The Saint
By Alexis Levitin
It began with a calf’s head in the butcher shop window on Main Street. Francis had been buying pork chops, ground round, rib eye steaks, the usual, from the rotund, jovial butcher since moving to town for his graduate studies three years earlier. He was pursuing a doctorate in Moral Philosophy. So far, his studies had not affected his eating habits. But when he confronted the naked horror of death in the form of the innocent calf head on its clean steel spike, he was shocked, shocked at the brutality of its death, of its unembarrassed presentation in the shop window. As if it were only a question of tasty food. As if suffering and death were irrelevant.
And suddenly he thought: “Really, must I eat meat? Why not let our fellow mammals cling to their lives as we do? I can get by without meat.” So, he left the store having bought nothing and, at the impressionable age of twenty-three, became a pescatarian. But he was not a fanatic. He continued to eat seafood and swiss cheese and he loved a strawberry milkshake. However, influenced by this sudden change in his life, he signed up for a course in Animal Ethics being offered the following semester. The course load included works by Tom Regan, Richard Ryder, and Peter Singer. A serious shift from Plato, Aristotle, Pascal, and Kierkegaard.
Francis had been named by his pious mother after the famous Saint Francis of Assisi. As a child, he had gone to Mass with his mother regularly, but once he went off to college he had drifted away from the church. However, he remembered Saint Francis fondly and shared his namesake’s love of birds. He was sure Saint Francis would have been just as appalled as he at the calf’s head in the butcher shop window.
His girlfriend Jenny, a graduate student in comparative anatomy, was a slender blond with a powerful appetite. Their Friday date took them, as it often did, to Manolo’s, downtown. They were sipping their usual Pinot Noir and perusing the leather-bound, embossed menu, when Jenny, tossing aside the long bangs from her eyes, took an emphatic, gastronomical stand: “Fillet mignon,” she declared, as if marching straight from a French class. “And keep it bloody,” she added, with a smile. Francis, newly converted, felt awkward. He decided to go for a crustacean, a creature more distant from us than a steer. “I’ll have a lobster,” he proclaimed recklessly. It was the most expensive dish on the menu, but at least it was not red meat, his fellow flesh. Jenny lifted an eyebrow and said she would try that next time. Francis didn’t mention his conversion, and all went well. It was the first time he had eaten out since becoming a vegetarian, but of course no one knew of the change in his life.
It was autumn, the leaves were turning, and they decided to spend a weekend on the coast of Maine. A longish drive, but worth it. On Saturday afternoon, having visited the famous Pemaquid Point lighthouse, they found, via endless backroads, a relatively secluded lobster shed not far from Christmas Cove. The view was lovely, the air was crisp, they had enjoyed their night together at the Newcastle Inn, so they celebrated by ordering two giants, a pound and a half each. Before they could turn to walk out into the sunshine, the assistant had already tossed their lobsters into a bulging net and, without a thought, dumped them into a deep vat of boiling water, slamming down the wooden tap. Francis thought he heard some scrabbling noise, maybe even a mewing, and, taking Jenny by the arm, moved with some determination to the door.
Twenty minutes later the lobsters were done, and they sat in the still-warm September sun, cracking open the red shelled claws, extracting the meat, dipping pieces into their melted butter, then savoring it all, as it went down. Jenny was more adept than he at extracting the maximum pleasure: she didn’t limit herself to the firm meat in the claws and the tail. She was, after all, studying comparative anatomy. She ate the bright red eggs, she pried the fluffy white flesh from between the gill plates, she sucked dry each of the eight spiny legs, she crushed the flat tail fins between her teeth. What a healthy creature she was. What a lovely afternoon in Maine.
