GODLESS

The candle had burned down to a coin of wax, and still Don Tommaso wrote, because to stop writing was to admit that the argument was finished, and the argument was never finished; it only paused, as a man pauses at the edge of a cliff to admire the view before continuing to walk.

He had tried other doors first. In October, before the argument narrowed itself down to silence and to mercy, he had begun a page titled On the Tears of Christ at the Tomb of Lazarus. He got no further than the title before he understood where the thread led if he pulled it: to a God who had actually wept, salt and water in a garden outside Bethany, and not the tidier weeping his seminary had trained him to permit, the kind confined to Christ’s human nature alone while the Godhead itself stood apart from it, whole and untouched, incapable by its own definition of being moved. Deus impassibilis, he had written once in the margin, the scratch of the metal nib stark in the quiet room, much as a man wrote down an address he had no intention of visiting and crossed the page out inside a week. A parish priest did not go looking for the seam in a wall his own bishop had built.

On the Silence of God as a Species of Mercy, he had titled it instead, three nights running, and three nights running, he had crossed the title out and begun again beneath it, because mercy was not yet the right word; mercy implied intention, and intention was the very thing in question. His hand did not tire. This was the strange gift and the strange curse of it: since August, he had not once felt his hand tire, though the ache had instead migrated into the base of his skull, a small, persistent knuckle of pain that felt, absurdly, like being watched.

He dipped the pen. He wrote: If God’s silence is not absence but a kind of listening so total it produces no sound.

Someone was at the door. Not knocking. Striking it, the flat of a fist, four times, unevenly spaced, like a man who has forgotten that knocking is a thing with a rhythm. Tommaso set down the pen with the peculiar tenderness he reserved for it alone—he had never once, in fifteen years, set it down carelessly—and went to the door already knowing, in the manner a man knows the shape of a room in the dark, that whatever waited on the other side of it would require sentences he did not have.

Edoardo stood in the wet dark without a coat.

“Don Tommaso.”

He said the name and then seemed to have nothing to put after it, as though the name itself had been the whole of his errand and he’d only just discovered it wasn’t.

“Edoardo. Come in, you’ll catch your...”

“Mattia’s breathing’s gone strange.” He was still standing in the doorway, rain flattening his hair to his skull, and he made no move towards the warmth of the room, as though crossing the threshold would make it true in a way that standing in the rain did not. “Like there’s a hand on her chest. Rosa sent me. She said, ”Come now,“ she said, ”Don’t wait for morning,“ she said... He stopped. Started once more, in a different key, quieter. ”She’s eleven, Father. Eleven.“

As if the number were an argument, Tommaso thought, and hated himself instantly for thinking it, for the coldness of the observation arriving before the grief did, always before the grief did; this was the shame he confessed to no one, that his mind reached first for the shape of a thing and only second for its weight.

“I’ll get my coat,” he said, his breath pluming in the freezing air, which was not comfort, was not scripture, was not anything at all.

Edoardo nodded at the non-answer as if it were the most reasonable thing he’d heard all night, because it concerned the next thirty seconds, and just then, thirty seconds was as much future as either man could hold.

Tommaso reached for his coat and, without deciding to, glanced back at the desk, at the candle, at the coin of wax, at the sentence stopped mid-clause, with the ink still wet, at the listening it produces. It felt the first small, wrongly-shaped thought of the night: that he would rather be finishing that sentence than doing what he was about to do. He put the thought away as if he put away everything he was ashamed of, folded small, in the drawer behind his ribs where he kept the rest of them, and followed Edoardo out into the rain. He did not know yet that he would never finish the sentence.

Mattia’s breath found its rhythm again before the sky greyed into morning, like how frightened things sometimes recover for no reason anyone can bless or blame. It was Celestina, the cough finally took, three weeks later, not yet a year old, and never having weighed enough, in her whole brief accounting on this earth, to put up much of a fight against anything.

Edoardo came to the confessional this time, rather than the rectory door. Tommaso supposed there was a kind of etiquette to grief that even ruined men observed: a death in progress called for a priest at the bedside, a death already finished called for the box, the screen, the old formula that let a man speak without having to watch his listener’s face.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

He had not sinned. Tommaso understood this before Edoardo said another word, understood it as he understood most things about this particular parishioner, by the specific gravity of the silence that followed the formula rather than by anything spoken. A man does not sin by having a daughter cough herself pale over a hard winter and then stop coughing one grey Thursday altogether. He simply survives it badly and needs somewhere to put the badness. He simply survives it badly and needs somewhere to put it.

“She never did anything, Father.” Edoardo’s voice came through the grille, thin and scraped, the voice of a man who has been talking to himself for three days and has only now found someone else to say it to. “Eleven months. What is there to confess in eleven months? She hadn’t lied to anyone. She hadn’t wanted anything she wasn’t given. She hadn’t had time to be anything but hungry and then not hungry anymore. And you,” he was not speaking to Tommaso now. “You took that one first. The one who hadn’t earned a single mark against her, good or bad. What was the arithmetic in that?”

