Chapter Text
Belo Horizonte, 1964: Will I see you beyond the fog?
With two heavy suitcases in hand in the middle of a tumultuous crowd, Hilda Furacão felt that it was her heart that weighed her down the most. As the fog enveloped her, she dropped her bags and fell to her knees, mascara running down her rosy cheeks. Whatever joy she had from Santo’s phone call had dissolved into an empty void inside her.
How stupid she was to believe in a prophecy.
It ends here, she thought.
In the fog.
Then, for a brief moment, she felt warmth brush her cheeks. Her tears were dried.
“Santo?” she whimpered and glanced up.
The golden rays of the sun looked down upon her as if to offer comfort in the middle of all the chaos.
Prophecy I: The Princess and the Monk
Smoke billowed around the novice monk Malthus as he knelt down behind the pew. It was a quite sensory feast: the sharp scent of incense dominating the room as deep, melodic chants hung over in the air. He bowed his head, humbly covered by the hood of his habit, so that the candlelight only reached his lips parting and meeting to sing in Latin, identical to all the other monks lined up in the room for their prayers at dawn.
A slapping sound echoed throughout the chapel, and yet no words were needed to explain it, nor were any monks rattled by it. Possibly a brother falling asleep in the midst of prayer, caught by Abbot Nelson.
Malthus learned earlier on that the life of a monk required a natural sensitivity to routines, enabling one to be carried by the daily rhythms to a point that all tasks were ingrained in every muscle and bone, executed without having to think. With meager sleep in their schedule, most monks struggle to stay awake during prayers.
Except for Malthus. To him, it came so easily once he had been doing it for a few weeks. Ever since he was a child, he had craved repetition and found safety in the familiar: mass on Sundays, rosary in the evening, and Bible passages read by his mom as bedtime stories. He was so compliant in these spiritual rituals that his mother would endearingly call him “santino”. She would proudly boast to other families in the village that no whining or complaints would ever come from her son as he prayed.
As he grew out of his tiny sacristan’s robe, Malthus continued to seek a life of constancy, a life of which would continue to make his mother believe he was unlike the rest, and a life that would isolate him from his childhood friends who he felt were slipping away into worldly desires and could no longer understand him.
While he found this the hardest part to let go, Malthus knew it would be better to honor the memories of his friendship with Aramel and Roberto if they had gone separate ways now, rather than later, when their words to each other would cut much deeper.
“Are you sure, Malthus?” Roberto asked as he packed for the monastery.
“Why can’t you just be a regular priest or something?” Aramel, who was often less careful with his quips, attempted to negotiate. “I heard you can’t even write letters to us! Why, Malthus, why a monk?”
To know exactly what you are expected to do at every second of your life — for Malthus, this was the dream. Yet he could only muster to say: “I can visit once in two years. I promise.”
Now, Malthus was deeply immersed in the Latin chants, swathed in the comforting harmony that made him feel submerged in the water, like an infant on his baptism day. He enjoyed the suffocating feeling that allowed him to believe for a moment that only God was present. There was no world, no pain, no uneasy feeling inside him that he was insufficient and alone.
Then, at last, came the vision.
The visions began when he was 14 years old, and by chance, it would appear to him during deep prayer. Even on the worst days, when he felt unloved or unwanted by anyone other than his mother, the visions offered a temporary escape and a glimpse of God’s overwhelming love. Perhaps it is the reason why he yearns for a life of prayer… to chase the vision and to make it clearer, more vivid, more real.
The scene always opened to a cloud of incense, a rush of militants breaking into the smoke and committing acts of violence. Somehow, Malthus floated past them, his feet light in the air. As he wafted through the smoke and the commotion, in the middle of it all was a bright figure, its porcelain skin reflecting the light of the sun.
The Angel. It was always kneeling, head bent upwards to the heavens. Two suitcases by its side. The dreamy landscape surrounding it made its face too hazy for Malthus to make out, but its electric blue eyes always buzzed its way to tear into Malthus’s gaze.
As always, he would gravitate towards the Angel and feel a desperate hunger for its touch, just as devotees and pilgrims would be so overwhelmed with emotion as they held onto statues of the Virgin or the blessed saints.
This time, to Malthus’s surprise, the Angel had not vanished into smoke. The vision had not been cut short, like it usually does.
Is this it? he thought. Will the Angel finally tell me God’s message?
Malthus’s hand grazed over what felt like soft, warm skin. The light melted from the Angel, and suddenly, he could finally see what it was — or rather, who she is.
