Ann Patchett (37 page)

“It is a healthy thing to wait,” General
Alfredo told her, because he enjoyed the show himself. “It gives you a sense of
anticipation.”

“I don’t want to wait,” she said, and suddenly
thought that she might cry with frustration, the dull white stretch of the
afternoon pushing out endlessly in every direction. She had already cleaned her
gun and passed inspection and she didn’t have to stand guard until night. She
could have taken a nap or looked at one of the magazines she had seen and not
understood a hundred times before, but the thought of it all seemed unbearable.
She wanted out of this place. She wanted to walk down the streets in the city
like any other girl and have men tap their horns as they drove by her. She
wanted to do something. “I’m going to see the priest,” she said to Alfredo. She
quickly turned her face away. To cry was strictly forbidden. She thought of it
as the worst thing she could do.

Father Arguedas adopted a “translator optional”
policy in regard to confession. If people chose to confess in a language other
than Spanish, then he would be happy to sit and listen and assume their sins
were filtered through him and washed away by God exactly as they would have
been if he had understood what they were saying. If people would rather be
understood in a more traditional way, then they were welcome to bring Gen along
if it worked out with his schedule. Gen was perfect for the job, as he seemed
to have a remarkable ability not to listen to the words coming out of his own
mouth. But that didn’t matter because today Oscar Mendoza was confessing in the
language they both grew up speaking. They sat face-to-face on two dining-room
chairs pulled over to the corner. People respected the arrangement and avoided
the dining room when they saw the priest was sitting down with someone there. At
first, Father Arguedas had brought up the idea of trying to rig up some sort of
proper confessional in the coat closet but the Generals would not allow it. All
of the hostages must be out in the open where they could be clearly seen at all
times.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been
three weeks since my last confession. At home I go every week, I promise you
that, but there isn’t a great deal of opportunity to sin in our present
circumstances,” Oscar Mendoza said. “No drinking, no gambling, only three
women. Even to try and sin with
yourself
is nearly
impossible. There is so little privacy.”

“There are rewards to the way we live.”

Mendoza
nodded, though he could hardly see
it as such. “I am having dreams, though. Can certain types of dreams constitute
a sin, Father?”

The priest shrugged. He enjoyed confession, the
chance to talk to people, possibly to relieve them of their burden. He could
count on one hand the number of times he had been allowed to hear confession
before the kidnapping, but since then there had been instances when there had
been several people waiting to speak to him. Perhaps he would have chosen
slightly more sin, if only because it would have kept the people with him
longer. “Dreams are a matter of the subconscious. That’s unclear territory. Still,
I think it would be best if you told me. Then maybe I can help you.”

Beatriz leaned her head into the doorway, her
heavy braid swung down against the light. “Are you finished yet?”

“Not yet,” the priest said.

“Soon?”

“Go and play for a while. I can see you next.”

Play.
Did he think she was a child? She looked at
Gen’s big watch on her wrist. It was seventeen minutes after one o’clock. She
understood the watch perfectly now, though it dogged her a little. She couldn’t
go for more than three minutes without checking the time no matter how hard she
tried to ignore it. Beatriz lay down on a small red Oriental carpet just
outside the door where Father couldn’t see her but she could comfortably hear
confession. She slipped the end of her braid into her mouth. Oscar Mendoza had
a voice as big as his shoulders and it carried easily, even when he whispered.

“It is more or less the same dream every
night.” Oscar Mendoza stopped, not entirely sure he wanted to say anything too
horrible to such a young priest.
“Dreams of terrible
violence.”

“Against our captors?” the priest said quietly.

Out in the hall, Beatriz lifted up her head.

“Oh no, nothing like that.
I wish they would leave us alone
but I don’t wish them any particular violence, at least not usually. No, the
dreams that I have are about my daughters. I come home from this place. I
escape or am freed, it’s different in different dreams, and when I get to my
house it is full of boys. It’s like some sort of boys’ academy. Boys of every
size, light-skinned, dark-skinned, some fat, some lanky. They’re everywhere.
They are eating out of my refrigerator and smoking cigarettes on my porch. They
are in my bathroom, using my razor. When I pass them they glance up, give me a
dull look, like they couldn’t really be bothered, and then they go back to
whatever it was they were doing. But that’s not the terrible part. These boys,
what they are mostly doing, they are . . . they are, having knowledge of my
daughters. They are lined up outside their bedrooms, even the rooms of my two
little girls. It is a terrible thing, Father. From some of the doors I hear
laughing and from others I hear sobbing and I start to kill the boys, one by
one, I go down the hall and I break them apart like matches. They don’t even
step away from me. Each one looks so surprised just before I reach up to snap
his neck in my hands.” Oscar’s hands were shaking and he knotted them together
and pressed them between his knees.

Beatriz tried to look discreetly around the
corner to see if the big man was crying. She thought she could detect a
trembling in his voice. Were these the sorts of things other people dreamed
about? Was this what they confessed? She checked the watch: 1:20.

“Ah, Oscar.
Oscar.” Father Arguedas patted his
shoulder. “It is just the pressure. It’s not a sin. We pray that our minds
won’t turn towards terrible things but sometimes they do and it is beyond our
control.”

“It feels very real at the time,” Oscar said,
and then he added reluctantly, “I’m not so unhappy in the dreams. I feel a
rage, but I’m glad to be killing them.”

This piece of information was perhaps more
troubling. “The thing to do then is to learn. Pray for God’s strength, for His
justice. Then when the time comes for you to go back to your home there will be
peace in your heart.”