Here was a question, Tommaso thought, that a man could build an entire career answering, and had, in a manner of speaking. He had written, in his second year at seminary, an essay on the innocence of infants that his rector had called the finest student work he’d read in a decade: a child who dies before the age of reason has not yet had the chance to choose against grace, and so returns to God unclaimed by anything but love, entire and unbargained for, the one soul in any parish to arrive at judgment holding nothing back, because she never had anything to hold back with. It was, he still believed, true. It was also, he discovered now, sitting in the dark with a father three feet away asking him to say it aloud, a truth built for the pulpit, not for a man’s hands: the kind that holds its shape from a distance and comes apart the moment someone asks you to carry it those last three feet.

He opened his mouth. Nothing arrived. Not the seminary essay, not a line of scripture, not even the Latin of the absolution he had said several thousand times and could, until tonight, have recited asleep. He had never needed to search for an answer before, not really; the words had always simply been there when he reached for them, just as a hand finds a familiar doorframe in a room walked through a thousand times without looking. Tonight, his hand closed on nothing. The doorframe, or the room, or whatever in him had always known the difference between the two, had gone missing without any warning at all.

“She is with God,” he finally said, and heard, as if from several feet outside his own body, how small a thing it was to hand a man who had asked him for arithmetic.

Edoardo did not answer right away. When he did, it was gentler than Tommaso deserved, gentler than the sentence had earned. “Yes, Father. I know that part. I wanted the reason.”

“I know,” Tommaso said, and this time said nothing else at all, and let the silence in the box do what his own throat, for the first time in his life, could not.

That night, he did not go to his desk to write a sermon. He went to it because it was the only shape his panic had ever known how to take, fifteen years of habit pulling him towards paper like a man with a bad leg still reaches first for the leg that no longer holds him. He would write down what he could not say. He had told himself this on the walk back from the church, the wind driving sleet sideways into his collar, and it had felt, for the length of that walk, like a plan rather than a superstition. If the mouth had failed him, the hand would not. The hand was older. The hand had been faithful since he was nine years old, when his tutor first pressed a nib into his fingers and told him that a boy with his gift owed God a lifetime of using it well. He dipped the pen.

Nothing came.

Not slowly. Not as a river narrows towards a dry season, giving a man time to notice the banks closing in before the bed goes to cracked mud. It came like a lamp goes out, entire, between one breath and the next, no flicker to warn him, only light and then its total absence, and Tommaso sat with the nib touching the paper and felt, for the first time in his adult life, that the great machine behind his forehead, the one that had never once in fifteen years failed to produce a sentence when a sentence was required, had simply and silently stopped. He tried a word. Celestina. It sat on the page looking like someone else’s handwriting, a name with nothing attached to it, no sentence willing to come and claim it.

He tried again. The pen, obedient as always to a hand that no longer knew what to ask of it, produced a single downward stroke and stopped there too, a scratch with no shape to grow into. Something happened in his chest that he would later be unable to describe to anyone, least of all himself. It was closer to the panic of a man who reaches for the ground with his foot, expecting a stair that is not there.

His hand, without asking permission from anything that might still have been in charge of it, swept sideways across the desk.

The inkwell went over.

It should have alarmed him. The small iron pot was rolling. The black spreads fast and flat across the wood in the shape of nothing at all, a continent with no coastline. He watched it happen like a man watches the weather.

Then, before he had decided to, his fingers were in it.

He did not wipe it up. He dragged it. Two fingers first, then the whole flat of his palm, moving the ink as if he might once have moved a sentence towards its verb, hunting for a shape much like his mind, for as long as he could remember, had hunted for the right word and always, always found it. He smeared a rough curve. He smeared another beneath it, longer, a kind of falling line. He did not know what he was making. He only knew that his hand, moving, had stopped screaming, that something in the roaring at the base of his skull had gone, for the length of one held breath, almost quiet. He looked down at what his hands had done to the desk. Two shapes. Not letters. A woman’s outline, perhaps, or nothing at all, just as a cloud is an animal for exactly as long as a child agrees to believe it. It was the closest he had come to comfort in eleven days.

He sat with his ink-black hands resting on his knees, the candle guttering, and did not, God forgive him, want to give it back.

