I can still see the intensity in the doctor’s face. “These suicidal impulses. Did you ever discuss them with anybody?”
“Yes.”
He sat, waiting.
“Years later. With a friend. A woman friend.”
And then I asked Jacinta directly: “When will you come back? I have learned that it is the only way to the truth. A straight line. I want to know when you will come back from Aguilares. I want you to tell me honestly.”
She studied my face for a long time, the eyes exploring. “I will tell you honestly. I don’t know.”
“Do you want to come back?”
“I want to be here more than I want anything. But there are other factors. There is work to do.”
“I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
She smiled softly, placed her palm on my cheek. “They sent poor Alfonso here so nothing would happen to him.”
“If you come back . . . I promise that I will become whatever I must become.”
“You must become the man Alfonso saw in you. And that man is, for now, a priest.” She placed her hand on my forehead to read my thoughts. The way the blind read Braille. “Your dreams rise to my fingertips. And I am not among them.”
“I need you.”
She shook her head.
“I’m afraid.”
She moved the fingers to my lips. “You have everything you need already. There is nothing to be afraid of.” She smiled.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“That we will never meet again.”
“But we will. I’ll make sure you’ll always be able to contact me. I promise.”
“Okay,” she said. “You must stay safe to keep the promise.”
“But you’ve never tried to stay in touch?”
Shaw had been busily taking notes, but at this point he was just listening, watching me intently.
“I heard from her once.”
“After that?”
“Nothing.”
“And was the death of your friend . . . the priest . . . was that officially resolved?”
“It was.”
He studied me, waiting for more, then finally looked back down at the file. “Let’s talk some more about your father.”
“My father?”
“Don’t you see the connection?”
“Connection?”
“Your father and the young woman. Your priesthood. They occupy the same place in your memory.”
“Place? What place?”
“Despair neutralized by hope,” he said.
Dear Pelirrojo:
I hope this letter finds you well and that you will not be surprised to discover that I am still in El Salvador. I have been here for three weeks and plan to stay. I am writing to reassure you . . . that I am fine, and to remind you of your promise to be strong.
Effie came to see me unannounced halfway through my third week. I was reading in my room when there was a gentle knock on my door.
“You have a visitor.”
She wanted to take a walk, so I led her toward the look-off, where Jude and I would sit and contemplate the impenetrable escarpment.
“My God,” she said. “It’s almost worth provoking a crisis to be able to enjoy a little bit of this.”
We just sat in silence for a while. Then I told her as much as I could remember of what Jude told me about the geology of the massive ridge. And then I told her a little bit about Jude.
Abruptly she said: “I couldn’t believe it when I heard you were here.”
“Who told you?”
“Sextus.”
“How much did he tell you?”
“Just that he thought you were having some kind of breakdown.”
“He should talk.”
“I know,” she said. Then slipped back into her thoughtful privacy. Abruptly again: “Where do you think it started?”
“I don’t know. There’s a shrink here who thinks it originates with our parents.”
“Very original.”
“A fantasy mother. A tragic father. Archetypes, he calls them.”
“I went to a shrink once,” she said.
“I didn’t know.”
“After I broke up with Sextus the first time. I figured it was time to look for some new answers.”
“New answers?”
“The old ones weren’t working for me anymore. They basically all started with two depressing words: ‘Poor me.’”
Without thinking, I put my arm over her shoulders and drew her close to me. She said nothing and we just sat like that, silently watching the sun and the escarpment as they drew closer together.
“What else did Sextus have to say?” I asked after a long pause.
She sighed deeply. “If anybody needs therapy, it’s poor Sextus.”
After another silence I asked: “So what did you tell your shrink about our father?”
“I told him how guilty I felt. For how I despised him.”
Before she left, she held my hand for what seemed like an unusually long time. “I realized in the end what our father’s problem really was . . . and I’m not talking about the war. He had a bigger problem than that.”
“Oh?”
“Wondering who he was. Something as simple as not knowing who his grandparents really were. Not knowing who his father and his mother really were. Just having the name, without the substance or the history. Abandoned in time. Can’t you see that?”
I laughed. “When did you learn all this stuff?”
“I’ve always known the basics, just like you. I never really put it all together until the day I spoke with old Peggy in Hawthorne, last year. You remember?”
“I remember.”
“Did you know that Daddy’s mother tried to leave him with her parents in Hawthorne?”
