The eyes of the axolotls spoke to me of the presence
of a different life, of another way of seeing.
—Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl” (translated by Paul Blackburn)
WHEN I FIRST MET those bedridden children in the Kingston slums, their existence disturbed me. I wondered why God would create such useless beings, whose only inheritance was suffering. Now I am not tormented by such questions. Now I am one of these children.
In the summer of 2023, I was volunteering with Missionaries of the Poor, a Catholic order. The brothers run four homes in Kingston, Jamaica, for outcasts nobody else will claim—orphaned children without limbs, orphaned adults with HIV and dementia, the lame and crippled and mute, as they call them. The brothers come from India and Kenya and the Philippines, from the farthest corners of the earth, to lay down their lives for people they do not know. Love is their only affiliation. Anyone who loves father or mother more than Christ is not worthy of following him, and these brothers, clutching a fistful of white habit in one hand and wooden beads in the other, have left fathers and mothers and never looked back.
I came to Jamaica because I too wanted to be worthy, to lay down my life for the poor and so gain the treasure of heaven. Little did I know where my heaven lay buried.
He also came to Jamaica for darker reasons. This became clear after we met. His reasons were hidden even from himself. He arrived at Bethlehem, where we live, searching for an atonement I’m not sure he believed in, and found in me, an object that stirred up the dark sediments in his soul. He was a golfer, I guessed on the day we met, based on his polo shirt and the set of his shoulders. That first day I failed to notice the scar on his hand, a mark left by the sport he once loved. Would you think it possible that a pale, discolored line on a man’s palm might stretch all the way down the fairway of his soul?
On my first day, I visited a home for older men, men with long strands of drool hanging from their carious mouths. Most could communicate only in grunts.
“What did you think?” Brother Innocent asked later that afternoon, walking back to the monastery with me. He had lighter brown skin than the other Kenyans and a more reserved spirit. Tributaries of wrinkles lined the corners of his wide-set eyes, like an ancient map. Nothing seemed to disturb his serenity.
The monastery was planted among shanties with rusted zinc roofs, where secondhand American goods, Nike backpacks and Converse shoes, hung from rotting wooden frames. The homes were built on rubble. Trash bags lined the narrow, potholed streets like snowdrifts, mobs of pigeons pecking at the detritus. Gunshots echoed at odd hours. Abandoned courtyards were painted with graffiti, and their tattered soccer nets hung limp. Catty-corner to the monastery was a field of cinder blocks with a toppled seesaw, the frame of an ancient swing set, and several overturned cars. I followed Brother Innocent without fear, as if he were an archangel leading me through Hades.
“The residents brought the beatitudes to life for me,” I said as we passed through the door in the fifteen-foot barricade surrounding the monastery. Blessed are the poor in spirit. As I spooned rice into the toothless mouth of a man without limbs, my heart burned with gratitude. I joyfully contemplated my dependence on my creator. The man’s poverty—not spiritual, but literal—was the mirror I used to see and appreciate the beauty of my own blessings. His agony did not cross my mind. I could not ignore it, however, in the face of a child.
A bell rang in the courtyard.
“Tomorrow you will go to Bethlehem,” Brother Innocent said, locking the gate behind us. “Now we pray the rosary.”
The following morning I went to Bethlehem, the orphanage. A throng of screaming kids, many in wheelchairs, met me in a dappled courtyard of mango and avocado trees, clutching at me as if I were a soccer star. Their hands were three- and four-fingered claws, and I recoiled at their touch; their yellow teeth were crooked, gapped picket fences; their foreheads were crowned with what looked like golf balls lodged beneath the skin. Others sat in their wheelchairs with slack tongues. One boy without legs was slumped against the wall like a burlap sack. “We do not have enough chairs,” said one of the brothers, shrugging. Another boy tottered in circles on the balls of his feet like a broken windup toy, his neck buried between the two bony peaks of his shoulders.
I forced myself to smile at the children. I thought of the disciples asking Jesus about the man born blind: “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” and the Lord’s reply: “This is so the glory of God might be revealed in him.” As I looked at that limbless boy, I did not see any glory.