The last peddler of the season came through San Giovanni before the first week of Advent closed, a bent Neapolitan with a mule and two panniers of things the village could not make for itself: needles, salt, dye, and a few cheap prints of saints too poor for the church’s own collection. After him, the passes would close as they did every year, and San Giovanni would be alone with itself until March. Tommaso bought from him in the shadow of the sacristy door, out of a habit of privacy he did not examine too closely. Not needles. A twist of paper filled with raw pigment, cheap enough that the peddler did not ask what a priest wanted with it. A stub of willow charcoal. He told himself, walking back across the yard with the parcel inside his cassock against his chest, that it was for the children, that he might teach them their letters with something to draw the shapes first. He knew, even as he thought it, that it was the first lie he had told himself in longer than he could remember, and that lying to himself, unlike everything else lately, still came to him without the slightest effort.

He did not write again after that night. He told the housekeeper his hands ached from the cold, which was not, strictly speaking, untrue.

He did not open the twist of paper that night, nor the next. He told himself this was restraint, and knew, in the same breath, that it was only patience waiting for an excuse it had already decided to accept.

The excuse came three days later, in the shape of Signora Bruni’s grandson, sent up from the lower lane to say the older woman had taken a turn in the night, that the family thought, though no one wanted to say the word, that it might be time for the Sacrament. Tommaso told the boy he would come within the hour. He meant it when he said it.

He went first to his study, only to fetch his stole and the small case with the oils, and it was there, reaching past the case for the stole folded beneath it, that his hand found the paper twist instead, still sealed, still smelling faintly of the peddler’s mule and the road. He told himself he would look at it for a moment. A moment, he understood later, was not a unit of time he could still be trusted to measure.

He unfolded the paper. He touched the pigment with one finger, then two, and found the door of his own attention swing open onto a room he had not known was there, wide and quiet and entirely without Signora Bruni’s failing lungs, and he stepped through. By the time he came back to himself, the light in the window had changed its angle, and his desk held four studies of a woman’s hand he could not remember beginning, each one worse than his memory of the one before it, and the stole was still folded exactly where he had left it, untouched.

He sent the boy back down with a note instead of his own coat and collar: that his hands had been troubling him badly since the cold set in, that he would come the moment they allowed him to hold the oils steady, that the family should send again if there were any change. It was not, strictly speaking, a lie. His hands had been troubling him. He simply did not say “since what” or “with what.”

He went the following afternoon, the oils cold in their case, and found the crisis had broken on its own in the night, as fevers sometimes did in the very old, for no reason a doctor or a priest could take credit for. Signora Bruni lived another six weeks after that, and died, in the end, on an ordinary Tuesday with no one sent for at all, which Tommaso told himself was not a judgment, and did not entirely believe.

The habit did not need many more excuses after that first one. By the second week of the new year his fingertips had gone the colour of a bruise that will not finish healing, the cuticles split and scabbed from working the charcoal too hard against the grain of cheap paper, and he had learned to keep his hands inside his sleeves just as other men kept theirs inside their pockets, a gesture that could pass, in a village this cold, for nothing more than good sense.

Lorenzo and Filomena found him at the church door on a morning grey enough that the mountain itself seemed to have given up defining its own edges. They had walked forty minutes down from their holding to ask him to bless what was left of their grain, gone soft and grey with rot in the damp of a cellar that had never, in thirty years, betrayed them before this winter.

“ Just a blessing, Don Tommaso,” Filomena said. Just a blessing, Don Tommaso,“ Filomena said. ”Just a blessing, Don Tommaso,“ Filomena said. Her hands, chapped raw, were folded in front of her like a woman folds her hands when she has run out of other things to do with them. ”Enough that it doesn’t spread to what’s left.“

He wanted, with something that felt almost like the old hunger, to give her the sentence such a moment deserved, something about bread and multiplication, about the difference between scarcity and curse. It did not come. It had stopped coming to order, like water no longer answering a pump that has finally, after enough dry seasons, lost its prime.

“I’ll come by this afternoon,” he said, which was true, and small, and entirely beneath what she had walked forty minutes through the cold to receive.

He kept his hands in his sleeves the whole exchange. Lorenzo did not notice. Alessandro, sweeping the church steps a few feet away with the particular unhurried attention of a man who has swept the same eleven steps for twenty years and no longer needs to look at them to do it well, noticed everything and said nothing, which was its own kind of noticing.

“Your knuckles, Don Tommaso,” he said later, once the couple had started back up the track. “Troubling you again? ” Troubling you again?“

“The cold,” Tommaso said.

Alessandro looked at him a moment longer than the answer required, the manner of a man who looks at a wall he has begun, without quite deciding to, suspecting it is not entirely sound. Then he went back to his sweeping, and Tommaso went back inside, and neither of them said anything further, which in San Giovanni, that winter, had become the closest thing to a conversation either man could still manage.

Mattia’s cough came back with the deep cold, as certain griefs do, pretending for a season to have left for good and then letting themselves back in through a door nobody remembered leaving open. By the middle of January, she no longer left her bed except to be carried nearer the fire, and Rosa had stopped asking Tommaso to come by in the evenings, because there was, this time, nothing for him to do there that prayer alone could not do just as uselessly from a distance.

