Verdad Magazine Volume 34
Spring 2023, Volume 34
Fiction by Peter Dellolio
Patience Is the Companion Of Wisdom
Dear Father Cosmo,
I shall be pleased to discuss with you some specific subjects for the paintings that have been commissioned. I expect to arrive in California next month. I’m sure that you are fully joyful that the Holy Father has granted permission for some religious paintings, perhaps including a fresco, for your beloved parish. I shall meet you for lunch as we previously arranged.
Yours In Christ,
Domenico Tojetti
Father Cosmo, like many people in their early forties, had discovered one day that he could no longer read without the aid of eyeglasses. The priest preferred a large magnifying glass. He used it whenever he went through correspondence at his desk in the rectory alongside the church. A letter of great importance had arrived recently and he had left the heavy thick instrument on top of it while he prepared for morning mass. The shapes of the inked words became enlarged and distorted, like the dissected particles of an insect viewed on a slide under a microscope, because the convex surface of the glass rested so close to the handwritten page.
A teenaged boy, overcome with anger and sorrow, had recently ventilated his rage towards the church by firing his .22 Smith & Wesson at its stained chapel windows. The boy appeared one evening with his rifle and began shooting; he had learned that day that both of his older brothers had died in Texas at the battle of Sabine Pass. Fortunately, because of the small caliber of the bullets, the panes did not shatter. There were, however, scattered holes circumscribed by web-thin cracks in the rainbow rich colors of the panels. Sunlight streamed through these little circles and overlapping chinks in the chapel glass. Suspended geometric shapes, a sprinkling of cylinders and trapezoids projected onto the dark confessional wood, made the smooth mahogany surface resemble a jumbled puzzle, filled with white pieces that would not fit.
Sitting on a bench inside the murky booth, Father Cosmo adjusted his position, causing his severely starched, black clerical clothing to make rustling sounds that were amplified by the enclosed space and evoked a bundle of papers cascading from a shelf. The thirty-three buttons of the cassock, representing the earthly life of Christ, were particularly vexing to Father Cosmo this morning; his fingers kept slipping on them in the soggy sea mist that permeated every surface in his rectory quarters. He was annoyed and dressed with impatience. Being especially sensitive to heat, the priest greatly missed his previous parish on the east coast. The tuft of his biretta had wilted from the steamy air; the square, black hat rested on a little stool next to the priest’s handsome, oak armoire, a gift donated by the town’s funeral director.
When Father Cosmo visited parishioners in the town, his mind became preoccupied with the noise of the busy streets. There was something about the relationship between movement, sound, and silence that had an inordinately powerful effect on Father Cosmo’s thoughts. Shop-owners waved at him from behind the glass windows of their stores and the large black lettering on the glass obscured his smiling face. Elderly townspeople, especially women, greeted him with great seriousness and dignity; they crossed themselves repeatedly and grasped his forearm with as much strength as their old hands could exert. At the confectioner’s shop, where groups of children could be found regardless of the time of day, a circle of little boys and girls surrounded Father Cosmo and provoked gentle yet determined opposition from him as he struggled to keep their soiled hands away from his fresh clothing.
There was a small, gold woman’s ring, with a rectangular, blue-green garnet, in Father Cosmo’s cassock. It poked his flesh when he tried to cross his legs. He found it difficult to sit still. He kept forgetting that the edges of the ring-stone pressed against him at a painful angle; they pinched him again and again. The friction of the fabric irritated his skin. Some of the material had dampened from absorbing his perspiration. The humidity in the church made everything moist and sticky. The glaring, Indian summer sun was slowly burning the hazy, steamy air of the morning away. It was the middle of the week but already the pews were filled with many parishioners waiting to be absolved. From time to time a newcomer tried to squeeze into a space that was only a fraction of what was needed to accommodate someone adequately. The congregation sat in respectful, prayerful meditation, heads bowed, as if everyone had slumped into a state of sleep.
