This then is the principle of transubstantiation. Jesus's most brilliant trick—the minima of his being, containing his infinite soul, passed unchanged into the circle of bread. Is that correct?

—You have said it.

The gods too—their endless transformations into things, Jupiter into swans, showers of gold, bulls; others into other things, Venus into a cat, everyone knows.

—Everyone knows.

But of course such power of transubstantiation or metensomatosis is impossible for those not gods or the sons of God. It may be that a clever man may have the power to make himself a simulacrum of another thing, and so fool the unwary.

—It is possible. It is also possible for one living thing to become another, and thereby cease to be what it has been.

Possible!

—Unless we teach ourselves by our thoughts to act, there is no point in thinking. Every philosopher has attempted to describe the world, but the point is to contain it.

So the wise man may do what the immortals have done.

—Given enough years, a wise man might accomplish it.

Years, dearest friend, son and brother, are what you have.

With that, the messenger bent his head, smiling confidentially toward the immured philosopher. Around them the stone walls of his cell and the thicker ones of the castello; around the castello the Papal City all in its ranks and the battlements of the Holy Roman Empire around that.

I have a plan, he said.

II

BENEFACTA

1

When he came at length to believe that he was too sick to finish his last book—that he would himself be finished before it was—then the novelist Fellowes Kraft experienced contradictory impulses.

On the one hand, he thought to put it aside and think no more of it, while with the little time left him he put his (few, pitiful) affairs in order. On the other hand he wanted to do nothing but work at it, to be found at the end (facedown on his pages, like Proust) to have escaped or at least exited into it. He spent the mornings making long notes to himself about further chapters and scenes, further volumes even, expanding an already immense project into unrealizable grandeur (since he was to be freed, he supposed, from having to execute it) and then when the horrid lassitude returned at day's end, would push away the mess of alien handled paper feeling ashen and sad. Then he would find himself thinking, for no reason or for many reasons, of his mother.

In the course of, or more exactly instead of, settling his life's business he had been collecting from his files the letters his mother had written him over the years, most of which he had saved but never looked at again after first opening them (saved in their envelopes, whose faint addresses charted his own old restlessness, chasing him from house to apartment to pensione as the stamps in the corner rose in cost). There were fewer than he recalled.

"Son,” she began, she always began, in pencil vanishing now but that would never vanish away. Son. What was he attempting to pack up, or unpack for good, that was in them? How could their envelopes, when he pressed open their torn mouths, exhale the familiar mildew of the house on Mechanic Street, after so long in his own house? It was the smell of the gnomes’ entrance into the basement apartment, the crumbling linoleum of the hall; the smell of the damp-soft wooden stair that stepped up to the door to the alley: and it certified to him, as mere memory could not, that his own life had in fact begun and continued there, and so could not have done so anywhere else.

"Son, I forget whether I told you that Mrs. Auster in the front has died. So just for a moment there is no one in the house.” This one from five years ago, just before the letters ceased to come anymore, before her final illness. “Now Baxter is worried that the next people to come and take the apartment will be negroes, because there are so many of them on Mechanic and all around. He's terribly worried, I don't know why."

Baxter. He should do something about Baxter, make sure he gets the house (though for sure now all filled with Negroes) for himself, blessing or curse or only destiny, amazing how few the choices we have, how strait the way. Baxter found asleep in the entranceway of the house on a December night in the Depression, taken in, still there tonight.

"Well it's odd,” Ma had written, starting a fresh paragraph. “Baxter says that negroes care for nothing but sex. He says when they have their lodge meetings or preach or dance or have a rent party or perform in a jazz band they're only playing at those things, and what they're really doing is trying to get sex. I tell him I don't think that's different from anyone. People are always being blamed for doing things just to get sex, aren't they? It was always said when I was younger that whatever men say, they're only thinking about one thing, and this was always said in a very censorious way, as though the men were selfish hypocrites. No one ever considered that the poor men were to be pitied after all for even trying to think about anything else at all, trying to be politicians or preachers or banjo players or generals—because isn't it actually Sex that's selfish, Sex that twists every ambition and desire into only itself? Here a poor fellow wants to be a poet or a bandit and all he's allowed to make of his desires is babies."

Well it's odd. How often had he heard his mother say it, with her small smile of satisfaction, having hit on another flaw in the fabric (as it seemed to her), another mismatch of the soul and the earth.

Odd: all his friends who over the years had sobbed into their drinks about how they'd broken their mothers’ hearts by not marrying, not making babies, and his own mother quite satisfied to learn of her son's constitution, even proud of him, as though it had been a sly choice of his, a way of defeating if not the enslaving itch itself then at least the usual outcome of it: embarrassingly curious as to how he had managed this coup against the world, and awarding some credit to herself too for taking his side in the matter.

Except for the iceman there had been no Negroes at all on Mechanic Street when he was a boy, or much of anywhere else in the city beyond the confines of the Sunset district, which at the age of three or four he had named Browntown when he and his mother passed through it on the streetcar. With the other kids on his block he had followed the old long-armed hugely strong iceman in his wagon, waiting for the chunks of hard white-veined ice he would sometimes toss out to them. The cruel tongs with which he clamped the blocks and threw them onto his rubber-caped back. The dripping wagon advertised Coal and Ice, and he used to ponder that, why it was appropriate for one place to sell both, the fiery and the cold, the dirty and the clean.

He pocketed the letter in its envelope, disheartened suddenly, having glimpsed that eager receptive kid, and missing him: lost to him now, he alone left inside his flesh. Wonderful and terrible, how children love the world, and swallow it down daylong in spite of everything, everything.

There could hardly have been a street in the city less appropriate than Mechanic for his mother's house, though she hardly noticed: satisfied to be inappropriate everywhere, walking to market past the battling Polish housewives and the kids (heads cropped close for lice) who played tipcat and rolled smokes in the alleys: she in the remains of some ancient æsthetic costume, of which she had many, and her hair coming down. Buying a frightful yellow newspaper and a tin of Turkish cigarettes at the corner store and then making a telephone call that the whole store overheard, a call perhaps to the school principal to explain her son's absence from class: he standing beside her meanwhile (not as good as she was at assuming invisibility, at believing or pretending to believe that people neither notice nor care much about you) and staring fixedly at his shoes.