The Surrogate, The Sudarium Trilogy - Book one (16 page)

1:30

A crescent moon was high in the sky, when Hannah and Father Jimmy crossed the garden to the rectory.

“Oviedo is famous for its cathedral. The sudarium is housed there,” he said.

“What’s the sudarium?”

“You’ll see. It’s starting to make sense to me now.”

The study was on the first floor off the kitchen in what had been a large pantry, back in the days when four priests had actually lived in the rectory. On shelves, which had once housed canned goods, there were reference books, philosophical treatises and the odd, approved novel. In a corner stood an outdated globe of the world that still showed most of Africa as belonging to the colonial powers. A long pine table in front of the window served as a desk, although it looked as if it really belonged in the kitchen itself with a large bowl of fruit on it, instead of the Macintosh computer that sat there now.

Father Jimmy took his place on the straight-backed desk chair, flipped the computer on, and did a search for “sudarium.” A list of sites popped up on the screen. He scrolled down then clicked on HISTORY OF THE SUDARIUM.

“You’ve heard of the Shroud of Turin, haven’t you,” he asked Hannah.

“I think so.”

“It’s an ancient piece of linen cloth with the imprint of a man on it. Many people believe that it is the burial cloth of Jesus and the imprint is that of the Jesus Himself. It’s in the cathedral in Turin, Italy, and is one of the most venerated relics of the Catholic Church.”

“I remember now,” Hannah said, drawing a chair up to the screen. “What’s the connection?”

“Well, the sudarium is sometimes called ‘the other shroud’ and it’s thought to be the cloth that covered Jesus’ face, after he died on the cross. The word comes from ‘sudor,’ Latin for ‘sweat.’ It literally means ‘sweat cloth.'’

“Why would they put a cloth over his face?”

“Jewish custom. Back then, if someone died an agonizing death, and the face was contorted with pain, it was masked from public view. That could well have been the case with Jesus. If so, the sudarium could be that cloth. Believers say so, anyway.”

“How does that explain the photos?”

Father Jimmy held up out one of the Polaroids of the man whose head was swathed in cloth. “It’s a little complicated. Look at the crucifix over there.” He pointed to the wall opposite her. “See?”

“See what?”

“The similarity. Between the man in these pictures and Jesus on the cross.”

“You’re saying these are photographs of someone being crucified?”

“No, but somebody may be
re-enacting
the crucifixion.”

A shrug of her shoulders underscored her bewilderment.

“To me,” he continued, “it looks like that’s what’s going on in these photos, some kind of experimentation, you know, to show how the sudarium might have been wrapped around Jesus’ face. There seems to be a great deal of effort to duplicate the position of the head exactly. I think that’s what the mannequin seems to have been used for. No one is actually being tortured.”

“Thank heavens. So it’s like…some kind of research?”

“That would be my guess, yes.”

The screen was now filled with the story of the sudarium. Surprisingly, the history of this “other shroud” was actually better documented and more straightforward than that of the Shroud of Turin. There were puzzling gaps in the history of the latter, during which its whereabouts and its ownership were unknown. The history of the sudarium, if what they were reading was to be trusted, stretched unbroken all the way back to Biblical times. After the crucifixion, it had remained in Palestine until 614, when Jerusalem was attacked and conquered by the Persians. For safe-keeping, it was spirited away to Alexandria in Egypt, then when Alexandria came under Persian attack, transported in a chest of relics across Northern Africa into Spain.

By 718, it had come to rest in Toledo, but again, to avoid imminent destruction - this time at the hands of the Moors who were invading the Iberian peninsula - the chest was taken north and stored in a cave, 10 miles from Oviedo. In time, a special chapel, the Camara Santa, was built for it in the town.

King Alfonso VI and the Spanish nobleman known as El Cid presided over the opening of the chest on March 14, 1075, when its contents were officially inventoried. The sudarium was chief among them, eclipsing in importance the fragments of bone and the bits of footwear that had accompanied it. Ever since, it had remained in Oviedo, where it was displayed to the public only on certain holy days. The Cathedral, in fact, had been a hugely popular stop for pilgrims in the middle-ages, although the twentieth century variety tended to go elsewhere.

Lost in a world an ocean away, neither of them heard the rectory door creak open and Monsignor Gallagher plod wearily into the entryway.

“Are you still up, James?” he called out.

Hannah jumped at the sound of his voice. Father Jimmy put his finger to his lips, signaling her to remain quiet. “Yes, Father,” he answered. “I was just finishing up some work on the computer.”

“Where do you get the energy? Tonight’s gathering did me in. Those women and their dreadful desserts! Don’t stay up too late.”

“Not too much longer. Good night, Father.”

“Good night, James.”

The heavy footsteps went up the stairs. A door shut. Silence settled over the rectory. Father Jimmy remembered what the Monsignor had said to him the other day. Hannah shouldn’t be here with him in the rectory at this hour.

“Is anything the matter?” Hannah whispered.

“No,” Father Jimmy said, vowing inwardly to tell the Monsignor everything in the morning. “You can relax now. He sleeps like a log.”

He punched a few more keys on the keyboard and suddenly a picture of the sudarium itself filled the screen. It was unexceptional in appearance, a piece of linen cloth that measured roughly 32 inches by 20 inches, with random stains the color of rust. But it matched one of the fuzzy Polaroids that Hannah had dismissed as a mistake of the camera.

“Marshall and Jolene visited that cathedral,” Hannah said. “The must have taken pictures of the sudarium.”

“They could have. Someone did.”

“For her artwork? …” Her voice trailed off, as she tried to imagine other possibilities.