Signore Tojetti’s lunch appointment with Father Cosmo was less than an hour away. They were to discuss the frescoes and other religious paintings that had been planned for the church. The Vatican held Domenico Tojetti in high esteem; he moved in powerful circles there and the fact that his transatlantic visit to America included an invitation to the priest of this small, isolated parish indicated good prospects for the curate’s career. Before his trip, Signore Tojetti had finished an extensive restoration project at the Vatican. Father Cosmo appreciated the value of religious icons; he believed that images were important to Christianity and offered a method for understanding and preserving faith. Father Cosmo was scheduled to hear confessions all day; he wished instead that he was holding mass and giving communion. That way he wouldn’t have to speak individually to each person, except to say The body of Christ as he placed the dry wafer on a slippery tongue. He sighed, quietly waiting for the penitent to finish his narrative. The meshed screen separating them vibrated slightly. On the other side was an old man who trembled with palsy and often used the little screen to brace his palm. Father Cosmo associated the shaking panel with a honeycomb faintly stirring with the movements of bees. He reminded himself that he was bound by duty to the old man, having heard his confessions for many years (particularly since the passing of the man’s wife the previous winter), yet he could not refrain from making this comparison during their interviews. He tried to concentrate on the man’s words, changing his posture once more to avoid the irritation of the jewelry in his pocket. He thought about the delicious seafood at the restaurant where he was to meet his guest. He knew that the European church, throughout medieval times, distributed the priests’ leftover food to the poor. He imagined the lobsters being prepared at this very moment for the midday clientele and wondered if the church’s charitable practice regarding food was still in effect.
“It’s been so difficult these months. I think of her constantly. Everything she did for me...everything. I’m barely able to look after myself. I miss her company, her face, her voice. Why did she leave me?”
Another priest, looking through the chapel window, noticed how birds quickly filled the trees. Turning to the confessional, he saw the silhouette of a sparrow that suddenly appeared within one of the white patches of sunlight that emanated from the pockmarked glass. The bird’s pecking gestures were jittery and animated and its semblance trembled upon the confessional cabinet, a delicate pantomime within one of the small, deformed configurations.
The old man’s voice was weary with sorrow. The often-repeated statements, the often-asked questions were a challenge for Father Cosmo who always searched for something comforting to say during a confession. Yet in this case Father Cosmo recognized that there was nothing left to say. The old man and his wife had been together for almost fifty years. There were no children. He lived modestly but comfortably enough on his savings. Much to Father Cosmo’s annoyance, the confessions had become a pretense for the man to state over and over his singular fear of being alone for the first time in his life. Since his wife’s death the lonely widower, whose attendance at mass was far less than regular when the woman was alive, sometimes appeared twice in the same day, desperate to hear something comforting from Father Cosmo or, more likely, determined to enumerate his anxieties.
Father Cosmo, most confused by such behavior, thought that Christianity taught its followers to find courage in the promise of everlasting life. The old should understand this better than most, thought Father Cosmo. He would speak his thought, a bit harshly at times, whenever the old man, either because of his infirmity or stubbornness, did not reach for the confessional door to exit, even after Father Cosmo’s repeated attempts to end the session.
Unfortunately, Father Cosmo suffered from a severe stammer; sometimes he could not find sufficient breath for clearly enunciated speech unless he spoke in a whisper. He found that he could overcome the embarrassing stutter only when his voice was no more than a murmur. At such times, especially when he was hearing confession, he spoke very quickly. This technique, which preserved the air required for clearly uttered speech, forced those who listened, such as the old man today, to lean closer and closer toward Father Cosmo, to capture the flow of words. As Father Cosmo spoke, the old man replaced his palm with his head, so his ear was pressed tightly against the screen and the divider ceased to quiver. In the silent, stuffy confessional, filled with crustacean-like outlines that reminded Father Cosmo of his growing hunger, the widower tried to absorb all that Father Cosmo said, and the old man hoped there was some element of insight or consolation that he had not heard on past occasions.
There was the faint jangle of metal falling against metal as a woman dropped her pennies into the poor box next to the tiered candle stand. As she crossed the aisle and returned to the pew, her back intercepted the sunbeams. Her hobbled gait made the incomplete triangles and rhomboids of light bobble slightly, until her shuffling body unblocked their path, allowing the rays to glance upon the wood.