He said the low mass on the last Sunday of January for eleven parishioners, most of them widows old enough to remember the mountain’s last real famine, the kind spoken of only in the register reserved for weather and the dead. The church held the cold as only stone always did, indifferent and total, and the few candles threw more shadow than light onto walls that had not been re-limed in a generation. He lifted the chalice at the consecration and felt nothing whatsoever through his whole mouth and throat. Not the old sweetness he remembered from seminary, not even the plain fact of wine, sour and thin as it had been for years in a parish this poor. Water. It might as well have been water.

He set the chalice down and, in the particular grey light of a morning too weak to commit to being morning at all, looked past the altar to the wall behind it for what he would later understand was not the first time, only the first time he let himself admit he was looking. The soot was there the way it had always been there, sixty years of kerosene laid down in patient, wordless weather. But this morning it did not lie flat. It gathered along the old cracks in the plaster, much as frost finds the path already scored into a windowpane, and in the candlelight, the gathered places did not quite sit still. He blinked. It settled, or he told himself it settled. He finished the mass with his eyes fixed slightly too long on the middle distance.

One of the widows, an old woman named Concetta who had buried three sons in the mountain and outlived every one of them by decades, caught his sleeve on her way out and said, not unkindly, “You look like a man who’s stopped sleeping, Father.”

“I have a great deal to pray about,” he told her, and did not correct himself.

Mattia died on a Tuesday in the second week of February, with the ground outside frozen too hard for any grave to be cut. It took until the following Tuesday, and a brief false thaw, for Alessandro to call the first mercy the mountain had shown anyone all winter before she could be buried beside her sister. Edoardo did not come to the church until the Sunday after that.

The confessional at San Giovanni had been carved by a man who had died sixty years ago, and in sixty years the wood had taken on the particular smoothness of things touched too often by people asking for too much. Don Tommaso rested his hand against the grille and felt nothing. Not coldness, which would at least have been a sensation, a fact his skin could report. Nothing. As though the wood had reached some final state past temperature altogether, just as a corpse is not cold so much as simply finished with the argument of warmth. He had noticed this about the rosary first, back in the autumn, then the pyx, then the stone font at the door. Now it was the confessional’s turn to fail him. Soon, he suspected, it would be everything. A man’s hand does not go numb by increments and then stop. It goes numb by increments and then reports numbness everywhere, all at once, as if the body had merely been waiting for permission.

Edoardo knelt on the other side of the screen. Tommaso could smell him before he spoke, wet wool and the sourness of a man who had stopped washing because washing required believing tomorrow mattered. This was the second time in one winter that Tommaso had sat on this side of the screen for this particular family, and he understood already, before a word passed between them, that a second time was not a rehearsed thing. It was only heavier, similar to how a coat gets heavier the longer a man stands in the rain wearing it, not because the coat has changed but because he has less strength left to carry the same weight he carried the first time.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

The formula came out of him flat, a phrase memorised as a dog learns a whistle, without content, without the faintest interest in its own meaning. Then silence. Long enough that Tommaso heard the candle at the far end of the nave gutter and right itself. Long enough that he became aware again of the pressure building at the base of his skull, a weight with no source and no name, and that he had begun, privately, to think of as the sound God’s silence made when it had nowhere else to go.

“Take your time,” Tommaso said, and was pleased, distantly, in the same manner a man is pleased by a stranger’s good manners, that his voice still worked.

“She stopped breathing on a Tuesday.” Edoardo’s voice did not break. That was the terrible part, Tommaso would think later. Men who wept could be comforted; grief that has already dried into fact is a harder animal to reach. “Rosa was holding her hand. I was at the foot of the bed doing nothing, Father, doing absolutely nothing, because there was nothing left to do, and Mattia made a sound like air going out of a bellows, and then she didn’t make any more sounds.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want you to know.” For the first time, something moved under the flatness, a current under the ice. “I want you to hear the sin, because I have not told this to Rosa, I have not told this to Alessandro, I have told it to no one, but you and God, and God already knew, so really I have only told it to you.”

Tommaso said nothing. It was the correct silence, the priestly one, the kind that leaves room.

“When she stopped, Father, when the sound stopped.” Edoardo’s breath went ragged on the last word and then steadied itself, as if he had reached down and physically closed a hand around his own throat. “For one second, before Rosa screamed, before I understood what I was feeling, I felt relieved. God, forgive me. I felt something in my chest let go, like a rope you’ve been hauling on for six months, and for one second, one single filthy second, I was glad it was over.”

