The Face of God

CW: Physical violence, crude sexual language

He is frustrated with this one. He is struggling to get the exact right glance of her eyes. There is a light behind her and shadows should fall under her chin, but he refuses to let this reality spoil her beauty. He leans back and squints. He inhales short sharp puffs of air. He shakes his wrist as if to blame his hand or the brush for his short-comings. He leans into the painting, holding in the air that is bursting from his chest. He wants a moment of death. He wants to deny himself the chance to exhale until he can get things right with her face.

He guides his left hand with his right, drawing the paintbrush across the canvas. He is painting a woman, robed in blue and gold. Her eyes are fixed like two stars that somehow seem to sparkle. His paint is primitive, but he has been making these images for so long that he is adept. He moves close to the image, to see it, to see her face appear where there was nothing.

She was once nothing until she became everything. And now he wipes the tip of the brush so that it sharpens, and he paints the fine thin lines of her lips and nose and eye lids. The canvas sits on a stand on his old stained table in the studio just off the corner of his modest home. He is not a rich man, but he is not poor either. His icons (because this is what he paints, icons of her, the mother of God) earn him what he needs to live and so does his practice.

His beard is streaked in gray and white and silver with just the memory of the black that once dominated his face in his youth. He looks religious. He looks rich. Tall and dark like many Greek men. He is a gentile in a world of Jews. It’s not just paint that stains his fingers but ink as well. He is a writer. While the ill and the lame celebrate his life, it will be the readers of his writing who will celebrate him long after he has died.

But these are all thoughts that escape him as he sits, angry at himself. Angry at the painting. He twists his long eyebrows in an expression of pain. The paintings are never perfect and never finished, but he feels an obligation to send them off into the world. He places the brush in the cup next to the canvas and clenches his fingers in the shape of a claw.

“Damn.”

There is no relief for him. He leans back and imagines smashing the painting. He could. He has. In the past. Until one day, He came to him as a warning. It is my mother, the vapor said to him in the dim dying light of twilight as he dozed on his couch in the studio. Remember, beloved physician, this is my blood and flesh you paint. She lives for you. She lives for all of you.

He woke that day in terror. The rabbi had never visited him, even when he was so close to Paul like a shadow when Paul was in jail. Christ never spoke to him or through him, and he was never sure that his writings were right or accepted by God. It wasn’t until he started with the paintings that Christ appeared to him many times. It scared him. He could not feel the peace that many describe when in the presence of the lord. In fact, it left the smallest seeds of doubt in his mind as to whether or not others really saw the smiling, loving lord in the blackness of sleep when his vision of Christ was always a warning or a threat.

“Father?” The familiar voice of his ward called from the alley just outside his kitchen window. “Mathias” was a useful boy, but at times an idiot. Luke had saved him when his family had the illness, but he could not save any of the others. As a result, Luke took on the child almost as his own. While the boy frustrated Luke with his lack of morals and feeble mind, he felt affection for him. It was hard not to see that the grief of the child’s losses were the reason for his ambiguity. Despite all of Luke’s teaching, Mathias’ mind slipped this way and that down the dark alleys of Boeotia. It was ironic. Here was the mother of God, created by his thin hands, leaning on a short easel, one image painted after another, and yet Luke had no power to teach the boy right from wrong.

“Mathias. I am in the studio painting. What is it, my son?” There was a grunt. The boy stomped into the room and landed on the couch.

“Nothing, Father. I was just testing you.”

“Testing me?”

“Yes, to see if you were working!” His voice deepened. He was changing from a boy to a young man, yes, but that change in voice was meant to injure Luke.

“Why would I not be? Have you known me not to work?”

“No, father. Work, work work…” He tossed the pillow into the air and balanced it with his feet. “WORK!”

“You have your work, and I have mine.” There was silence. Luke picked the brush from the cup and returned to the painting. “What? You don’t think I know of your work, Mathew?”

“Mathias–”

“I have my spies, young man. I see you picking pockets. Tricking the old and the foreigners.” Luke took a deep whole breath but let it out and ran the brush across the chin of our lady and savior. “I see you….Mathias.”

There was a shift in the weight of the room. The young man got several years younger and sat up straight on the couch. “I. I do not. I am not.” His face twisted and his shoulders jutted backwards as he thrust out his chin. “You don’t SEE me. It’s a trick! You are tricking me into making a confession that would be false.”

Luke kept painting. The sound of his brush scratching across the canvas was loud enough to expand the tension. Luke kept painting, saying nothing. His silence was enough.

“We can’t all be saints, father.”

“Oh, I am no saint, Mathias. I have sinned, too. Worse sins. Bigger sins.”

