Jacob Atabet (3 page)

“And what else happened? Can you remember?”

”Yes. It seems to me that I saw something else. It lasted just for a second, but there seemed to be a figure on the ceiling. It was full of light and there were little whirling things inside it . . .”

“Little whirling things?”

“Yes.” He smiled at the thing’s absurdity. “Yes, it looked like an angel! It must’ve been a figure in the glass. Who knows?” He laughed. “Who knows? Nothing really makes sense about this. I wish we could find Jacob. Bello is looking for friends of his landlord.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“He’s an artist, but very reclusive. A mysterious man really, though he’s been popular here with the boys. He taught a class in pantomime, and another one in myths and fairy tales. I’ve known him for ten years or so, ever since I came here from Italy, but no one knows him well. He’s always been a hermit. Never married. His parents used to go to church here. They’re Basque people. The mother lives in Nevada now, if I remember right, and he lives with another Basque family somewhere in North Beach. I believe his father died. But I’ll try to find out.” He smiled weakly. “I’m glad you came up here. It helps me see I’m not crazy.”

There was silence as we looked at one another. “But I’m tired,” he said. “Why don’t you leave me your number. I’ll let you know if we find his address. I’d like to talk to you more about this.”

I went down to the street with a surge of excitement. The important thing now was to follow every lead as soon as I could. From experience I knew how fleeting these openings could be.

I turned and went up the street past the church steps. Father Bello was coming down from inside. “Mr. Fall!” he shouted. “You’re still here! By luck I found the address of the family Atabet lives with. Their name is Echeverria and they live here in North Beach. Here’s the number. But you’ll have to wait until tomorrow if you want to see them. They’ve gone away for the day.”

F
OG WAS COMING IN
over Russian Hill as I went up the street toward the Echeverrias’ place. It came sweeping down into the little valley of North Beach like an ocean breaker, its upper edge bright in the setting sun. I pulled up the collar of my jacket. It was a typical pattern on summer days. The tiers of white buildings would soon be dripping wet and close, as if an edge of St. Tropez had turned to London streets.

The address was on Telegraph Place, a block-long alley lined with narrow wooden buildings. I rang at the front door and waited, but no one answered. After two more rings I crossed the alleyway. An outside staircase wound up one side of the building and a heavyset man was coming down it. He came out at street level and I asked if he knew the Echeverrias.

“Which one you want?” he said with an accent I couldn’t quite place. “
I’m
an Echeverria.”

I said that I was looking for their boarder, Jacob Atabet.

“You a friend?” He came closer. “What’s your name?”

“I’m not a friend of his. But Father Zimbardo gave me your address. My name’s Darwin Fall.”

“Jacob know you’re coming?” He eyed me suspiciously. “I think he’s busy now.” He stood about five feet away, in the middle of the narrow alley, sizing me up. I guessed he was about sixty years old.

“It’ll just take a minute,” I said. “I want to give him these papers. Father Zimbardo thought he’d be interested in them.” I handed him a package with my articles about Bernardine Neri.

“I’ll give it to him myself.” He took the package from me. “Do you have a number where he can call you?”

“The number’s on the cover,” I said. “You can tell him I want to talk about the thing that happened during the Mass yesterday. When Father Zimbardo fell down. He’ll know what I mean.”

He gave me a long melancholy look, then nodded and went into the house.

Two hours later a call came from Atabet. “You wanted to talk to me?” he asked with a tentative inflection. “It has something to do with Father Zimbardo?”

I was surprised at the sound of his voice. The man I remembered had been ruggedly handsome though spent, and had looked to be fifty years old. The voice I was hearing sounded like it belonged to a very slight man in his twenties.

“I was in the church yesterday when you came away bleeding,” I said. “Father Zimbardo and I have talked about it. I got your address from him.”

There was a long silence.

“Hello?” I said. “Are you there?”

“Yes,” he said faintly. “I thought you were going to say something more. I read your articles. They’re interesting.”

“Would it be possible to see you? I’ve been talking to people who were in the church, trying to find out what happened. I had an extraordinary experience—an incredible thing really. Like the things in the article I gave you. I’m involved in a research project that’s studying experiences like this.”

