City of Brick and Shadow

by Tim Wirkus

  Once, when the three of them were alone together, Claudemir had told the elders that he had never been unfaithful to Fátima with another woman, had never even considered it, but that he lusted after sleep with an ardent passion. In his daydreaming moments at work, it wasn’t his wife that occupied his mind, but the thought of his bed and the deathlike rest it brought him. If sleep assumed a human form, he said, he would take her on as a mistress without a second thought. As was often the case in these conversations, neither of the missionaries was quite sure what to say, so they told Bishop Claudemir that if there was anything they could do to help, they’d be happy to do it.

  At eight-fifty-five, Abelardo, Claudemir’s elderly second counselor, shuffled in and took his seat at the front of the room, removing the coat and scarf he wore in spite of the morning’s already considerable heat. The man survived on the verge of death, fighting off one illness after another. Various conflicting church records put Abelardo’s age at somewhere between eighty-five and a hundred-and-two years old.

  Based on his rambling conversations with the missionaries when he accompanied them on investigator visits or had them over to his house for lunch, Elder Schwartz knew that as a young man, Abelardo had hastily emigrated from his native land under conditions that he vaguely referred to as his European troubles, and had set out here in the New World on a series of misadventures that had ultimately left him living as an old man in a mildewed shoebox of a house in Vila Barbosa. By his own account, Abelardo had worked as a solitary rubber tapper in the depths of the jungle during the waning days of the rubber boom, had played a key role in a major government overthrow, and had later languished as a political prisoner under the military dictatorship because of that role. He had briefly owned a bakery, had founded a short-lived school for the blind, had worked several years in construction, and had done any number of odd jobs in the times in between. He had been married five times, twice to the same woman, and had fathered, to his knowledge, eighteen children, none of whom ever visited him.

  At one point several decades earlier, he had accumulated enough money to retire and had bought a small house at the base of a hill in a small town in the country. He had led a quiet life there, fishing in a nearby stream every morning and evening, and sleeping away the warm afternoons in a hammock stretched between two shady trees. Then, one day in the rainy season, a mudslide from the hill buried Abelardo’s house and all of his worldly possessions. He’d had a little bit of money left, and so he had moved to Vila Barbosa, a burgeoning slum at the time, because he knew he could live cheaply there and stretch his remaining resources as far as possible.

  Soon after moving, he had met a pair of missionaries who had told him a story about God appearing to a young farm boy and telling him to restore the true church to the earth. Abelardo had told the missionaries that he had seen enough crazy things in his life that the story seemed plausible to him. He had read the Book of Mormon, had prayed to God about their church, and had decided to be baptized, becoming one of the first members of the Vila Barbosa branch. In the intervening years, Abelardo had briefly served as branch president, managing in that small period of time to alienate several new converts with his stern interpretations of church doctrine and his propensity for calling individual members of the congregation to repentance over the pulpit every Sunday. Not long after his baptism, he had also married his current wife, Beatrice, a long-suffering woman now in her sixties who, not long after joining the church, had had a dream—whose provenance the missionaries privately questioned—that she needed to marry Abelardo.

  Beatrice came into the makeshift chapel a few moments after her husband, smiling at the missionaries and taking a seat next to Fátima. The missionaries knew far less about Beatrice than they did about her husband. When she talked about any period in the last twenty years of her life, it was always in terms of whatever illness Abelardo had been suffering at the time—the era of his edema, the time of the terrible shingles, or the age of the great pneumonia scare. In spite of his near-constant state of illness, the man seemed incapable of dying. At some point in every conversation the elders had with him, Abelardo shook his head and bemoaned the fact that with health like his, he couldn’t be much longer for this life. And yet he soldiered on, conquering—just barely—one illness after another, sapping the vitality from his attentive wife with each bout of chilblains, each flare-up of gout, each massive constipation. Whenever the missionaries asked Beatrice how she was doing, they received a detailed account of the state of Abelardo’s body.