A week later, Jenny invited him over to her condo for dinner. She said it would be a surprise. He brought their usual Pinot Noir and entered with anticipation. There she was in the brightly lit kitchen with a huge metal pot on the stove.” What’s that about,” he asked. With a sly grin she reached into a sack in the bottom of the fridge. “Ta taa!” she proclaimed. She had a squirming black and green lobster in each hand, with sturdy rubber bands on their claws. “We can do this at home,” she proclaimed. “Take off the lid,” she commanded. No sooner had he done so, than, with complete aplomb, she slipped the lobsters, one after the other, headfirst into the boiling water. She grabbed the lid from his hands and slammed it down fast. He could clearly hear a dreadful mewing sound. He looked aghast. “That’s nothing,” said Jenny. “Just air escaping from under their shells. I read about it somewhere. Anyway, it isn’t clear that with their primitive little brain they really feel pain. Not like us, in any case.” They settled down close together on the sofa in her living room, leafing through National Geographic and Nature. Twenty minutes later they moved to the kitchen to eat. Francis was most uneasy, but he couldn’t get out of it. He wielded his nutcracker and his mallet (she seemed to be fully prepared for this extravaganza) like a professional and hid his feelings. “Ah,” said Jenny, dissecting every segment of exoskeleton, sucking out every bit of meat from every hidden crevice. “Boy, that was good! Let’s finish the wine and go to bed!” And that’s what they did. They didn’t even stop for dessert.
However, for Francis that was his last lobster. Luckily, a Greek-leaning vegetarian restaurant, The Stavros Greenery, had just opened in town, so he was able to lead Jenny there without any philosophical or ethical perorations. “Let’s try the new place,” he said, disingenuously. “It sounds healthy, don’t you think?” She said fine, and they launched into fried Brussel sprouts, grilled cauliflower, tahini hummus, stuffed grape leaves, a large garden salad, and a substantial eggplant parmesan. Jenny seemed to be enjoying it; Francis was terribly relieved and hoped he could convince her to shift her allegiance from Manolo’s to The Stavros Greenery.
Cuisine, however, wasn’t Francis’ only problem. He had begun to feel that he shouldn’t kill the small creatures that appeared now and then in his apartment. He didn’t like mouse turds on his kitchen counter, but after hearing a sharp snap from the kitchen floor one night, and being confronted by the perfect, innocent paws of the tiny creature as he let it drop from the trap into the shrubbery beneath his window (what should one do with the corpse of a diminutive mouse; he wasn’t sure), he knew he couldn’t set another trap. He simply kept cleaning the counter tops every morning and decided that cohabitation was possible. For the rest of the winter, having accepted his mouse, or was it mice, things went well.
But when spring came, ants began to crawl, spiders to weave their webs, and black flies and midges to swarm out of nowhere. Then even a few mosquitoes managed to get into his apartment. The first time he was bitten inside his own abode, he slapped hard and stared at the bloody smear on his forearm. The blood, of course, was his own, but the small, smashed body, was somebody else. After that, he relented, and would just brush them away, hoping they would go elsewhere. The first time Jenny saw him brush aside a mosquito in his kitchen, she gave him a strange look, then deliberately pursued the invader until she caught it against the white surface of the refrigerator door, then SMASH! “No more mosquito,” she proclaimed, with a grin. She used a sponge to wipe away the splotch.
But when Francis started to hesitate on the sidewalk, and even skip awkwardly to avoid ants busy at their work, Jenny grew upset. “You know, you’re really getting weird, sweetie” she said. Then, late one night, sleeping over, she got up to go to the kitchen for a drink of water and heard a rapid scurrying, when she turned on the light. “Jesus, Francis, you’ve got a mouse in here!” she almost screamed. Francis, awakened by her voice, groggily replied, “I know darling, but what can I do?” “You can get a mousetrap and kill it, that’s what you can do?” “But I can’t, honey, I just can’t,” was his plaintive reply, and he said no more. Things were going too far, she felt, but she slipped back into bed and, healthy as she was, quickly fell sleep.
The next morning, as they sat at the breakfast table in the bright sunlight, sharing a grapefruit, Jenny turned to him in a business-like tone : “You’re a cool guy, Francis, and a good man, but I think you’re going a little batty. Death is part of life, don’t you understand that? Life is wonderful, it’s marvelous, but death is everywhere. You can’t just abolish it, you know?” Then she drew him towards her, put a gentle hand on his arm, and said, in a soft voice: “Let’s give it a rest, for a bit, OK. Let’s give it a rest. After a while, we can see where we’re at.” And from that moment she stopped hanging with Francis, that young man striving to be good.
