Despite Quintino's initial resistance, Berto and Vanni eventually managed to load him into the Fiat Panda. They promised to take care of him until his situation was clear.
Vanni insisted on going to the Church of the Seven Sins immediately. It was almost eleven at night, and Berto pointed out they would find it closed. But Vanni went anyway. He was convinced that priests, doctors, and gendarmes were always ready to listen to the cries of men in difficulty. It was a matter of vocation.
The church was in Pescara and the journey was particularly long because Vanni avoided state roads as much as possible.
Traveling in the dark and on bumpy, tangled roads, Berto only had a vague idea of ??where he was. The signs of the towns he passed through helped him make his whereabouts clear for just an instant, before getting lost again.
At twenty past one, along a deserted street in the hills of Pescara, Vanni turned to take an avenue surrounded by two rows of cypresses and slightly uphill. At the top of the climb, there was an empty square, and Vanni parked.
Leaving the cockpit in the dim moonlight, Berto saw the church at the end of the square. It was a dilapidated brick building with a large rose window on the facade. A bell tower on the right rose about ten meters above the roof's slopes. Behind the building, a wall a couple of meters high enclosed the cloister of a monastery.
Vanni seemed to know exactly what to do. He walked along the wall until he reached a wrought-iron gate, where a bell hung. Without hesitation, he rang it energetically. The place was so isolated that there was no risk of waking anyone except the monks.
After a couple of minutes, an old man wrapped up in his habit came out. He was trembling from the cold and his face was deeply wrinkled. After crossing the courtyard he removed the latch from the gate, opened it, and scrutinized the three visitors. Berto immediately noticed his gray and cloudy pupils. The monk must have had quite a cataract, or some other vision problem.
“Giovanni, dear son,” the monk said with a hint of despondency in his voice, “What brings you to me on this cold night?”
That wasn’t Vanni's first night visit to Father Geronimo, nor even the second. The old man seemed painfully accustomed to being thrown off his meager cot to soothe the poor man's spiritual pains.
“Father Geronimo, something extremely serious happened,” Vanni began to explain, pointing to Quintino, “This is a friend of mine and yesterday they found his body on the Sangro river bank. But, as you can see, he lives. I believe it is a spiritual manifestation because he told us of infernal and sinful visions.”
Quintino stood in silence, with a dismayed expression on his face. He didn't know how to respond to Vanni's crazy explanation, and his misadventure had exhausted him to the point that he now passively accepted the unfolding of events. Berto also didn't feel like intervening, even if he disagreed with Vanni's theory.
The priest's dim eyes shone. “Vanni, your friend seems to me to be made of flesh and blood. He does not look like a spirit at all – ”
“I know Father, but – ”
Father Geronimo motioned for Vanni to stop to give him time to finish. “But I see something peculiar in his soul. It has some unusual features. In mean, he has a soul and it is not the soul of a dead person, but it is not like the souls of other men, it is not like yours."
Berto and Quintino exchanged a questioning look. Was the old monk able to see souls?
“Please follow me to the church, we'll talk about it there,” the priest concluded, turning and walking towards the opposite side of the cloister.
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Vanni followed Father Geronimo, and Berto and Quintino followed him. The group reached the sacristy through a back door, and from there they emerged into the presbytery, behind the altar. Father Geronimo invited the three to sit on the first bench in the nave, then went to get a candle from a niche, lit it, and returned to them.
Sitting on the mahogany bench, Berto quickly looked around. The church was unsettling. Over their heads hung a row of crystal candelabras that gave off faint red reflections, and the subjects of all the frescoes and statues looked distressed and suffering. The walls and pillars were black with soot.
Standing in front of Quintino, with the lit candle in his hand, Father Geronimo asked, “Tell me son, what is your name?”
“My name is Quintino Liberatore,” Quintino replied.
The priest trembled. “Oh, Quintino Liberatore… you are not a believer, a model sheep of our flock. Are you?"
“Not anymore. Where I come from we don't have many opportunities to be tame and behave like model sheep."
Father Geronimo was shaken by new tremors and jolts and for a moment Berto thought of getting up and supporting him before he fell. But then the priest began speaking in a two-tone voice, acting as if it were the most natural thing in the world, not even bothered by his dyskinesia. “Yeah, where you come from isn't nice. Normally I would tell you that the faithful shine the brightest in the hour of darkest tribulation, but I fear that this does not apply where you come from.”
The priest interrupted his speech and began to shake faster and faster until he became almost impalpable. Berto personally witnessed the transformation that Quintino had spoken of in his story and was finally able to understand what he meant. It looked like a glitch from a video game. The monk had glitched himself. His afterimage was still before them, but he was no longer physically present.
The ethereal figure of the monk spoke again and his distorted voice seemed to come from the void.
“In fact, you did good turning to me. Not all Celestial Emissaries in a similar situation would have been as composed and thoughtful as I can afford to be. But you have to understand one thing, what Quintino Liberatore has put us in – not at his fault, I want to make it clear – is a big mess.”
“A big mess? Is it serious?” Vanni asked bewildered.
"Indeed it is. So serious that a reset of the entire penance system may be required, if the Celestial Emissaries cannot restore the logical connections with a debug. Our Celestial Father has revealed to me he would be glad to provide you with the necessary explanations. I should limit myself to sending Quintino Liberatore's soul back to him, but perhaps you too can help solve this mess. Do you want to meet him?”
A blinding white light began to spread from the monk's body. After a few seconds, Berto was forced to look away. He noticed that the nave was now brightly lit.
“The… the Celestial Father? Can we meet him for real?” Vanni slurred, barely holding back his emotion. Berto turned towards Quintino. He had terror on his face.
“I'm happy to see you so motivated to go of your own volition. On the other hand, I fear that even if you hadn't been, I would still have been forced to send you to him."
The sounds became muffled and then vanished completely, and light pervaded everything. The tactile sensations of the hard bench under the buttocks and the smell of incense and the cold and the acidic and bitter taste of the reflux of the beer from a few hours earlier disappeared.
The existing became a white and empty sheet.
But Berto's consciousness remained intact, attached to a changing form, which gathered in a point and then expanded into a sphere.
The features of the existing re-emerged, more essential and geometric.
Berto could not claim to have recovered his sight, but somehow he could see. He saw that his body had become spherical, and two protrusions were moving away from him, getting lost in other existential planes. He saw that the sphere of his body was surrounded by an aura, which he could only describe as a flame, a flame that had no colors but characteristics, characteristics definable as cyan, yellow, and purple. And he also saw Vanni and Quintino, in the form of spheres, enveloped in auras with characteristics different from his. In addition to Vanni and Quintino, there was an infinity of other spheres dispersed in space, and he personally knew some of those souls.
And then, Berto perceived something immeasurable in front of him. He perceived that it was a series of concentric spheres that were transparent and opaque at once, but the first of the spheres was so immense that it seemed like a wall devoid of any convexity. It was an infinite wall, insurmountable even climbing it for eternity.
Berto postulated that the wall was God.