Good Offices

Tancredo looked up at the church ceiling again, as if seeking to escape. Father San José’s Mass, he thought, was a hybrid, a vivisection; he used passages from outdated Masses containing abandoned conventions, splicing them together with others from the contemporary Mass, which he nevertheless dared to sing in Latin. Immediately after the Offertory, before the Sanctus, something occurred that Tancredo thought would appal Father Almida, a priest with forty years of experience: Matamoros, standing, his arms outstretched, leaned his head on the altar and immersed himself in the Secret, not, to everyone’s surprise, the customary brief prayer, but a good five minutes’ worth, which made Tancredo think, astonished, that Father Matamoros might well be dozing.

He was more amazed — this amazement might have extended to the street children and the blind who frequented the Meals, to the elderly and the prostitutes, to the Pope far away — he was dumbfounded, when helping the Father with the sacred vessels and holding out the cruet for him to mix the water with the wine, unstopping the cruet and offering it — snatched away by anxious, demanding, skeletal hands — it turned him to stone in that corner, the most sacred corner of the church, the altar — it made his hair stand on end, it enraged him, to smell, amid the incense, sharp, bitter aniseed, more cutting than cloves or cinnamon, the scent of the countryside, he thought — aguardiente, he realized. Yet he saw Matamoros pour more than half of the liquid into the sacred chalice and drink thirstily. This was the Transubstantiation, and Tancredo could not and did not want to believe that aguardiente would be used in the transformation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. For the first time in his life, the acolyte, the hunchback, was scandalized. San José Matamoros, he thought, was not only a priest-cantor but one of those they call a mass-and-mealtime priest, a proper little drunk. Then, after the genuflection, he saw Matamoros do something dreadful: he wiped his mouth on the stole. But Tancredo recovered himself. He had known other priestly lapses, either seen them for himself or heard about them. Even priests, he thought, as Almida taught him to think so often, were flesh and blood exposed to sin, men after all, who could tell all their bones, ordinary men who did the impossible: pronounce the word of God, the ancient word.

In any case, Reverend San José redeemed himself. It was unfair to regard him as a simple little priest. There was his sermon, for example. While Tancredo read the Gospel, San José sat and listened from the marble throne with its elaborate gold armrests, to one side of the altar, lolling against the broad, cushioned back, supporting his head with one hand, eyes closed, exactly as if he were asleep. Indeed, after Tancredo finished his reading, three or four endless minutes passed before Matamoros came back to life and approached the pulpit to begin the sermon. A sermon which had little or nothing to do with the Gospel — which Gospel? Matthew, Luke, Mark, John? His reading rent the heavens, but how could it not, Tancredo said to himself, as it was a sung sermon, a Mass risen out of those who had died. An unusual sermon, besides, in its brevity, full of grace, that struck Tancredo more as a sung poem than as a proper sermon, but a prayer after all, he thought, a prayer to brotherly love that pays no heed to race or creed, the only way — still scorned — of entering heaven, proposed by Christ to humankind as if reaching out a helping hand. It was a Mass of Transparency. When they finished saying the Lord’s Prayer, the congregation waited expectantly for Matamoros to repeat it, sung, as he had the Gloria and the Credo, and so it was, for the grace of all: exquisitely sung in Latin, the Our Father, qui es in caelis: sanctifecétur nomen tuum; advéniat regnum tuum; fiat volúntas tua, sicut in caelo, et in terra. . raised them up to heaven. They came down to earth with a bump during Communion, however. Father San José approached the line of the waiting faithful and, with the gesture of a worried, flesh-and-blood man, called for the acolyte’s help in supporting the golden ciborium containing the radiant Body of Christ. The communicants were alarmed by his trembling hands; more than once, they feared the hosts would slip from his fingers. They chose to attribute the trembling to the same emotion overpowering them: the plenitude of the singing that had made the Mass an apotheosis of peace. They were on the edge of their seats as they waited for him to finish singing the Prayer after Communion, and when the time finally came to respond and take their leave, all sang Amen as one. Their hearts were audible.