“You told me. Who was it you referred to? Hester something.”
She smiled. “It must be hard to handle that kind of rejection.”
“Does that explain the anger?”
“Partly, I suppose.”
“And it’s why you’ve forgiven him?”
She gave my hand a rough little shake before letting it go. “No. I forgave him long before I knew that.”
Danny is contemplating the ceiling, arms folded. He seems relaxed.
“I don’t suppose . . . doing away with yourself would ever enter the mind of a priest,” he said. And then laughed at the absurdity.
“I’m sure it’s happened,” I said.
“I doubt that.”
“What makes you so confident?”
“It couldn’t happen. Not with the Holy Ghost looking after you.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said.
On a Saturday morning at gym, Jude whispered excitedly: “I’ve got a pass! Probably because of what we are. They gave me a pass. We can go out for the afternoon. We’ll take my car.”
“Where are we going?” I said, feeling the sudden surge of childish anticipation.
“There’s a place I want to show you. It’s on the escarpment. Rattlesnake Point, it’s called.”
“Sounds inviting.”
“We’ll stop somewhere for lunch.”
We drove in silence, eastward, for almost an hour. In the distance I could see a pinkish haze hanging over the metropolis.
“Imagine living in Toronto, under that,” Jude said, pointing.
“I suppose we could just keep going,” I said.
“We could. Just make tracks for the coast, eh? Imagine what it would be like down there now. Snow to your knees still, I’d bet. That’s what I don’t miss. The long winters.”
He turned onto a smaller road that disappeared in trees, up the side of what seemed to be a low mountain.
“We’re actually going into the escarpment,” Jude said. “You should see this place on a nice fall day. The colours . . . it’s like fire in all directions. Then it would be crowded with sightseers. It won’t be too crowded this time of year.”
Ther
e were only a few people there that day, older couples with dogs, a few solitary hikers. Taut ropes, attached to trees, disappeared over the edge of a high cliff.
“Rock climbers,” Jude explained. “They practise here.” He pointed toward Bronte Creek and described the remnants of an ancient Indian village nearby. “A nice brisk two-hour walk. We’ll come back to do that some other time.” Two large birds hovered in the pale blue sky. “Turkey buzzards,” he said happily.
“They look like hawks or eagles,” I said.
“No. Just vultures. Scavengers like the others . . . but not as nicely named.” He was smiling. “It’s all in the name, isn’t it? If you called an eagle something else . . . he wouldn’t be an eagle, would he?”
I sat down on a large rock, not far from the precipice.
“You know the eagle’s secret?” he said. “He never lets us see him scavenging. You only see him soaring. Or sitting high up, somewhere out of reach. Kind of superior. He’s very discreet about the mundane, the mortal. Like the priesthood used to be. Out of reach. It’s easier to mythologize that way, priesthood and eaglehood both.”
We were silent for a moment, watching the floating birds.
He stood and stretched. “Nature calls. I know there’s a parking lot with a toilet not far from here.”
“I’m just going to stay here for a moment,” I said.
There was a long silence then, broken only by the gentle sighing of the breeze. In the distance I could see a fenceline, a large meadow in the foreground, trees following the contours of the land, disappearing over a rise, leaving only the sky.
I wondered if Brendan Bell had ever visited this place. I doubted it. He didn’t strike me as the outdoor type. But I now knew that Father Roddie had occupied that landscape. Orangeville was over there somewhere. Did he marvel at that grandeur, and his luck?
I heard a voice, realizing that it was someone on a rope, dangling below me on the face of the cliff. I stood up and walked toward the edge, tried to peer over. But I saw only the jagged rocks below.
I felt a creeping chill. Then heard the voice again. It seemed to be from the rope. The words were indistinct. Birth is only the beginning of the journey. Life is but a passageway. Death is just the end of the beginning. I felt the surge of fear and grief. Don’t think, the voice seemed to say. Believe in the Resurrection. Follow your faith. The fear is really only longing. The longing to be truly free. Eternity awaits you. Eternal freedom. There is nothing here. You know that now.
But Jacinta? I promised.
Jacinta was a lie, a fantasy.
There is no future. The future is an illusion. There is only now.
I was no longer conscious of the edge, or of the rocks below. Only of the soft meadow and the endless sky. I was suspended on a current of ecstasy, already airborne. Time fused, past, present, future merged, meadow and horizon—one continuum. I was on the threshold of the absolute.
