The Sparrow s-1

by Mary Doria Russel

  Looking from face to face, he watched comprehension working its way into their minds. What could any of them say? He almost laughed. "Can you guess what I thought just before I was used the first time?" he asked them as he began to pace. "This is rich. This is very funny! You see, I was scared but I didn't understand what was going on. I never imagined—who could have imagined such a thing? I am in God's hands, I thought. I loved God and I trusted in His love. Amusing, isn't it? I laid down all my defenses. I had nothing between me and what happened but the love of God. And I was raped. I was naked before God and I was raped."

  The agitated pacing halted as he heard his own words, his voice almost normal until the end, when it fell away into uncomprehending grief, when he knew at last his own devastation fully. But he did not die, and when he could move again, and breathe once more, he looked at Vincenzo Giuliani, who said nothing, who met his eyes and would not look away.

  "Tell us." Two words. It was, Vincenzo Giuliani thought, the hardest thing he had ever done.

  "You want more?" Sandoz asked, incredulous. Then he was moving again, unable to keep still or silent a moment longer. "I can provide endless detail," he offered, theatrically expansive, merciless now. "It went on for—I don't know how long. Months. It seemed like eternity. He shared me with his friends. I became rather fashionable. A number of exquisite individuals came to use me. It was a form of connoisseurship, I think. Sometimes," he said, stopping and looking at each of them, hating them for their witness, "sometimes, there was an audience."

  John Candotti closed his eyes and turned his head away, and Edward Behr wept silently.

  "Distressing, isn't it. It gets worse," he assured them with savage cheer, moving blindly. "Extemporaneous poetry was recited. Songs were written, describing the experience. And the concerts were broadcast, of course, just like the songs we heard—is Arecibo still collecting the songs? You must have heard some of the ones about me by now." Not prayer. Christ! Not prayer—pornography. "They were very beautiful," he admitted, scrupulously accurate. "I was required to listen, although I was perhaps inadequately appreciative of the artistry."

  He looked at them one by one, each of them pale and speechless. "Have you heard enough? How about this: the smell of my fear and my blood excited them. Do you want more? Would you like to know precisely how dark the night of the soul can get?" he asked, goading them now. "There was a moment when it occurred to me to wonder if bestiality is a sin for the beast, for that was certainly my role in the festivities."

  Voelker suddenly moved to the door. "Does it make you want to vomit?" Sandoz asked with thin solicitude, watching as Voelker left the room. "Don't be ashamed," he called. "It happens to me all the time."

  Sandoz spun back to face the rest of them. "He wanted it to be my fault somehow," he said informatively, looking at each of them, eyes lingering on Candotti's. "He's not a bad guy, John. It's human nature. He wanted it to be some mistake I made that he wouldn't have made, some flaw in me he didn't share, so he could believe it wouldn't have happened to him. But it wasn't my fault. It was either blind, dumb, stupid luck from start to finish, in which case, we are all in the wrong business, gentlemen, or it was a God I cannot worship."

  He waited, shaking, daring them to speak. "No questions? No argument? No comfort for the afflicted?" he asked with acrid gaiety. "I warned you. I told you that you didn't want to know. Now it's in your minds. Now you have to live with knowing. But it was my body. It was my blood," he said, choking with fury. "And it was my love."

  He stopped suddenly then and turned away from them at last. No one moved, and they listened to the ragged breathing stop and hold and then go on in defiance. "John stays," he said finally. "Everyone else: get out."

  Trembling, he faced John Candotti, waiting for the room to clear, Giuliani gracefully sidestepping the wreckage on the floor, Brother Ed­ward hesitating by the door, waiting for Felipe Reyes, white-lipped, to pass, but leaving finally and pulling the door shut with a quiet click. John wanted more than anything to look away, to leave with the others, but he knew why he was there and so he stayed and tried to be ready for what he had to hear next.

