The Son, The Sudarium Trilogy - Book Two (18 page)

2:39

The prospect of finally seeing the cloth, combined with the tumultuous events in Llanes, kept Mano in a restless half-sleep. He couldn’t help thinking of the man balanced precariously on the cube, feet slipping from under him, and how in an instant his life had been altered forever. And he wondered if seeing the cloth would have a similar effect on him. Events did that. All it took was the death of a loved one, an accident out of the blue, a chance meeting, and life, which had been going north, suddenly reversed itself and was headed south. Were Judith and Dr. Johanson part of that eternal unfolding of possibilities that could change you forever? Was Claudia? Even if he discounted all that he had been told him about his conception, he still had to deal with the fact that he was not his parents’ biological son and his true origins remained obscure. Still, thousands of children were adopted every day and many of them led lives of great meaning. But no matter how hard he tried to construct a normal life for himself, no matter how he struggled to see himself as one of many, he always came back to a simple fact; he belonged to a category of one.

He was alone in this situation. Alone in the world. And the image of the man on the cube came back to him again. Not having fallen, but about to fall, arms beginning to wheel backwards, eyes widening with a sense of the void all around him. Mano sat up abruptly in bed and looked at the clock. Time to meet Claudia.

She was waiting for him in the breakfast room. She put on a smile. “Did you sleep?”

“No, not much. You?”

“Me, neither.”

“Too many emotions.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

People were already streaming toward the cathedral’s portals. Many of the long-established families of Oviedo were known to arrive early in order to get (and reserve) seats as near to the cloth as possible. This was not just Good Friday; the day before Christ gave up his life for humanity, as it was in the rest of the world. Oviedo had the proof. To be beheld with reverence, of course, but also with the curiosity bestowed upon a sideshow attraction. The YouTube video had reached Oviedo and one of the local newspapers had already run a story about it. The cloth was back in the public consciousness – or at least on the Internet, which was probably the same thing – and a couple of local photographers and a small television crew were on hand to get footage to accompany any future stories about the phenomenon.

“Big event,” commented Claudia, surveying the crowd.

“Apparently,” said Mano, warily.

Their entrance into the cathedral went unnoticed. They were merely part of the throng that already packed the central nave. Elsewhere, it was standing room only and even standing room came at the price of some serious jostling. “I want to get closer,” Mano whispered to Claudia. “You can’t see anything from here. Follow me.” Pushing and prodding discreetly but firmly, they maneuvered their way past several chapels, relegated to insignificant status on this particular day, until they reached the Chapel of Bethlehem. There by pressing up against a thick column (and dislodging a couple of teenagers) they had a good view of the altar and the sacristy door, through which the sudarium would be brought in all its majesty. The sense of anticipation in the congregation was palpable, thickening the air already thick with candle smoke and incense.

Mano’s senses were alive. He could feel the coldness of the column at his back, the softness of Claudia pressing his side, even the hardness of the floor coming up through his feet. Then abruptly, the sacristy door opened and a procession emerged – two altar boys, first, followed by the archbishop himself, dressed in splendor and holding a large silver frame, containing the cloth. He was flanked by two deacons, brandishing gold staffs, whose expressions of frozen piety only added to the solemnity of the moment. The congregation rose as one. The archbishop raised the frame high so all could behold the relic; many people fell to their knees. He then placed the frame to the side of the altar, where it remained on view throughout the mass.

Claudia and Mano were only about twenty feet from the cloth, from which vantage point it looked objectively like little more than a dirty rag framed in silver. Still its mere presence, its history, its purported reality had an immediate effect on both of them. Claudia had to work hard to keep her emotions in control and hidden from Mano. How many lives had this cloth affected, her own included? He, on the other hand, was experiencing an acute curiosity, mixed with a sinking feeling - not disappointment exactly, but unease. Most of the mass went by in a blur for him, until the archbishop lifted the chalice above his head, the host suspended above that, and proclaimed, “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.” At the sound of those words, Mano broke out in a cold sweat. Beads trickled down his back and dampened his shirt. He wanted desperately to escape from the church as fast as possible, but his muscles seemed paralyzed and he remained riveted to the spot.

At the conclusion of the mass, the archbishop approached the cloth and lifted it high in the air again to give the congregation a final view of Christ’s holy blood. Unbeknownst to Mano and Claudia, one of the photographers in the plaza had made his way patiently down the nave to take a picture of the cloth. Pushing to the right to get a better angle, he inadvertently stepped on Claudia’s foot. “
Disculpeme
,
senorita
,” he said, throwing her a quick look of apology. That was when he recognized Mano, the man on the Internet, the face on YouTube. As the procession left the altar to return to the sacristy, the photographer turned away from the cloth and, elbowing people aside, started frantically clicking shots of Mano and Claudia. These would sell for far more than any more pictures of the cloth, of which there already existed hundreds. Since most of the hustling was taking place behind a column, the majority of the congregation was initially unaware of any disturbance. But the archbishop saw it, paused for a moment, and muttered something bitterly to himself.

“It’s him,” said one of the worshipers, standing near Mano, and what started out as a murmur, spread like a brush fire throughout the congregation. Mano grabbed Claudia’s hand and tried to dart down the aisle, but the crush of curiosity-seekers, already heading his way, was like an impenetrable wall. There was no passage. Hysteria was building in the crowd and the cries were growing louder. “Who is it?” “Let me see?” “You’re blocking my view.”

Mano took the only escape route possible. Pulling Claudia along with him, he bolted toward the ambulatory, where the last of the procession was exiting and took refuge in the sacristy. Those, who instants before had been celebrating communion with God, were stunned. Mano came face to face with the equally astonished archbishop. “I just need to get out of here,” he said. He felt trapped. The archbishop commanded the altar boys to go outside and guard the door against unwanted visitors, who were already five deep and growing.