  “But how are you doing, sister?” Elder Toronto would say, and she would always reply that she was persevering, that she couldn’t complain because there were others in this world far worse off than she was. No matter what questions Elder Toronto asked her, Beatrice never disclosed any information about her own interests, her own past, her own thoughts and desires. Her answers always veered inevitably back to the illnesses of Abelardo and the suffering endemic to the world at large.

  After she had arranged herself in her seat, Beatrice leaned over Fátima and asked the missionaries what was going on with Marco Aurélio. Elder Toronto said that they hadn’t seen him in a few days, that he must be busy. He didn’t mention the incident at the street market. Beatrice said it was strange because ever since he was baptized, Marco Aurélio had been almost a bother to her and Abelardo, stopping by their house at odd hours to chat, often keeping Abelardo up late into the night. She said she didn’t mind the company, it was the potential threat to Abelardo’s delicate health that worried her. Elder Schwartz watched Elder Toronto’s brow furrow in surprise.

  “That doesn’t sound like Marco Aurélio,” said Elder Toronto. “He never leaves his house.”

  “No,” said Beatrice, “he visits us nearly every night. At least until this past week.”

  “What does he talk about?”

  Beatrice shook her head and said they’d have to ask Abelardo.

  “Are you talking about that Marco Aurélio?” said Abelardo on hearing his name.

  “Yes,” said Beatrice, “I told them we’re concerned about him.”

  “He’s a shifty one,” said Abelardo.

  “Shifty?” said Elder Toronto. “How so?”

  He was leaning forward now, rapt.

  “He’s not shifty,” said Beatrice, shaking her finger at her husband. “He has a good heart.”

  “He’s up to something,” said Abelardo.

  “Why do you say he’s shifty?” said Elder Toronto.

  “He’s up to something,” said Abelardo.

  “Like what?” said Elder Toronto.

  Abelardo waved an angry hand at the elder.

  “It’s not something for missionaries to worry about,” he said, and folded his arms, the matter closed.

  Elder Toronto, who, truth be told, couldn’t stand Abelardo and disregarded every word that came out of the old man’s mouth, leaned over to Elder Schwartz and dropped his voice low. “Abelardo thinks everyone’s shifty. It’s probably nothing.”

  Elder Schwartz nodded, unsure.

  Throughout the previous exchange, Bishop Claudemir sat hunched over and snoring next to Abelardo. The clock on the wall now read five after nine. Fátima asked Abelardo to wake her husband up so they could get started. Abelardo elbowed Claudemir in the ribs, causing him to sit up with a snort, blinking his bloodshot eyes. He looked at the clock and at the congregation of eight that sat facing him.

  “All right, then,” he said, and stood up to the podium. “I’d like to welcome you all to sacrament meeting this morning. We’ll start by singing a hymn, whatever hymn Sister Beatrice has chosen for us to sing, and then we’ll have an opening prayer by one of the missionaries. It doesn’t matter which one.”

  He sat down and rubbed his eyes. Beatrice stood up, hymnal in hand, arm raised.

  “Hymn number one-ninety-six,” she said. “‘Nas Montanhas de Sião.’”

  She waited for everyone to open their hymnbooks and then they all began to sing, approxim
ating the tune as nearly as they could without accompaniment, Beatrice’s hand waving in four-four time in a vain attempt to get them to sing in something like unison. When they had finished singing, and Elder Schwartz had said the opening prayer, Bishop Claudemir stood up at the podium again, fully awake now.

  “There’s no ward business that I’m aware of, so we’ll now prepare for the sacrament by singing hymn number one-oh-six.”

  They all opened the hymnbooks they had just closed and, at Beatrice’s signal, began to sing again. Halfway through the first verse they heard the door at the back of the room open and someone step inside.

  “Excuse me.”

  Everyone but Abelardo stopped singing and turned around. The man standing at the back of the room was tall and thin. He wore a faded brown suit that was several inches too short for him in the legs and arms. He had a short, thick scar under each of his eyes.

  “I don’t mean to interrupt,” he said, “but is this where the Mormons meet?”

