The Final Retreat Read online

  But within a few months of being there I felt hopelessly out of place. My fellow novices (all nine of them) were narrow-minded and prudish. There was a hothouse atmosphere, a competitive spirituality as to who could spend longest in the chapel, who could be up earliest, who could be most abstemious at the dinner table, who could stay longest praying after Communion. The talk during recreation times was narrow and bigoted. It was the start of the aids epidemic and cruel, ignorant remarks were commonplace. One of the nine was a little more sympathetic and we became friends — Jason from the Philippines. A stocky, short guy with dark skin and a big smile who tried to appear macho-tough but was actually quite sensitive. He was musically inclined and his tuneful, powerful singing voice always rose above the others in the chapel services.

  One spring day the two of us were assigned to paint the recreation room whilst the other novices were outside doing work in the grounds. Devoid of charm and with insufficient furniture to fill its cavernous space (a man in a suit too big for him), this room was where we had our community get-togethers and where we occasionally watched movies — Bing Crosby’s Bells of St Mary’s, Hitchcock’s I Confess, Mickey Rooney’s Boystown, but also videos of Father Mario preaching (sempre con fuoco) with subtitles. There was an upright piano in the corner which I had played a few times but which was now covered with dust sheets. Jason was sanding the wall near it when he came across some music scores on a shelf — mainly songs from the shows Carousel, My Fair Lady, South Pacific.

  ‘Hey Joe, I used to sing these back in the Philippines. Shall we try one? What about this?’ I put down my paintbrush and walked over to the piano as he opened the book at ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’ — Lerner and Lowe, that alliterative dream-team of melody and romance. I uncovered the piano, balanced the score on its rickety desk, and sat down to vamp the introduction, my eyes darting up and down awkwardly from music to keyboard. Then he began to sing, standing behind me quite closely, bending over a little, obviously needing to read the words from the page. He sang pretty well, although I got the feeling that he was more interested in projecting the vibration of his vocal chords than the emotions of the song. Indeed the volume increased as he got carried away and I was scared that Brother Dominic would return and hear us — but I didn’t like to discourage him.

  He turned the page and I could smell his breath and his clean, black hair as he leant over me. ‘Ac-cust-omed to her... ’ — four B flats, each with a slightly different tuning from his untrained, youthful voice. This vocal blip alongside his cockiness made him seem vulnerable and strangely irresistible. My heart began to beat faster.

  ‘That sounds great, Jason,’ I said as he finished. ‘Let’s try another. What about “You’ll Never Walk Alone”?’ I felt safer in C major and this time the melody’s arch was higher and more passionate. He put his hand on my shoulder as he began and I started to tremble, my fingers suddenly cold and moist. He really got into it and it was pretty loud in my ear. Then his hand on my shoulder became his leg against my back as he began the second verse. His vanity, his fondness for his own voice, was the guard he had let down, and I found myself carried along the river in a swift and dangerous current. I was on the point of stopping, of saying that we should get back to work, of dousing myself with that bucket of iced water which was ready on my shoulder (there was enough for both of us), but I delayed. I allowed the romantic moment to unfold. I kept playing, he kept singing, his arm now around my shoulder as if we were two leads on Broadway. That’s it! We’re actors! It’s theatre! We’re on stage! This isn’t reality! This can’t be sin!

  We finished the song and there was a strange pause. It seemed to last a minute but was probably only a few seconds. We looked at each other, inside each other. The music had ended in silence and only a bird now sang outside the window.. I was on fire. He was flushed too and was smiling his big white grin. I’d not been aware of any special sexual attraction to Jason before, but now with the music and the hand and the leg and the gaze of our eyes I was overcome with tenderness and desire. He quickly leant towards me and kissed my lips, but in a stagey, jokey kind of way, as if to break a spell rather than to cast one.