  When they were alone, Sandoz began again to pace and talk, the soft awful words pouring out as he moved sightlessly from place to place in the room.

  "After a while, the novelty wore off and it was mostly the guards who came. By that time they were keeping me in a little stone-walled room without lights. I was alone and it was very quiet, and all I could hear was my own breathing and the blood ringing in my ears. Then the door would open and I would see a flare of light beyond it." He paused then, seeing it, no longer able to tell how much was real and how much was dream turned nightmare. "I never knew if they were bringing food or if—if…They kept me isolated because the screaming disturbed the others. My colleagues. The ones in the drawing you saw, back in Rome, do you remember? Someone from the harem must have drawn it. I found it in with my food one day. You can't imagine what that meant to me. God left me, but someone remembered where I was."

  He stopped then and looked directly at John Candotti, who stood paralyzed, a bird caught by the cobra's gaze.

  "I decided finally that I would kill the next person to come through the door, the next one who…touched me." And then he was pacing again, the hands rising and falling as he tried to explain, to make John understand. "I—There was nowhere to escape to. But I thought, If I'm too dangerous, they'll leave me alone. They'll kill me. I thought, The next time someone comes in here, one of us is going to die, I don't care which. But that was a lie. Because I did care. They used me hard, John. They used me hard. I wanted to die."

  He stopped again and looked helplessly at Candotti. "I wanted to die, but God took her instead. Why, John?"

  John wasn't following this. But it was a question he'd had to answer before, asked so often by survivors, and he was able to say, "Because, I suppose, souls are not interchangeable. You can't tell God: Take me instead."

  Sandoz wasn't listening. "I didn't sleep, for a long time. I waited for the door to open and I thought about how I could kill someone without my hands…" He was still standing, but he was no longer seeing John Candotti. "So I waited. And sometimes I would fall asleep for a few minutes, I think. But it was so dark. It was hard to tell when my eyes were open. And then I could hear footsteps outside my cell, and I got up and stood in the far corner, so I could use the momentum, and the door opened, and I saw a silhouette, and it was so strange. My eyes already knew but my body was so primed. It was like—the nerves fired without my telling them to. I crashed into her so hard…I could hear the bones in her chest snap, John."

  He tried desperately to take the force against his ruined hands, to cushion the shock, but before he could make his arms come up, they'd both cannoned into the stone wall and Askama was crushed by the impact.

  He found himself on the floor, supporting his weight on his knees and his forearms, with Askama crumpled beneath him, her face so close to his that he could hear her whisper. She smiled at him, blood bubbling in the corner of her mouth and seeping from a nostril. "You see, Meelo? Your family came for you. I found you for them."

  He heard the voices then, human voices, and looked up from Askama's corpse half-blinded by the brilliant light of second dawn pouring through the door. Saw their eyes, single-irised, as frightening to him now as his own eyes must have been to Askama when she first met him. Recognized the look of blank shock and then of revulsion.

  "My God, you killed her," the older man said. And then he fell silent, taking in the jeweled necklace, the naked body decorated with scented ribbons, the dried and bloody evidence of the priest's most recent employment. "My God," he repeated.

  The younger man was coughing and holding his sleeve over his nose, to filter the stench of blood and sweat and perfumes. "I am Wu Xing-Ren, and this is my colleague, Trevor Isley. United Nations, External Affairs Committee," he said at last. He was almost but not quite able to keep the contempt out of his voice as he added, "You must
be Father Sandoz."

  There was a sound that began as laughter, as shocking and outrageous as anything they could see or smell, and ended as something more difficult to listen to. The crisis went on for some time. Even after the hysteria was exhausted, they got nothing sensible from the man.

  "Why, John? Why did it all happen like that, unless God wanted it that way? I thought I understood…" His voice trailed off, and Candotti waited, not sure what to say or do. "How long has it been for you, John?"

  John, the sudden shift taking him by surprise, frowned at Sandoz and shook his head, wanting to understand, but not able to follow the train of thought.