Her stooped form was the result of having been a housekeeper most of her life. Luckily, she had found secure employment for many years in the home of a wealthy textile merchant. Her employer, a life-long bachelor, was a cold man who ate alone and was parsimonious both in his personal life and his accounts. While he had provided the woman with free room and board, her accommodations were slight. She lived in an attic apartment furnished with nothing more than a simple straw bed, a washstand, and a dilapidated bureau. The merchant was obsessed with cleanliness and order; his splendid home had wooden floors with elaborate parquetry that he wanted regularly waxed and polished. Hunched over the floors for hours at a time, the housekeeper gave the wood a beautiful sheen, moving up and down with the rhythm of her strokes as she applied the thick rag for her task.
Always a devout churchgoer, the housekeeper hoped that her recent prayers would be answered. The merchant had died and a nephew, who resembled him not only in appearance but personality, had summarily informed the woman that she must make new arrangements as soon as possible. The nephew, after learning about his uncle’s death, had sold the house to the man’s competitor. There had been some degree of animosity between this nephew and his aloof uncle, hence this arrangement that gave ownership of the merchant’s home to a business rival. The new owner had, in fact, offered the housekeeper a position. Her prayer was that another offer might miraculously find her. This man, she learned, would rent the house; he wanted the housekeeper to travel with him, far away in the East, and provide her services at his urban townhouse. There was no element of compassion in this decision. The man despised his competitor so viciously that he wanted to somehow obliterate all traces of the dead man’s existence. Renting the house and transferring the deceased’s servant to unfamiliar surroundings was his way of making the man’s life null and void, as though he had never been. Naturally the housekeeper, a spinster, hoped to finish her days with some familiar company, such as the small group of people she came to know in the town over time. She had become anxious and frightened and was almost sixty; suddenly nothing in her future was certain.
A bruised child averted the rigid brim of his father’s black hat as he lit a candle for his recently deceased sister. The man dropped his rosary and it fell to the stone church floor, resounding like pebbles or shells. A cluster of tapers was imbedded in the scented ash. A man was lighting a series of candles to mark the anniversary of the death of a loved one. Returning to his seat, behind the first row of candles positioned at waist level, he watched the child step down from the candle stand, viewing him through the tapers, which acted as an obstruction in the manner of a picket fence. The boy wore short pants and the fresh bruises on his thighs were partially concealed by the thin, closely grouped sticks. Speaking through clenched teeth and digging with calloused fingers into the soft fabric of the hat, the boy’s father commanded him to retrieve the rosary. The child noticed the white border of a photograph of the man’s daughter that protruded from his jacket pocket. In an alcove set aside for the candles were several large statues of saints. Imposing figures with arms outstretched, their likeness appeared across the glossy paper because of the hundreds of candle flames in the gallery. These little torches, bending and twisting in all directions, gave the dark forms an eerie, restless mobility. The boy’s father removed the photograph after the child sat down, as though the lighting of the candle for his daughter somehow authorized this public examination of the memento. In the picture, which had been taken in front of a fireplace, there was a large kerosene lamp on the mantle behind the man’s head. He stared at the camera with an expressionless gaze as he held his newborn daughter in his arms.
The man was a blacksmith and the harshness of his work seemed to have characterized his appearance and personality. He bent the fingers of his right hand as though his tool was always invisibly in his grasp. The man could not distinguish between the clang of steel that resonated even at night as he lay in bed and the rush of angry thoughts that would not leave his mind since the death from tuberculosis of his young daughter. He wanted to force the rage and despair out of himself the way he used the tools to impose a new shape upon the heated steel. Unfortunately, no one who knew him, least of all his easily frightened boy could understand that this roughness towards his son was his only protection against a numbing fear that this child, too, might fall sick and die. The man had been raised to believe that one must go to church to find consolation in God; that lighting a candle for the dead was important; that death was only a doorway to eternal life. He looked at no one and forgot to cross himself.
The silver tip of a cane for the blind snapped sharply against the aisle stone as a young man rose from the last pew. After whispering his litany of penance, he stepped confidently toward the center aisle, using his walking aid to guide himself from the church. Blind since birth, the young man, like many deprived of sight, had sharpened his remaining senses. Sound in particular had become a substitute for vision and he was astute in recognizing the identity and location of both things and people by listening to telltale characteristics of movement. He had memorized the number of steps between his house and the church. When he stepped from the boards onto the dirt, the sound of wagons guided his movements. Tapping the stick back and forth helped him walk in a straight line. The smell of pitch always let him know that he had almost reached his destination. There was a blacksmith’s only one hundred yards from the church. The young man was especially fond of his sense of touch. The feel of soil was very pleasurable for him. There was a small vegetable garden at home and his mother helped him plant tomatoes and carrots. The young man kept his Braille copy of the New Testament in his room. The mud was cool and smelled pungent and the man often tried to imagine Jesus. He wondered what it would be like to see for the first time after Christ rubbed the mud on his eyes.