  ‘Thanks Joe,’ he said breezily. ‘You play really well. Hey, we should get on with the decorating if we’re going to finish before Benediction.’ He moved away and started vigorously rubbing the sander against the wall, his back to me. I was speechless, my throat tight, my feelings confused. I had a full erection and my whole body was hot. ‘Thanks Joe’ were sweet words from a mouth I wanted to kiss again, but also words of cancellation, of erasure, of a return to normality. And words of a certain hauteur, as if I’d done him a favour, a rental pianist for his audition, a jobbing accompanist sitting out of view whilst he flaunted himself before the producer and director, hungry for the role, desperate for fame. I was both attracted by and resentful of his ego. Irrationally, I felt used by him, sexually and musically, but I longed for it to happen again. I wanted him to kiss me deep and long and hard... and I needed to go to Confession.

  No one to confess to except Father Pietro, our spiritual director, the resident priest. Would Jason also go to Confession? Would he think he’d sinned? Maybe such a gesture of affection, such fooling-around, was customary for Filipinos back home, much like Italian men who throw their arms around each other whilst wolf-whistling at passing pretty girls. I didn’t know what Jason would do and there was no way on earth I could talk to him about it, but I knew I had sinned. I’d felt the passion. I could have stopped the intimate moment but I didn’t. It had given me intense physical pleasure. I knew it at the time but I continued, and I would do it all over again. Then the waves of panic began. If I would do it again then I was not repentant. Yes, if Jason had put down the sander and walked over to me and taken me in his arms and thrust his tongue to the back of my teeth I would have offered no resistance.

  I was shaking and my mind was spinning. Contrition was out of the question, but maybe attrition was possible, repentance through fear of Hell rather than love of God? My heart was beating quickly again, but now not from desire. I had to go to Confession as soon as possible. I was in a state of mortal sin. If the room we were in were suddenly to catch fire and the blaze to spread wildly and consume the sofas and the books and the piano then roar ferociously towards me engulfing me in seconds in a screaming heap of flames... then I would go to the flames of Hell for all eternity. Hell for all eternity. If you travelled to the Sahara and began to count every grain of sand in that desert, taking one minute for each grain, when you finished it would be as if only day one in that place of torment where you were destined to spend so many days that the number of zeros would themselves be like the grains of sand under your burning feet. That is the teaching of the Church, unadulterated by flabby liberalism or equivocating modernism. One kiss between two men in which the pleasure found was not repudiated and resisted was enough to land you in the Sahara desert on a one-way ticket. And me? I was sitting on the piano bench wanting to feel those Filipino lips press against my mouth again.

  We were silent for the next half-hour as we continued our decorating. Benediction was at 5:00 and at 4:30 Brother Dominic popped his head in the door.

  ‘OK guys, you should get yourselves cleaned up now. You’ve done a good job here. Looking nice.’Jason put down his sander and walked out jauntily whilst I held back a little. ‘Brother Dominic?’ I said, as Jason disappeared around the corner. ‘I need to see Father Pietro. Is... is he around?’

  ‘Yeah, I saw him go up to his room, Joe. But there’s not enough time to see him before Benediction. Go and have a shower now and you can talk to him after dinner.’

  I hurried out of the room, still hoping that I could manage to see the priest before the service began, but I couldn’t do so as I was, covered with paint and dust and dirt. I raced up the stairs to my room, grabbed a towel, and went to the bathroom to take a quick shower before getting into my cassock. It was now 4:50. I still had 10 minutes. I walked over to Father Pietro
’s room and knocked on his door. There was no answer. I knocked again. Again, no answer. I was still in a state of panic and so I ran back down the stairs to the chapel and saw him talking to one of the Brothers outside the sacristy. I walked up slowly, looking down at my feet, hoping he would see me and finish his conversation but staying far enough away so that it didn’t look like I was eavesdropping. Eventually the Brother turned and walked away and the priest went directly into the room where he would vest for the liturgy, seeming not to have noticed me. I followed him into the darkened space. ‘Father,’ I called out. He stopped and turned around. It was now just a couple of minutes before five o’clock. ‘Can I have a word?’ Then I added in a quieter voice, ‘I need to go to Confession.’

  ‘Well, there’s no time now, Joe. Benediction starts in a couple of minutes.’ I felt sick, guilty, filthy. ‘Come and see me in the sacristy after the service.’