His finger hovered over her rosy cheeks, wet with dark tears pouring from her swollen eyes, still so magnetic and blue. To Malthus, she was hauntingly beautiful despite her loneliness, to which he felt strangely drawn to, like a rope tied to his chest from hers. Her dark curls framing her cherubic face, she resembled the sorrowful, towering sculptures of the Holy Mother in the church of his little hometown, weeping real tears of blood as both a warning and a miracle.
He felt the need to venerate her, somehow sink deeper into the ground to bow to her, but her striking eyes remained planted in his, full of admiration and even fear… as if she were the one who saw an angel. “Santo?” she asked, almost out of breath. She was looking through him rather than at him. “Oh Santo, you promised you’d come.”
He was… a saint?
For the first time, Malthus’s head was throbbing from prayer. He was so disoriented by the unexpected continuation of his vision that he vomited and collapsed on his way out of the chapel. From then on, everything was a blur.
A flurry of hooded monks rotated in circles around him, a mix of worry, curiosity, and even amusement in their faces. Light and dark alternated as he was carried from one room to another. Ceilings rushing past and turning at corners he had once known so well to navigate with his feet.
Even as he was half-conscious, Malthus could sense that he was back in his dormitory, judging by the hollow echo of steps and low intensity of the candlelight. Whispers and breaths all around him, he overheard some fellow brothers speak:
“He has been overworking himself with prayer, Abbot Nelson. He always goes an hour beyond rather than having his meal.”
“He is too devoted, our blessed Malthus,” spoke the Abbot, his voice still commanding more than empathetic.
A hand on his forehead.
“He is warm. Prepare some medicines, Pedro. No one will wake him except me.”
It had been a week since Malthus recovered from his dangerously high fever. His malaise was so terrible that Abbot Nelson had to travel out of the monastery to a nearby town’s apothecary across the river. He was thankful for the care extended by the Abbot and the other monks, but he also felt extremely guilty for having missed so much prayer and work to contribute to the monastery.
And perhaps the most sinking feeling he tried to push aside was his vision. It no longer appeared after his illness, and it created a maddening noise in his head that could not be silenced. He could not pray in pure solemnity, nor could he copy Biblical texts on parchments as faultlessly as he used to. The pain emanating from his hands were no longer numb, but amplified from the repeated writing, gardening, and working.
He refused to talk about it, but he knew that he would give in to Abbot Nelson along the way.
In the brick-walled scriptorium, Malthus packed away the scrolls he had finished transcribing, completing five pages less than he used to accomplish. He passed by the slanted tables built specifically for long hours of writing, some monks still anchored to the carefully inked letters in front of them.
Earlier, the ink dripped across a page, and Malthus found himself reminiscing of the black tears falling from the Angel in his vision, or whatever she was, he was now unsure.
In his usual crouched posture, as if his hood were pushing him downwards to kneel humbly at all times, Malthus hurriedly strolled through the candlelit hallways, pointed arc after pointed arc, until he arrived at the square-shaped orchard through a descending staircase. The sun’s hot rays met his skin, and he let his hood fall backwards, taking in the same heat that reminded him of summers in his little hometown, running across fields with Roberto and Aramel.
He sat by a stone bench under the cool shade of a cypress tree. He found his hands wandering around the nearby bushes for the soft petals of the pearl white lilies he had been cultivating since the beginning of his service.
“Malthus.”
The young monk glanced upwards to the weary yet stern expression of Abbot Nelson. His head had fully covered the sun, except for a few rays bouncing out at the edges like a halo around him.
“Yes, Abbot Nelson?”
“Don’t think I have not noticed. You have been… less present lately.”
“But—“
Abbot Nelson broke into a smile, which caught Malthus off guard. It was almost of the scheming sort, as if he and God knew of the same plans that Malthus was not informed of. The older monk playfully ruffled through Malthus’s round helmet of hair, still thick with strands but would need to be tonsured as soon as he completes his initiation.
“It is a natural part of any monk’s life to be challenged with spiritual weariness,” spoke the Abbot. “But once you rediscover and hold onto your footing, your faith will be reanimated into a stronger force. Focus on God. You will find him much more vivid than before.”
Before, Malthus would nod in awe of anything the Abbot told him. But now, none of it seemed to mean anything. It was all so vague, and it did nothing to quell the anxieties sitting heavily in his heart. If anything, God was becoming more foggy in his mind, and he yearned for something more present, more real.