“And all the regrets I cannot escape...all the little things I cannot make up for anymore. The times I was cross with her, when I lied to her, or if I forgot to do a small kindness for her, when she had asked me for something.”
Father Cosmo listened with a sense of duty, but the old man’s words blended with the faint rumble of wagon wheels bouncing on the road just outside the church. The driver of the cart cracked his whip against the hindquarters of the tired horse as another priest busied himself at the altar, cleaning a chalice and other Eucharistic materials used during the previous mass. There were black double patches stitched upon the front of the priest’s vestment, adorned with Latin inscriptions. Two black rectangles with rounded edges, the patches resembled the leather eye blinders that pacified the beast. With its vision artificially restricted, the animal pushed itself forward in response to the whip. The repeating mechanical swipe of its tail fanned away the buzzing flies hovering above its posterior as the priest wiped the wine stained cup with a linen cloth.
As the wagon was passing on the road, two elderly sisters, walking in unison, crossed themselves as they approached the stone steps of the church. Their ill-fitting high-laced boots were revealed when they arduously lifted complicated skirts over the long stones that radiated the oppressive late morning heat. At the same instant, the sun’s brilliance infiltrated the foot of nude cherubim in the stained glass. Unencumbered by gravity, the figure floated in celestial space, gesturing towards earth with a merciful expression. The sisters had never married and lived together in a large house that belonged to their parents. Having grown up there, it was the only home they had known. One of the sisters was fond of painting; she did some needlepoint as well but arthritis and failing eyesight had caused her to abandon this pastime. Her painting continued. Scores of canvases, hung and stacked, could be found on the many walls and floors, throughout the rooms in the large house. Her favorite subjects, inspired again and again by visits to the church for mass as well as social events, were in fact the many depictions of cherubim and saints that were to be found in panel after panel of stained glass. The woman had a very unusual sense of detail, especially in creating a spatial context for her scenes. Most of the motifs in her canvasses showed the earth, blue and green and suspended in the universe, as a small ball. Next to the earth, dwarfing the planet would be one of the angels from the imposing and regal panels of stained glass. It did not occur to the artist to separate the angelic figure from its man-made, artfully constructed frame, or to paint it in realistic proportion to the earth, hence the gargantuan size of the figure. Thus the finished result was most peculiar in that it combined an awareness of the real position of earth in the solar system with the purely imaginary presence of a piece of religious imagery, shown in exaggerated scale.
The sisters, now very old, were well known in the town; though they had never joined the society outside of their home. Except for these trips to Sunday mass, they had no contact with anyone or any social function. They spoke only to each other and feared anything new. In return, the people who had seen them grow old or knew them only as old watched them pass by without sympathy. As little girls, more than seventy years ago, they had fed apples to the horses in their father’s barn, played with wisps of straw, helped their mother bake pies. But their father’s Calvinist obsession with moral purity left them no room for social mingling and emotional growth. Their ability to live and love died long before the dirt scattered over the lids of their parents’ coffins. They had only the legacy of the painting, encouraged by their mother, a schoolteacher who tried to give her daughters a sense of beauty in the world.
Located less than a mile from the shore, the church was frequently buffeted by gales. Behind the rectory was a little garden littered with wood chips blown about from the prior night’s storm. Some workers were doing repairs on the rectory and the blond shavings were scattered throughout the roses. As the wagon approached the church, a sharp sliver of wood flew in the garden, the result of a man using an axe to split some old beams. The tiny wooden spear nicked a grasshopper in mid-stride, immobilizing it underneath some rose bushes. The velvet green legs twisted helplessly in the sweet garden air. Some mockingbirds perched upon a large wooden cross in the rear of the garden.
