Children of God (15 page)

But then, on Rakhat, when Emilio Sandoz had made a place in his soul large enough and open enough, he had, against all expectation, been filled with God—not filled but inundated! He felt himself flooded, drowned in light, deafened by the power of it. He had not sought this! He had never taken pride in it, never understood it as recompense for what he had offered God. What filled him was incommensurate, measureless, unearned, unimagined. It was God’s grace, freely given. Or so he’d thought.

Was it arrogance and not faith, to have believed that the mission to Rakhat was part of some plan? Until the very moment that the Jana’ata patrol began to slaughter children, there was no warning, no hint that they were making a fatal mistake. Why had God abandoned them all, human and Runa alike? Why this silent, brutal indifference after so much apparent intervention?

"You seduced me, Lord, and I let You," he read in Jeremiah, weeping, when Kalingemala Lopore left. "You raped me, and I have become the object of derision."

Outraged that anyone’s faith should be tested as his had been, and profoundly ashamed that he had failed that test, Emilio Sandoz knew only that he could not accept the unacceptable and thank God for it. So he had abandoned his body, abandoned his soul—surrendered them unconditionally to whatever force had beaten him, tried to live only in a mind over which he retained sovereignty. And for a time, he found not peace but at least a kind of uneasy ceasefire.

Daniel Iron Horse put an end to that; whatever had happened on Rakhat, whoever was to blame, Emilio Sandoz was alive and his life touched other lives. So, he told himself, face it.

He ate decent meals three times a day, as though the food were medicine. He began again to run, circling the dormant retreat house gardens, working up to four eight-minute miles every morning, rain or shine. Twice a day, he forced himself to break off work and carefully picked up a set of handweights, methodically exercising arm muscles that now did double duty, indirectly controlling his fingers through the brace mechanisms. By April, he was approaching welterweight, and the shirts he wore no longer looked as though they were still on hangers.

The headaches persisted. The nightmares continued. But he won back lost ground with infantry doggedness and, this time, he was determined to hold it.

IT WAS AN UNUSUALLY CHILLY MORNING IN EARLY MAY AND CELESTINA was at kindergarten when Gina Giuliani glanced out the kitchen window and noticed a man on foot talking to the guard at the end of the drive. She recognized the gray suede jacket she’d bought for him before she recognized Sandoz himself and briefly considered doing something about her hair, but changed her mind. Pulling on a cardigan, she walked out the back door to meet him.

"Don Emilio!" she said smiling broadly as he approached. "You look well."

"I am well," he said without a trace of irony, responding to the automatic pleasantry as the literal truth that it was. "I was not certain before, but I am now. I have come to beg pardon, signora. I believed it was better to be rude than to worry you uselessly."

"Mi scuzi?" she said, frowning.

"Signora, two members of the Stella Maris party became ill on Rakhat. One died overnight. The other was sick for many months and was near death before he was killed," he told her with expressionless calm. "We were never able to determine the cause of either illness, but one of them was a wasting disease. Ah, I was correct not to say anything of this earlier," he said when her hand went to her lips. "Perhaps then you will forgive me. In December, it was brought to my attention that I might have carried that illness back with me." He held his arms out slightly from his body, presenting it to her as the irrefutable evidence he had required himself to produce. "As you see, I was suffering from cowardice, not from any pathogen."

She was speechless for a time. "So, you put yourself in quarantine," she said finally, "until you were sure you were healthy."

"Yes."

"I don’t quite see where cowardice fits in," Gina said.

The gulls were screaming and he let her wonder if the wind had carried her words away. "The men I spoke to on my way here tell me this stretch of coast is under guard at all times," he said. "This is true?"

"Yes." She pulled the hair away from her face and the cardigan tighter around her.

"He says ’Mafia’ is the wrong term. It is the Camorra in Naples."

"Yes. Are you shocked?"

He shrugged and looked away. "I should have realized. There were indications. I have been preoccupied." He stared at the view of the sea that she had from her bedroom window. "It’s very beautiful here."

She watched him, profiled, and wondered what to do next. "Celestina will be home from school in a little while," she told him. "She’ll be sorry if she misses you. Would you care to wait? We could have a coffee."