Here it was, then. The exact shape of the thing Tommaso had spent eleven sleepless nights composing an answer for, back when he still believed answers were made of sentences. He had written, in the days before the ink stopped obeying him, forty pages on the nature of relief in grief: that the body’s mercy towards itself is not a betrayal of love but love’s own exhausted cousin, that a father watching a child suffer for months will find, buried under the grief, something that resembles gladness like a burn resembles warmth. The argument’s real foundation, the part he had been proudest of, was theological rather than pastoral. He had built it on the same doctrine his seminary had handed him at twenty. He had never once thought to test: that God, being impassible, does not grieve as a father grieves, cannot be wounded or moved or changed by what happens to His creatures, and that this was not God’s failure of love but its guarantee, since a God who suffered alongside every dying child would have nothing left over, no stillness at the center of Him, from which to be merciful to the next one. A father’s relief, then, was not a stain on the love that had preceded it. It was only the human version of a mercy God performed without the cost of feeling it. He had built, he was almost certain, a genuinely elegant argument. He remembered the shape of it now, like a man remembers the shape of a house he grew up in after it has burned down: perfectly, uselessly, from the outside only.

He opened his mouth. Nothing arrived, not the seminary essay, not the forty pages, not one line of it. He had expected that, if the words failed, they would fail in the same manner his pen had failed, with a visible tearing, a nib biting through the paper, some noise to mark the collapse. Instead, there was simply the shape of a man’s silence extending itself past the point where silence is company and into the point where silence is an accusation. He reached for the first sentence of the forty pages, the good one, the one he had been proud of, and found where it should have been a smear, ink gone to mud, a page he himself must have ruined and could not remember ruining. If God’s silence is not absence but a kind of listening so total it produces. It had stopped there once before, in his own hand, at his own desk, and it stopped there again now, in his own throat, as though the sentence itself were cursed, as though it had always known it would never be permitted an end.

His hand found the rosary hanging from the hook beside him and closed around it. Thumb against forefinger, hunting, like a blind man’s fingers hunt a familiar doorframe in a house gone dark. Nothing. Beads like a string of small cold stones a child had picked up off a beach and forgotten why.

“Father?” The roaring had come up now behind his ears, not loud in the way the sea is loud, loud like a held breath is loud, a pressure with nowhere to discharge itself. He understood, with the cold clarity of a man watching his own house from across the street, that he was a priest who had been asked the single most important question of his career by a man who had waited his whole life without knowing it to ask exactly this question, and that he had nothing. Not comfort withheld out of wisdom. Not a silence chosen for effect. An emptiness with no bottom to it, and no craft in his hands to build a floor.

“Father, did I damn her? By feeling that?”

“No,” Tommaso managed, and the word cost him more than it should have, like a single step once cost a man with a broken foot more than a mile. It was the only word that came, and for a moment it seemed to be enough, or enough for what it was: confirmation that a man’s exhaustion was not the same thing as his damnation.

Edoardo was quiet for a moment, like a man goes quiet when the first answer has satisfied a smaller question than the one he actually came to ask. “Then does He grieve for her, Father? As I do. As You’re meant to have grieved for Your own Son, if any of what’s painted above that altar is true.” He was not accusing. That was the thing Tommaso would remember afterwards, that there had been no anger in it at all, only a man laying the last of what he had on the counter to see if the priest could make change for it. “Or does He only watch? Just as you’ve been watching me try to say something back there and failing.”

Edoardo waited for the rest of the sentence. There was no rest of the sentence, on either side of the wood that felt like nothing to at least one of them, and both men understood, in their different ways, that this second failure was the truer one. After a while, Edoardo said, quietly, with the particular gentleness of a man forgiving someone weaker than himself, “It’s all right, Father. You’re tired.” He said an Ave, badly, from memory, the words worn soft at the edges from underuse, and he left as men leave places where they had hoped for more and been handed a smaller thing wrapped in the same paper.

Tommaso sat alone with the roaring. Somewhere above him, Christ hung in painted agony from a beam that had cost the village four years of tithes it did not have. Tommaso understood, in the particular grammar of his exhaustion, that he had just failed to absolve a man of the sin of being human, and that no one, least of all the wood beneath his numb and searching hand, was going to absolve him of anything at all.

He went to the sanctuary that same week because there was nowhere else in San Giovanni tall enough to hold what he needed to say, and because a man raised on the grammar of prayer does not, even in ruin, know how to address God from a kitchen table. The candles were low. He had not lit new ones. Some economy in him, some last scrap of the housekeeper he used to be, would not permit fresh wax to be spent on an argument he already suspected he would lose.

“Domine.”

He said it to the altar like a man says a name into an empty house, testing whether anyone still answers to it. Nothing answered. He had not expected it to. He had stopped expecting it sometime around the second week of November, though he could not have said exactly which day, as a man cannot say which day his hair started going grey, only that one morning he looked and it had already happened.