He strengthened the grip of his fist so that his nails would dig into his skin. What horrible, sinful thoughts he has been having, ever since…
“The vision. Always remember the vision. An angel has chosen you, Malthus,” the Abbot offered awkwardly sympathetic pats on his back.
Malthus shook his head. “I am not so sure about the vision anymore,” he blurted out. “I don’t think it was an angel.” There, he finally said it.
The Abbot raised a brow, and by the way his jaw clenched, anyone who knew him could tell he was restraining his frustration. “Why would you say that?”
Malthus heaved in a deep sigh. “Well, I saw more of the vision.”
“Yes?”
“The glow of the angel disappeared. Once I touched it, she was made of flesh.” Malthus opened his mouth to say more but he stopped in his tracks when dangerous thoughts crossed his mind: what her cheeks pressed against his bare chest for comfort would feel like, how her smile might look if he made her laugh.
“Even Jesus became flesh,” reasoned the Abbot, seemingly wanting to control the narrative of the vision. “Perhaps this angel was a reminder of that.”
Malthus simply nodded. He wanted to say that she called him santo with so much reverence, but he knew that it would open up a can of worms and he could not possibly live up to that expectation.
He liked it, the feeling of being adored as a saint.
But on the other hand, he felt undeserving of that title. It was nothing but a recall of a silly nickname his mother would utter in his childhood.
Malthus was summoned to Abbot Nelson’s study, while he was examining and reflecting upon the Gospel of Luke. Another young monk had called on him through his iron-barred door, taking him by surprise and prompting him to shut his leather-bound Bible close. He immediately tossed it aside in panic.
“Are you okay, Malthus?” asked Pedro the monk.
“Yes,” he let out a tiny squeak.
His eyes shot up to the crucifix hammered onto his wall, staring down at him with knowing eyes.
“Forgive me,” he whispered to the immobile Christ in agony, covered in bruises and fresh scars.
Slowly, he picked up and reopened his Bible to take a glimpse of the parchment snuck in between the pages: it was supposed to be his copy of the text, but he got carried away and sketched out the Angel from his visions: her equally sharp and delicate eyes, strong and expressive brows, and soft, curved lips.
“Who are you? Why are you calling me? Leave me alone! For I cannot hear the Lord anymore!” he spoke in whispers to the illustration, fighting against raging, hot tears.
As he made his way to Abbot Nelson’s study, Malthus was suddenly joined by Dindin, a trusted caretaker who is skilled in mending robes, although he is not a monk.
“Hello, Malthus!” Dindin bobbed alongside him cheerfully. “I think we will be working together for an assignment.”
“Oh.” Malthus could not imagine what sort of work he would be asked to do with Dindin, of all people.
With framed oil paintings of biblical scenes, intricately woven tapestries of religious icons, and oak statues of angels, saints, and the Holy Family, filling every corner and surface, Abbot Nelson’s study was a stark contrast to the average monk’s room. Monks have sworn not to have personal property, and yet everything about the abbot’s study screams extravagance.
The abbot sat tall on his velvet-cushioned chair, behind stacks of ornately-decorated covers for scriptures sprawled out on his desk. He chuckled with the strange, patronizing tone of amusement he appears to fondly have for Malthus, making the young monk feel small and naive. “Well, well, I have a special task for the two of you, but you must… must swear yourself to secrecy.”
“Of course, Father!” Dindin enthusiastically responded, twirling his fingers around his ear to push aside his short, neatly combed curls. It was as if he had been through this drill many times before.
Malthus found himself fidgeting with his fingers. “Wh-what might it be, Father?”
The abbot grinned. “Let us say that this will be your final trial before your initiation to the order.”
Malthus gulped. “Of course.”
Most monks were secretive about the last test before the initiation, but from what Malthus has gathered so far, it was never the same for two monks. Some had been deprived of food, while others were left to survive under extreme outdoor conditions. It was largely dependent on what the Abbot thought was fitting for the weaknesses of a monk-to-be.
“I’m certain that you are pondering on the trials of your fellow brothers, but I trust that this task will be a rather challenging one that only someone of your purity and innocence could overcome,” said Abbot Nelson.
Beads of sweat began to form on Malthus’s forehead. He bit on his tongue to feel a release of tension. He wanted this, he had to go through this, no matter what.
“Calm down, boy,” Abbot Nelson stood from his chair and rubbed the young monk’s back for reassurance, although it created the opposite effect. “I have an old friend who I have been trying to convince to turn away from a life of sin.”
“Who might he be?” asked Malthus.
