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When Thomas Lawrence came by the papal apartments that evening, he came, unsurprisingly, with a bundle of papers under his arm.
Vincent tried on and discarded four separate teasing comments about it, but didn’t get to decide on one before Thomas silently handed them over, and he realized they were newspapers, opened and refolded over the weekly comics, his favorite. Three of them, one for each week he’d been away.
Ah, he thought, with the feeling of a sudden hard deceleration in his chest, the press it put on his heart. Ah. All right then.
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Bookmark Notes:
such a novel piece of writing that provides Vincent with more than he usually is allowed to walk in with. visceral, gritty, layered. just a gorgeous work overall
It was the theme of every place he’d ever lived.
Jalisco to Veracruz to Kinshasa to Kandahar to Kabul, the West came and opened the veins of the world and then complained about the mess.
He hadn’t known before he was asked to come north and live here, installed as head of state in a glorified palace built on the bones of the poor, how much it would bother him.
There was little he could do about it now, but he could go and sit in the cafeteria with people like him until it stopped being so unbearable: Cardinal Mendoza from Manila; Sister Bernice from north Vietnam; the cardinals from Accra and Casablanca generously pausing their ongoing arguments with each other to quarrel with him instead; the Jimínez brothers, both bishops from Cancun who claimed they could follow their matrilineal line all the way back to the days of the Triple Alliance and the Meshica grandmother who’d stood up to her thighs in swamp water and watched the eagle kill the snake on the place that would be Tenochtítlan. They were here too.
They knew what it was like, loving a God and believing in a salvation their ancestors wouldn’t have known without violence, to pluck faith from the jaws of conquest and say, Yes, thank you, this is ours.
You’ve had it long enough. We’ll take it from here.
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Bookmark Notes:
(...he put his face against his neck and looked past him into the gilt marble presence of the Holy Spirit, and Vincent Benítez, crude and folkish, bared all his teeth. You may have every part of me but this, he thought. This is mine alone.)
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Bookmark Notes:
What lovely and evocative narration, conducted in a non-linear way so expertly (unlike other authors who stumble and trip over it). This explores beautifully Vincent's background as a Mexican priest, and his international missions in war and extreme difficulty. All that, and we get to see the first consumation of love between Vincent and Thomas, two old Catholic priests... This is just jaw-droppingly superb. Reading this once will make you want to instantly re-read it again.