The Boy in Brescia (2 of 2)

I loved him with the straightforward intensity that children bring to the people who seem to them to have found what life is for.

• • •

The first memory that matters happened when I was seven years old.

It was a Sunday in Lent. The church was dim in the way that Lenten churches are — the statues veiled, the flowers absent, the whole building stripped of decoration in a way that felt less like poverty than like honesty. I was sitting between my parents in the pew we always occupied, third from the front on the left side, and I was, in the way of seven-year-olds at Mass, simultaneously present and not entirely present.

Then Don Matteo elevated the Host.

I cannot explain what happened in me at that moment. I have spent sixty years trying and have arrived at the conclusion that explanation is not the right category. Something in the center of my chest went very still and very large at the same time. The world did not stop — I could still hear my mother’s breathing, still smell the incense and the beeswax of the candles — but it rearranged itself around that moment of elevation the way iron filings rearrange around a magnet.

I did not understand the Eucharist at seven years old. I did not understand what I was seeing. But something in me knew that what was happening at that altar was the most important thing that ever happened anywhere, and that my life was somehow connected to it in a way I could not yet articulate.

I have spent my entire priesthood inside that moment. Every Mass I have celebrated, every host I have elevated in sixty years of ministry, has been a return to the third pew from the front on the left side, with my mother’s breathing beside me and the world rearranging itself around something true.

Here Emmanuel clears his throat and looks at Michael.

Emmanuel: “He hasn’t told you about the funeral yet. Tell him about the funeral, Augusto. That’s the other first memory that matters.”

Emmanuel. È impossibile.

He is right, though. The funeral is part of the story.

When I was nine years old, a boy from my school died. His name was Roberto Cattaneo. He was ten years old, and he died of a fever that in any other era or with any other family’s resources might have been treatable. It was the first death that entered my life at close range, and it devastated me in the way that the deaths of peers devastate children — not with the grief of loss, exactly, but with the terror of the category.

If Roberto could die, then anyone could die. If anyone could die, then everyone would. Including my mother. Including my father. Including me.

I could not sleep for a week. I did not tell my parents why. I was nine years old and did not have words for existential dread, so I lay awake with it in the dark and felt it pressing down on my chest.

The Sunday after the funeral, I watched Don Matteo celebrate Mass with Roberto’s empty space in the congregation — the Cattaneo family were in the front pew, the mother’s shoulders curved inward with a grief that seemed to make her physically smaller — and at the elevation, the thing happened again. The stillness. The rearrangement.

And into that stillness came a thought that I can only describe as a gift, because it did not come from anything I had been taught or anything I had worked out. It was simply there, the way a stone is simply there when you look at it:

He is not gone. He is in this.

I do not mean that I heard a voice. I mean that certainty arrived without argument. Roberto was not gone. Whatever Don Matteo was holding above his head at that altar — whatever that thing was — Roberto was somehow part of it. Death was not the last word. There was a Word before and after death, and that Word was what this was about.

I went home and slept.

I was nine years old. I had not yet been confirmed. I had read almost no theology. But the central conviction that has held my faith together for sixty-nine years arrived in a cold church in Brescia while a grieving mother curved inward in the front pew, and it has never left.