"How much do you know about me?" he asked bluntly, turning toward her.

She straightened, startled by the question. I know that you treat my daughter like a little duchess, she thought. I know that I can make you laugh. I know that you…. She found the directness of his gaze sobering. "I know you are in mourning for dear friends, and for a child you loved. I know you believe yourself responsible for many deaths," she said. "I know that you were raped."

He did not look away. "I wish there to be no misunderstanding. If my Italian is not clear, you must tell me, yes?" She nodded. "You have offered me… friendship. Signora Giuliani, I am not naive. I am aware of the emotions of others. I wish you to understand that—"

She felt sick. Ashamed of her own transparent schoolgirl crush, she began to pray for a major tectonic event—something that would cause, say, the entire Italian peninsula to sink into the Mediterranean. "No explanations are necessary, Don Emilio. I’m terribly sorry that I’ve embarrassed you—"

"No! Please. Let me—. Signora Giuliani, I wish that we had met before — or maybe a long time from now. I am not clear," he said, looking to the sky, impatient with himself. "There is… a habit of thought in Christianity, yes? That the soul is different from and higher than the physical self—that the life of the mind exists separate from the life of the body. It took me a long time to understand this idea. The body, the mind, the soul—these are all one thing to me." He turned his head, letting the wind take the hair out of his eyes, which rested on the horizon where the brightness of the Mediterranean met the sky in a knifeblade of light. "I now believe that I chose celibacy as a path to God because it was a discipline in which the body and the mind and the soul were all one thing."

He stood silent for a moment, gathering himself. "When—. You must understand that there was not one rape but many, yes?" He glanced at her, but looked away again. "There were seventeen men, and the assaults went on for months. During that time, and afterward, I tried to separate what happened to me physically from what it… did to me. I tried to believe, It is only my body. This cannot touch what I am. It was… not possible for me to think in this way. Forgive me, signora. I have no right to ask you to hear this."

He stopped then, nearly defeated. "I’m listening," she said.

Coward, he thought savagely, and forced himself to speak. "Signora, I wish there to be no misunderstanding between us. Whatever the legalities, I am not a priest. My vows are a nullity. If we had met at another time, I would wish for us perhaps more than friendship. But what I once gave to God freely is now enforced by—" Nausea. Fear. Rage. He looked into her eyes and knew that he owed her as much truth as he could bear. "By aversion," he said finally. "I am not whole. Can it be acceptable to you that what I offer in return for your friendship will be something less?"

My body is healed, he was asking her to understand; my soul is still bleeding. It’s all one thing to me.

The wind, constant this close to the coast, sounded loud in her ears and carried the scent of seaweed and fish. She looked, as he had, toward the bay, its water sequined with sunlight. "Don Emilio, you offer me honesty," she said, serious for once. "This, I think, is not less than friendship."

For a time, there was no sound but the call of gulls. In the distance, down the driveway, a guard coughed and threw a cigarette on the ground, crushing it out with his shoe. She waited, but it was clear that Sandoz had done all he could. "Well," she said finally, remembering Celestina and the guinea pig, "you can still have the coffee."

There was a sort of gasping laugh that gave some measure of the strain, and the braced hands went to his head, as though to run his fingers through his hair, but then returned to his sides. "I think I’d rather have a beer," he said with artless candor, "but it’s only ten o’clock."

"Travel is so broadening," she remarked equably. "Have you ever had a Croatian breakfast?" He shook his head. "A shot of plum brandy," she explained, "followed by espresso."

"That," he said, rallying a little, "would do nicely." Then he became very still.

She was held in the tension just before movement, about to walk back toward the house. Later she would think, If I had turned away, I’d have missed the moment he fell in love.

He would not remember it that way. What he experienced was not so much the beginning of love as a cessation of pain. It felt to him as physical and as unexpected as the moment when his hands finally stopped hurting after some awful bout of phantom neuralgia—when the pain was simply gone, as suddenly and as inexplicably as it had come. All his life, he had understood the power of silence. What had eluded him was the ability to speak of what was inside him, except sometimes to Anne. And now, he found: to Gina.

"I missed you," he told her, discovering it as he said the words.