After playing half-heartedly with the children for a few minutes, I slipped away into the dormitory. It was quiet, save for a Power Rangers episode on the television and a corpulent Jamaican woman humming while she folded clothes. Two rows of beds lined the walls, all holding large, crippled boys, their legs knotted and torsos twisted and stretched like rope.
The walls were a cheerful blue, painted with swimming fish. These children, unable to talk or smile, might as well have been goldfish. No, worse even. They could not swim or move at all. They were axolotls trapped at the bottom of an aquarium.
A faint gurgle interrupted my thoughts. I noticed a boy lying on a bed in the corner. He did not stir at my approach. His gaze moved dumbly along the ceiling. His bony limbs were trapped at acute angles, and he lacked the natural configuration of fingers. His index finger was melded to his thumb. Undressed wounds on his knees were blotched white, and his shaved head was furrowed like a finger held too long under water. One of his cheeks was swollen to the size of a melon and pressed against his cleft lip and nose bridge, a cubist portrait of suffering. As he emitted a soft groaning breath, his back arched off the bed a few millimeters, then fell back. I thought of reaching out and trying to fit my fingers into the furrows on his head—as if I could somehow make him whole.
I stood over him and stared into his deep brown eyes. One of them, his left, fluttered back and forth, disconnected from the right, the tail of a tadpole. I leaned closer, drawn by a presentiment that he was trying to tell me something.
I heard Brother Innocent call me to come outside. He needed me to carry a little girl to the dental clinic upstairs. But long after I left the dormitory, that bedridden boy remained with me, his eye fluttering in my mind.
It seemed he left just as he was on the verge of hearing me.
We are not dumb, you know. We can say many things through the faint tremor of an eye. But most people are too ignorant—or terrified—to listen. They are happy to believe we can communicate in a limited way, to groan in pain and hunger and thirst, but language—that’s quite another thing. I think my American friend was scared to believe I might have been speaking to him—and him alone. Then he might have been forced to see me as I really am: a creature with a choice.
Surely it would have shocked him to know that I like some volunteers more than others, that on occasion I have refused to swallow food out of spite. To go hungry rather than accept charity from someone you don’t like—is this not the height of pride? Yes, I have tasted the bitterness of sin in my own heart, and also the sweetness of mercy.
But he was not yet ready to hear my voice or see beyond my marred body. He did not want to face what it might reveal about himself, for he too had a soul marred by pride. He knew what it was to turn from God out of spite.
The following day, I was supposed to visit the home for elderly women and HIV patients, but I insisted on returning to Bethlehem. The child had awakened something in my heart. I had a premonition that I had come to Jamaica for this one child, that my salvation was entangled with his. All morning I sat by his bedside and watched the movements of his eye and listened to the faint changes in his breath. I felt as if we were related by blood, brothers even. At mealtime I lifted him out of his bed and propped him in a wheelchair. I poured milk over the mash of rice and beans and spooned it into his mouth. He spit up most of it, and I wiped his face with a rag throughout the meal.
“You’ll help bathe him,” Brother Innocent told me after lunch.
I stripped off his clothes and diaper and laid him on a wooden gurney. We rolled him to the bathrooms, where other children were bathing themselves. Screams and laughter ricocheted off the walls. The smell of excrement emanated from plastic drums of soiled diapers and clothes. The brothers did not seem to mind. I saw a fluttering eye beneath me and felt a nausea seep down into my soul.
“What happens when the children grow up?” I asked Brother Innocent as we returned to the monastery under the stifling sun.
“If they grow up.”
“Do many of them…”
“Oh, yes. We have a cemetery. Most of the children you have met will not live to be adults.”
We passed the field of abandoned playground equipment, the broken chains of the swing set reminiscent of gallows.
“It all seems kind of…”
“Pointless?” Brother Innocent suggested, smiling.
“I was going to say futile.”
“Many of them die on their beds.”
I stopped walking, thinking of my brother lying on his deathbed, everyone around him oblivious.
Brother Innocent said, “They cannot talk, you know? We don’t know how sick they are. We find out only at the end.”
“It shouldn’t be that way.”
“We need them more than they need us. They are the face of Christ. They teach us how to love.”