  Bishop Claudemir said that it was, and that the man was welcome to join them if he’d like. The man said that he appreciated the offer, but actually just wanted a word with the missionaries. Elder Schwartz and Elder Toronto looked at each other. They had never seen this man before. They stood up from their seats and the rest of the minuscule congregation rejoined the hymn with Abelardo, who hadn’t stopped singing through the exchange with the tall stranger.

  The missionaries walked to the back of the room where the tall, thin man stood waiting for them, his hands clasped politely in front of him. Elder Schwartz and Elder Toronto each introduced themselves. The man said it was nice to meet them but didn’t offer a name of his own. He smelled like fried food and cigarettes.

  “So you’re the missionaries?” he said.

  “That’s right,” said Elder Toronto.

  “You’re just kids,” said the man.

  “We’re old enough,” said Elder Toronto. “How can we help you?”

  The man in the brown suit turned so his back was to the front of the room.

  “Listen,” he said, his voice low, drawing the elders closer. “This isn’t the right time or place, but I didn’t know how else to get in touch with you. We need to discuss your friend Marco Aurélio.”

  “How do you know Marco Aurélio?” said Elder Toronto, his voice high with interest, a crack in his usual detached demeanor. He quickly composed himself. “Are you a friend of his?”

  “I can’t talk now,” said the man. He reached into the pocket of his faded brown suit coat and pulled out a small black notebook and a pen. He opened the notebook and wrote something down. He tore out the paper and handed it to Elder Toronto.

  “We can talk at eight o’clock tonight at this address,” he said.

  The man replaced the notebook in his jacket pocket, lifted a hand in farewell to Bishop Claudemir, who had been watching the whole conversation, and slipped out the door.

  After sacrament meeting, Bishop Claudemir pulled the missionaries aside and asked what the tall, thin man had wanted.

  “He said he just had a few questions about the church and wanted us to come by later,” said Elder Toronto.

  Elder Toronto was not in the habit of lying. Elder Schwartz, who had been picking at a thread in his tie, looked up at his companion in surprise. If Bishop Claudemir had seen the expression on his face, the game would have been up. But Claudemir didn’t notice, as Elder Schwartz, in his incompetent silence, remained essentially invisible to the members of the ward.

  “Really?” said Bishop Claudemir.

  “Yeah,” said Elder Toronto, “which is great because we could definitely use some new investigators right now.”

  Bishop Claudemir nodded, squinting his bloodshot eyes.

  “Is that all he wanted?” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Elder Toronto, “as far as I could tell.”

  Bishop Claudemir rubbed his eyes. He told the elders that he appreciated all the work that they did—he could tell that they really cared about the ward here and wanted things to go well.

  “Absolutely,” said Elder Toronto.

  Bishop Claudemir looked the two missionaries in the eyes.

  “Elders,” he said. “You two are the most reliable missionaries this area has had in a while. Please don’t do anything that we’ll all be sorry about later.”

  He clapped Elder Toronto on the shoulder and the three of them crossed the room to take their seats in the Sunday school class that Beatrice had already, at Abelardo’s insistence, begun to teach.

  CHAPTER 3

  The elders couldn’t find the tall, thin man’s address anywhere on their map. Of course, many addresses in Vila Barbosa couldn’t be found on their map. The government cartographer who had designed it had chosen to represent the neighborhood’s favelas—with their guerrilla architecture, their makeshift dirt roads, their unofficial addresses—as empty patches of green, giving the false impression that Vila Barbosa consisted of a few small clusters of neatly ordered streets surrounded by acres of green, rolling hills, a pastoral fantasy that glossed over the crowded, tangled reality of the neighborhood’s physical space. Over the years, various missionaries had attempted to remedy this incongruity, drawing the streets they traveled and the houses they visited onto the map’s green areas. However, the favelas had such a dramatic tendency to mutate, even from one month to the next, that the missionaries’ ongoing cartographic efforts were continually rendered irrelevant.

  So Elder Toronto and Elder Schwartz did what they always did when they couldn’t find an address: They asked at every bar or padaria that they passed. Unfortunately, this, too, proved fruitless; it seemed that nobody had heard of the street where they were supposed to rendezvous with the man in the brown suit.

