It was a crude portrayal of Thomas putting two fingers into the wounded side of the risen Jesus. To begin with, I saw nothing more in it than a reference to Thomas’ own Christian name. But that was only a start. Its real meaning was not vouchsafed to me until later.

The little group of Foils used to meet twice weekly at the city’s fencing school for the lessons that provided it with a respectable excuse as well as with a splendidly symbolic derivation. The fencing master’s attitude toward us was ambivalent, unerringly strict when it came to passing judgment on a low feint or a stop hit in the high line, but turning a blind eye to any scuffles of our own we might engage in in the cloakroom or under the showers. We were quite sure that this retired cavalry officer, unmarried and fashioned from his grizzled head downward entirely of muscle and sinew, was really one of us, but he never gave us so much as a glimpse of what lay behind his fencing jacket and wire mask. When one of our number once hinted at having enjoyed his favors he met with such contemptuous disbelief that he abandoned the subject, but the attempt marked him in our eyes in a way that he never quite lived down. For there were among the Foils some things that simply were not done. No written law defined them, but we could tell them with an infallible instinct and the sanctions we imposed were strict and inflexible.

Because I was the youngest and the newest recruit, they called me Fleurette, a name I answered to quite readily, even from other boys who used it without knowing what it meant To begin with I had been considered rather “unappetizing” because I was so skinny, but Raphael—whose word was law where matters of sex were concerned—had rehabilitated me by praising my penis, which at that time was relatively long and chubby. Its silky softness—he said—was in contrast to my skinny thighs and meager belly, stretched like a canvas across my jutting hip bones. “Like a bunch of juicy grapes hanging on a burnt-out bit of trellis,” he declared rhapsodically, in a way that both flattered and made me laugh. I must admit that to these subtle charms I added a talent for sucking hard and thoroughly which derived from a liking I have always had for seminal fluid.

Thomas had the same liking, more than any of us, although he rarely satisfied it in our direct fashion by a straightforward head-to-tail. In fact, he did nothing like anyone else, but brought to everything a breadth, a loftiness which was essentially religious. Religion was the natural element in which he lived and breathed and had his being. For example, I could quote the kind of ecstatic trance he would fall into every morning in the dormitory as we made our beds before going down to chapel. The rule was that we had to give our sheets a shake before making up the beds. This simple action, performed simultaneously by forty boys, shook out the crust of dried sperm from the sheets and filled the air with a seminal dust. This vernal aerosol got into our eyes, noses, and lungs, so that we were impregnating one another as if by a pollen-bearing breeze. Most of the boarders did not even notice the subtle insemination. It was only to the Foils it gave a gay, priapic delight that would prolong the adolescents’ early-morning erections. Thomas was deeply stirred by it. The reason being that, lacking the capacity to distinguish between sacred and profane, he had an intense awareness of the etymological unity of the two words “spirit” and “wind.”

This vernal ecstasy, compounded of air and sunshine, was the luminous side of Thomas’ spiritual life. But his burning eyes, always darkly circled, his tormented features, his brittle, flimsy body, said clearly enough to anyone willing to hear that he had also a darker side to contend with, one which he rarely overcame. This shadowy passion I witnessed only once, but the circumstances were unforgettable. It was one winter’s evening. I had asked permission to go to the chapel to fetch a book I had left in my stall. I was just about to dash out again, awed by the dimly lighted spaces of the vaulted roof and by the dreadful echoes they gave back to every little noise I made, when I heard sobs coming apparently out of the ground. And indeed someone was crying underground: the sound was coming through a narrow opening at the back of the choir which led by way of twisting stairs down to the chapel crypt. I was more dead than alive and all the more terrified because—as I knew perfectly well— there was nothing to stop me from going down there to see what was happening below.

So I went. The crypt—as far as I could see by the flickering, blood red light of a single lamp—was a jumble of desks, chairs, candlesticks, prie-dieus, lecterns, and banners of all sorts, a whole assortment of religious odds and ends, God’s lumber piled up in an odor of mildew and stale incense.