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Sicknesses of the soul and their external expressions have always been fodder for divine contemplation.
Saints have sweated milk and honey. They say David literally had a tongue of silver, which turned to lead in the Bathsheba incident. In Luke, St. Peter spat three nails at the denial of Christ. There was St. Lucia, whose eyes (around the 15th century) came out on ropes of gold, but whose neck was forever cut with the sword to spill myrrh. St. Dympha, who felt gravity heavier than anyone else, who could not be lifted and carried by ten men. St. Teresa of Ávila, who was pierced by the angel and caused reciprocal ecstasies at a touch. St. Anthony, whose ennui manifested as "a thin foulness of the skin," which scholars take to mean a slime. St. Hildegaard Von Bingen, whose music is still better known than the fact that her tears turned to lilies and jasmine as they fell.
Of course, it's not a sign of sainthood, any more than it's a sign of demonic influence, insists Cardinal Bellini. They are a church but they are also modern people. It's an illness like any other—its causes can be identified and treated, like any other disease. Why, he had a textbook case of horticultural flora-hemoptysis a year and a half ago, and a shot or two and a little lie down was all he needed to be cured.
It's flashy, sure, but it's not God-given. It's not a miracle of any kind. There's a distinction that should be made between hanahaki, and miracles, and those who are miraculous but who also happen to have hanahaki. He has written several monographs on the subject.
(He is not miraculous, for example, for coughing up slugs when he thinks too long about Cardinal Tedesco! Poor little awful things, like phlegm, low and lost and foul when they're exposed and far from the green safety of the shade. They are sludge, they are shame, and they are dense, too—all muscle and slime, just strong enough to crawl, just wretched enough to have to.
Aldo hates them, although he knows it's not their fault, just as he hates the occasional, splendid, richly fragrant peony blossoms he hacks up.
Those are just mangled newsprint, some kind of dirty tissue of a thing. Don't worry about it. It's nothing.)
Tedesco's repressed resentment causes him to breathe out smoke.
They hanged witches for that kind of thing, back in the day. There are so many paintings of the Last Judgement with smoking men in them, just like him. Salome had that hatred in her, and it rose from her skin when the Baptist's head was given to her; Saul puffed smoke like a bull in his worst moments.
The JUUL is a prop, to make it less obvious that he’s got a disease. He feels a burst coming and takes a hit and breathes out the stifled resentment, the rage. It doesn’t look good for a holy man to be constantly smoking from no visible source! He has not sought a cure or a vaccine or any kind of medical intervention. God, he is sure, will heal him of it in due course. He only needs to do God's will, return this church to its rightful role, and all his anger will vanish like mist at noon. He is only angry at the infidels, at the liberals, at the weakness of this age—and the irony is not lost on him, how it has turned him into a living repetition of witches, the demonic, the traditional iconography of the sinner with no grace in his heart.
But that's just the disease. It means nothing. The optics are bad, that is all. He's well on his way to a cure.
The performance is working, right up until he gives himself away. He lost his composure and forgot his prop in the auditorium—not that one little pen would have hidden the way he was breathing a storm of smog, the fury finally burning out of him: clear, at last, just how much anger and loathing he had buried deep.
Cardinal Tedesco turns the air around him dark and heavy. His smoke will never be white. All that sound and fury signify something unholy about him. After the conclave he lives on, knowing everyone else knows there is some terrible, infernal engine burning inside of him.
Cardinal Adeyemi has never understood all the fuss and the drama. His voice is deep and rich and clear as a bell, and it has never failed him. Never once.
But isn't as loud a voice, afterwards. He thinks this is natural, and appropriate: a subconscious softening to demonstrate his newfound humility.
It never occurs to him to wonder if all that time, he was announcing something—or perhaps speaking over something, hiding a persistent, 30-year whisper he only seemed to hear at night.
For days, Cardinal Tremblay hides a guilty conscience that has him coughing up silver coins, just like the ones Judas choked on. He opens his mouth to deny Cardinal Lawrence's accusations and a shower of silver comes spilling out of him, clinking cold on the marble floor. As they elect Benítez, he must sit with his mouth open to let the coins drop out, or he'll choke, too.
