Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  “But why can’t we?” Celestina whined. She leaned on the kitchen table with her elbows and rocked her little behind back and forth. “What will Lizabet eat?” she asked slyly: a sudden inspiration.

  Gina looked up. Good, she thought judiciously. Very good. But she said aloud, “I’m sure Brother Cosimo has plenty of vegetables for Elizabeth.” She stared at Celestina. “This is, by actual count, the seven hundred and thirty-first serving of macaroni and cheese I have made for you. This year alone.”

  “That’s a lot of fingers,” Celestina said, and giggled when her mamma laughed. “Can we go tomorrow?”

  Gina closed her eyes for a moment. “Cara. Please. No!” she said loudly, stirring in the cheese.

  “But why not!” Celestina yelled.

  “I told you: I don’t know!” Gina yelled back, plunking a bowl onto the table. She took a breath and lowered her voice. “Sit down and eat, cara. Don Emilio’s voice sounded a little husky—”

  “What’s ‘husky’?” Celestina asked, chewing.

  “Swallow before you speak. Husky means hoarse. Like when you had your cold last week. Remember how your voice sounded funny? I think perhaps he’s caught your cold and doesn’t feel well.”

  “Can we go tomorrow?” Celestina asked again, spooning in another mouthful.

  Gina sighed and sat down across from her daughter. “Relentless. You are absolutely relentless. Look. We’ll wait until next week and see how he feels. Shall we ask Pia’s mamma if Pia can come over to play after lunch?” Gina suggested brightly, and thanked God when the diversion worked.

  This morning had marked the first time Emilio Sandoz had ever rung Gina Giuliani up, but her pleasure was quickly dampened by his tone when he asked if he might cancel their usual Friday visit. She agreed, naturally, and asked him if anything was wrong. Before he could answer, she made sense of the unusual roughness in his voice and asked, a little anxiously, if he were sick. There was a stony silence and then she heard his cool comment, “I hope not.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, a little huffily. “You’re right, of course. I should have realized it wasn’t good judgment to bring Celestina.”

  “Perhaps we have both made an error in judgment, signora,” he said, the chill becoming glacial.

  Offended, she snapped, “I didn’t realize she was coming down with anything. It’s not a very bad cold. She was over it in a few days. I’m sure you’ll survive.”

  When he spoke again, she could tell something was working on him but couldn’t imagine what it was.

  “Mi scuzi, signora. There has been a misunderstanding. The fault is not in any way yours or your daughter’s.” The Viceroy, she thought irritably, and wished he’d allowed a visual for the call—not that his face gave much away when he was like this. “If you will be so kind, I find that for now it is not … convenient that you should come.” He paused, groping, which surprised her. His Italian was ordinarily excellent. “ ‘Convenient’ is not the correct word. Mi scuzi. I have no wish to offend you, signora.”

  Confused and disappointed, she assured him that no offense had been taken, which was a lie but one that she was determined to make true. So she told him that a change of scene would do him a world of good and prescribed an evening in Naples, which would be crowded and merry with shoppers. She was sure he’d be over the cold by mid-December. “No one does Christmas like the Neapolitans,” she declared. “You have to see it—”

  “No,” he said. “This is impossible.”

  It was difficult not to be insulted, but she’d begun to know him and correctly interpreted his rigidity as fear. “Don’t worry! We’ll go at night! No one will recognize you—wear gloves and a hat and dark glasses,” she suggested, laughing. “My father-in-law always sends guards with me and Celestina anyway. We’ll be perfectly safe!”

  When this failed to move him, she took a step back and assured him, with a generous measure of irony, that she had no designs on his virtue and promised that Celestina would be their chaperone. This backfired rather decisively. There was another round of stiff apologies. She was astounded, when the call was over, by how very much she wanted to cry.

  The flowers arrived that afternoon.

  A week later, Gina pitched them onto a compost pile with a resolute lack of sentimentality. She did keep the card. There was no signature on it, of course—only a note in a shopgirl’s handwriting: “I need some time.” Which, she supposed, was the exact if unenlightening truth. So, for Christmas, Gina Giuliani gave Emilio Sandoz time.

