After tutoring in the mornings, our afternoons were to be dedicated to catechism classes. Our First Holy Communion was to be a big social affair at the end of the summer when his parents returned from New York.
The opening of the novel introduces the main characters through the narration of one of them. Andrea begins by talking about her best friend Victor Escalante. They will be bound together throughout the narrative, inseparable and forever tied to each other for better and for worse. The Holy Communion is mentioned here for the first time and foreshadows its significance, though in a way that is impossible to imagine at this point with so little information on hand.
The loft was dusty, full of cobwebs, but that didn't matter. From then on, we would lie on the floor and spy on people for hours. We thrilled to the dirty words of the men in the bar. We were drunk with power. We watched Armida and learned her secrets.
Andrea and Durcal, the Holy Communion still off in the distant future, have discovered a treasure: stairs leading to a loft over a locally owned mom and pop store operated by a shady husband and wife who aren’t exactly the mom and pop sort. The secret hiding place at first merely affords the thrill of voyeurism—this is the power which intoxicates. Watching others while they remain unaware of being watched. It is such a thrill that entire government organizations exist just to fulfill that craving for power. And just like with spies around the world, eventually the point comes when mere watching no longer gives the high it once did and inevitably the move must be made from inactive non-involvement to active involvement. Armida’s secrets will prove to be the fuel that fires that engine.
By day I let myself be coddled and protected by her, and then the nights would come and with them came fear and guilt, and I would wake up in the darkness and feel a terrible, familiar weight on my chest. It was so definite, so solid, that I moved my hands across my chest to verify that no rock was pressing down upon my heart.
Ultimately, this novel is about guilt. Holy Communion is about sin and confession and getting rid of that weight of guilt. The acceptance of the wafer and wine is inextricably tied to confession to sins and receiving salving for that confession. The proverbial wisdom that confession is good for the soul is what’s really going on here and one needed not be Christian or even religious to recognize this fundamental element of human psychology. It is, in fact, so undeniably a construct of human psychology that the entire judicial system depends upon it to a degree. Just as much—if not more—effort sometimes goes into trying to get a suspect to confess as goes into an investigation to find evidence proving guilt to the point that no confession is needed. That shift from voyeuristic inaction to action results in consequences that reach far into the future for both Andrew and Victor. And it will be—as the title indicates—the act of confession that marks the line of demarcation between the two partners-in-crime.