“What’s going on?” Claudia whispered to Mano.

“Claudia, I need you to do me a favor.”

“Of course.”

He handed her the key to his hotel room. “Get my backpack and things from my room. Here’s some money. Pay the bill. I need to get out of town.”

“Why? What is it?”

“I’ll explain later.” He redirected his attention to the archbishop. “I assume there’s a way out of here other than the front door.”

“Of course, there is.” He tapped one of the deacons on the shoulder. “Show the Señorita safely out.”

“Where do you want me to bring your stuff?”

“You know the archway in the park, the one that is falling down? The ruin?”

“Yes, I know where it is.”

“I’ll meet you there. Thank you, Claudia.”

The deacon escorted Claudia out a side door, while the archbishop asked those remaining to kindly clear the sacristy. Then he checked to door to the church itself. The crowd was building. When a few flashes went off, he quickly shut and locked the door. He rubbed a hand over his chin reflectively, obviously putting his thoughts in order. There was a minute of silence. Finally, the archbishop spoke, “So you’ve come all this way to perpetuate this hoax of yours?”

Mano was flabbergasted. “How do you know about me?”

“I may not be young. But I have a computer. I was sent this preposterous claim of yours on the Internet.”

“Internet? What are you talking about? I have made no claim.”

“Well, shall we say then, the claim that has been made on your behalf?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about? I swear to God.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“What does it say, exactly?”

“I don’t want to play games with you, young man. What is your purpose?”

“I have no purpose, believe me.”

“I presume you came all this way for a reason.”

“I wanted to see the cloth for myself. I had no idea anyone knew of my existence outside of a small group of people.”

“Oh, lots know. That’s evident. As you can see. Do you think we always have such mad throngs of people on Good Friday? And now everyone is talking about the cloth. You’ve made headlines in our newspapers with this ridiculous stunt of yours. Claiming to be the Son of God, indeed! What blasphemy! But little did any of us expect we’d get a personal appearance from the star attraction himself. So tell me, why are you doing this?”

“It’s not me. It’s others who are saying these things about me.”

“And do you believe them?”

Mano paused, hung his head in confusion and embarrassment. “I don’t know what to believe,” he replied. “That’s why I came here. I really don’t. My parents told me just days ago that I was not their biological son.”

“Then whose son did they say you are?”

“I was told that this…this group of people had engineered my birth.”

The archbishop registered his surprise openly. “Engineered?”

“From the DNA of this cloth. My parents tried to keep the information from me, so I could have a life like everyone else. But these people came and found me and revealed to me the circumstances of my birth and what they thought was my destiny.”

“You haven’t answered me. Do you believe them?”

“That my birth was something unusual? Yes. Their ultimate claim? No. How could I? How could any sane person believe that?”

“You must deny it then. Immediately. Before this insanity spreads and damages the church irreparably.”

“But people won’t believe it, will they?”

“People already believe it. You saw what happened outside this door. Trust me. I have spent my life in a spiritual search for a small understanding of a God none of us can see or touch. Every day I pray for just a sense of Him, an intuition of His essence. People spend their whole lives in preparation for the one moment when they will finally come face to face with Him. Millions around the earth ask for nothing more. What do you think their reaction would be if they thought the wait was over, the second coming was here? Christ has returned! Everyone wants quick and easy answers these days. And for many, you would be that answer. You think this story - this hoax - will just go away? Not when billions of people cry out for relief from their misery every day. You would be their hope, everything they have been waiting for. Are you ready to relieve their suffering? Of course, you aren’t. You can’t. And here is the sad part, even if you deny it, there will be those who are so desperate to believe, they will continue to do so as long as you live. No matter what you say.”

“What do you suggest I do then?”

The archbishop suddenly found himself bereft of words, not knowing himself what he should be thinking or saying. How could he decide the whole of a man’s destiny in the snap of a finger? The young man’s face was registering so many emotions, it was difficult to continue looking at him. It was like watching a film on fast-forward. Too much information, too much pain, too much searching - all passing by so quickly - it was impossible to process.

Mano broke the silence in the sacristy. “May I ask something?”

“Of course,” replied the archbishop, relieved not to have to pontificate for a while.

“Is it possible – conceivable even – that someone actually did take blood samples from this cloth?”

The priest guided Mano to a table in the center of the sacristy, where the cloth lay on a table, before it would be returned to the Camara Santa. The reddish-brown stains were more visible up close. But there was no pattern to them, no coded message. They were like a Rorschach test: a person could read into the blots and smudges whatever he chose. Only one simple truth seemed incontestable to Mano: These were traces of the blood of a man who had lived and died. It could have been the blood of a farmer or a soldier. The blood of anyone. And because of that, for the first time, he thought of Jesus as a simple human being, a creature of flesh and bone, both penetrable, both perishable. The stories in the Bible always seemed apocryphal to him, compared to this homely cloth that said a man, some man, was born and suffered and died in agony two thousand years ago. Perhaps no more than that could ever be known.

The priest pointed to a corner of the cloth. “See this here. A small piece is missing. It is a long story, but I will be brief. Twenty-seven years ago today, Don Miguel Alvarez was putting the cloth away in the Camara Santa, as he did every year after the service. Because he was a very devoted man, he was allowed a few moments alone with the relic. In fact, he died that year, while praying before the cloth. That was the story the media carried – a devoted priest who died of a heart attack with the blood of Christ in his hands. How fortunate, he was! How blessed, we all said.