“What kind of project is it?” His voice sounded stronger. “I didn’t get a very good idea from the story.”

“It would be better to tell you in person. It’s complicated. If we could just meet for half an hour or so, I could show you some other things I’ve written.”

There was another silence. He must be terribly shy, I thought. “And something happened to you during the communion?” Again his voice was tentative.

“I even had a premonition of the time. In a dream the night before, something happened at exactly 12:30. That was the time, you know—12:30. Exactly 12:30 according to my watch. You can see why the thing’s shaken me up.”

“What do the other people say?” he asked with the same distant voice. “Everyone has a different version of it. One lady saw light coming from the chalice. Father Zimbardo saw you disappear. A few people thought you pushed Zimbardo over . . .” “Disappear?” he broke in. “Zimbardo saw me disappear?” “He thinks it was the shock of the fall and whatever else that happened. His doctor thinks he had some kind of epileptic seizure.” “But he saw me disappear? For how long, did he say?” “No one can agree how long
any of it
lasted. Some people say two or three minutes, others say a few seconds. Zimbardo doesn’t know. But he does remember seeing blood on your face.” “Did you see me disappear?” he whispered. “I didn’t see you disappear. But there was a light. A light that seemed to come
through
the people between us. For a moment it filled the whole church.” Talking to him now, I realized how clear it had been. For an instant, everyone in the church had been enveloped in that dazzling explosion.

“Yes, it would be a good idea if we talked,” he said. “Come up here now if you like.”

T
HE STAIRCASE WOUND UP
the side of the three-story building to his apartment on the roof. At the second story landing there was a gate and I stopped before ringing the bell. The climb and nervous excitement had left me out of breath. As I stood there I rehearsed my story, for I knew how elusive he might be. If the events in the church were related to gifts he possessed, it was conceivable that he had learned how to protect them.

I rang the bell, and a buzzer sounded in the doorlatch. I pushed it open and continued up. After two more bends in the staircase another gate came into view, and I rang another bell. There was a buzz in the gate and I stepped through it onto a broad wooden deck. He stood twenty feet away, dressed in sweatshirt and jeans. I started back. Instead of the broken-looking man about fifty who had passed me in the aisle, here was a man about thirty in radiant health. But the most startling change was in his physical beauty. He was one of the handsomest men I had ever seen. It was almost impossible that he could be the figure I had seen in the church.

He seemed amused at my startled expression. “You got here just in time.” His dark eyes flashed. “Look at that light in the bridge!”

To the west, the fog had turned to molten gold along its upper edges, and in the distance rising through it were the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. His apartment, the only structure on top of the building, stood like the bridge of a ship on the billowing sea of San Francisco.

“You can smell the ocean,” he said, breathing deeply. “I think there’ll be a storm tonight. But come on in.”

As I followed him inside I felt myself shaking. A ship’s table was surrounded by captain’s chairs and he gestured toward it. “Take a seat,” he said. “Would you like a glass of wine? The Echeverrias made it.”

I said I would, and he poured us each a glass from an unlabeled bottle. “You met Carlos,” he smiled. “He owns the building here. His family and some of my cousins have a vineyard in Sonoma.” He lifted his glass in a toast. “To your health.”

As we drank, he watched me. It was clear he was sizing me up. “It’s good,” I said. “Do they make it themselves?”

“In the basement here. They’re good people to know if the crash comes.” He sat down across the table and put the bottle between us. “They make their own cheese and bread, and grow vegetables at their farm in Sonoma. I keep this kitchen so they’ll come up and cook.” He nodded toward an iron stove and laden sideboard. For a moment we were silent. There was a manly quality about him that was completely unlike the voice I had heard on the phone. Could this be the same person? “The smell in here,” I said to break the silence. “It reminds me of a time I lived in Biarritz.”

“Biarritz?” He leaned back from the table. “I was born there. But further up in the Pyrenees, just west of Pau. What were you doing there?”

“Seeing Europe one summer in college. Are your people Basque?”

