Just your average 68-year-old college freshman studying abroad.
There is a legend of a man who walks the streets here with no companion but the sins on his soul. He is a foreigner welcomed by all and treated with great dignity.
The legend tells of his search for a father confessor, a priest to hear his sins. But the man has a problem.
His resume of sins is disappointing, completely devoid of drama and imagination. He didn’t rob from the rich to pay the poor. He didn’t lie to save the life of a child. If he were to write a memoir, which he most certainly will not, only small sins of omissions would be confessed.
His deepest dread is wasting the time of a confessor and being dismissed as lightly as a schoolboy. Three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys would be the cruelest penance of all.
He goes from parish to parish to find a priest who doesn’t understand one word of his language. In all of Barcelona is there such a man of God?
One day at a grand boulevard, an elderly priest begins to step out in front of an onrushing autobus. Our man grabs his arm and saves the priest’s life. Obviously the old cleric has lost his hearing.
They retire to wine and companionship. When two bottles have been emptied the man asks the priest — deaf, unfamiliar with his language and now many sheets to the wind— if he will take his sins to God.
The priest is shocked at the cruelty of what he wrongly imagines the man has confessed. He orders the foreigner to sell all his possessions and follow the way of The Savior, an unusually harsh penance usually reserved for those facing the firing squad. No penance is more difficult to satisfy. But the man complies.
He had once overpaid his credit cards and for a short time was able to spend with abandon. Surely, he reasons, the Almighty is a munificent as Capital One. He wonders which of the Seven Sins he will enjoy committing most.
