Saint Pancracia, Relic

Clostridium difficile. The diarrhea did not subside. Twenty-four hours straight without leaving my apartment, refusing to go to a hospital emergency room. There was nothing left to expel in my bowels, but I didn't dare leave the toilet for long. The cramps were back and the paranoia of ending up shedding intestinal mucus in my underwear prevented me from standing up. I wondered if this continued diarrhea without shit could cause some kind of damage to my intestines. Or cause the condition to revert to something like necrotizing colitis, with tissue death in the large intestine, for example. After all, it seemed to be a rather violent bacteria that had taken over my digestive system. And there was still a little more to go until it became the worst day of my life.

There on the toilet, in the midst of boredom, looking at stupid things on my phone, like everyone, I decided to make the most of the last twenty percent of battery life it had left. I hadn't visited Pancracia even once in the last few days. It's true that I wasn't in any condition to masturbate, but a little erotic emotion wouldn't hurt.

Pancracia had been a miracle from her very conception: her mother, pregnant after being raped in a Turkish airport bathroom, was seventy-four years old when she brought her into the world. By the time this elderly single mother died at the age of eighty-eight, leaving behind a substantial inheritance, it had become clear that the ordeals her teenage daughter had been subjecting herself to since her menarche were not the product of some kind of fit of rebellion. Perhaps hysteria, considering that one of her favorite mortifications was fasting for days on end, something that by then was already known as anorexia nervosa. Her other favorite means of flagellation was the cilice. She had made a wire corset, composed of interwoven links, each with a sharp point. The origin of her fondness for pain, it would soon be known, was the mystical delirium that would make her famous and respected. She used to tell anyone who would listen that if she could choose how she would die, it would be crucified upside down like Saint Peter.

After her mother's death, she decided, accompanied by the guardian assigned to manage her assets, to travel the world carrying the word of God and performing miracles. She was supposed to have made disappear a tumor that a neighbor had in her breast. As her fame as a saint grew, government donations began to flow in.

Already twenty years old and with a surprising resemblance to actress Angelina Jolie, of all the places visited she decided to settle in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Culiacán, Sinaloa, a territory that was by then the scene of an undeclared civil war between the government and the local cartel. She found her home in an abandoned church, where she had dragged a woman found dying in the street, partially eaten by rats and ants.

This act of supposed piety—she let the beggar die without requesting any kind of medical assistance, she simply limited herself to praying by her side—constituted the founding of the home for the dying that would ultimately catapult her to canonization, although many insisted that her resemblance to the famous actress outweighed her undeniable beatitude. The Home of the Immaculate Heart had its heyday during the bubonic plague epidemic that broke out in northwestern Mexico.

The Black Death was the beginning of the end for Saint Pancracia. When it was determined that the cause of the outbreak was a plague of fleas that spread the germ through their bites, the Sinaloa cartel decided to take the bull by the horns and toured the state implementing sanitary measures. This included burning entire homes if they found them infected with fleas. And with their inhabitants inside, if they were infected too.

When some cartel henchmen arrived at the Home of the Immaculate Heart and saw the aberration that the world ignored and had been going on behind closed doors for years, now aggravated by the number of bubonic plague patients arriving at the old church, they decided to inform their superiors before proceeding. After all, it was Santa Pancracia who was threatening the public health of the State of Sinaloa.

Two of the drug traffickers closest to El Rojo, the cartel’s leader, took the trouble to appear, of course wearing protective suits. In the shelter, the sick languished on mattresses on the floor, without access to antibiotics or painkillers, some even suffering from gangrene. But, yes, the beautiful Pancracia walked around the nave without pews dedicating a time each day to each one, praying beside them, lying on the floor with a rosary in her hand. The moans of the inhabitants of the ‘home for the dying’ were an intolerable symphony. The fleas were eating them raw. In the kitchen of what had been the sacristy, sheets stained with feces were washed along with the dishes. The millions of dollars in donations were probably in some kind of ghost account in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.

"These people are suffering," was the first thing one of the drug traffickers said to the saint. And her response went down in history: "That means Jesus is kissing them." 

That was too much.

The place was razed to the ground, and Pancracia was taken prisoner, a lesson to the Vatican. El Rojo, it should be remembered, was a self-confessed Satanist.

The saint was kidnapped for almost two years, hidden in a safe house on a hill accessible only by helicopter. Little was known about her during that captivity, except for a viral video in which, in a kind of sexual ritual, she was subjected to a Latin bukkake. But neither did the cartel claim responsibility for the video, nor was the identity of the abused woman confirmed. The footage was quite dark, with torches as the only illumination. Gloomy and grim, in short, was the perhaps apocryphal footage.

Pancracia's head appeared at the door of the Basilica of Santa María de Guadalupe on the same day she turned twenty-seven years old. She had been decapitated with a chainsaw after they tried to get five Neapolitan mastiffs to eat her, in what had been a mock martyrdom in a Roman circus. What happened then could be considered the saint's penultimate miracle: the starving animals, released into the corral where she was waiting, abandoned their rudeness when they reached her side and smelled her. Instead of tearing her to pieces, they had lain down beside her and let her pet them.