“Olavo, Duke of Belo Horizonte. He will have a masquerade ball in three days. The monarchs of the whole town will be there to celebrate.”
“A-a ball?” Malthus nervously stuttered. He had never been to a ball, not even in his hometown. While Roberto and Aramel would often urge him to join them, he would refuse, since he knew those celebrations would be a rabbit hole to all sorts of sins. The way Roberto and Aramel spoke of ladies they met and all the wine they intoxicated themselves with… it was enough to make Malthus shiver. He would often cover his ears with both hands, retreating to a corner. Then, his friends would stop talking and apologize to him.
Abbot Nelson handed Malthus a letter, sealed with red wax that had the symbol of a cross embedded on it. “You will deliver this to Olavo and convince him to visit me at once. That man is very sick and near his deathbed. You shall also prepare some jars of jam as a present from me. That is all you must do, nothing less, and nothing more.”
The last statement was enough to keep Malthus’s nerves
“Dindin will prepare your outfit for the ball. I would not want word spreading around that one of my order is going to these sinful banquets. They will also not let you in unless you are in a mask,” said Abbot Nelson.
Dindin was bursting with excitement, jumping up and down with his hands clasped together. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to sew an outfit for a ball!”
Abbot Nelson shot Dindin a sharp glare, as he typically would to a young child who squeals loudly during mass, sending both the chirpy caretaker and Malthus twitching on their spots. “The least extravagant attire possible. You work at a monastery, not a boutique."
Anxiety burning up in his chest, Malthus began scrambling in his head for the worst possible scenarios: What if he was cornered by a crowd, forced to indulge in too much wine? What if he witnesses the wicked, uninhibited encounters between the flesh, just like in Sodom and Gomorrah? Phantoms of naked bodies that remained blurred in his mind, like puzzle pieces only supplied faintly by Roberto and Aramel’s conversations he tuned himself out of.
Abbot Nelson circled around the young monk in an unsettling manner and eyed him from head to toe as if he could see all the hidden desires trapped in Malthus’s bones, blood, and muscles, “I hope you understand, Malthus. Duke Olavo, however wretched he may have become, was a good friend of mine. I trust you will not engage with any other… unnecessary pleasures. Here in the monastery, it is easy to withdraw from such sinful behaviors… but the true test of your faith will come when you are surrounded by Satan’s handiwork.”
“We will turn you into a magnificent prince, brother!” Dindin was giddy as he wrapped Malthus in swathes of white cloth embedded with subtle yet intricate patterns of swirly gold.
The caretaker was having a little too much fun playing dress-up, thought Malthus, but he did not have it in him to break the young man’s spirit and tell him to stop. Secretly, he found it endearing whenever Dindin was being true to his jolly demeanor, especially when Father Nelson’s eyes were averted from him. Father Nelson would tell Malthus in confidence that Dindin was taken in the monastery for strange behavior unbefitting of men, but the young monk thought that Dindin was not hurting anyone.
“Dindin, I will just deliver some jam. I do not need to look like those rich folks from town.” Malthus feebly remarked. He felt shy looking at his reflection on the standing mirror in Dindin’s quarters. Being stripped off of some layers of his monk’s robe felt wrong, like he was slowly slipping away from God’s shield.
In place of his white habit, Dindin fashioned a silk vest, fitted pants, and a rigid overcoat in neutral white and beige tones that altogether made Malthus seem taller and broader even as he hunched over to lessen the unfamiliarity of his appearance.
Dindin frowned and raised a brow, “I spent all night carefully selecting the colors that suit you and working on the brocade on your vest, then now you tell me you don’t like it?”
Malthus landed a hand on Dindin’s shoulder, to which the latter shook him off with a scoff. “It’s absolutely wonderful, Dindin! You are extremely talented. It’s me who’s the problem!” He beat his chest with his palms a little too harshly and faced the caretaker with teary eyes. “I cannot possibly handle this as my final trial. I’d rather fast in the middle of a desert as Christ had, or even feel the pain that Christ went through as he was whipped, but not this!”
Dindin looked at Malthus with a bewildered expression, as if he had a mental malady, and then simply rolled his eyes. “You monks are always so dramatic.”
He handed Malthus a simple, unembellished white mask that would cover half his face during the banquet.
“While you’re wearing this, nothing you do there would actually matter.” He winked playfully, leaving the monk collapsing to kneel on the floor. “You can be your true self for one night before giving it all up."
But that was what scared Malthus the most: he did not know who he truly was outside a monk’s robe.