After breakfast, I went to Vinces with Laurent with the excuse that I needed to go to church and confess. I didn’t want to confess, certainly not to my brother. What I wanted was to get a confession from him.
Alberto smiled at me from across the nave. Gone were the pale face and the confused expression I’d seen the other day.
“What a pleasure to have you here, Don Cristóbal, but you’re a little late for mass.”
“That’s all right. I would like to have a word with you, if you may. It’ll only take a couple of minutes.”
“A confession?”
“You could say that.”
Nodding, he led the way to a sacristy saturated with incense. There was an enormous cross behind a desk, where vessels, candles, and other religious items sat. There was also a bench-like couch with burgundy cushions, where the two of us sat, and an open armoire where I could spot cassocks and white, purple, and green robes.
“How can I help you?” He’d acquired that solemn tone that priests often take during sermons. He hadn’t seemed so grave when he sat across the table in the bar last week.
I didn’t know how to start.
“Did you always want to be a priest, Alberto?”
He was taken aback, probably by my lack of reverence, but recovered quickly.
“No,” he said slowly. “I wanted to be an architect.”
I remained quiet, expectant.
“In my youth, I went through a period where I doubted the very existence of our Lord.” He set his gaze on his cassock, almost apologetically. “Oddly, my love for architecture is what brought me to Him. You see, my father had a book of European churches. It was a beautiful book, filled with pencil illustrations of Notre Dame, the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, St. Peter’s Basilica, Santiago de Compostela. This book was forbidden to me since it was one of the few precious things my father had brought from France and he said I would ruin it with my dirty hands. But every time I saw him climb onto his horse, I would sneak into his study and look at the pictures for hours. As I grew older and was able to read the text, I learned that throughout the centuries, theology has always been at the core of the aesthetics and construction of these Christian churches.”
He glanced at the cross on the wall with reverence. “When my mother would visit family in Guayaquil and Quito, she took me with her and we inevitably went to those impressive churches. I spent more hours than I can count in mass, but I was silently enraptured by the beauty of those cathedrals. And yet, my mother’s excessive religiosity frustrated me just like my father’s skepticism filled me with doubt.”
His words resonated with me. My mother had also dragged me to church for six o’clock mass every morning—the chocolate store had been a wonderful excuse not to go anymore. It was interesting that the two women in my father’s life had shared such devotion.
“So, I set out to disprove the existence of God,” he said, and a tight-lipped smile followed. “I went to great lengths to do this. I joined the seminary so I could learn everything I could about philosophy and religion and I could come back home filled with rational arguments to support my stance. Of course, I hid my perverse plan from all those around me, but the more I learned, the more I attempted to illuminate my mother of all my findings. And yet, her faith remained intact.” He took a deep breath. “Her death was so shocking and painful to me that one afternoon, filled with rage against this so-called God who had taken the person I loved the most away from me, I turned to the very source of my doubt and struggle for solace.”
His voice broke a little. He stared at his hands before speaking again.
“I remember praying the rosary, as I’d seen my mother do so many times, with the hopes that it would calm me—numb me, if you will—as I’d seen happen to her. I sat in this very same church, in front of the statue of Our Lady, her impassive expression maddening me even more. I wished then with all my heart that God truly existed, as I believed that only He could take this pain away. I lowered my head and closed my eyes, resigned to the thought that this anguish and despair wasn’t going anywhere. I can’t explain what happened then, not rationally anyway. As I knelt down as a first sign of humility, a sort of serenity descended upon me. My body became light, as if floating, and an enormous peace took over me—not unlike the feeling you get when you leave a cold building and the first rays of sun hit your cheeks. It was at that moment that I realized that everything that had led up to that point in my life was part of the Lord’s big plan for me.” His fingers rubbed the cotton of his soutane. “I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.”