By Night in Chile

gauntlet of leather and metal, and in the air, in the square space of sky bounded by gold-colored walls, I noticed the shadow of a bird, and when Fr. Pietro saw me he said: Let’s go up the bell tower, and without a word I followed in his footsteps and we climbed up to the bell tower’s steeple, tackling that silent, strenuous ascent in tandem, and when we reached the steeple, Fr. Pietro whistled and waved his arms and the shadow came down from the sky to the bell tower and landed on the gauntlet protecting the
    Italian’s left hand, and then there was no need to explain, for it was clear to me that the dark bird circling over the church of St. Mary of Perpetual
    Suffering was a falcon and Fr. Pietro had mastered the art of falconry, and that was the method they were using to rid the old church of pigeons, and then, looking down from the heights, I scanned the steps leading to the portico and the brick-paved square beside the magenta-colored church, and in all that space, as hard as I looked, I could not see a single pigeon. In the afternoon, Fr.
    Pietro, one of God’s keen falconers, took me to another place in Pistoia where there were no ecclesiastical buildings or civil monuments or anything that needed to be defended against the ravages of time. We went in the parish van.
    The falcon traveled in a box. When we reached our destination, Fr. Pietro took the falcon out and flung it up into the sky. I saw it fly and swoop down on a pigeon and I saw the pigeon shudder as it flew. The window of a council flat opened and an old woman shouted something and shook her fist at us. Fr. Pietro laughed. Our cassocks flapped in the wind. When we got back he told me the falcon was called Turk. Then I took a train to Turin, where I visited Fr.
    Angelo, curate of St. Paul of Succor, who was also versed in the falconer’s art.
    His falcon, called Othello, had struck terror into the heart of every pigeon in Turin, although, as Fr. Angelo confided in me, Othello was not the only falcon in the city, he had good reason to believe that in some unidentified suburb of Turin, probably in the south, there lived another falcon, which Othello had occasionally encountered during his aerial forays. Both birds of prey hunted pigeons, and, in principle, there was no reason for them to fear one another, but Fr. Angelo felt the day was not far off when the two falcons would clash. I stayed longer in Turin than in Pistoia. Then I took the night train to
    Strasbourg. There Fr. Joseph had a falcon called Xenophon, with plumage of deepest midnight blue, and sometimes when Fr. Joseph was saying mass the falcon would be perched on a gilded pipe at the top of the organ, and kneeling there in the church listening to the word of God, I could sometimes feel the falcon’s gaze on the nape of my neck, his staring eyes, and it distracted me, and I thought of Bernanos and Mauriac, whom Fr. Joseph read and reread tirelessly, and I thought of Graham Greene, whom I was reading, though he was not, since the French only read the French, in spite of which we stayed up late one night talking about Graham Greene, without being able to resolve our disagreement. We also talked about Burson, priest and martyr in North Africa, whose life and ministry were the subject of a book by Vuillamin, which Fr. Joseph lent to me, and about l’Abbé Pierre, a funny little mendicant priest of whom Fr. Joseph seemed to approve on Sundays but not during the week. And then I left Strasbourg and went to Avignon, to the church of Our Mother of Noon, in the parish of Fr.
    Fabrice, whose falcon, called Ta Gueule, was known throughout the surrounding area for his voracity and ferocity, and my afternoons with Fr. Fabrice were unforgettable, Ta Gueule in full flight, scattering not just flocks of pigeons but also flocks of starlings, which in those long gone, happy days, were common in the countryside of Provence, where Sordel, Sordello, which Sordello? wandered once, and Ta Gueule flew off and disappeared among the low clouds, the clouds descending from the desecrated yet somehow still pure hills of Avignon, and while Fr. Fabrice and I conversed, Ta Gueule appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and swooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the
    starlings was bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the