Francis was distraught. Jenny was so pretty, so sweet, so up-beat, such a good companion, that he really felt bereft. But what could he do? He had decided not to kill and that was the path he was following. First, he had given up meat, then lobsters, then fish. Recently he had stopped eating eggs, stopped eating Swiss cheese, stopped drinking strawberry milk shakes. He had grown in virtue, as he graduated from pescatarian to vegetarian to vegan. His life had become a badge of honor, but, without Jenny, it had also become a burden. He was so upset, so disoriented, that he began to miss classes. Torn by inner conflict, distraught, he even stopped attending Animal Ethics. His life might be righteous, but without Jenny it was a sad and lonely affair. What should he do?
One day, leafing by chance through an article in Nature on the complex relationship of the human body to the world of microorganisms that always surround us, he was horrified to find that merely breathing brings a swarm of microbes into the body. But our mucus, our cilia, our white blood cells, our lymph system all take action against the invaders. In a word, we welcome in living entities, only to kill them once they are inside us. We are like a spider welcoming a fly into its web. Francis felt now that he had nowhere to turn. To live it seems we are obliged to kill, perhaps not an innocent calf, but millions of equally innocent microorganisms instead. There was only one solution. He decided to hold his breath. To die so that others could live.
After exactly one minute and twelve seconds, entirely against his will, he inhaled. His heroic effort was a failure. He realized that his attempt was an act of madness. Of course, one cannot hold one’s breath until one dies. The body, that selfish animal, won’t tolerate such biological foolishness. But one could shoot oneself, at least if one had a gun. Being a philosophy major, Francis had never handled a gun in his life. But in what now was a delirium, he set off for the shopping mall just beyond the town line. He thought he had seen gun supplies at the endless Walmart. He was desperate, determined to no longer contribute to the carnage of the world. He would kill nothing. Nothing but himself.
He left his car in the half empty parking lot and marched toward the entrance like a condemned man. As he wandered down the aisles in what he thought was the right direction, he suddenly noticed a lovely blond creature bending over a sack of birdseed. It was Jenny, his Jenny! He stood motionless, unable to act, unable to speak, unable to think. She felt his presence, turned around, and as if she hadn’t left him half a year ago, gaily chirped out: “Well if it isn’t good old Saint Francis, a sight for sore eyes. How are you, after all this time? Are you back to normal by now?” She took his arm, squeezed it, gave him a peck on the cheek and begged him to come to dinner at her condo that night. “We’ll be having fillet mignon, OK with you? It’ll put hair on your chest, sweetie,” and she smiled her most ingratiating smile. Utterly confused, he nodded yes. He took her arm and caressed it for the first time in half a year, feeling its soft blond down beneath his fingertips. Dizzy drunk, he couldn’t remember why he had come to Walmart in the first place. With a deep sigh, he turned around, said “see you tonight,” and headed for the door. “I’ll bring the Pinot Noir,” he added, and felt a smile trembling to his lips.
How delightful it had been running into Jenny at Walmart. What a lovely woman. And how pleasant the warm sunshine on his skin in the parking lot. What a wonderful summer day. How good life was, after all. As he drove to the liquor store to get their Pinot Noir, he reconciled himself with this new reality. He had done the best he could, but he realized now, though with a touch of chagrin, that he just wasn’t cut out to be a saint. But what a splendid day!
*
Alexis Levitin’s short stories began to arise unexpectedly during the fear-tinged isolation of the pandemic; an attempt to redeem what time remained. So far, thirty-two of these efforts have been accepted for publication in magazines such as Agon, Agape, American Chess Magazine, Bitter Oleander, Gavea-Brown, Latin American Literary Review, The Nonconformist, and Rosebud. A book-length collection of chess-related stories, The Last Ruy Lopez: Tales from the Royal Game, will be coming out in the fall. Alexis Levitin has also published forty-eight books in translation, mostly poetry from Portugal, Brazil, and Ecuador. He has served as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universities of Oporto and Coimbra, Portugal, The Catholic University in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Brazil, and has held translation residencies at Banff, Canada, Straelen, Germany (twice), and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy.