by Kent Meyers
His humor disarmed me, let me speak.
When I was young, I said, I fell in love with someone. And let him fall in love with me. I think I wanted to escape myself. Or my own dreams for myself.
I stopped. I’d never thought of it that way. Yet in this small box designed for telling secrets, what I said seemed ordinary. Perhaps that’s confession’s real purpose—to make sin banal. Or grace banal. I don’t know which.
Is that your sin? What you waited twenty years to tell?
I heard it in his voice: that he recognized what I was saying, a thing he’d heard before.
No, I said. Not the love. Or the letting love. Or what we did together.
Was he married?
It isn’t any of that.
We must admit our sins if we’re to be forgiven. By God or by ourselves.
What I had to tell him wasn’t ordinary. He just expected it to be. But he was a good man. I tried again.
I tried to be someone I wasn’t, I said. Then I was offered the chance to be that person. And didn’t have the courage for it.
I’m sorry, but how can it be wrong to refuse to be someone you’re not?
He was too willing to forgive me. Too willing to find a way to categorize what I’d done so that he could forgive.
I cared about ribbons, I said. When killing was going on.
I said it cruelly. How could he make sense of it? And when he didn’t, I said: This isn’t working, Father. I’m sorry. I have to go.
When I was a child my parents took me to a cave called Wonderland in the Black Hills. We walked down narrowing corridors, the earth closing in, all that weight of rock so close. Then suddenly, behind a narrow opening, space ballooned, its distance receding to darkness—a silent, private, underground cathedral. It was like that with Roberto—a ballooning into secrecy big enough to more than fill a life. I hadn’t known such secrecy was possible, full of space, stalagmited with guilt and honeycombed with revelation. Or so I thought.
One night I woke with a hand on my mouth, pressed so hard I cut my lips against my teeth and tasted blood. I thrashed, made gurgling noises. Sleep wouldn’t let me go. Then clay walls took shape, a face bending over me. His lips brushed my ear.
It is all right, Elise.
His fingers lifted off my lips.
Roberto! I whispered. You shouldn’t be here. If Sister Xavier—
Yet I was overjoyed. I raised my arms and pulled him down, and without a word he removed his clothes, and mine, giving me no language by which to name refusal. In the silence and dark, with tropical insects swaying in the mountain night, we made wordless love.
Then he said: I must go, Elise.
I know.
I knew nothing: I kept him dangerous moments longer. From across the village someone was singing. I wanted to lie with Roberto and listen, as if that song were meant for us.
I’m so glad you came, I whispered.
He rolled off the narrow bed and knelt for a moment, his face over mine, before his eyes hardened, a resolve coming to them which should have frightened me. Instead, I basked in it, believing it was directed toward the two of us together. I watched him put his clothes on in the dark. Then he was gone. I’d never felt so glorious, so jubilant. Even holy. Or so frightened. This—now—had to be my life. I’d betrayed all others. The things Roberto had pointed out, distinguishing our lives, no longer mattered. His life was mine. Mine, his.
I fell asleep and woke to army trucks carrying young boys holding rifles, and a screaming commander whose language was a babble. Except for the name, Roberto. I threw on my clothes, which were scattered on the floor. I knocked the dust off them. Even then I thought my secret mattered.
His name rose from the current of foreign curses like the music of a songbird among crows. In all that spewing language, it was the single word I understood. We were prodded, lined up like livestock. We moved in a cloud of dust lit by sun behind the mountains yet. Then we were made rigid in an uneven, ragged line, while the soldiers formed another, straighter line facing us. Between the lines the colonel strode.
People bowed their necks as he screamed into their faces. They shrugged, mumbled, shook their heads. He came down the line and then was standing in front of me, treating me no differently from the others. I thought my skin color, nationality, connection to the church, would set me outside these bizarre events. But I was implicated with the rest and was stunned by it. I stared at him, his mustached mouth forming words too fast for me to follow, spittle shining at the corners. Again I heard him say Roberto.
I had an insane thought—that the colonel was trying to force from me my own betrayal. That he cared what happened in my bedroom, that somehow it was connected to whatever else he was after. I feared I’d be exposed. That’s how lost I was. How ignorant—and safe.