Act. Don’t think. You’re almost there. I took a deep breath. Closed my eyes.
Jude’s hand was gentle on my shoulder. “It’s something I could never do,” he said, peering past me. “This rock climbing . . . you’d have to have a death wish. Dopes on ropes, I call them.”
The voice was soft, the chuckle a low, insinuating rumble in his throat, his fingers now firm, digging into the cloth of my jacket, drawing me back, away from the ledge, toward him.
“You have to be careful near the edge,” he said. “The overhang is treacherous in places.”
I turned my head toward his voice and he was staring off dreamily, past me into the distance.
Finally, Danny cleared his throat and slowly said: “But you don’t think . . . if your friend hadn’t come along?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You’d never expect that somebody in your line of work ...”
And I heard myself ask: “What is my line of work? What do you think my line of work should be?”
The expression on his face was the look of a child trying to understand abandonment.
So I said: “Danny . . . let me tell you what I think a priest should be. I think a priest should, first of all, be human.”
I kept it brief. I had a friend once in a place called Honduras. An exemplary priest, perhaps the only one I’ve ever known. Danny listened, face solemn, until I finished, then just sat for a long, still moment.
Around the silence there was wind. He coughed briefly, cleared his throat.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “That’s some story.”
The clock ticked.
“I guess a fella never really knows what people have to put up with.” He shook his shaggy head then stood. “Excuse me for a minute,” he said. And shuffled down the hallway.
When he came back, he asked: “So who do you think killed the poor fellow? The priest. Your friend.”
“In a way,” I said, “I did.”
They’d been gone, our dead Alfonso and Jacinta, for almost a week. Now the cops were back. Calero and a younger man. They were in uniform, and one of them had a weapon you rarely see in the hands of a policeman. It was a machine gun of some type, short and stubby, with an oversized ammunition clip protruding. He had his finger on the trigger out of habit. The third man was a civilian, a Canadian. From the embassy, he said.
“We have a potentially awkward situation,” he said.
“How well did you know this woman, Jacinta?” Calero asked.
“Well enough,” I said.
“Do you know where she is now?”
I shrugged. “In El Salvador, I presume. That was where she was going.”
“You know where?”
“Aguilares, I think. Wasn’t that where Father Alfonso came from?”
“Yes. But wasn’t she from Chalatenango? Some village in the mountains?”
“I don’t know.”
“Might she have gone there?”
“I have no idea, and why does it matter? She had nothing to do with Alfonso’s murder.”
“Perhaps,” Calero said. “But we would like to speak with her.”
The Canadian then spoke up. There was some uncertainty about the motive for the killing of Alfonso, he said. “The local authorities made certain assumptions at the time, relating to your friend’s political connections, some of his past activities. The motive seemed obvious. Maybe it was too obvious. They’re now leaning toward another theory. There are rumours, widespread gossip in the neighbourhood. Jacinta was having a relationship with a priest. It seems the rumours came to the attention of her estranged husband.”
Did I know that her husband is an army officer? Did I know that he is a major in the FAES?
I heard she might have had a husband once. But I never discussed it with her.
“I would hate to have him as my enemy, this Major Cienfuegos,” the younger policeman said.
And after silently consulting the other two, by way of knowing glances, Calero said: “There has been a significant development in our investigation of the tragic death of Padre Alfonso.
“We have arrested a soldier from her husband’s battalion. He was attempting to cross the border near Colomoncagua. Under interrogation, the soldier has suggested that the killing of the priest was motivated more by honour than by politics. He admits to the assassination. But we aren’t certain who he meant to kill. It was dark. His mission was to kill ‘a Red’ who was a priest. After inquiries locally, he assumed the target was Padre Alfonso, a well-known supporter of the Communists.
“But we understand you’re known here as Padre Pelirrojo . . . Your hair, I presume?”
“They call me that.”
“We have to consider the possibility that he got . . . the wrong Red. Can you be of help in that regard?”
“Hardly,” I said stiffly.
“Yes,” Calero said, studying his hands. “Of course.”
“We don’t propose to take a chance,” the Canadian diplomat interrupted sourly. “We’ve made our own inquiries. We’ve been in touch with your b
ishop and he agrees. Perceptions can mean life or death in this part of the world.”
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