Father Cosmo admitted to himself that his mind was indeed elsewhere today. He had been thinking for some time about his questionable conduct with a girl from a farm several miles away. After much formal meditation and painful introspection, he had decided that any form of profane love must not violate his life-long bond to the church. Such a violation must be avoided, whatever the cost. He reproached himself for allowing this hypocritical situation to perpetuate itself for so long, but he was relieved by the conversation he had had with the girl. During this recent meeting he informed her that he would end their meetings, that they would not see one another again. The girl was naive, poor, and ignorant: her infatuation with Father Cosmo was not surprising. She had fallen in love with his knowledge of ideas, of the world, his sophistication, his charms. Her inexperience and youth made her unprepared for his rejection, something which would have to be considered not only necessary but also inevitable. Only someone in Father Cosmo’s position, who was fully aware of the unalterable bond between God and His servants, could see such things clearly. Far more serious concerns were at stake, beyond the understanding of a lovesick child.
Patience is the companion of wisdom.
The quotation from Saint Augustine, something that Father Cosmo had often spoken to the young lady, was written on a little piece of green notepaper that the girl quietly handed to Father Cosmo before saying good-bye. She went through several rooms and closed each door so Father Cosmo could not hear her sob. On a bureau in the last room was the girl’s display area for her treasured ring: a crochet, filet pattern doily, depicting hands folded in prayer. The sound of her tears lingered in the priest’s ears as he rode from her farmhouse that day. They lingered in his ears even now, with the repetition of memory. He suppressed his agitation and forced himself to listen to the end of the old man’s confession. Noon was approaching and Father Cosmo wanted desperately to refresh himself with a walk in the breezy garden. Then he would lunch with Signore Tojetti, who had gifts of elegantly bound books of poetry and philosophy. The seafood restaurant where they were to meet was just a few miles from the ocean. Father Cosmo enjoyed the smoothness of the sawdust-covered floors, the porthole mirrors above the bar, and the myriad photographs of ships at sea, which decorated the walls. He loved this church because of its proximity to the coast and the abundance of refreshing salt air.
“Do you think she sees my suffering? Can she know my sorrow? Can she know that I regret my shortcomings? That would be a great comfort, wouldn’t it? Do you think she knows?”
Earlier this morning, before the first mass, while Father Cosmo was reading Signore Tojetti’s letter, the cart driver had respectfully waited by the desk at the undertaker’s office, after removing his filthy cap. The mortician had returned his pen to the inkwell as the child meekly lifted the imposing fedora to his glowering father as they began their weekly journey to church. Cases of suicide were handled with discretion, especially when the deceased was so young. The mortician, glad to conclude this unfortunate business, was grateful that the girl’s parents were already at the cemetery, awaiting the arrival of the body for burial. After sending his assistant to get some carbolic acid, the mortician had spent a rather long time preparing the girl’s body. He was respected in the town; many funerals were performed on account and there were many families who owed the man for billing the necessary dignified procedures on a monthly installment basis. Release papers had to be signed before the corpse could be dressed, placed into the coffin and transported. When the mortician came back upstairs he was flushed and distracted. He found it impossible to look at the driver face-to-face and stared at the man’s boot when he spoke to him. As he rose from the desk to let the driver out and simultaneously admit the two men brought along to carry the box to the cart, another assistant struggled with the bluish-white, staring, rigid form that hours before had spoken and moved, trying to push the stiffened legs through a petticoat the way one would struggle with an undressed, uncooperative mannequin. The assistant recoiled in disgust when he tried to grip the girl’s upper thigh. It was the driver who felt a personal affinity for the dead girl: like her and her family, he was a farmer and lived off the land.
The boy instinctively flinched as his father reached for the crumpled hat. Grasping the child’s wrist with a practiced gesture, the man led him out of the church, the knotted rosary dangling from his other hand.
The sparrows remained on the branches. As Father Cosmo opened the door of the confessional and gingerly helped the old man to remove himself, the umbra of the perched birds vanished. The postern swung forward and dispelled the forms of sunlight like a mirrored closet door casting out its reflected occupants as it is opened. In fact Father Cosmo appeared to reach for a garment the way a person who is late vacantly regards an item of clothing, grabbing the old man’s arm without noticing he was there. A moment later the sparrows actually leapt from their perch and flew towards the sea. Deprived of the interplay of light and shade, the confessional portal no longer recorded the birds’ movement. Their departure from the branches included real, sudden, spiked motion of flapping wings. The old man struggled ahead, aided by Father Cosmo, with uncertain steps. At the altar the other priest prepared for the next mass as the horse’s ears pricked to the cart driver’s affectionate whistle. A large bump in the uneven dirt caused the small, pine casket to thud against the side of the cart as the blind young man stumbled into the sisters. Greatly fatigued from their difficult ascent to the final step of the church, they were dizzy and disoriented, and took no notice of the clicking stick that announced his approach.