Roberto? I said.
But before I could find the Spanish to say anything more, to lie or tell the truth, deny or claim my actions, a voice said: Señor.
Sister Xavier stepped out of the line as if its force had never really held her, she had merely reconciled herself to it for a while. She shed the line like clothes and walked between the villagers and soldiers, a naked act. All eyes watched her. The young men lifted their rifles but had no idea what to do. Sister Xavier ignored them all. We were horrified, ashamed, and awed. Silence grew out of her footsteps like a vast, fragile structure. She walked to the colonel and said in Spanish, slowly enough for me to understand: The man you want is gone.
She pulled the colonel’s eyes to hers, and his demands, screamed at her now, came too fast for me to follow. But her replies were slow and calm, and I realized she was speaking to the colonel but also to me. She never let her eyes drift to mine. Her discipline was perfect. But I sensed I was meant to understand her words and something inside them, too.
Because last night he told me he was leaving, she said.
My breath caught. Last night.
The colonel screamed gibberish again, and Sister Xavier replied in slow, perfect Spanish: He said that if he stayed, the mission was in danger. I didn’t know what he meant precisely, but I was certainly not so foolish as to ask, or to find out where he planned to go.
This old nun, who I thought worried only about chalk and bookkeeping, was admitting to this dangerous man that she knew everything—except what she chose not to. If she pretended complete innocence the colonel would be insulted. Instead, she let him see she knew his world and knew that she was part of it—even let him see she opposed him in it. But then she winked. She invited him to see things from her perspective: ignorance as chosen and innocence as strategic, not as a state of being.
She was like a magician letting an audience in on the machinations behind a trick, confident that even then they’ll be fooled and take delight in knowing that delight can have such tawdry, cheating bases. She held her innocence out to the colonel as a thing maintained and crafted. She was cynical and innocent both—a condition I would have thought impossible.
It was brazen and unbelievable. I was still trying to comprehend my own abandonment, yet I knew something much larger was taking place, and I struggled with what Sister Xavier was trying to say to me. The colonel screamed again. Sweat rolled off his forehead, down his cheeks, even his neck. Sister Xavier shrugged.
I may be lying, she said. That’s true. But don’t insult my intelligence, Colonel. Don’t you think I know what not to know?
He stared at her, halted, no response within his repertoire. Then he pulled his pistol from its holster.
Even then she faced him down.
Do you really want to shoot an American nun? she asked. Especially one who really does know nothing?
He raised the pistol. He didn’t care if she was American. Didn’t care she was a nun.
But she’d said those things knowing he didn’t care. In the game she was playing, they had to be said. She had to affect what was, in actuality, my innocence—had to make him think she was naive and proud enough to believe her habit and nationality
and sex protected her.
When the pistol touched her forehead, her lips began to move, saying prayers inaudible to anyone but herself and God. I think—I believe—these were the sole authentic words she spoke, her true self expressed. But even this may have been part of the web of lies and almost-lies, knowns and not-knowns, she spun around the colonel, just so he’d believe a single thing: that she’d chosen her ignorance, and that because it was chosen it had to be genuine.
Around us there was a silence no one ever wants to hear. I could have spoken then. I’d finally found the Spanish words by which to claim Roberto—and thereby claim the life that hours ago I believed I’d taken on.
A parrot squawked, a young boy’s pet, turning circles on a string.
The barrel dimpled Sister’s skin.
I was silent.
The colonel pressed the barrel even deeper and twisted, and her skin whorled around that empty eye like satellite photographs of hurricanes. But her expression didn’t change, and her prayers continued as if the colonel had become insignificant, his world beneath her notice now.
If you’re lying, you old American whore—
He turned the pistol one more cruel quarter-turn. Her skin tightened even more, her whole face distorted. He looked at his accomplishment. Then suddenly he tipped the barrel down and strode away, shouting orders. The boys, who had been standing still, rifles ready through it all, suddenly came alive. They were just boys. They climbed into the trucks, some of them laughing, sharing cigarettes. Others slouched, clearly disappointed. One caught my eye as a truck went by. He had a cigarette half lifted to his mouth. His hand paused in midair, and suddenly he winked, kissed the air, and grinned.