  "I figured it out once. Twenty-nine years. I get confused about the time, but I was fifteen and I'm supposed to be forty-five now, I think." The frayed nerves holding him up snapped abruptly, and he sank to the floor. John went to him and knelt nearby and listened, and Emilio wept as he whispered, the words thin and silvery. "See, I know a lot of men make accommodations. They find someone—someone…to help them. But, the thing about this is: I didn't. And I—I thought I understood. It was a path to God, and I thought I understood. There are moments, John, when your soul is like a ball of fire, and it reaches out to everything and everyone equally. I thought I understood."

  And then suddenly, Emilio wiped his eyes and pulled in a shuddering breath and when he spoke again, his voice was normal and ordinary and tired and, for that reason, sadder than anything John Candotti had heard before. "So, anyway, I was about forty-four, I guess, when it—when…it happened, so it must have been about twenty-nine years." His lips pulled back into a terrible smile, and he began to laugh, the glistening eyes bleak. "John, if God did this, it is a hell of a trick to pull on a celibate. And if God didn't do it, what does that make me?" He shrugged helplessly. "An unemployed linguist, with a lot of dead friends."

  His face hardly moved, but the tears began again. "So many dead, because I believed. John, they're all dead. I've tried so hard to under­stand," he whispered. "Who can forgive me? So many dead…"

  John Candotti pulled the smaller man to him and took Sandoz in his arms and held him, rocking, while they both cried. After a time, John whispered, "I forgive you," and began the ancient absolution, "Absolvo te—absolvo te…" but that had to be enough, because he couldn't say the rest.

  "That was an abuse of power," Felipe Reyes hissed. "You had no right—My God, how could you do that to him?"

  "It was necessary." The Father General had left the building, walking swiftly from his office down the long echoing hallway, throwing open the French doors and passing outside to the garden, hoping to pull his thoughts together in sunshine and in quiet. But Reyes had followed him, furious, outraged that Emilio Sandoz had been made to speak with so many witnesses.

  "How could you do that to him?" Reyes persisted, implacable. "Did you get some kind of perverse pleasure from listening to—"

  Giuliani rounded on him and silenced the other priest with a look that froze the words on his lips. "It was necessary. If he were an artist, I'd have ordered him to paint it. If he were a poet, I'd have ordered him to write it. Because he is who he is, I made him speak of it. It was necessary. And it was necessary for us to hear it."

  Felipe Reyes looked at his superior for a moment longer and then sank abruptly onto the cool stone of a garden bench, surrounded by summer blossoms in dazzling sunlight, shaken and sickened and unconvinced that any of it was necessary. There were sunflowers and brilliant yellow daylilies, delphinium and liatris and gladioli, and the scent of roses from somewhere nearby. The swallows were out now, as the evening approached, and the insect noise was changing. The Father General sat down beside him.

  "Have you ever been to Florence, Reyes?"

  Felipe sat back, open-mouthed with disgusted incomprehension. "No," he said acidly. "I haven't felt much like touring. Sir."

  "You should go. There's a series of sculptures there by Michelangelo that you should see. They are called The Captives. Out of a great formless mass of stone, the figures of slaves emerge: heads, shoulders, torsos, straining toward freedom but still held fast in the stone. There are souls like that, Reyes. There are souls that try to carve themselves from their own formlessness. Broken and damaged as he is, Emilio Sandoz is still trying to find meaning in what happened to him. He is still trying to find God in it all."

  It took Felipe Reyes, blinking, several moments to hear what he'd been told, and if he was too stiff-necked to look at Giuliani for the time being, he was able at least to admit that he understood. "And by listening, we help him."