  ADVENT THAT YEAR WAS DIFFICULT. GINA SPENT IT WITH FAMILY AND old friends, trying not to think of where Carlo was, or with whom, or of what the flowers from Emilio might have meant. Gina Giuliani was not good at not thinking about things. December seemed as endless to her as it did to Celestina, who was dying for the month to be over so it would be time for the big Epiphany party at Carmella’s. That was when all the children would learn if they’d gotten coal or gifts from La Befana—the Bitch, who had rudely driven the Wise Men away when they stopped in Italy on their way to see the Christ Child.

  Everyone tried to prevent Celestina’s holiday from being spoiled by spoiling her with presents instead. Gina’s in-laws were particularly lavish in their giving. They liked Gina, who was also the mother of a beloved granddaughter, and made sure that Carmella included her at all the parties. But despite Don Domenico’s regular denunciations of his son, Carlo was family, and blood counts.

  Only Carlo’s aunt Rosa, seventy-four and not inclined to subtlety, addressed the situation at Carmella’s party. Trying to escape the crush of friends and relatives and the mind-boggling noise produced by dozens of children whipped into a froth of sugar, excitement and greed, she and Gina took refuge in the library.

  “Carlo’s a prick,” Rosa said flatly, as the two women settled into butter-soft leather chairs and put their feet up on a stylishly low table. “A gorgeous man, Gina, I see why you fell for him. But he’s never been any good! He’s my own brother’s son but I’m telling you, he’ll screw anything with a pulse—”

  “Rosa!”

  “Boys, dogs, whores,” Rosa went on, as relentless as Celestina. “They think I don’t know, but I hear things. I’d shoot the bastard right in the balls if I were you.” Her cloudy eyes full of conspiracy and violence, the skinny old woman leaned over to grip Gina’s arm with surprising strength. “You want me to shoot him for you?” she asked. Gina laughed, delighted by the idea. “I’ll do it!” Rosa assured her, sitting back comfortably. “I’d get away with it, too. Who’s going to prosecute an old broad like me? I’ll be dead before the appeals are done.”

  “It’s a tempting offer, Rosa,” Gina said, loving her, “but I knew he was a rat when I married him.”

  Rosa shrugged, agreeing reluctantly. Carlo had, after all, left his first wife for Gina. Worse, Gina Damiano had met the gorgeous Carlo Giuliani at an ob-gyn clinic; she was the nurse who took care of Carlo’s mistress in post-op after an ugly second-trimester abortion. Gina could still remember the sense of detached amazement at her own stupidity when, mesmerized by his looks, she heard herself accepting Carlo’s irresistibly charming offer of dinner that first night.

  She shouldn’t have been surprised when she caught him with the next lover, but Gina was pregnant with Celestina at the time and made the mistake of being outraged. The first beating was such a shock, she could hardly believe it had happened. Later, she remembered the mistress’s bruises, and Carlo’s explanations. The signs were all there—it was her own fault for ignoring them. She filed for divorce; believed his promises; filed again …

  “Your marriage never would have worked anyway,” Rosa said, breaking into Gina’s thoughts. “I didn’t want to say anything before the wedding—you always hope for the best. But Carlo’s gone so much—all that space shit. Even if he wasn’t a prick, he’s never home.” Rosa leaned forward, voice low. “In my opinion,” she offered, “it’s mostly my brother’s fault. Carlo takes after my sister-in-law’s side, you know? E
ven when they were first married, Domenico was screwing around so much, he couldn’t imagine that his own wife wasn’t. Never believed Carlo was his. Poisoned everything. Then my sister-in-law spoiled Carlo rotten, to make up for it. You know why Carmella turned out so well?”

  Gina shook her head, brows up.

  “Her parents ignored her. Best thing that could have happened! They were so busy fighting over Carlo, they never got around to making a mess of their daughter. Now look at her! A good mother, a wonderful cook, beautiful home—and she’s a very smart businesswoman, Gina! It’s no wonder Carmella’s running everything now!”

  Gina laughed. “Now there’s a novel approach to parenting! Have two kids, and concentrate on ruining one.”

  “At least you won’t have to take care of Carlo when he’s old,” Rosa resumed philosophically. “I thought Nunzio would never die!” A bluff, Gina knew. Rosa had been devoted to Nunzio and missed him very much, but unlike most Neapolitans, she refused to give in to operatic bathos. It was a characteristic that bound the two women together, across the generations. “Men are shits,” Rosa declared. “Find yourself a twelve-year-old and train him right,” the old lady advised. “It’s the only way.”