We are now about to reach the reason for my confession. The last miracle was the incorruptibility of the cadaveric head of Saint Pancracia. The drug traffickers had placed it inside a cooler, in a plastic bag, on a mattress of dry ice. Removed from the cooler and placed in a display case, even after several years, it still didn't rot, as had happened more than once before with the corpses or relics of certain saints.

Thanks to one of those whims of modernity, the display case was equipped with a camera that broadcast live from the Basilica of Santa María de Guadalupe website. Since that face was free from any attack of rigor mortis, they had taken the trouble to manipulate its features. Therefore, the head was upright, on an acrylic cushion, with its eyes open and its mouth... The mouth not only half-open, but more as if Pancracia was about to take a breath before diving underwater. And she already looked too much like Angelina Jolie...

So I must not have been the only person who spent hours watching it from the basilica's site, where they broadcast twenty-four hours a day from the crypt, because a few months later, without warning or explanation, the Vatican sent a statement ordering the camera to be turned off. Thousands of masturbators had to be content with resorting to photos or recordings hosted on pornographic sites.

By then I was already in love with Pancracia. I don't know if I need to explain that.

My life changed when, during a visit to the basilica's crypt, where I was thrilled to see the head in person, I initiated something resembling a friendship with the person in charge of security there. His name was Alejandro, and after a chat, I waited with him until the tourist admissions closed and we went to a bar. He spoke English very well.

The speed with which that Mexican drank tequila was something to be feared. He drank so much that he ended up confessing to me that he liked me and wanted to take me to bed. I, without hesitation, replied that I was willing to give him a free pass into my pussy in exchange for something. I had noticed that the camera was still installed and turned on. Out of necessity, it had to be part of the basilica's monitoring system.

"I want the link and password for the computer monitoring system. Give me that, and we'll go to the hotel where I'm staying."

His joy was such that he didn't hesitate, and we left.

As I had suspected, not only could he not get an erection, but he fell asleep after a while of watching me try to get him hard with my mouth. He seemed to be a stand-up guy, though. In the morning, he apologized and gave me the link and password. We went to breakfast.

He seemed taciturn. It was clear that, in between sips of coffee, he had something he wanted to tell me but didn't dare. Finally, he spoke again.

“Would you give me another chance, another night of sex, if I told you the biggest secret about Pancracia’s head?”

He was no fool. He had clearly come to understand the degree of morbid irreligious devotion I felt for that relic. And how important it was for me now to have an exclusive channel to the everyday life of that perfect, uncorrupted face.

Of course, I invited him to talk.

“The miracle of the incorrupt head of Saint Pancracia is fake. A hoax, as you Americans call it. The head arrived here preserved in dry ice, and the bishop, neither slow nor lazy, hired the services of Ayax, the leading company in cryogenic preservation of corpses for resurrection purposes. A couple of hours later, technicians arrived and placed the martyr, or what was left of her, in a capsule filled with liquid nitrogen. She was kept there, between insulating vacuum walls, while they built what everyone takes to be a display case. Weren't you surprised by its self-illuminating feature? That ultraviolet light, similar to that found in surgical instrument sterilizers? In there, behind those glass walls, it's cold, very cold. There's a refrigerator engine under the display case. Added to that is the constant diffusion of hydrogen peroxide in gaseous form, sealing the environment away from bacteria. The outcome? The incorruptible head. For ever, as long as no one unplugs or opens the false display case.”

Since then, in one way or another, perhaps even as an abstract thought that I never wanted to admit or contemplate too much, I had been fearing that Alejandro's corrupt mind would lead him to take the next step. He had a whole market at his disposal. He could have given the link to the monitoring computer system to many other people. But that fantasy of exclusivity, of intimacy between Pancracia and me, felt very good. I preferred to believe it that way. Just her and me. Her thick, open lips, her and me. And the crypt security staff, but they didn't count.

And who knew? There was even a chance that one day science would advance, and, through the use of a robot body, her brain could be revived, and Pancracia could walk among us again.

But now all that's over. I still cry every day. Perhaps without the despair, anger, and helplessness of the day of the violent diarrhea, but sorrow will never end. It doesn't even console me to know that Alejandro was imprisoned for attacking the Catholic Church's heritage, by "neglecting" his duties in the crypt, allowing the glass case to be opened and the neuropreservation process to be interrupted.

He must have certainly been in need of money to dare to do such a thing. And, especially, to leave a video record of the consequences of his crime. I don't think he's stupid enough to forget to disconnect the monitoring system for a while. In any case, if he didn’t, the fact that the camera continued transmitting could be a final miracle of Pancrasia. I don't understand why the Vatican is waiting to investigate and confirm this. 

The video I saw live and in person sitting on the toilet had become viral hours before. And I have not dared to witness that horror again. An abject scene, condemnable and infamous, that indescribable moment when one of the glass panels was removed and, as if it were a pornographic film, where only the genitals of the heterosexual actor matter in his body, an erect penis, thin and long, covered by what looked like a wool condom, appeared in the frame of the static image to desecrate the mouth of, I admit, the most platonic of the loves of my life.