  I went into the chapel and knelt down. There was Jason on the other side, head bowed, seemingly at peace. I suddenly felt like an outsider. I felt as if I had crashed not a party but an intimate family gathering. I had opened the door and entered inside and taken a seat where the children should be sitting. The parents themselves were kind and gracious but I knew I had sat down where I did not belong. A bell rang and Father Pietro, covered in a gorgeous bejewelled cope, entered the sanctuary from the right side, genuflected slowly and reverently, then removed the Host from the tabernacle and placed it in the bright gold monstrance. He positioned it carefully on the altar, perfectly centred, and genuflected again, with a sigh of devotion and with eyes fixed on the white wafer inside the glass case. No, this was not like crashing another family’s gathering but instead as if an invisible wall had arisen between me and my own family, cast out, disgraced, stripped of my place at the table. During the hymns and chants of the service I could hear Jason’s voice riding over the rest of us and it made me feel a searing melancholy which came directly from my churning stomach.

  After Benediction I went again to the sacristy where Father Pietro was disrobing.

  ‘Father...’

  ‘Yes, I know, Joe. You want to go to Confession. Just wait a minute.’ His brusqueness surprised me. He seemed impatient and annoyed. Wasn’t he meant to welcome the return of a sinner? My courage was already faltering. Had Jason already been to see him whilst I was taking my shower? What had he said, if so? No, there wouldn’t have been time. Was I putting Jason in an awkward position by mentioning him in this context? Well, I didn’t need to name him. I could just say that I’d had a sexual encounter with another man. But who else could it have been, seeing as I hadn’t left the premises? But saying I’d had a sexual encounter was stupid. It sounded much worse than it was, like we’d actually had sex. Yet why should it bother me if the priest thought worse of me? My sin was as bad as if we’d fucked for an hour on top of the altar. A mortal sin is a mortal sin. The Sahara. And being ashamed of telling Father Pietro was pride, another sin. It didn’t matter what the priest in Confession is kept secret. But he could voice concerns about my vocation, about my suitability, without naming them. And what would my mother say if I were to be rejected from the Oblates of Christ? My heart froze as Father Pietro continued to disrobe, these thoughts tumbling around in my head in a frenzied cacophony.

  And then I had a brainwave. I would simply say to him that I had entertained sexual thoughts and taken pleasure in them. That was the sin after all. Two human beings placing their lips together for one second was not the sin. The sin was in the mind — not as in imaginary but as in internal consent. ‘You have heard that it was said to them of old: Thou shalt not commit adultery. But I say to you, that whosoever shall look on a woman to lust after her, hath already committed adultery with her in his heart.’ That’s it! I can spare Jason, I can avoid misunderstanding, I can be truthful (in a real, spiritual sense), and I can get absolved. I felt an instant, tremendous relief, and it became a technique I used frequently over the years. ‘Entertained sexual thoughts’ — a hostess throwing supper parties, no shortage of guests.

  9 Wet dreams

  ______________________

  ‘Do you have any recurring temptations of an impure nature?’ asked Father Pietro when I first applied to join the Oblates of Christ.

  ‘No, Father,’ I replied. It was an honest answer in that I was convinced such temptations were firmly under my control. Before deciding to enter the novitiate my reflex of avoiding occasions of sin with others had become honed and habitual and I had even stopped masturbating. At night inside the bedclothes if I felt an erection developing I would reach for my rosary and start to meditate on the Sorrowful Mysteries. Almost immediately the excitement would dissipate and I would imagine myself under the loving gaze of my Guardian Angel. I didn’t have to deal with the jaws of sin because my temptations had baby teeth. There are other sins of course, not just those of the flesh, but these didn’t figure in my thoughts. They seemed even easier dragons to slay — toothless wonders in thrall to the One True Church.

  But I probably should have told him about my steady stream of wet dreams. Sometimes my sheets were barely dry from last night’s emission when I found myself soaked again, trembling with guilt in the aftermath of my body’s exploding pressure cooker. Great wet patches through pyjamas to the mattress were seedbeds sufficient for nations, their stains like continents mapped out on the linens of my bed. Sometimes I woke up on the very edge of an orgasm and thrust my engines into reverse with fervent prayer. My heart was racing and my loins were aching and I felt a frightening surge of panic: had I sinned? Could I receive Communion before going to Confession? If I didn’t receive Communion what would people think? No one denies themselves the Sacrament because of an angry word or a jealous thought. No, when you see that young man staying back in the pew when others are going forward and everyone is singing ‘Sweet Sacrament Divine’, it’s sex sex sex.

  No one had ever really talked to me about sex. I’d discovered my own source of secret pleasure with masturbation, mined it frequently for a few years, then blocked it, gas safely turned off at the mains... until the later explosion. At least girls have to have explained to them what is happening as they begin their monthly periods, but with boys it can all go unspoken, information gleaned from behind a shed, in a bubble-gum whisper, in a mutual fumble when peeing in the toilets, a knowing smirk from a pubescent fuzz-face, cunts and slits and dicks and cum and balls. Sex was something from which I shut my ears. The rubbish dump of fucking and a contented, rosy-cheeked family gathered around the hearth... there could be no possible connection between these two images in my youthful mind.

  10 Gold cufflinks

  ______________________

  Sitting here at my desk my mind keeps going back to that year at Immaculate Heart in Chicago, a quarter of a century ago. That year of exploring then rejecting a vocation with the Oblates of guilty enjoying such a sensual moment but that was short-lived because Father Pietro recommended that we take cold showers for mortification. Then the gushing was less welcome, although still better than the piddling, hand-held shower we’d had at home, its tubes a toothless blow-job around the taps. Edging our stained bath tub was a floppy, mildewed curtain which would slap against me in a flap of annoyance, as disgusting as an elderly aunt’s wet kiss. After my drafty childhood bathroom Chicago was paradise.

  We didn’t get to see much of the city as we were stuck out in Joliet, but on two occasions we were driven to magnificent St Peter’s Cathedral for Mass with the Archbishop of Illinois. Cardinal O’Reilly was an impressive man on many levels. Tall with a large frame and an athletic build, he was jovial in a way that seemed to facilitate his keeping a distance from you rather than drawing you closer to him. His friendly pat on the back and chortling laugh was a practised way to leave a situation behind, not to invite a confidence. I know that busy men like him need these techniques for quick exits along fast-track lanes, but once you’ve noticed that it’s a technique the smiles and the bonhomie seem hollow and they fail t
o cheer. Not like Bishop Bernard whose shyness calms and consoles; he wouldn’t have lasted the length of a Novena in the bustle of the dioceses of Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. The Cardinal’s polished Cadillac, his chunky gold cufflinks, his crisp white shirts, his crisp white hair — a Prince of the Church on his throne in the mission fields of North America. He ran a tight ship, all polished brass and rich-hued oak, it’s just that I could never imagine Christ walking up its gangplank to preach. No, the Nazarene was to be seen standing with sandalled feet in a fishing boat, floor dank with stale brine and fish bones: ‘But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they that wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses.’ The Cardinal’s residence was the only king’s house I’ve ever visited.

  Because he venerated our own Father Tetrazzini we were treated very well. After Mass there was a brunch at the splendid Palmer House hotel, built in the days when Wall Street seemed indestructible. Its lobby was dazzling, an opulent secular cathedral where the Sunday sacrament was smoked salmon and champagne rather than bread and wine, accompanied by the groove of grainy live jazz in place of choir boys and organ. It was my first Sunday in America, barely over the jet lag, eating French toast (French?) with maple syrup and blueberries (what was maple syrup? What were blueberries?), eggs over-easy (so easy) and bacon crisped in snap-crackle slabs. Air-conditioned, airbrushed, air-headed — thrilling and totally overwhelming after Timperley and Tescos. And yet that kind of confident, glossy American Catholicism made my experience with the Oblates worse in the long run. It was all so fake. To mortify myself on a deep-pile blue carpet, to reach around to whip my back whilst vents blew temperature-controlled air into the welts, to reduce my intake of food when there was a choice of half-and-half, full fat, or semi-skimmed milk... it all seemed like amateur theatre, complete with bad make-up, ill-fitting costumes and overacting. I just couldn’t take it seriously. Serious though was the smug self-satisfaction which such self-denial bred in some of us. Soon we were to learn that the costume of our black habits was a sign that we had been set apart, that we were experts-in-training for higher things. Callow youths as vessels of grace with easy answers for every difficult question.