The boy wanted to reply, but for one of only a few times in his life, his simple mind stopped his tongue.

“Yes, I am a sinner. I’ve lost lives. Caused families to decry God. They turned their back on the one who never lost love for them because I was weak. I was stupid. I was….DAMN” Luke touches the canvas with his thumb, wiping away a mark that was too black. “You see?” He turned to the boy. “Even the holy mother isn’t safe from my wretched hands.”

Mathias was still, piecing together his insufferable anger with the slim sliver of pity that Luke evoked in him. “Yes. Your hands are wicked.” His voice was like the hiss of steam from a tea pot.

That morning, Mathias found Skotádi in the street, and ran with him to the waterfront to see the visitors coming off their boats. There was a small fortune to be made from the coins and purses living in their shallow pockets. They worked all morning until they ran in different directions, chased by Romans, eventually finding the wet corner of an outhouse, their “hideout.”

“A killing, Mathias! We’re rich!” Mathias looked down at their haul, picked up a gold coin, and threw it at Skotádi. “What! You son of a bitch! I’ll break you for that!” Mathias knew he was less hurt by the force of the coin than the risk of losing it. “That’s our loot, asshole.”

“Loot! It’s nothing. Scraps. Nothing at all. I want more, Skotádi. I want to make more.” His eyes burned into his partner.

“How? We make plenty. We can barely spend it all”

“I spend it!”

Yes. On Kalós.” Skotádi picked up the coin and bit it to be sure. “She’s a whore, Mathias.”

“Shut your mouth, Skotádi. Kalós is trapped in a life that’s not her own. I know this. She would be a princess if it weren’t for her twisted uncle. That pimp. I spend my money on her to save her.”

“You want to fuck her, idiot. You’re like I was when I was your age. Sex. Sex. Sex.”

Mathias’ mouth hung open while his slow brain tried to turn his anger into something other than his curling fists.

“You pay her to tug your thing, you idiot.” And with that, Mathias was unleashed, but the older, stronger, quicker Skotádi pinned Mathias’ anger into the dirty street, twisting his arm like a pretzel. “I don’t blame you for it, Mathias. I could use a good tug, too!”

Grunting, “But you’re married!”

“So? It’s worse to be married. I get no tugs at home, and if I go to a brothel I’m a ‘sinner.’”

Mathias stopped struggling. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t make sense of things and often found himself resorting to violence. As a very little boy, he took to mashing things with rocks just to see the destruction. It was his way of creating. Transforming the shape of something into pulp. His father would paint in order to see God, but Mathias saw God far too often. It was the face of God that made him the most angry. It was the face of God he wanted to destroy.

“Listen, my friend, you’re entitled to be in love with the girl. I’ll admit she’s different. She’s lonely…like you. You’re alike and I think that’s the attraction.”

“You see her liking me?” Mathias stood slowly and checked himself for cuts or lumps. “You think she has feelings for me?”

“I don’t know. All I meant was that I see similarities between the two of you.”

Mathias thought for a moment. “I suppose she’s not much older. Maybe there’s more than just being tugged. I feel like when I am with her, it’s not just physical. I feel almost somehow…religious.”

Skotádi was a bit shocked at this blasphemy, but then he thought that Jesus was said to have washed the feet of a whore. “Religious?”

My father paints the face of the Madonna, but I think Kalós has the face of God.”

“You spend all of your money on her, don’t you?”

Mathias paused. “Yes. Yes, I do. When I am with her, I feel healed from the nightmares of Jesus visiting me. He is always there, bending my spirit. Like my father. Kalós makes me see horizons. I can see the future. She straightens me out.”

“Quite literally!” But Skotádi’s laugh was cut short by Mathias' fist to his belly. Skotádi didn’t punch back. He had that coming. The boy was opening up to him, and he was making jokes. “Come on. Let’s get you home. Your father’s eyes are everywhere.”

MY father’s eyes are dead.”

When he got home, his father was napping in his bedroom. Mathias went into the gallery. The latest painting was a reminder of his sins. Mother Mary. “She’s not my mother,” Mathias grumbled. He went back to his father’s sleeping body. He had picked up a knife from the kitchen, and he stood over his father. He had already used the knife minutes earlier when he cut the eyes and the mouth from the painting. He stole from Jesus’ mother the way Jesus stole his family from him. The physician who saved Mathias could not save his brothers or sister or mother or (true) father. He did to the painting such awful things, and now he stood over his father. Angry. Cursed.. Alone.

He leaned towards his father, with the knife still in his hand, and he spoke.

“Wake up. Jesus has abandoned us. Wake up for me, father.”

His father turned and moaned, haunted by the dim ghost of his savior and lord, and did not wake from his dreams for a very long time after that.