  Before Gina could reply, Celestina—extravagant compensation for a brief marriage to a gorgeous rat—burst into the room. Wailing, she delivered herself of a wide-ranging indictment, charging her cousins Stefano and Roberto with several atrocities having to do with her new bride doll and a space freighter. “It’s hopeless,” Aunt Rosa said, throwing up her hands. “Even the little ones are shits.” Shaking her head, Gina went off to set up some kind of demilitarized zone in the playroom.

  THAT WINTER, GINA WOULD SOMETIMES TAKE THE FLORIST’S CARD OUT of her bureau drawer and look at it. Holding up an unbraced hand, she would say aloud, with Sandoz’s own antique formality, “No explanations are necessary.” Nor were any likely to be offered, she realized as the weeks became months. Every Friday, she left guinea-pig chow and a bag of fresh litter at the refectory with Cosimo. After the first two visits, she made a point of doing this while Celestina was at kindergarten. It was bad enough trying to explain Carlo’s absences and inconsistencies to the child without attempting to explain Emilio Sandoz as well. Once, in early spring, she worked herself into a rage and considered banging on Sandoz’s door to tell him he could ignore her but not Celestina, but she identified this almost immediately as displaced emotion, more properly aimed at Carlo Giuliani than at an ex-priest she barely knew.

  She understood that a good portion of what she felt and thought about Emilio Sandoz was concocted of equal parts romantic idiocy, hurt pride and sexual fantasy. Gina, she would tell herself, Carlo is a prick but you are a fool. On the other hand, she thought prosaically, fantasies about a dark, brooding man with a tragic past are more interesting than blubbering over getting dumped by a jerk for a teenaged boy.

  And Emilio had sent her flowers. Flowers and four words: “I need some time.” That implied something, didn’t it? It wasn’t all in her head. She had the note.

  She might have wished for some golden mean between Carlo’s endlessly inventive eloquence and the strict, unexpansive silence of Emilio Sandoz. But in the end, she decided to play by Emilio’s rules, even if she didn’t know quite what they were. There didn’t seem to be any other choice, apart from forgetting him altogether. And that, Gina found, was evidently not an option.

  WHAT COULD HE HAVE SAID? “SIGNORA, I MAY HAVE EXPOSED YOU AND your child to a fatal disease. Let’s hope I’m wrong. It will be months before we know.” There was no point in scaring her—he was frightened enough for both of them. So Emilio Sandoz took himself hostage until he could prove to his own satisfaction that he was not a danger to others. It was an act of will, and it required of him a complete strategic reversal in his war with the past.

  Living alone had allowed him to withdraw with honor from the battlefield his body represented. Once a source of satisfaction, it had become an unwanted burden, to be punished for its frailties and vulnerability with indifference and contempt. He fueled it when hunger interfered with his work, rested it when he was tired enough to sleep through nightmares, despised it when it failed him: when the headaches almost blinded him, when his hands hurt so much that he sat laughing in the dark, the pain comic in its intensity.

  He had never before felt so entirely disconnected from himself.

  He was not a virgin. Neither was he an ascetic; while studying for the priesthood, he had come to the conclusion that he would not be able to live as a celibate by denying or ignoring his physical needs. This is my body, he told his silent God, this is what I am. He provided himself with sexual release and knew this was as necessary to him as food and rest, as lacking in sin as the desire to run, to field a baseball, to dance.

  And yet, he was aware that he had taken inordinate pride in his ability to govern himself and that this, in part, accounted for his reaction to the rapes. When he began to understand that resistance made it worse for him and more gratifying for those who used him, he tried to submit passively, to deny them as much as he could. It was beyond him: intolerable, impossible. And when he could not endure being used again, when he decided to kill or die rather than submit once more, it had cost Askama’s life. Was rape his punishment for pride? An ugly lesson in humility, but one he might have been able to learn, had Askama not died for his sins.

  None of it made sense.

  Why had God not left him in Puerto Rico? He had never sought or expected spiritual grandeur. For years he was, without complaint, solo cum Solus—alone with the Alone, hearing nothing of God, feeling nothing of God, expecting nothing of God. He lived in the world without being part of it, lived in the unfathomable without being part of it. He was grateful to be what he had become: an ex-academic, a parish priest working in the slum of his childhood.

  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.”