Thomas Lawrence coughs out thorns. He is a sufferer of Atheist's Sickness, as Christ himself was in the Nona Ora. There is no known cure, but usually one dies of something else, in the meanwhile. It is an affliction that takes its time.
What does it mean for the Church, some ask, that he's considered a candidate at all, when he bears the marks of unbelief?
It has been like this for three years. At first it was humiliating, and now it is something much worse, precisely because it is so unremarkable. There goes poor old Cardinal Lawrence, whose throat and mouth are always raw from the thorns, and whose Monsignor O'Malley is often nearby with a handkerchief, to catch the trickle of blood that often escapes his lips without him noticing.
Poor, grey eminence: he is always bleeding, he is always pierced and tasting his own blood; it is always dribbling down the back of his throat. It is a cruel disease, Atheist's Sickness, because the harshest cases are always held by those who once had the deepest faith. He is dying for the devotion that grew bitter inside him.
Obviously, this is the man Vincent Benítez is voting to be Pope. It is a very striking sight, that burst of rich crimson between his lips and against the pallor of his skin. God forgive him, Vincent likes the rasp in Cardinal Lawrence's resonant voice, and the little scars in and around his mouth. How striking is his homily, when it comes from that mouth and in that voice, when it comes with the frequent pauses where Lawrence must stop speaking to cough and wince.
Most of all, he likes that Cardinal Lawrence speaks for uncertainty while he himself is reliable and welcoming—he likes that Cardinal Lawrence is so brave, turning the weakness of his body into an argument for the opening of the spirit. Lawrence calls for reconsidering, for failure and remorse and trying again and again, and he lives for that principle so plainly, in a wash of his own blood. Cardinal Lawrence's faith may be faltering and he might suffer for it, but he has not left the Church.
This is a man who knows what it is to suffer for God, for the absence of God. If he has lost his faith, he is still faithful. He is not dramatic, he is not trying to make a point. He only accepts what God, or what fate, or someone gives him: the great and yawning absence. He feels it, and he does not hide it. He speaks honestly to his brothers and to the whole world about it. Vincent couldn't vote for anyone else.
But after the conversation in the Room of Tears, Thomas lurches and chokes and coughs the whole thing up.
It's a hateful, horrible thing, and it hurts as it comes out—impossibly huge, brittle and yet so strong. Dead leaves like holly, with points that sting, twisted roots, gnarled limbs. It's vile, and it turns his stomach to think of how it lived inside him, fed off of him, cruel and glutted on his despair. It is an unspeakably ugly tangle on the inlaid marble floor, lying there smeared in his blood and spit and bile.
But the air that rakes into his lungs is so clean. There is no pain, just fresh air, roaring fast into him, carrying into him a sense of newness, fullness—making him expand, feeling how much space is inside him. He's not cramped inside his own skin, anymore. Nothing is pulling him down from within, pulling him to hunch over, to be the old and broken man he has been, he is. His head turns light with how much air he can take in, as if he's been dropped in an instant from the tallest peak down to sea level, with nothing but soft breezes and luscious, rich oxygen flooding into him.
When he can see again, a turtle is eating it. Munching on the leaves and branches like they are tender and tasty.
And when he picks the turtle up, it just holds the illness in its little jaws, and Thomas can't bring himself to touch it long enough to take it away, so...
He walks the turtle and his illness out to the pond, and when he dips them in the water the other turtles come out. They eat it all up. All that pain and all that loneliness that was devouring him, itself devoured in an instant by these little, blameless, holy fools. Gone forever, to feed their bellies, like it never happened.
But it has happened. He's liberated. He needed a shepherd, and his shepherd has come and found him in the wilderness, and brought him safely home.
Vincent Benítez suffered through a very dark time, after he learned about himself. It was a great shock and it spurred an identity crisis, a crisis of faith of his own.
He never coughed anything up. Not thorns, not smoke, not anything. No signs that anything was wrong.
Later, he knows why: because nothing was wrong.