The Madonna above the side altar wept her painted tears, glass beads set into wood by some travelling craftsman forty years dead, and she had been weeping in exactly that fixed, unblinking way since before Tommaso was born. He had passed her a thousand times without seeing her. Tonight, he crossed the nave and stood close enough to touch the hem of her robe, and he did not touch it, because he already knew what his hand would report, and he was tired tonight of the same report.

You gave her a face that grieves forever, he thought, and then, before the thought had even finished arriving, some colder and more exacting part of him corrected it. Not forever. Painted. A craftsman’s forty years, not Yours. He could not have said, standing there, which of the two was praying and which had simply run out of patience with the other.

He had meant to kneel. His knees did not go down. They simply refused, like a horse refuses a gate it has decided, correctly or not, will not hold its weight, and he stood instead, arms loose at his sides, addressing the Virgin in the tone one colleague addresses another whose competence he has begun, privately, to doubt. None of it left his mouth. It had stopped leaving his mouth months ago, and some nights, standing exactly like this, he could no longer tell whether that was a symptom or the last mercy still available to him.

I buried a girl on Tuesday. Good. Start there. Facts hold their shape. Eleven years old. Her father asked me, in the box, whether feeling relieved that her suffering ended made him a monster. Here, the argument he had spent eleven sleepless nights building, the elegant one, the one about the body’s mercy towards itself, simply gave out beneath him, like a floorboard gives out under a man who has crossed it a thousand times and trusted it the thousand-and-first time. And I said nothing. I had nothing. Forty pages arguing that you are too whole to be broken by what breaks us, and when the man in front of me needed one line of it, I had nothing at all. The thought did not so much end as fray, no period doing the work of stopping it, only the cold coming up off the flagstones and the small, humiliating awareness that he was a grown man alone in an empty church rehearsing an argument no one, least of all its intended audience, owed him any obligation to answer.

Thirty years of my sentences, he tried again, quieter this time, more careful, with the caution of a man handling a cup he has already dropped once. Forty pages on the mercy hidden inside a father’s relief, and I could not give him one line of it. Because you had already taken the one thing I was ever good at. Even inside his own skull, laid out plainly like that, it sounded less like an accusation than a resignation letter. He noticed, with something close to shame, how much more naturally the second one fit.

Silence answered him. Not the ordinary silence of an empty room, which has texture, which has the creak of old wood settling and the small conversations mice hold behind plaster. This was the other silence, the one that had begun climbing into his skull sometime in October and had not left since, a pressure with no outlet, roaring like the inside of a shell roars, which is to say: not a sound at all, only the ear inventing one rather than accept there is nothing left to hear.

He looked past the Madonna to the wall behind her, where sixty years of kerosene smoke had laid down its slow black weather, layer on layer, an inch of soot nobody had ever scraped off because nobody had ever thought a wall worth the ladder. And for the first time, though he would later be unable to say why that particular night and not another, he noticed that the soot did not lie flat. It gathered. It thickened along old cracks in the plaster as frost gathers along a windowpane, finding the path already laid down for it, and in the candlelight, the thickened places cast shadows that did not quite look like nothing.

Is that you, he thought, and the colder voice was there again instantly, sharper this time. Don’t. It is a wall. But the first thought was already finishing itself anyway, of pure stubborn momentum after he had already understood it was a bad idea. Hiding in the dirt behind your own mother’s face, because the front of the church got too crowded with people asking you for things?

He almost laughed. It came out instead as something with no name he was willing to give it, a short exhale through the nose that a stranger might have mistaken for either, the only sound he had made aloud since Domine.

He had an answer ready for this, or had once believed he did, the same answer his seminary had given every student who asked a version of the question from the safety of a classroom instead of a burying ground: that Christ had wept, yes, actually wept, at the tomb of a friend four days dead, two words in the Latin text short enough that a boy could learn them before he learned anything else about the Gospel of John, but that the weeping belonged to the man and not to the God inside the man, the human nature carrying the grief much as a coat carries rain without the body beneath it ever growing wet. The Godhead itself stood apart from its own incarnation’s tears, as a landlord stands apart from a burning house, present at the address, untouched at the source. Deus non patitur. He had written the phrase in a margin once and crossed it out, the same week he had crossed out an entire page called On the Tears of Christ at the Tomb of Lazarus, because the doctrine had seemed, at twenty-two, like the only thing standing between a coherent God and a God who could be undone by the same six months that had undone Edoardo.