It occurred to me that Christian charity masked the injustice of suffering. The poor you will always have with you. Maybe Jesus said this because he knew how little we cared to make them rich. I ruminated on this as we neared the monastery. My work was done for the day, yet what about my brother? I had left him to suffer while I would retire to a well-furnished room, rest for several hours, eat rice and chicken and avocados picked fresh from the trees, and sing hymns of praise to the God who had blessed me with four working limbs, ten fingers, and a mind capable of romanticizing his suffering. I was using him as a rag to clean up my soul.
Of course, I did not share my revelation with the brothers. They would have told me that God’s ways are higher than ours and salvation is a mystery. Who were we to say where these children would spend eternity? Perhaps their earthly suffering was a brief passageway to some incomprehensible joy. Perhaps we would find them sitting at the right hand of Christ next to the Father’s throne while the rest of us contented ourselves with the outer atrium.
But I knew then, anyone who resorted to such explanations had refused to look suffering in its fluttering eye and ask why—why was his suffering necessary for my salvation? Could it really be that God was so cruel as to use a child as nothing more than a pawn? What good is atoning blood to those who cannot comprehend the meaning of a sacrifice? If God were a god of mercy, he would save these children not from death, but birth.
I canceled my flight back to America. I could not abandon my brother. I began to share my doubts with him. He was my only confidante, the only one I trusted with my innermost thoughts. His eye fluttered intermittently while I told him about my stomach ailments and the isolation I had begun to feel among the brothers. I liked to pretend we were having a conversation, a fantasy that comforted me while I wrestled with what to do.
“I think you’re the lucky one,” he said one day while feeding me. “You know physical pain, but you’ve never known the pain of regret. That’s far worse, I promise you.” He grimaced. “Unless you become like a child, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. That’s not too difficult for you, is it?” I tried to answer him, but he would not listen. He got a rag and wiped the drool from my chin.
He envied me, I realized, because he thought I’d been given a free pass to heaven. He thought I was incapable of regret, of sin and rebellion. But we are not vegetables, nor innocent lambs. I once murdered a woman with the twitch of my eye—or at least I tried. “You sweet thing,” she kept saying, and I snapped. I felt that uncontrollable rush of blood to my head and I wished her dead.
He would stay by my bedside late into the night, and in the dim light cast on his face, I could see his agony. He needed someone to hear his sins and absolve him. And yet he also needed a scapegoat. He needed me to be both more and less than he believed, divine intercessor and useless collection of bones and nerve endings. The weight of his contradiction began to burrow into me, as if my destiny were caught up in his. His words left a depression on my soul even after he returned to the monastery.
I whispered to him often that I forgave whatever evil festered in his heart. My voice, though he refused to acknowledge it, seemed to lead him slowly to a crossroads. Either accept and believe that I was more than a vegetable, a human with a soul, and receive life anew as a merciful gift…or turn his back on life, once and for all.
He had a great dream as a child, he told me, of winning a junior golf tournament in Alabama. Each year the winner was given a green jacket—just like the one the professionals competed for in the real Masters—and he wanted this jacket more than anything in the world. At eighteen, his last year of eligibility, he emerged as the leader on the final day. “I came to the eighteenth hole leading by three. But as I was teeing up my ball, I picked a sunburned patch of grass and the tee snapped in half. One of the splinters sliced my hand.”
He looked down at a white blemish on his palm, the faint scar that I’d failed to notice before.
“It wasn’t a deep cut. One of the marshals gave me a bandage. I could have easily played through it, made a par or bogey. But I was cursed, I knew it immediately. I remember thinking how much worse it would be to lose now, after coming so close.
“I kept gripping and re-gripping the club. I wasn’t able to get comfortable. I hooked my drive nearly out of bounds, then chipped out and hit my third shot in the greenside bunker. I could barely see straight when I walked up to the green. If I got up and down, I’d still win. Three shots and I’d be tied, and I’d still go to a playoff.” His voice broke. “It was an easy bunker shot. I could have gotten up and down in my sleep. But I kept thinking how I was destined to choke, how God wanted to rip it all away from me…”
He leaned back in his seat and drifted into silence. I could still hear him, as his barbed thoughts twined strangely, painfully with mine. We seemed, for a moment, not like separate souls but like one soul with two bodies. “I know it’s unconscionably petty to hate God for letting me lose a golf tournament, for letting me get so close to my dream just to rip it away at the last second. But I did. I hated him enough to wish he didn’t exist, to pretend I didn’t believe in him. Everything bad, all my future regrets—they began in that moment. And none of it would have happened if I hadn’t stuck my tee in that particular patch of grass and cut my hand. It’s the particularity that haunts me. Even now, after coming back to the faith and repenting and believing in God’s mercy and trying to pick up my cross like we’re supposed to, I can’t escape it.”