Very little about the fabric had gone unscrutinized - from the weave of the fibers to the traces of pollen on the cloth, which came, according to one scientific study, from plants typical of Oviedo, Toledo, North Africa and Jerusalem, and thereby confirmed the historical route it was said to have followed.

The most provocative pieces of evidence, however, were the various stains on the sudarium, which analysis showed to have been made by blood and a pale brownish liquid. From them, it had been deduced that the man, whose face the cloth had covered, had died in an upright position, “his head tilted seventy degrees forward and twenty degrees to the right.”

The spots of blood came from wounds all over the head and the nape of the neck, made by “small sharp objects,” which, logic argued, were the thorns in the crown of thorns. As for the brownish, phlegm-like stains, they were left by a pleural fluid known to collect in the lungs of those who die of suffocation, the immediate cause of death in a crucifixion. Such liquid is ejected through the nose, when the body suffers a rude jolt, as it necessarily would when taken down from a cross.

Extensive experiments had been undertaken by the Spanish Center for Sindonolgy in Valencia, to show how the cloth would have been folded and attached to the face in order for the blood and fluid to have produced this precise pattern of stains. One researcher had even superimposed an image of the sudarium upon an image of the shroud of Turin and concluded that there were 120 “points of coincidence,” where the stains on each cloth coincided. The conclusion: the two pieces of cloth had enveloped the same man.

“But how do they know there were two cloths to begin with?” Hannah asked.

“That’s easy.” Father Jimmy reached over to the bookshelf and picked up a Bible. “The Gospel of St. John. Chapter Twenty, where Simon Peter and a fellow disciple enter the holy sepulcher.”

He found the passage and read it out loud, his voice barely a hush in the quiet rectory:

“So they both ran together; and the other disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.

And he, stooping down and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet went he not in.

Then cometh Simon Peter, following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie,

And the napkin that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.

He saw and believed.”

“The napkin that was about his head, that’s the sudarium,” she said. “So it
is
real.”

“Who can say for sure? All we know is there was one,” he answered, rubbing his eyes, which were growing tired from reading.

He was reminded of the pilgrimage he had made to Rome as a young seminarian, every stop along the way awakening more powerful feelings than the one before. He had expected to be awestruck by St. Peter’s and the brief audience he and his fellow seminarians had been granted with the Pope. And he was. The timeless splendor of the city and its monuments had also overwhelmed him - coming as he did from Boston, where a few vestiges of the 18th century were held to be remarkable.

But the biggest revelation didn’t happen until he and several of the seminarians made a side trip to Turin. There in a glass case in the cathedral, they beheld the shroud and the unmistakable image of Jesus imprinted on fragile fabric that had somehow survived nearly two millennia - survived fires, wars, the mockery of the incredulous and the assaults of scientists, alternately bent on certifying its authenticity or declaring it a forgery.

The ongoing debates, Father Jimmy had decided, were unimportant to him. Relics didn’t give him faith; he brought his faith to the relics. They helped put him, mind and body, in touch with the saintly people who had gone before. In that respect, he considered them to be resonant metaphors. The image of Jesus on the shroud, genuine or not, spoke to him urgently. “Spread my word,” it said. “Don’t let my image fade any more than it has on this linen. Bring me to life for millions. Keep me vivid in their hearts.”

He looked over at Hannah. “I guess I’ve always been fascinated by relics. What they do for me is serve as a reminder that the saints are not fictional characters. They were real people, who had real lives and came into real contact with the divine.”

She gave the idea some thought. “I wonder what that was like - to have contact with the divine.”

“But you do. Whenever you take communion.”

“Oh, yes.”

“That doesn’t count?” he chided gently, and she turned away out of embarrassment. She could see the parking lot from the window. All the cars were gone. The social hour had long since broken up. She would have to get home soon or Jolene would start fretting. Any absence at all, these days, was pretext for a scene. The later the hour, the bigger the scene.

“Hannah, come look at this.”

While she’d been looking out the window, Father Jimmy had stumbled on a bizarre footnote to the sudarium’s past, a newspaper account of an elderly priest who had died, while putting away the sudarium in the Camara Santa after special Good Friday services. He had been found on the stone floor by an attendant, and the sudarium had been promptly restored to its honored place in a locked cupboard, none the worse for wear, apparently.

The deceased, one Don Miguel Alvarez, was 79 at the time and had a history of heart problems, so authorities saw nothing suspicious about his demise. The writer of the newspaper account went so far as to note that “death came peacefully” to him and implied that such a blessing could be attributed to the holy cloth itself.

“The Spanish papers made a big deal about him dying on Good Friday with the blood of Jesus on his hands,” Father Jimmy said. “Look here.”

Hannah redirected her attention to the screen.

“This is where the sudarium is kept. In that gold cupboard behind the cross with the two angels kneeling at the base.”

“It’s a little spooky,” Hannah said.

“What?”

“All of it - the cloth, the people, the pictures.”

Father Jimmy had to admit it was. The sudarium had given birth to a regular cottage industry, second only to that inspired by the shroud. The research was presumably undertaken in a spirit of scholarly excellence and special congresses were held regularly to announce significant findings. But he sensed in all the activity a worrisome note of fanaticism. Wasn’t there danger in pressing science into the service of a holy cause? Faith was faith, its own thing. Buttressed by science, it risked becoming something else, something more strident and aggressive. When, he wondered, did piety turn into zeal? When did inquiry harden into agenda?

There were computer sites the world over. They’d barely made a dent in them. The Holy Shroud Society of Nevada gave as its address a post-office box in Reno, while the Italian Institute of Sindonolgy was located in Rome. The Center for the Investigation of Christ’s Burial operated out of Long Beach, California. An organization called the National Shroud Society was even located right there in Massachusetts.