He did not feel its coherence now. He felt only its convenience, the specific, ugly convenience of a claim that let every man in a collar tell every grieving parent that the silence they were receiving was not indifference but a kind of perfect health, God’s wholeness rather than God’s absence, and Tommaso understood, standing in the near dark with his own hand gone dead against the Virgin’s hem, that he had spent fifteen years handing out a coin he had never once turned over to check what was stamped on the other side. If the doctrine held, then the silence in the confessional that morning had been God working exactly as advertised: untouched, and therefore inexhaustible, therefore able to go on being merciful to the next father and the one after him long after Tommaso’s own capacity for it had burned down to nothing, still holds its shape a moment before it doesn’t. If the doctrine did not hold, if the tears at Bethany had reached all the way into the thing that made them and not stopped at the border of the flesh as three centuries of careful theology insisted they had to, then God’s silence was not healthy. It was the same throat closing that had closed Tommaso’s own, only vaster, older, and with nowhere at all left to confess it to, since a God who grieved would be, by the plain arithmetic of the thing, the loneliest griever there had ever been: first because He had buried more children than any man could count, and second because there was no larger silence above His own into which He might someday hope to be received and comforted in turn.

He could not decide which was worse. He was no longer certain the question admitted of a better and a worse.

If she weeps in wood forty years and never stops, he thought, and this time no second voice arrived to correct him, which frightened him considerably more than the question itself, what does the one who made her weep get to do with His grief? Where does He put it? Who hears His confession when He has run out of priests to blame? He remembered, standing there, a sermon he had given his second year in San Giovanni, on the passage where God finally answers Job out of the whirlwind, not with the accounting Job had demanded, the itemised reasons for a ruined man’s ruin, but with a storm of unanswerable questions of His own: where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth, who shut up the sea with doors, has the rain a father. He had preached it, at twenty-six, as a lesson in humility, the creature’s smallness before the Creator’s scale. He understood it differently now, standing in the cold with his hand on painted wood. A God who answers grief with more questions than He is asked is not necessarily a God above suffering. He might only be a God who has run out of better ways to say I don’t know, either.

The shape in the soot did not move. He was almost certain of that. Almost.

He stood a long while in the near dark, one hand resting at last, without deciding to, against the cold unfeeling wood of the Virgin’s hem, and upstairs, past the roof, past the bell nobody had rung in a week out of respect for the dead, the first wind of the storm that would not let up for three days began, very softly, to find the gaps in the old stone and sing through them like something learning, for the first time, to speak.

The storm did not pass in a day or two. By the third night, it had done what only the worst San Giovanni winters ever managed: sealed the village entirely from itself, drifts to the eaves on the northern lane, the mountain road already impassable since the peddler’s mule had crossed it for the last time in November. No one would come looking for a priest who did not appear for morning prayers. No one would be able to, even if they tried. He barred the great doors from the inside a little after ten, working the old iron bolt with hands that had stopped, sometime in the last hour, feeling entirely like his own.

The cassock came off first. He had not decided to remove it. He noticed, with the detachment of a man who notices a thing already finished, that it was on the floor of the sanctuary, that he was standing over it in his shirt, and that the shirt, too, a moment later, seemed to belong to someone whose business it was no longer to stay warm. The collar he set on the altar rail with a strange, formal care, the last gesture of a man observing his own funeral.

He had brought everything up from the sacristy already: the tin of charcoal dust ground fine, the paper twist of pigment, the stub ends of a dozen candles hoarded through the autumn for exactly this, though he could not have said, until tonight, what this was.

He mixed the grease and the soot in a chipped bowl with two fingers, the same two fingers, thumb and forefinger, that had spent four months hunting the rosary for a warmth it would not give him. Tonight, they found something. Not warmth. Weight. A blackness with body to it, the first thing in as long as he could remember that pushed back against his skin instead of simply refusing it.

He began below the side altar, where the plaster was oldest and already dark with sixty years of kerosene breath, because it seemed to him, in whatever country his mind now occupied, less like desecration to begin where the wall had already half-drawn the thing itself. The shape came out of him in long, dragging strokes, forearm and shoulder rather than wrist, nothing like the careful copperplate hand that had once filled forty pages on the mercy hidden inside a father’s relief. A great low back, bowed. Something enormous folding itself down and down, much like a bell folds sound into a room until the room cannot hold any more of it and has to let it out through the walls instead. He smudged the outline wide with the flat of his palm, dragging the black into the old grooves the plaster had cracked into on its own, so that the wall’s own scars did half his drawing for him. He gave it no face for a long time. When the face finally came, it was not a face so much as a place where a face had tried and failed to arrive, two hollows gouged deep with a thumbnail and left raw, plaster showing pale and wet beneath the black like something under a scab. From the hollows, he dragged two long unbroken lines straight down, past where a jaw would sit, past where a throat would sit, down to the floor itself, so that the thing seemed to be pouring itself out of its own eyes and had been doing so, by the look of it, for a very long time.