He got up and gritted his teeth. I strained to hear, but I lost the thread of his thoughts. I felt a moment of relief. Then a cold premonition passed over me, and I did not sleep the rest of the night.
Had he stayed a little longer that night, I would have told him: We have dreams too. The kind that bite into the heart. I used to dream of hearing Jesus whisper, “Take up your mat.” I wanted to go to America and walk in the land these volunteers come from. It was an unholy dream, a desire for a life that is not mine, and it caused me great pain. For a time, I too resented God for allowing me to want what I could not have. Now it’s just an old scar I can feel when I breathe deeply.
I was almost too ashamed to return to Bethlehem after all that I shared with him. My confession appeared hideous and juvenile in the daylight. My only comfort was that my confessor had not understood a word. And yet the following morning, when I slunk to his bedside and peered into his fluttering eye, I was overcome by a desire to explain myself. I desperately wanted this child to understand me—to understand why I told him the things I did—to love me as I loved him.
Weeks turned to months.
I cared for him day and night, showered him, fought his limbs into his shirt and shorts, spoon-fed the mash of rice and beans into his stiff lips, all while I contemplated whether I had the courage to show him true love. To give him what I would have wanted in his place.
The brothers asked me if I wanted to join them, to become a postulant in the Missionaries of the Poor and give up everything for the sake of the gospel. I lied and told them I’d pray about it. I no longer wanted to be like them. They thought I stayed because I was inspired by their way of life, the rhythm of morning prayer and adoration and evening rosaries in their courtyard, the shining reflection of Christ in their faces as they ventured into the slums of Kingston. They saw my devotion to a single bedridden child and told me that someday I might become a great saint. If only they had known why I stayed.
In the depths of December, several months after my arrival, I could not bear my agony any longer. One night, after all the brothers had left, as the housekeeper hummed to herself in the next room, I stood over the child and stared into his eye, that fluttering eye with its senseless tremors, its faint movements that, had I not known better, sounded faintly like someone screaming. I was terrified at what I had come to do. But at the precise moment I gathered my courage, I realized I was looking up, not down, into the disturbed blue eyes of a white man with his hand clenched over my mouth.
I tried to scream, but my lips did not work; I tried to reach out and grab his hand, but my arm would not budge; I tried writhing off the bed, but I was paralyzed. My left eye, I discovered, was the only muscle I could move, and I frantically swept it along the ceiling, hoping he would be moved by the sound of my cries.
Slowly he pulled his hand away.
I heard the patter of pills scattering on the floor, the slow recession of footsteps toward the door, then silence.
I do not know why he did not kill me as he intended. I like to believe he finally heard the silent cry of my soul.
He returned the next day, and in his eyes I saw a bleeding agony and guilt. I tried to console him, to tell him that I had already forgiven him. That I understood why he tried to do such a heinous thing and that, if I were standing in his shoes and he lying in my bed, I would have done the same. That in some triumphant mystery beyond the pale of our understanding, he was not alone in his guilt. But he kept muttering to himself and refused to listen.
In the span of weeks, I witnessed his agony turn to despair. His murmurings drifted into silence. He stopped caring for my needs, quit bathing or feeding me. Late one night, when nobody else was there, he wept uncontrollably at my bedside. So I called out to him. I begged him to listen. He peered into my eye for a long time, many minutes, an hour perhaps. And just as I thought he was beginning to hear my voice, he got up abruptly and disappeared into the night.
A long time has passed, but he has not returned.
I pray for him often. We can pray, you know. I pray that in quiet moments in America, if that is where he returned after all, he will remember what it is like to be me as I remember being him, and that in contemplating my soul as I contemplate his body, he will find something worth saving.
For the children of Bethlehem
Matthew Beringer is a seminarian for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta. He attends Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans.
Image: Anthony Camerlo. Unsplash, 2022.