Sister came to my side. She adjusted her veil with trembling hands.
What an unpleasant man, she said.
She tucked loose strands of hair, surprisingly dark, under the veil. I couldn’t look at the angry red circle, like a blank eye, on her forehead.
Sister? I faltered.
It would be best if you returned home.
Please.
For safety’s sake.
But you’re staying? The mission?
Her hand took mine. It was cool. I was aware how much it wasn’t his.
I don’t mean your safety, she said. Roberto is a courier for the guerrillas. We shall pray the army doesn’t find him.
Jealousy overwhelmed me. I thought I’d made him my life—and I didn’t even know him. What he showed me was pretense: chalk and ribbons. To her he’d shown the rest.
A courier? I managed. He told you?
I was close to tears, fighting to shore up my own secret, but sensing how small it was.
But even that secrecy was a lie I’d told myself. Sister Xavier squeezed my hand, and her voice was firm but not unkind.
Let’s be clear, she said. That colonel has lined men and women and children up. Whole villages. He has machine-gunned them. When Roberto was sixteen he returned from a visit to another village to find his family dead.
She squeezed my hand again, then let it go. I stood alone. I had no claim to any world.
I will protect this mission, she said, very gently. And Roberto. By whatever means. That includes removing his temptations to return.
I believed I’d see her brains blown against the wall behind her—and merely braced myself for it. He didn’t pull the trigger. But I knew he would. My ignorance and my dreams had brought me to a point where I had no useful knowledge, even for saving a life, and no voice to speak a word of mere distraction. I’m not sure if what really happened redeems what could have happened. Perhaps it does. But sometimes I’ll have dreams in which the trigger is pulled, and Sister Xavier’s skull deforms and opens at the back like a broken, vomiting mouth. I’m standing in front of her and look down and see a pistol in my hand. I can hardly bear to hear Jonathan, fascinated with science fiction, speak of how, with every decision we make, another universe blooms into being in which the opposite decision takes effect. I fear my dreams may be emissions from that other world.
I didn’t want to know Roberto’s life. I only thought I did. I wanted a pleasant market, his only errand a lavender ribbon, and caged, waiting chickens the only jarring note. In spite of all my guilt, I believed in and wanted innocence. And it left me without act or speech or courage.
All for the best? Perhaps. Sister Xavier, surely a saint if I’ve ever known one, would tell me to forgive myself, and I have, if cheering my son’s home run, and caring about where the ball is going, constitutes forgiveness. But I should have spoken to Hayley Jo Zimmerman. I have a voice here. I have a language. I should have grasped her hand before the last coin went into it, before the bills, before the quarters, even. Right away, while counting the pennies up. Grasped her hand and told her there is no hiding. Is there another universe where she’s alive right now because another version of me squeezed her hand and spoke? This is my world. I can’t be innocent here.
A Real Nice Girl
HE SITS IN THAT wheelchair, staring out the living room window, a goldfish in a sealed bowl suspended in the ocean. His right arm hangs like a limp flag at his side. He has words. He just can’t speak them. They’re like moths inside his head, batting against the screen his synapses have become. I pick them up after they’ve beaten themselves ragged, hold them in my hands: silky, barely fluttering. I breathe my own voice into them. My voice, his voice, myhis voice—if there is a difference, he can’t tell me. Unless I give the words.
In the room where I write, a single prism hangs, a reminder of my mother’s banal cheerfulness. It sends meandering light, color weak as the tea I drink, along the walls, stretching and bending into corners. I hear him out there, by his window, breathing. The right side of his face is beyond mind or nerves—as if a balloon could be half-inflated and half-not: the left side taut, expressive, the right sagging in misshapen pouches. He drools. In the light from the window the wetness shines on his chin—a slug track in morning sun on wilted lettuce leaves. I come out of my writing room, take a Kleenex from my pocket, and walk across the living room. I start at his chin and wipe up to the corner of his mouth. His skin pushes like putty away from my hands while his whiskers, gray as dirty snowflakes, catch on the Kleenex. I drop it in the waste-basket I’ve placed near him, then push his head erect, as if it were a crooked lamp.
