Inside, it is cold, a soothingly empty chill that contrasts with the ponderous mugginess outside. Mass hasn’t started yet. Lili tries to squeeze the water out from her hair as she steps over the threshold, so she doesn’t trail rain in.
Removed from the summer storm, dark space and intent silence swell. As her eyes adjust, the worn stone underfoot is soft like water that has run for centuries; the scent of residual incense is heavy and fragrant in the chilled air. Flicker of lit candles, dozens of side chapels, the glow of flames against old murals. Rows and rows of wooden chairs, maybe hundreds, are lined in barren, regimented rows under the drift of these high arches. A few people sit in the astounding scale of this place.
Lili watches them, as she slowly walks through the darker arcades. These other churchgoers, the echoing tap of her step. Dim alcoves, candles lit; euros dropped in alms boxes, wax, prayers. Thin tapers illuminate the loom of art: the face of the Virgin Mary, oil paintings on the wall. Art that is ancient, art that remains felt and seen daily, even if it means little to her.
There’s intimacy, rather than performance, to the space. People come, people go: A man lights a candle in a side chapel, while his small son looks up at the lofted ceilings, craning his neck; a young woman walks inside from the rain, a whoosh of fresh air with her, and the click of her footfalls down the aisle, the quick cross over her chest, a reflex action with a glance at the altar, before she finds a seat, settles.
Like a stone touched, a routine, a ritual.
Ablutions of faith, gestures seeking a meaning, and Lili wonders about that: the trust in something futile, at least to her. Isn’t that what faith is? Trust in futility?
There’s a heartbeat here; the sense of something she stands outside of, is not privy to.
I spent a lot of time in churches.
Her breath catches. Other people: around her, between them.
He could be—could have already—
Breathe, Lili. Breathe.
She finds a chair, takes a seat. She tries to settle her chest, as she looks around. This place could feasibly hold nearly thousands, likely has held hundreds of thousands in its centuries of standing here, sinking into earth.
At the front, a young man, a bit older than her, bows his head at the kneeling bench.
Lili stares, studies him. She attempts to find some story—understand what he’s asking for, what he’s on his knees for. What weight makes him bow his head: something he hopes for, fervently; something he has done, confessed—and whether it’s a soothing feeling, to ask for forgiveness like that, to want without expectation, past the sense of deserving? Because it’s foregone, in most traditions: that we’re sinners, that we don’t deserve.
Faith has always felt like a contortion to her. A shoving of her mind into a limiting of belief rather than an expansion of it. But she wants to understand it, has spent so much time studying religion—how generations have coped with the unknown, with uncertainty, with worries about morality, goodness, value, worth—but has spent so little time in churches.
But maybe there’s nothing there. Maybe this kneeling man is happy, and maybe he is only giving thanks.
Lili looks away. She lets her head tip back, staring up at the soaring arches, the vaulted stone ceiling. Architecture that’s intended to make you feel something grander, more mysterious, more powerful; even if it’s just incense, just chants, just human voices reaching higher, for what’s unseen.
He’d said he spent time in churches:I wanted to feel small again, but not anonymous—not insignificant—
Removed from nature here, even more so than in New York, she feels like man has swallowed up everything.
She closes her eyes; quietly, softly. She tentatively lets a few thoughts come through.
Distant, she can hear the ocean.
A different coast, another continent. Black sand, wind, sun through fog.
Tries to hear the shell of herself, finally.
She breathes in; she breathes out.
And it rushes in.
The immensity of her actions, the ever-rippling spread of her consequences; and the clink, the metallic weight of her keys in her hands, as she’d set them on his kitchen counter, and his grin, as he’d pulled her in close at the gala, kissing her temple, a moment, quick, entirely appropriate, but the sheer joy and want of him, and the thought—violence, this thought—of him with another person, a woman in her place; other people, feeling the weight of his body, knowing his hands on their skin, and she knows, she knows, how stupid it is to feel this panic, this shock, at the fresh thought of it, and how justified he would be in having slept with other people, after what she did. But the idea of him with someone else, anyone else, makes her so nauseous her vision blurs.
Good,she tries to tell herself.You need to feel the weight of what you’ve done.
But she doesn’t want to—she doesn’t want to have doneanyof this.
And there are her thoughts, and these are her actions, and here are her feelings: and there is her, responsible for everything, but feeling no power in that. And across the water, across the ocean, on another continent, in another city, is that man she could have had—that she did have.
In the quiet, she tries to remember moments when they were breathless and alone together, hot skin, gasp of her exhale against his mouth; how held by him, she’d broken, reaching her own pain—earlier moments, when she was younger, walking alone to black sand beaches, carrying sadness that’s only shifted into different parts of her; such endless sadness, and somewhere on that beach, a man, older than her, but when he was young, her own age, he had stood in churches, huge and empty, places of repentance and forgiveness, in this same city.