  “What time is it?” asked Elder Toronto as they walked down the wildly uneven sidewalk, unsure of where to go. The sun was low on the horizon, the sky a burnt orange over the red-brick sprawl of the city.

  “My watch was stolen, remember?”

  Elder Toronto said he had forgotten. The previous week they had been mugged an unprecedented three times in four days. After the first two muggers had deprived them of, respectively, their dummy wallets—containing just enough cash to satisfy a mugger—and their actual wallets—containing, in addition to some cash, their government-issued identification papers—the third mugger had found a greatly diminished profit to be had from his two intended targets. Elder Toronto had apologized for their lack of cash and had offered up Elder Schwartz’s watch as compensation—it wasn’t a new watch, or even a very good one, but it did keep very accurate time. After making sure that their pockets and their bags truly contained no cash, the mugger had settled for Elder Schwartz’s watch and, almost as an afterthought, his tie, before running off down a nearby alleyway.

  “It’s probably close to eight,” said Elder Schwartz. “I don’t think we’re going to make it.”

  He hoped that Elder Toronto would nod his head in response, throw away the address, and choose a nearby street where they could knock a few doors until it was time to call it a day. All Elder Schwartz wanted out of his mission experience, out of life, really, was to keep his head above water; he didn’t want any trouble, and this business with the man in the brown suit seemed certain to bring just that.

  “No,” said Elder Toronto, “we’re going to make it.”

  If it had been a week earlier, with his senior companion in much different spirits, there might have been a ghost of a hope of Elder Toronto giving up on the venture.

  Although his fellow missionaries had told Elder Schwartz plenty about his current companion’s odd and frustrating behaviors, no one had warned him of the dramatic, unexpected shifts in mood. Much of the time, Elder Toronto behaved more-or-less exactly as might be expected. If Elder Schwartz ever made even a glimmer of an assertion, Elder Toronto latched onto it, pointing out its flaws and demanding that his junior companion defend the idea, thus providing further argumentative fodder. If Elder Schwartz refused
to play along, Elder Toronto subjected him instead to a pedantic, over-detailed lecture on whatever topic came to mind: the importance of dedicated language study, the merits of a robust space program, the pitfalls and advantages of continental philosophy.

  In these moods, Elder Toronto attacked missionary work with a similar vigor. He knocked on door after door after door with a constant, assured energy, and on the rare occasion when somebody invited them inside, the lessons he taught effervesced with perfectly crafted bubbles of basic Mormon doctrine.

  Then, each evening, Elder Toronto addressed, in a concise and stinging summary, any flaws in Elder Schwartz’s speech, behavior, or person that had been left unexamined throughout the day.

  All this behavior was to be expected, but what surprised Elder Schwartz was his companion’s occasional tendency to, apropos of nothing, shut down, completely disengaging from the world around him. Elder Toronto might spend hours or even days in one of these dark, reserved moods. He spoke only when necessary, responding to Elder Schwartz’s questions with halfhearted monosyllables. His junior companion could make whatever ridiculous assertion came to mind, the more outrageous the better, and Elder Toronto wouldn’t even bat an eye. He allowed Elder Schwartz—disastrously—to teach all of the lessons, to the complete bafflement of their investigators. During these times, Elder Toronto went to bed early and got up late, eating only sporadically. As they walked to appointments or knocked on doors, he always lagged a step or two behind Elder Schwartz.

  Then, just as suddenly as it had arrived, the mood would pass, instantly transforming Elder Toronto back into his energetic, condescending self. Whenever Elder Schwartz broached the subject of these drastic shifts, asking what caused them or what ended them, Elder Toronto refused to acknowledge that his mood was anything but constant and predictable.

  The past twelve days had brought an especially intense bout of this chilly disengagement, and Elder Schwartz had begun to worry. Even the previous week’s muggings had left Elder Toronto gloomily unruffled. But the visit of the man in the brown suit had flipped a switch. Elder Schwartz could see the gears picking up speed, his companion reanimating at the prospect of this meeting. He wasn’t going to let it go.