You’re not very levelheaded today, I say.
It’s a joke he used to tell about Norwegians when I was just a girl: How do you tell a levelheaded Norwegian? The snoose-juice runs out both sides of his mouth at once. He told it whenever he had friends around. They always laughed. If I was there—silent as a plant, all eyes and ears—he’d catch my eye and nudge the air in my direction with a beer bottle.
Even before the stroke he never spoke, except with borrowed words. It’s as if he’s decayed into a full realization of who he always was. Within a year after my mother married him, he wouldn’t lift his eyes from the television when she spoke to him. She never wondered why. He grunted—as if his voice box had a crack and he forced a little sound through it. Now he can’t even grunt. Justice may be blind, but in this case it’s also mute.
When I was young and the three of us lived here together, only the house had a voice, the squeal of its hinges the only protest. As if it had seen enough. Houses must grow weary of what they know. Sometimes I imagine them speaking among themselves, a deep bass register, like elephants, below our range of hearing. It would be a different story from anything Bea Conway’s put into her rah-rah county history.
I’ve read how the young men of certain African tribes endure circumcision as teenagers. A bloody affair. They stand in public while older men with flint knives approach. The anthropologists say it aids the young men’s memories. They learn the stories of the tribe and then are mutilated: sacrifice and fulfillment, something given for what is taken, words for flesh and blood, all tied up in sex. They never forget the stories.
He always turned the radio on. Just loud enough to hide the other sounds.
As if my mother would ever have investigated. A little square radio by my bed, a Pandora’s box of loveliness: I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain. A peaceful, easy feeling. The clouds of Michelangelo. Lovely phrases. Words I’ve never forgotten.
Do those boys, I wonder, late in life, feel satisfaction watching the old men die?
Until I was thirty-two I’d never held his gaze. Never—a word that chants all by itself. Its own echo. Nevernever. No wonder Poe loved it. I’d never looked into his eyes until that day he grabbed my wrist. I must have imagined if I didn’t look into his eyes he couldn’t see me. As if seeing was the fault—the crime, the sin. But the absence of my eyes on his never blinded him. He still sees as well as ever. Assesses weakness as well as ever. But he can no longer move toward what he sees, take it, make it his.
The only reason I’d agreed to help my mother was because I thought he’d die. Would tip his head further and further to the side until one day it pulled his whole body down. Oh, my mother’s hips were bad, and she hobbled in her duties to him, grimaced when I visited, made small mutters of pain which she pretended to hide from me while making sure I heard them. Martyrs are artists of control, and my mother was a da Vinci. But I’d grown up seeing the brush strokes. It wasn’t her martyring but his dying that made me agree to help her. I thought he was winding his life inside himself, coiling it around a tightening spool there: a fishing line snapping, that high, dissonant twang, the weight of too much life, a tiny question mark disappearing with a snick inside a reel.
When he was healthy I refused to visit. Ten years of absence. Only when I heard of the stroke did I return—a morbid fascination. My heart was in my throat when I knocked. But he was helpless. Still, I circled him. I stayed far from the reach of his arms and refused to touch him, though I knew my mother wanted me to—a sign that all was forgotten: wiped clean, erased.
Then, on one of my visits, I was about to step into the living room when I heard a sound like a shy, reclusive train whooshing and panting. Ignorant of my eyes, he was trying to move his wheelchair by himself. He gasped, and sweat beaded on his brow, and his left arm pumped up and down, up and down, the elbow pointing to the ceiling, then straightening, pointing and straightening, his large hand gripping the wheel, throwing it forward with a hideous frenzy. His fingers flew open as if they had spring catches in them, then clamped down again. And the result of all this effort was the right wheel staying put while the left one followed its own track compressed into the carpet, around and around and around. His head flailed on its neck, drool ran down his cheek. Like a burned-out lighthouse, its blank lens wobbling.
