The reader should not suppose that I was interested in tabernacles or in the upper storeys of convents or of presbyteries because I was attracted to the invisible personages in whose cause such places had been built. I was in awe of Almighty God; of his son Our Lord, Jesus Christ; of Mary, the Mother of Our Lord; of all the angels and saints. Rather, I was in awe of the images of those personages that had lodged in my mind as a result of my having looked from an early age at certain statues, coloured windows, and holy-cards. I was anxious not to offend the personages by any misdeeds of mine. Several times daily, I uttered aloud or in my mind prayers addressed to one or another of the personages. Sometimes I felt that one or another of the personages was scrutinising me from behind the cover of his or her invisibility. I did not doubt what I had been taught from early childhood: that my chief task in life was to become on close terms with as many as possible of the personages. And yet, I was not at all attracted to any of the personages; and although I would never have dared admit it to anyone, I felt as though none of the personages had any special fondness for me.
I was not devoted to the personages, but I was interested in the places where they were venerated or where they were depicted as dwelling. I peered not only at upper-storey windows but into the dim, furthest reaches of grottoes in churchyards. I tried to imagine the garden behind the high wall in front of the Marist Brothers’ monastery. I seem to have envied priests and members of religious orders not only the views to be had from their imposing buildings but also whatever they saw when there was nothing of note to be seen around them: what they saw when they paced up and down the same path in the same walled garden, and even, perhaps, what they saw when they closed their eyes or covered their faces after they had received Holy Communion in some secluded chapel at first light.
My interest in these matters found its simplest outlet of a Sunday morning when I knelt beside one or another of my parents in our not-unpretentious parish church. During much of the service I would fix my attention on one after another of the stained-glass windows. The foreground of each window-picture was the preserve of one or another of the personages mentioned above. The background, however, seemed available for me to fill with landscapes or with glimpses of distant townships. And yet, whenever I gave up trying to imagine scenery fit to be discerned in some or another background of transparent pale-green or translucent orange and asked myself, in a mood of literal-mindedness, what in fact was just out of sight behind those converging pastel-toned plains and skies, I had to acknowledge the obvious. However many other-worldly personages might have loomed in the view of the worshippers inside the church, they existed against an ultimate background hardly different from what lay around me whenever I walked to school or to my local shops. The farthest imaginable background might have been a suburb of a provincial city overlaid by a pale wash of colour.
But I have not yet finished my report of the holy-card showing the curly-haired child getting away, so it seemed, with sacrilege. What I am about to report would have happened gradually and subtly and would have made scant difference to my everyday life; would have been hardly apparent to me except at odd, illuminating moments. What I am about to report is not at all an account of my drawing closer in my mind to the nun who had sent me the holy-card mentioned often above. If anything, I preferred not even to recall the pink-faced, brown-robed figure who had made much of me in the parlour of the convent on account of my bearing, according to her, an uncanny resemblance to my father.
In order to complete my report of the effects of a certain holy-card on the child that I seem to have been, I have to introduce into this work of fiction a personage whose title will be from here onwards the Patroness. I have used just now the word personage for want of a more accurate word. The reader must not suppose that my patroness occupied the same level of existence that was occupied by the personages mentioned in detail in the fourth-most recent paragraph and mentioned briefly in two subsequent paragraphs. This is necessarily a complicated piece of fiction, and if the English language had provided them, I would have used a variety of terms so as to distinguish such as the Patroness mentioned just above and what might be called the chief characters of the religion of my childhood, not to mention certain beings that I reported in earlier pages as having come into existence while I read works of fiction.
The Patroness was the least predictable of any of the beings that I choose to call personages. On rare occasions, she seemed closer to me and more aware of me than any other denizen of my mind. Mostly, though, she led a wavering existence, sometimes seeming as though anxious to break through whatever barriers lay between us but at other times seeming as though the very purpose of her existence was to remain aloof from me and so to provide me with a task worthy of a lifetime of effort: the simple but baffling task of gaining admission to her presence.
The Patroness almost certainly made her first appearance in my mind at some time after I had received the holy-card mentioned often in the preceding paragraphs, but for as long as I went on trying to see her clearly in my mind, I understood that she was a personage or an entity in her own right and definitely not a memory in my mind of the pink face and the brown robes and the ingratiating presence of the nun that my father had taken me to visit in the north-facing building of two storeys. The Patroness, so I learned after much struggling to apprehend her image, was changeable in her attitudes towards me. Sometimes she seemed to assume the most forbidding of poses: she was the merest outline of a female; the transparent representation in ice or glass of the virgin-goddess of my religion or of my own mother as she might have been when my father had first courted her. Paradoxically, my patroness could seem closer to me during those periods when I was quite unable to visualise her than when I was repeatedly glimpsing her in my mind. I would give up for a few days all my straining after her image and would experience a period of calm and reassurance, as though what separated us was not distance but her prankish hiding behind this or that image in the foreground of my mind. Such tantalising periods would often end with my catching sight of a picture of a young woman in a magazine or even of an actual young woman in a street and then feeling for a few hours afterwards as though my patroness had thus arranged for me to be shown her approximate likeness.
My patroness would have first appeared in my mind, or would have first signalled her presence there, when I was puzzling over the picture of the boy who was leaning against the tabernacle. I am no more concerned nowadays, as I write this report, than was the boy who received the holy-card long ago with any such abstraction as character. I am only concerned to report that the boy felt from the beginning as though his patroness had come to him with the message that she herself, in certain moods, would not despise him and would not report him to his teachers or to the parish priest if it came to her knowledge that he had thought of touching the satin coverings of a tabernacle or even of trying its door. He even felt as though his patroness understood that his being interested in tabernacles was not an expression of his interest in the personages who presided over his religion. And at some unrecorded hour on an unrecorded but fateful day, the boy, in his daydreaming, felt as though he had succeeded in reporting to his patroness that he would have been no less eager to clamber up to a tabernacle and to prise open its door and to learn at last the details of its inner arrangements even if he had known beforehand that the place contained no sacred vessels, so called, and no Blessed Sacrament, so called.