Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  “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.

  Celestina, she thought. Who never stopped moving, who never stopped talking, who exhausted her mother before breakfast, who would have driven the Holy Mother herself to consider hiring a hit man. Whose face in sleep still showed the profile of a newborn, whose small fingers still held her mother rapt, whose knotted navel still traveled the coiled route to another belly in spirit. Who had quickly learned not to mention Papa’s new friends to Mamma.

  Gina sighed and turned, and saw Emilio leaning against the door frame, watching her with a still face and eyes that hid nothing. He held his arms slightly away from his body, as he did for Celestina’s hugs, to keep from scratching the child with the hardware of his braces when she came to him for an embrace. So Gina came to him.

  The edge of her lower lip was as fine as the rim of a chalice, and the thought almost stopped him, but then her mouth rose to meet his and there was no turning back, nor any wanting to. After all the years, the effort, the anguish—it was, he found, all very simple.

  She removed his braces and helped him with his clothes, and then took off her own, feeling as familiar with him as if they had always been together. But she did not know what to expect and so she braced herself for a failure of nerve, or for brutal urgency, or for weeping. There was instead laughter, and she too found that it was simple. When the time came, she took him into her and smiled over his shoulder at the small sound he made, and nearly wept herself. Naturally, he came too soon—what could you expect? It didn’t matter to her, but a few moments later she heard his muffled chagrin next to her ear. “I don’t think I did that quite right.”

  She laughed as well, and told the air above him, “It takes practice.”

  He went motionless and she was afraid then that she’d hurt his feelings, but he rose on his elbows and looked down at her, face amazed, eyes merry. “Practice! You mean we get to do that more than once?”

  She giggled as he collapsed on her again. “Get off me,” she whispered after a while, still smiling, hands drifting along his back.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Get off me! You weigh a ton,” she lied, kissing the side of his neck. “All that macaroni and cheese!”

  “No. I like it here,” he told the pillow under her head.

  She put a finger into his armpit. He exploded and rolled away as she laughed and shushed him and whispered, “Celestina!”

  “Soy cosquilloso!” he said, astonished. “I don’t know what that is in Italian. What do you call it when there’s a reaction to touch like that?”

  “Ticklish,” she told him and listened, amused, as he guessed at the verb and quickly conjugated it. “You sound surprised.”

  He looked over at her, chest quiet now. “I didn’t know. How would I find that out? People don’t tickle Jesuits!” She looked at him, massively skeptical in the dark. “Well, some people tickle some Jesuits,” he admitted indignantly, “but I assure you, madam, that no one tickled me.”

  “Not even your parents? You weren’t always a priest.”

  “No,” he said curtly.

  Oh, God, she thought, realizing she’d wandered into some new minefield, but he rose up on one elbow and draped an arm over her belly. “I hate macaroni and cheese,” he confessed. “There were no dragons to slay for my beloved, but I ate macaroni and cheese for you. I want credit.”

  She smiled up at him, wholly content. “Wait,” she said as he went to kiss her. “Go back to that part about ‘beloved.’ ” But his lips dropped once more onto her mouth, and this time he did better.

  They were discreet, for Celestina’s sake, and he was gone before dawn. It was as difficult as anything he’d ever done, to say good-bye to her and leave. But there were other days at the beach that wore Celestina out early, and other nights that wore them both out late, and as that summer passed, she made him whole again. There was no memory of bestiality that she did not efface with beauty and gentleness, no humiliation that was not eclipsed by her warmth. And sometimes, when the dreams came, she was with him: salvation in the night. Before the summer was over, while the days were still far too long and the nights all too short, when the fragrance of lemon trees and oranges had deepened and drifted each night through her bedroom window to scent the sheets and her hair, he began to give back to her some of what she had given him.

  He had a sense, sometimes, of flawless peace. The words of Donne seemed perfect: “For I am every dead thing / In whom love wrought new Alchemie.” Attacked by hope, he could no longer resist belief in the goodness of having a future, and felt the past’s grip loosen. It’s over, he would think now and then. It’s finally over.

  Trucha Sai

  2042–2046, Earth-Relative

  SOFIA MENDES DID NOT LACK COMPANIONSHIP IN TRUCHA SAI. THE VILLAGE population stabilized at about 350, and there were other settlements nearby; visits were common and festive. She shared chores and meals with many people, and soon it felt natural to pass the time weaving the sword-like leaves of diuso trees into mats, windbreaks, umbrellas, cooking packets for steaming roots, baskets for collecting fruit. She participated in the seasonal round of ripening, and learned the location and identification of useful plants, the ways to avoid dangers, and how to find one’s way in what had first appeared impenetrable jungle.

  She was becoming a competent Runa adult—a knowledgeable field botanist, a useful member of the community—and found a certain satisfaction in that. But during the early months of her exile, the orbiting Stella Maris library system was the nearest thing she had to an intellectual companion. She could not r
each the ship physically, but she spent much of her day in radio contact with the library. After she had polished and edited them, she poured her observations of Runa life and her private thoughts into its memory, rather than leave them logged only on her own computer tablet. This habit made her feel less isolated, as though she were sending messages, not making entries in a diary. Someday her words would reach Earth, and she could believe herself a solitary scientist, contributing to her own society with her research. Still human. Still sane.

  Then, when Isaac was only fifteen months old, the morning came when she called up the access routines and was greeted by an unyielding silence. Staring at the laconic error message on her screen, she felt the physical jolt of a ship whose mooring rope has suddenly given way. Had the onboard systems become corrupted somehow? Perhaps the ship’s orbit had degraded and the Stella Maris itself had burned up in the atmosphere or fallen into the Rakhati sea. There were endless possibilities. The only thing she did not consider was what had actually occurred: a second party from Earth, traveling under the auspices of the United Nations, had in fact arrived on Rakhat. Some twelve weeks after landfall, the Contact Consortium had located Emilio Sandoz. Believing him the sole survivor of the Jesuit mission, they had sent the Stella Maris on its automated way back to Earth, navigated by Sofia’s own artificial-intelligence programs, carrying Emilio Sandoz home alone to infamy.

  There were many kinds of loneliness, she discovered. There was the loneliness that came from understanding but not being understood. There was the loneliness of having no one to banter or argue with, no one to be challenged by. Loneliness at night was different from the daylight loneliness that sometimes overwhelmed her in the midst of a crowd. She became a connoisseur of loneliness, and the worst kind of all, she discovered, came after a night when she dreamed of Isaac laughing.

  A tiny infant, long and fatless, he had slept away his early weeks with a heavy unresponsiveness that frightened her. She recognized that sleep was his way of concentrating his meager resources on survival, so she fought the desire to rouse him, knowing it to be a sign of her own need for reassurance. But even when he was awake, he could not meet her eye for more than a moment or two without going gray under his papery skin, and though he suckled more strongly as the weeks passed, he often vomited her milk. No matter what she told herself about a preemie’s undeveloped digestive system, it was difficult not to feel this as a heartbreaking rejection.