Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

That thought of dying was worse because I had not seen the pretty girl, and somehow I expected to, as I had the day before, at the Novena. On the area of the sidewalk where I had followed her in the rain I saw four big boys and a small one sauntering along in my direction.

Strange boys approaching on the sidewalk in a certain careless way always made me nervous, because they were bolder in a group. For a moment I wished I had gone with Burkell, but then it was too late to think anything at all because the boys were blocking the sidewalk and wouldn’t let me pass.

I stepped off the sidewalk into the gutter and hurried onward with my head down.

“Want a fight?”

I said nothing.

“Get him, Angie.”

One of them tried to snatch my arm.

“He’s smaller than you and you’re scared.”

“Let go,” I said, and hated the tremor of fear in my voice.

“Chickenshit. Hit him, Angie.”

I winced and kept walking. I knew nothing crueler or more vicious and unforgiving than ugly hard-faced boys like these daring me to fight. One put his leg in front of me while another pushed me. I tripped and fell flat but scrambled to my feet and tried to get away.

“Fairy!”

Before I could move on, a boy I couldn't see punched my upper arm, then knocked me on the head. I was breathless and terrified.

“Asshole!”

I staggered along the gutter, splashing into a puddle left over from yesterday, and soaked my shoes, the water chilling my socks and feet. The boys laughed, and one of them threw a muddy stick at my arm.

My feet squelched, and what was worse was that one foot was wetter than the other and made a noise as I ran. I knew I was late for church, but at least I had a place to run to. I saw St. Ray's ahead as a refuge and was glad for my decision to go.

Easing the big door open, holding it ajar and hoping no one would see me, I slid through the narrow crack into the darkness of the church.

“Shame on you!”

With this hiss, which startled me, a hand snatched my ear and I saw the angry face of a nun — pale skin and a half-plucked mustache and a black hood like a villain, no lips and crooked teeth and a bristly chin. She twisted my ear and then punched my arm, harder than the attacking boy had done.

“It’s a sin to be late,” she said in a harsh sour breath. “It’s an insult to Jesus.”

I was startled and felt helpless again. Nuns were hardly human, bearded women, like demons, somehow incomplete, hidden beneath black gowns and starched collars. I could not imagine what their bodies might look like when I considered their scary faces and claw-shaped hands.

She had punched my coat where the boy's muddy stick had whacked me.

“You're filthy. Your shoes are soaked.” She held on to my arm. “This is the house of our Lord and Savior!”

She twisted my arm and pushed me so hard I scuffed my feet for balance, and some people in the last pew turned to see what the fuss was about. I ducked down the side aisle and into the nearest pew to get away from the nun, and as I knelt I heard the chanting of the congregation and the loud “Amen!”

“Sixth Station,” Father Staley said aloud, and raised his eyes to the image on a pillar. He stood there, an altar boy on either side of him, each one carrying a lighted candle. The priest went on announcing: “Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus.”

Palm fronds were folded behind the carved wood image that showed Veronica's cloth imprinted with the face of Jesus, the hanging cloth like a mirror, another miracle.

“Veronica in her mercy was guided by the angels,” the priest said, “although there were devils all around.”

Knowing human cruelty — boys who looked for fights, nuns who pinched me and tried to frighten me with threats, and other human scares — made it hard for me to believe in the devil. Human wickedness worried me and made me want to be alone, or else to find a friend.

She was not in church. I squinted into the dim light that was dulled by the soupy color of the stained-glass windows. I thought I saw her at the Tenth Station, Jesus Is Stripped of His Garments, but it was someone else, a bigger neater girl and not as pretty. I knew that in looking for the skinny girl I appeared attentive and pious, my face forward. I watched for her and heard Father Staley's shoe leather squeak. I watched for her and heard the chinking of coins in the collection basket. I dropped the nickel in and kept my quarter.

Father Staley had left the last Station, fourteen, Jesus Is Placed in the Sepulchre. He turned to face the people in the pews and said, “Confession will be heard tomorrow. You must be in a state of grace or else you can’t perform your Easter duty.”

As he spoke I saw the girl on the far side of the church — her lovely face — under the Eighth Station, The Women of Jerusalem Weep Over Jesus. I turned to get a better look and my arm went numb as though I had been bitten — it was the nun, bugeyed in fury, pinching me.

“Kneel down!”

“I want ejaculations from you,” she said in my ear. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, forgive me!”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, forgive me.”

“Five hundred times.”

I knelt with my head down reciting them, and when I was done the church was empty, the girl gone. But it wasn't only punishment; we were promised that each ejaculation knocked one day off the time we would spend in Purgatory.

I still had no idea who she was, but after two days I had a better notion of what she looked like, her thin face and green eyes, the way her clothes hung straight down on her, her thin neck and narrow shoulders and bony legs, her limp skirt and the way her slip drooped beneath it, different clothes on different days but the same torn slip. She was like a certain kind of skinny doll.

I did not want to talk to her — didn’t have the courage, had nothing to say. I just wanted a chance to stare at her. So outside the church on Wednesday afternoon I waited by the grotto, a statue of the Virgin Mary balanced on a ball, and standing there I realized for the first time that the ball was the earth and her bare feet were crushing a snake.

Earlier in the year we had had a special ceremony and a sermon on this spot, consecrating the statue, the pastor explaining the Assumption, that when the Virgin Mary died she rose to Heaven.

“The Blessed Virgin was not buried, her body did not decay, she was assumed into Heaven, body and soul, because she was the mother of God, the second Eve. This is Our Lady’s year, the Marian Year.”

I kept hearing the expression “Marian Year” and I knew it had something to do with Mary, but what was I supposed to do? It did not seem so odd to me that she had uprisen, flown to Heaven on rooster tails of flame: it was shown in all the pictures, even the oldest ones.

But now that the pastor kept insisting that Mary was assumed into Heaven, that this was official doctrine, saying “It’s true,” I started to think that it might not be true. Looking at the stone statue, the big hard folds of the Virgin’s blue cloak and her heavy body, I tried to imagine her rising from the ground, over the tops of the telephone poles and past the trees in Hickey Park, into the glowing clouds, the whole grotto, scallop shell and planet earth and all, shooting like a rocket ship upward on a plume of smoke.

Then, staring past the Virgin, I saw the skinny girl hurrying along the sidewalk alone, wearing the jacket she had worn to the Novena — it had dried out — but a blue skirt, the same shoes, falling-down socks, and the scrap of drooping slip. Her tangled hair made her seem nervous and unhappy, as though someone was chasing her.

The devil was always after us, the priests said. Maybe she was being dogged by the devil, walking lopsided, one shoulder higher than the other.