At the church entrance, a breeze made the water in the font quiver slightly. The housekeeper anointed herself when the cart approached with its wooden cargo. She shook dust from her shawl. The particles swirled in the wind and seemed to blend with the sawdust from the cheap casket. The coffin jumped once more as the rear wheel of the cart suddenly dipped. At that moment the blacksmith, with his little boy in tow, looked back and saw Father Cosmo behind the lurching box as the priest took leave of the old man. A piece of crumpled paper, dangling from his cassock pocket, blew away suddenly. The sky had darkened and the moist air indicated a thunderstorm. The little paper bounced along the wooden floorboards until it became wedged between two flowerpots on display in front of the potter’s store a short distance from the church. The potter’s young apprentice raced back and forth as he brought the wares back into the shop so they would be safe from the imminent heavy rain. The widower and the wagon moved in opposite directions while Father Cosmo stood between them at the vaulted church entrance.
Standing by the open grave at the cemetery, the dead girl’s father anxiously shuffled his fingers within the pocket of his trousers, making the few coins collected there tinkle softly. A mound of earth, about three feet high, stood on the side of the rectangular hole. The loss of his daughter, and particularly the realization that she was capable of taking her own life, was most disturbing to the man. The finality of what had happened continued to escape him; he was overwhelmed by a strange feeling of unreality, a detached, nebulous dream-state that preserved the living image of a dead loved one and somehow contradicted the certainty that that person will never be seen or heard again. Consequently, the man became very conscious of what he looked at and tried to avoid his daughter’s casket placed on the side of the grave. The shovel was embedded in the loose earth. He looked beyond the cemetery at a lovely white house in the distance. There was a rain barrel on the right side of the porch and a little boy was chasing his dog down the steps. The man turned his head suddenly because the image of the child scooping up his puppy made him think in rapid sequence of past images of his daughter.
The grasshopper made a few jerky movements as two mockingbirds pecked it with quick, vigorous nods of their beaks. The old man tried to summon the strength for the walk back to his empty house. The thin legs of the insect twitched faintly as the birds took turns trying to lift it to their nest. Father Cosmo stared at this hideous display of nature’s laws. The strong breeze wrapped the garden with the sensual aroma of the sea. The sight of this creature being eaten alive sickened the priest.
He looked away.
BIO: Peter Dellolio has written and directed various short films, including James Joyce’s short story Counterparts which he adapted into a screenplay. Counterparts was screened at national and international film festivals. A freelance writer, Peter has published many 250-1000 word articles on the arts, film, dance, sculpture, architecture, and culture, as well as fiction, poetry, one-act plays, and critical essays on art, film, and photography. Poetry collections include: A Box Of Crazy Toys published 2018 by Xenos Books/Chelsea Editions and Bloodstream Is An Illusion Of Rubies Counting Fireplaces published February 2023 by Cyberwit/Rochak Publishing. He is working on a critical study of Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock’s Cinematic World: Shocks of Perception and the Collapse of the Rational. Chapter excerpts have appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, Literature/Film Quarterly, Kinema, Flickhead, and North Dakota Quarterly since 2006.
His poetry and fiction have appeared in various literary magazines, including Antenna, Aero-Sun Times, Bogus Review, Pen-Dec Press, Both Sides Now, Cross Cultural Communications/Bridging The Waters Volume II, and The Mascara Literary Review. Dramatika Press published a volume of his one-act plays in 1983. One of these, The Seeker, appeared in an issue of Collages & Bricolages. Peter was a contributing editor for NYArts Magazine, writing art and film reviews. He authored monographs on several new artists as well. He was co-publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Artscape2000, a prestigious, award-winning art review e-zine. He has also taught poetry and art for LEAP. He is an artist himself: https://www.saatchiart.com/peterdellolio.com. His paintings and 3D works offer abstract images of famous people in all walks of life who have died tragically at a young age. He lives in Brooklyn.