The Hero's Body Read Online Free

deliverancefor me. A religion more vibrant and sanative than what I was being sold by the Catholic clergy six days a week.
    The convent sat adjacent to our school, and the nuns would sometimes corral seventh- and eighth-grade boys to lug a bureau, or ascend into the attic to retrieve boxes, or brave the damp basement for a ceramic Nativity scene. They once chose me and another boy for such a task, and on the way out I saw, there in the sitting room, sun-dappled by the window, an elderly nun I’d never seen before, her face a road map of creases and clefts, her posture one of European eons, nun shoes like blocks of black wood. A visitor from Sicily, she sat reading the Gospels aloud to herself in a tongue of some other age, Greek or Latin, I didn’t know.
    I stayed to listen to this startling rhapsodist, to the opulent prosody of whatever she was saying. I could see that she owned the verses by memory because although the bible was splayed on her lap, her eyes remained shut for minutes at a stretch. She seemed held as if by some welcomed hex. What was that called, that inner billowing I felt just then at the sound of her verses? Why should I have registered such intimations of joy at what I could not comprehend? But I could comprehend it: as a braid of wisdom and beauty. A mystery, a religion that meant poetry, a poetry that meant hope. At eleven years old, I had hope for something, from something, I could not begin to articulate. But I understood that it had to do with the intricate rhythms of her language and what those rhythms meant, the spaces into which they were trying to reach. At the beginning of The Power and the Glory , Graham Greene writes, “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” This must have been a moment when the future was making itself known to me, the partial realization that language would become my life.
    By the time I reached high school, I’d figured out that my family was wrong about literature, that if books weren’t exactly happiness, they were—to employ Stendhal’s definition of beauty—the promise of happiness. Once in high school, I was lucky with my English teachers, discerning women who registered my interest and nudged me in the right direction: toward Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor and Vonnegut, Hamlet and Macbeth .
    In light of all that, my meningitis at fifteen was an embodiment of my role in the family, of the inner fragility they’d long spotted in me. Not that I was forever sickly, but that I was a weakling always with a book in my hand, an unmasculine and romantically vulnerable softie. The meningitis was a month during which I was at my feeblest, literally unable to stand beneath my own weight, but it was a month that in some ways exemplified my entire life to that point. And so when I wandered down into my uncle’s basement that May afternoon, I had a stack of troubles quivering within, including the humiliation of having no mother, a humiliation helped by my father’s own shame of not being able to hold onto his wife. I was not wholly conscious of those troubles, but this I knew for certain: I needed to make my own creation myth, to renovate my pathetic vessel into a hero’s body.

II
    In conscious emulation of Pop when he was young, my uncle Tony got serious about weightlifting in his twenties. Like my father, he’d been a wrestler in high school, then earned a black belt in karate. I can recall the poster of Bruce Lee tacked up in his basement, behind the punching bag and speed bag, the bloody scowl of the great martial artist as he’s about to punt an enemy. Tony had always seen himself as too unmuscled (he hadn’t inherited Pop’s effortless bulk), and so, after wrestling and karate, weightlifting seemed the natural next step for him.
    In the 1980s, he trained with some hardcore Jersey bodybuilders—animals who squatted six hundred pounds, the