At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [153]
She went into the shop, where Jim looked up from the counter the way you’d be kind enough not to notice him there, and inside of the kitchen she heard Aunt Sawney giving a down-the-banks to Mr. Mack. The babba gave an egg-shaped yawn while the shop door closed behind. Home, said the clink.
When the Dominican brother had called each boy privately to his room—this was on the last day of their retreat, two summers previous—he told them—or leastways he told Jim: Jim didn’t know what he told the other boys, for no boy ever spoke of that confession—he told Jim of the sins of the flesh, the horror of impure thoughts, the terrible consequences of the solitary vice. No sins destroy a soul so utterly as this shameful sin, he said. It steals the sinner from the hands of God and leads him like a crawling thing into the mire of filth and corruption. Once steeped in this mire, he cannot get out. The more he struggles, the deeper must he sink: for he has lost the rock of faith. My Spirit does not dwell in you, the Lord hath said, if you are nothing but flesh and corruption. And so God gives up the impure to all the wicked inclinations of his heart. Hear him laugh at the truths of religion. Delightful to him the stench of corruption. In the mire of passions he wallows. Yet even so he will seek to hide his shame, even from his confessor, as if by darkness or solitude heaven were deceived. Will such a one at the last moment give a good confession, who has from his earliest youth heaped sacrilege on sacrilege? Will the tongue, which has been silent up to this day, be unloosed at the uttermost hour? No; God has abandoned him; heavy are the sins that already weigh him down; he will add one other, and it will be the last.
This then was the spiritual sequel. The priest went on to tell the corporal sequelae, how God has set the mark of ignominy on the solitary sinner’s face. The sickly pallor, the eyes darkened with the shadows of vice, the listless restless joyless posture. Where once the future shone brightly in his eyes, now but gleams the dark road to lunacy. In this life the asylum is his sole hope, in the next the fires of hell.
Jim had left that room, red-faced before the other boys who lined up outside waiting their turn, and he had walked the perimeter of the games field where other boys walked, each one alone, each with his head bowed down. He was burnt with shame and fear, but also he was scandalized. Why had no one warned him before this? Why wait till he was fifteen and he was confirmed in that vice? Indeed not confirmed only, but lost entirely, already abandoned by God. For the mark was on his face, plain to see, if he could bare to look, in his sallow skin, his dull eyes, in their maniacal blink. It was a scandal, and he had half a mind to go up to the national school now, burst in upon the classroom, cry it out to the young boys there, Don’t do it! Don’t think of it! Don’t start or you’re lost!
But horror, at such a pitch, required a frequent refueling: his weekly confession attempted the task, but frequency of its nature makes horror tolerable. Time passed, and it was the discriminations and distinctions of sin, with regard to impure thoughts, that held Jim’s mind. That the Church should see so far ahead, so deeply inside the soul, that no contingency was overlooked but she planned for all the twistings and quibblings of conscience: it was a majestic thing to contemplate, a structure built of thought and logic, magnificent and complex as the cathedrals the Protestants had stolen from her. In the end, whether his hand moved to that solitary vice was neither here nor there. For already there was the sin of desiderium, which was the desire for what is sinful; of delectatio morosa, the pleasure taken in a sinful thought; of gaudium, the dwelling with complacency on sins already committed.
It was round about that time