The scale of it frightened him before anything else did, working past midnight with only the height of his own reach to measure by: the shape climbed higher than a man could account for in a single night’s arm, higher than the side altar, close now to the dimensions he remembered, from one boyhood visit to a cathedral on the coast, of the Christ that had filled an entire apse there in beaten gold, one arm raised, two fingers lifted in the old gesture that could mean either come or stop, blessing and warning drawn from the identical shape of the hand. He had not decided to give his own shape a raised arm. He found, well past the point where deciding was still a thing he was doing, that one had arrived anyway, lifted from the great bowed shoulder towards the ceiling, and that the two lines pouring from the eye hollows, which read, by every reasonable account, as tears, could be read just as easily, if a man wanted badly enough to read them that way, as the same rays a mosaic in gold would have thrown from that same raised hand: radiance rendered, for lack of gold, in the only pigment a poor mountain parish had ever given him. He could not, by morning, have said which reading was truer. He was not sure whether the wall itself had decided.

The roaring in his skull, the pressure that had lived behind his ears since October and answered to nothing, no prayer, no ink, no charcoal until tonight, went quiet somewhere in the second hour. He noticed its absence the way a man notices, after weeks of toothache, a morning when his jaw has simply stopped hurting. He did not trust it. He kept working anyway, because the quiet, however he had bought it, was the first quiet that had not felt like an accusation.

His fingertips split somewhere past midnight, the same cracked cuticles that had been scabbing and reopening for weeks finally giving all the way through, and he watched, with an interest that belonged to someone standing very far away from his own hand, dark red beginning to thin the black wherever his fingers dragged hardest, a second colour bleeding into a work that had not asked for one. He did not stop to bind them. By then, his body no longer remembered how to stop. He worked the great bowed shape wider across three more feet of wall, folding smaller shapes into the hollow of its lap and the cradle of its lowered arm, so that the same gesture read, depending on how long a man let his eye rest on it, as an embrace closing around the dead, or as two hands still in the act of shaping something out of raw clay, unfinished, as the story he had been taught as a boy told it: hands that never quite let go of what they had made, whether to hold it or to keep working it. A village’s worth of grief given back the outline it had never been permitted to keep for itself. Somewhere in the doing of it, without a single word arriving to carry the understanding anywhere, the accusation he had started with turned, several hours in, into something closer to a portrait. Of what, he no longer had the apparatus left to ask.

The candles burned down one by one, and he did not replace them, working the last stretch of wall by the grey suggestion of a window he could not see, only feel, a lightening of the dark’s temperature rather than its colour. His arm had stopped responding to him with any strength an hour earlier. It went on regardless, as a struck bell goes on ringing a while after anyone is still holding the clapper. When the light finally came all the way up, pale and sourceless as San Giovanni’s winter mornings always arrived, as though apologising for existing at all, Tommaso was sitting on the floor at the foot of the wall with his back against the cold stone and his ruined hands open in his lap, palms up, like a man sits who has set something down and no longer remembers what his hands are for.

He did not look up at what he had made. He did not look at anything.

Alessandro spent nearly ten minutes with the flat of a hatchet against the ice, sealing the great doors shut, swearing under his breath at a lock that would not give even after the ice had, until he understood, with a small cold drop in his stomach that had nothing to do with the weather, that the door was not iced shut at all. It had been bolted from the inside, and no amount of hatchet work on ice was going to move a bolt that a man’s own hand had thrown.

It took him and two of the younger men the better part of an hour to force it. The doors opened onto a smell before they opened onto a sight: tallow smoke gone stale, and beneath it something mineral and old, like a hearth that has held its ash too long. Concetta was the first to step past them into the nave, and the first to stop. Behind her, the villagers filled in slowly, like water finding a low place, until perhaps twenty of them stood crowded just inside the doors, unable, every one of them, to take the next several steps that would have carried them farther into the room.

The walls above the side altar and along the length of the nave had been given over entirely to something the whitewash had never held before: a vast bowed shape in black and grey, weeping in two long unbroken lines from eyes that were not eyes, only hollows gouged raw into the plaster and left open, folding smaller huddled shapes into the deep dark hollow of what might have been a lap, or a hand still closing around them. One arm of it, if it were an arm, rose the height of two men towards the beam that held the crucifix, ending in a shape that might have been fingers raised in blessing or a hand thrown up against something falling. It went on for a stretch of wall that no single night should have been long enough to cover.

Don Tommaso sat beneath it on the cold stone floor, his shirt black to the elbow, his hands open and ruined in his lap, palms up. He did not turn towards the sound of the doors. He did not turn towards Concetta’s small, swallowed cry, nor towards Alessandro’s hatchet striking the flagstones as it fell from his hand.

A child near the back, too young yet to have learned what a room full of adults going silent all at once is supposed to mean, tugged twice at her mother’s sleeve and asked, in the ordinary voice children use for ordinary questions, why the wall was crying.

No one answered her. She asked again, more quietly the second time, as though she had already understood, faster than anyone twice her age standing in that doorway, that no one in the room intended to.