  "Yes. We help him. He will have to tell it again and again, and we will have to hear more and more, until he finds the meaning." In that in­stant, a lifetime of reason and moderation and common sense and balance left Vincenzo Giuliani feeling as weightless and insubstantial as ash. "He's the genuine article, Reyes. He has been all along. He is still held fast in the formless stone, but he's closer to God right now than I have ever been in my life. And I don't even have the courage to envy him."

  They sat there for a long while, in the late August afternoon, the light golden and the air soft, the small near sounds of the garden punctuated by a dog's barking in the distance. John Candotti joined them after a time. He sat heavily on the ground across the garden walk­way from their bench and put his head in his hands.

  "It was hard," the Father General said.

  "Yes. It was hard."

  "The child?"

  "The closest legal term might be involuntary manslaughter." John lay back, flattening some ground cover, unable to stay upright any longer. "No," he amended after a time. "It wasn't an accident. He meant to kill, but in self-defense. That Askama was the one who died—that was an accident."

  "Where is he now?"

  Candotti, drained, looked up at them. "I carried him up to his room, sleeping like the dead. That's an awful phrase. Anyway, asleep. Ed's with him." There was a pause. "I think it did him good. It sure as hell didn't do me any good to hear it, but I really think he's better now." John put his hands over his eyes. "To dream of all that. And the children…Now we know."

  "Now we know," Giuliani agreed. "I'm sitting here trying to understand why it seemed less awful when I thought it was prostitution. It's the same physical act." He wasn't the Father General. He was just plain Vince Giuliani, with no answers. Unknowing, he trod the path of reason that Sofia Mendes had traveled all those years before. "I suppose a prostitute has at least an illusion of control. It's a transaction. There is some element of consent."

  "There is," Felipe Reyes suggested wanly, "more dignity in prostitution than in gang rape. Even by poets."

  Giuliani suddenly put his hands to his mouth. "What a wilderness, to believe you have been seduced and raped by God." And then to come home to our tender mercies, he thought bleakly.

  John sat up and glared red-eyed at the Father General. "I'll tell you something. If it's a choice between despising Emilio or hating God—"

  Surprisingly, Felipe Reyes broke in, before John could say something he'd regret. "Emilio is not despicable. But God didn't rape him, even if that's how Emilio understands it now." He sat back in the bench and stared at the ancient olive trees defining the edge of the garden. "There's an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists."

  "So God just leaves?" John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. "Abandons creation? You're on your own, apes. Good luck!"

  "No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering."

  "Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine," Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. " 'Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.' "

  "But the sparrow still falls," Felipe said.

  They sat
for a while, wrapped in their private musings.

  "You know, he was always a good priest," Felipe told them, remembering, "but it must have been about the time that they were plan­ning the mission, something changed in him. It was like, I don't know, sometimes he would just—ignite." Felipe's hands moved, making a shape like fireworks. "There was something in his face, so beautiful. And I thought, if that's what it's like to be a priest…It was like he fell in love with God."

  "Offhand," said the Father General wearily, in a voice dry as August grass, "I'd say the honeymoon is over."

  The sun was already fairly high when Edward Behr awoke to the sound of a coffee cup rattling on a saucer. Blinking, he sat up in the wooden chair where he'd spent the night and groaned. He saw Emilio Sandoz standing by the night table, carefully setting the coffee down, the servos releasing his grip almost as quickly as natural movement might have.

  "What time is it?" Ed asked, rubbing his neck.

  "A little after eight," Sandoz told him. Wearing a T-shirt and a pair of baggy pants, he sat on the edge of his bed and watched Brother Edward stretch and scrub at his eyes with his pudgy hands. "Thank you. For staying with me."

  Brother Edward looked at him, sizing things up. "How do you feel?"

  "Okay," Emilio said simply. "I feel okay."

  Emilio stood and stepped over to the window, holding the curtain aside, but couldn't see much: just the garage and a little bit of hillside. "I used to be a pretty fair middle-distance runner," he said conversationally. "I did about half a kilometer this morning. Had to walk most of it." He shrugged. "It's a start."