Read Online Women in the Wall by Julia O'Faolain - Free Book Online Page B

that memory or it will go on tormenting me all night, buzzing like a fly on the edge of my mind. All right then: I was younger than twenty, actually, eighteen and backward in worldly matters, a student at Ravenna school. Most of us were vaguely intending to be priests. It is the obvious career. More or less what the civil service used to be. Celibacy was just beginning to be strictly imposed on clerics and the old practice of keeping one’s wife on as housekeeper had been banned. The change-over was not smooth. A few old priests tried to cheat. There were scandals and endless talk, especially among students. Some of my comrades said it was meaningless to give up something without knowing what it was. One fellow called Clement, a lively, irreverent boy from Milan, said that no one had the right to dedicate an imperfect instrument to the service of God and better test its worthiness first. The implication was that, for all our talk, we were terrified of women. We were.
    “Shall we organize a trial?” Clement proposed one evening. “I think in all honesty you owe it to God and yourselves to find out more about yourselves. The priesthood is for men sound of wind and limb—so what about that limb? The most important of all. I can promise you that trying it on a woman is not at all the same thing as auto-stimulation!” No castrate, he reminded us, could be a cleric.
    This dig was offensive to those of us who came from genuinely religious homes and were struggling with the uncertain leanings of our flesh. Someone asked him did he receive money for drumming up business for local pimps. He wasn’t in the least upset.
    “What’s it to you?” he asked. “Were you thinking of offering your sister?”
    There was a fight. I moved away but Clement’s suggestion kept echoing in my head. I am a man whose impulses get filtered through the mind and can there develop a dangerous strain. I fantasize, I debate. In the moral maze which I construct over weeks of dither, my original appetite battens like the Minotaur, takes on quirks and intensity until finally it threatens to burst out with the urgency of a primeval need. In this case it did. I went to a brothel.
    I knew where the brothels were. Everyone does. They are tolerated, even approved by the Church since, like sewers, they concentrate the filth and make it easier to keep the rest of the city clean. If there were no sewers our streets would be smeared with excrement. If there were no brothels, decent women would be in constant danger of being assaulted by sex-starved soldiers and other riffraff.
    So in I went. I asked for a girl and she took me past a curtain to a cubicle almost entirely occupied by a bed. She was wearing some loose garment which she simply pulled open. I fancied she was looking at me with the same expression that Clement had: mocking me. Even her nipples looked like pursed mouths and mocked me. My senses were in a turmoil. I could hardly see. My ears were drumming and the humours were storming through my body. I grabbed her to me—and realized that for almost the first time in days I was not erect. She coaxed me back to the required state by various loathsome arts. I didn’t loathe them then but their images return to shame me. I coupled with her. I slaked my lust. I—yes, I was so enthralled by her, so in thrall , that I was talking to her, promising to come again and ask for her by name, I was even—was I?—yes, I was actually quoting a poem to her by Sidonius or someone when the screaming began. It was horrifying. It reminded me of the screams of a butchered pig and seemed to come from the next cubicle. Actually, it was three rooms off. The girl jumped up.
    “Oh God,” she said. What did she know of God? I was offended at her using his name. “Oh God, she’s dying. It’s Celia.” She pulled on her garment as fast as she had whipped it off. “Wait,” she told me and left.
    I had no intention of waiting. Nausea was already rising in me. Post coitum