"Good," she said, her eyes holding his, knowing more than he did himself. She started off for the kitchen. "How’s Elizabeth?" she called over her shoulder.

"Fine! She’s a good pet. I really enjoy having her around," Emilio said, jogging a few steps to catch up with her. "John Candotti made her an amazing cage—three compartments and a tunnel. Pig Land, we call it." He reached past Gina to open the door, closing his hand over the knob without thinking of the movement at all. "Would you and Celestina like to come for lunch some time? I have learned to cook," he told her grandly, holding the door for her. "Real food. Not just packaged stuff."

She hesitated before stepping through. "We’d love to, but I’m afraid Celestina eats very little aside from macaroni and cheese."

"Kismet!" he cried, with a smile like sunrise that warmed them both. "Macaroni and cheese, signora, happens to be my speciality."

AS THE DAYS LENGTHENED, THERE WERE LUNCHES, BRIEF VISITS, SHORT calls, messages left three and four times a day. Emilio was at the house when the papers came in the mail, finalizing the divorce, and Gina cried anyway. She learned early on that he could not eat meat; eventually, he was able to explain why, and she wept again, this time for him. When he admired Celestina’s drawings, the little girl went into mass production, and soon the bare walls of his apartment were brightly decorated with crayoned renderings of fairly mysterious objects in very nice colors. Pleased by the effect, Gina brought brilliant red geraniums for his windows one day, and this was an unexpected turning point for him. He had forgotten how much he’d enjoyed his turns taking care of the Wolverton-tube plants on the Stella Maris, and began finally to remember the good times and to find some inner balance.

They took Celestina for walks, sweating in the glorious light of the mezzogiorno—a violet sea to the west, shimmering sunlit crags to the east, the acrid-sweet scent of dust and flowers and asphalt sharp in their throats. Strolling along, they argued over stupid things, and enjoyed it, and went home to fresh bread fried in oil from olive trees eight hundred years old, and zucchini with provolone dolce, and almonds in honey. Lingering after supper, Emilio would put Celestina to bed, and Gina would listen, shaking her head, as the two of them made up a long, complicated story with many episodes, about a princess with curly hair who was allowed to eat nothing but treats even though her bones would get bendy, and a dog named Franco Grossi, who went on trips with the princess to America and the moon and Milan and Australia. By June, Emilio had admitted to the migraines, and Gina brought several new medications for him to try, one of which was a remarkable improvement over the Prograine.

There was, as the weeks passed, an unspoken understanding that he needed time, but perhaps not as much as he’d once thought.

Gina taught him to play scopa one night; once he got the hang of the game, she was amused by the ferocity with which he played, though distressed by how difficult it was for him to hold the cards. When she asked about this, he changed the subject and she dropped it for the time being. Then, on midsummer’s eve, perhaps to prove that his hands were fine, he and Celestina set themselves the goal of tying their own shoelaces, something both of them had given up on in the past.

"We can do it," Emilio insisted. "This time for sure! Even if it takes us all day, it’s okay because this is the longest day of the year."

All morning, they commiserated over how easy this was for other people, but conquered frustration together, and ultimately shared a radiant self-satisfaction in the accomplishment. Happy for them both, Gina suggested a celebratory picnic down on the beach, pointing out that this plan would afford many opportunities to take off and put on shoes with unnecessary frequency and great flourish. And so the long midsummer evening was passed in quiet contentment, Emilio and Gina ambling along the seashore behind Celestina, watching her chase seagulls and grub for treasures and heave stones into the water until she wore herself out. As the darkness began at last to deepen, they climbed the cliffside stairway— Gina’s pockets and hands full of shells and pretty rocks, Emilio’s arms full of sleeping child—and murmured greetings as they passed the Camorra guards, who smiled with complicity.

When they got to the house, Gina held the back door open for him but did not turn on the lights; knowing the way, he carried Celestina through the quiet house to her doll-crammed room and waited while Gina cleared a nest in the bed full of stuffed animals. He could lift Celestina’s small weight if he was careful when he picked her up, but could not set her down again without damaging the braces, so Gina gathered her baby from his arms and lay the child in bed, and stood awhile, gazing down at her daughter.