“As pure as Basque can be.” He smiled handsomely. “My parents were cousins. Both of them could speak the language.” There was a roguish light in his look, a slightly evil insouciance. He was clearly a master of disguises.

“Do you speak the language yourself?”

“No, but I did for a couple of years. I was only three when we came to the States. From then on I spoke English mainly. And French. Hardly anyone talks it here, though
Eskaldmak,
their name for themselves, means the people of the language.” He fell silent and savored the wine.

There was a tangible aura of well-being around him, a buoyant contagious pleasure. But though he enjoyed this meeting, I could sense his distrust. It would be best to follow his lead in our conversations, best to spend this entire visit letting him get comfortable with me. “Hardly anyone speaks it,” he continued. “Though they do in the old country. They’re a remarkable people, the Basques.”

“They’re so old. Older than the Indo-Europeans, according to the things I’ve read about them.”

He studied my face for a moment. “I have a cousin who was a guide at Lascaux. He thinks the people who did the cave drawings might be our ancestors. Do you think there’s anything to it?”

I said I didn’t know.

“Does any of your project relate to stone-age religion? I would think you’d find some leads there.”

“Leads? I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Can’t you see it in their painting? They had that vivid sense of life, and were so physical. I take it that’s what you’re after—the physical side of these things.”

“You read the articles?”

“Yes, I read them.” He paused. “But after I did I had to wonder why you’re so interested in me. It was hard to see the connection.”

“I’m just fishing,” I said, refilling my glass. “That experience I had in the church was like the experience people had around Bernardine Neri. I was over there, you know, and talked to people who knew her. But it might be my imagination. I don’t know what you went through.”

“That bleeding,” he said. “I should’ve told you on the phone. It was a bloody nose. I get them sometimes when I’m tired. The reason I was tired was that I’d been up painting until three or four the night before.”

“So nothing unusual happened?” I asked with a sinking sensation.

“Nothing. I’m sorry I sounded funny on the phone, but I thought you might be in some kind of trouble. Now I can see that you’re fine.”

“Trouble! What do you mean by that?”

“You sounded kind of desperate. I didn’t want to cut you off.”

Was he putting me on? “I’ll be damned,” I murmured. “I sounded that bad? Well, to tell you the truth, I have had some problems lately. You must’ve picked it up.”

“What kind of problems?” He leaned back from the table.

“This theory, this project I told you about. It’s been hard to finish. At times I have doubts about it.”

“Well.” He paused. “What is your theory? I’d like to hear about it.”

Was he testing me? It was inconceivable that he hadn’t noticed anything strange during that communion service.

“So, your theory,” he insisted. “Can you summarize it?”

He could see my confusion, I thought. It was clear he was fending me off while he decided whether to trust me. “My theory?” I asked. “You want a summary of it? Well, that’s hard. But to put it briefly—I think there’s an immense frontier hidden in these things. A frontier that’s hardly been explored. The kind of things that happened to Bernardine Neri—the stigmata and luminosity, ‘her marks of the risen Christ’—point toward it. I’ve collected thousands of examples like hers, from the contemplative literature, psychiatric histories, sport, hypnosis, spiritual healing and other places, to show that there are possibilities in us for an evolutionary transformation, if you will. People like Bernardine Neri are harbingers of it. She’s a dramatic example of course, but similar things are happening all the time, all over the world—an evolutionary ferment that hasn’t been fully understood. By collecting all these examples I want to show how widespread the phenomenon is and discover something about its essential dynamics.”

“Its essential dynamics?” He frowned. “Don’t the Scriptures tell us how they work? Your articles remind me of St. Theresa . . . .”

“The Scriptures don’t tell us everything. The more research I do the more I’m convinced that the contemplative traditions have misperceived part of the process, especially in regard to the body. Take Bernardine Neri. I was over in Italy and talked to a dozen priests who knew her. Nearly all of them wanted to discount her physical changes. There’s a bias against this kind of thing, partly from a fear of sensationalism and a rejection of gross superstition, but partly from ignorance too—ignorance of this stupendous power we’re carrying around inside us.”