“I suppose.” Oscar nodded slowly, feeling
unconvinced. He realized now that what he had wanted the priest to do was not
to absolve him but to reassure him that it was impossible, the things he
dreamed about.
That his daughters were safe and unmolested in
their home.

Father Arguedas looked at him very closely. He
leaned in towards him, his voice full of portent. “Pray to the Virgin.
Three rosaries.
Do you understand me?” He took his own
rosary out of his pocket and pressed it into Oscar’s big hands.

“Three rosaries,” Oscar said, and sure enough,
there was a loosening of pressure in his chest as he began to work the beads
through his fingers. He left the room thanking Father. At least if he could
pray he would be doing something.

The priest took a few minutes to pray for the
sins of Oscar Mendoza and when he was finished he cleared his throat and called
out, “
Beatriz,
was that fun for you?”

She waited, dried her braid on her sleeve, then
she simply rolled over onto her stomach so that now she was facing into the
room. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You shouldn’t be listening.”

“You are a prisoner,” she said, but without
much conviction. She would never raise her gun to a priest and so she pointed
her finger at him instead. “I have every right to hear what you are saying.”

Father Arguedas leaned back in his chair. “To
make sure we weren’t in here plotting to kill you in your sleep.”

“Exactly.”

“Come in now and make your confession. You have
something to confess already. That will make it easier.” Father Arguedas was
bluffing. None of the terrorists made confession, although many of them came to
mass and he let them take communion just the same. He thought it was probably a
rule of the Generals, no confession.

But Beatriz had never made confession before. In
her village, the priest came through irregularly, only when his schedule
permitted it. The priest was a very busy man who served a large region in the
mountains. Sometimes months would pass between visits and then when he came his
time was crowded up with not only the mass itself but baptisms and marriages,
funerals, land disputes, communion. Confession was saved for murderers and the
terminally ill, not idle girls who had done nothing worse then pinch their
sisters or disobey their mothers. It was something for the very grown up and
for the very wicked, and if she were to tell the truth, Beatriz considered
herself to be neither of those things.

Father Arguedas held out his hand and he spoke
to her softly. Really, he was the only one who ever spoke to her in that tone. “Come
here,” he said. “I’ll make this very easy for you.”

It was so simple to go to him, to sit down in
the chair. He told her to bow her head and then he put a hand on either side of
the straight part of her hair and began to pray for her. She didn’t listen to
the prayer. She only heard words here and there, beautiful words,
father
and
blessed
and
forgiveness
. It was just such a pleasant sensation, the
weight of his hands on her head. When he finally took his hands away after what
seemed to be a very long time, she felt delightfully weightless, free. She
lifted up her face and smiled at him.

“Now you call your sins to mind,” he said. “Usually
you do that before you come. You pray to God to give you the courage to
remember your sins and the courage to release them. And when you come to the
confessional you say, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first
confession.’ ”

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is
my first confession.”

Father Arguedas waited for a while but Beatriz
only continued to smile at him. “Now you tell me your sins.”

“What are they?”

“Well,” he said, “to start with, you listened
in on Mr. Mendoza’s confession when you knew it was the wrong thing to do.”

She shook her head. “That wasn’t a sin. I told
you, I was doing my job.”

Father Arguedas put his hands on her shoulders
this time and it had the same wonderfully calming effect on her. “While you are
in confession you must tell the absolute truth. You are telling that truth to
God through me, and I will never tell another living soul. What this is is
between you and me and God. It is a sacred rite and you must never, never lie
when you make your confession. Do you understand that?”

“I do,” Beatriz whispered. He had the nicest face
of anyone here, nicer even than Gen’s, who she had liked a little bit before. All
the other hostages were too old, and the boys in her troop were too young, and
the Generals were the Generals.

“Pray,” the priest said. “Try very hard to
understand this.”

Because she liked him, she tried to make
herself think about it. With the feel of his hands on her shoulders she closed
her eyes and she prayed, and suddenly it seemed very clear to her. Yes, she
knew she was not supposed to listen. She knew it like something she could see
behind her closed eyes and it made her happy. “I confess having listened.” All
she had to do was say it and there it went, floating away from her. It wasn’t
her sin anymore.

“And something else?”

Something else.
She thought again. She stared hard
into the darkness of her closed eyes, the place where she knew the sins stacked
up like kindling, dry and ready for a fire. There was something else, lots of
something else. She began to see them all.
But it was too
much and she didn’t know what to call it, how to form so many sins into words.
“I shouldn’t have pointed the gun,” she said finally, because there was no way
to make sense of all of it. She felt like if she stayed forever she would never
be able to confess them all. Not that she meant to stop doing any of those
things. She couldn’t stop. It wouldn’t be allowed and she didn’t even want to. She
could see her sins now and knew that she would make more and more of them.

“God forgives you,” the priest said.

Beatriz opened her eyes and blinked at the
priest. “So it will go away?”

“You’ll have to pray. You’ll have to be sorry.”

“I can do that.” Maybe that was the answer, a
sort of cycle of sinning and sorriness. She could come every Saturday, maybe
more often than that, and he would keep having God forgive her, and then she
would be free to go to heaven.

“I want you to say some prayers now.”

“I don’t know all the words.”

Father Arguedas nodded his head. “We can say
them together. I can teach them to you. But, Beatriz, I need you to be kind, to
be helpful. That is part of your contrition. I want you to try it just for
today.”