in shadow. For duty calls. The moans of the awakened octogenarian - a priest who once guided him as well as caring for a large parish - fill the air. He'll give the old man a pill before he goes out.

With brisk purposefulness, he goes to the other room to choose the black garment and white collar and to get the barbiturates. He stoops gently to pat the tousled head of the little brother upon which he imagines a peculiar crown.

But the vial of pills is nowhere to be found. And as the priest searches for them, the older brother opens a swollen eye, uncurls

[p. 50]

fingers tinted red by a handfull of sleeping pills, and receives each flat, thin lozenge on an outstretched tongue.

Copyright © 1988 by Bruce Benderson, New York