The Sparrow

by Mary Doria Russell

  "Well, now, see. There’s exactly the problem, Anne. I’m afraid he’d think more of me. Which is to say, I’m afraid the whole issue would occupy his mind to some extent and I don’t want to distract him with trivia right now. Course, he’d work it all through and he’d realize that I’d played straight with him all along—"

  "So to speak."

  He laughed. "Poor choice of words." He stopped and scuffed a rock out of the ground with his foot. "It’s not like I ever lied to him. Subject just never came up. I never asked him if he was straight and he never asked me if I wasn’t. Closest we ever came to it was when he asked me about another guy, years ago. I just told him, hell, we ain’t all abstainin’ from the same thing."

  "And what did he make of that?" Anne asked, smiling.

  "Took it at face value." D.W. looked at the mountains south of them. Somewhere on the other side of the range was Alan Pace’s grave. "Look, Anne. The way things are is fine. I don’t need anything from Emilio. What went on inside my head years ago is my business. And it’s history."

  She couldn’t argue with that. She might have said the same thing herself, had their positions been reversed. "Okay, okay. Message received."

  "I ’preciate the thought, Anne, I surely do, and under other circumstances, you might be right. But, here, now—" D.W. leaned over to pick up the rock he’d unearthed and whipped it off across the gorge, loose-shouldered and accurate. It fell just short of the other side and rattled down the cliff to the river below them. "What concerns me is the big picture. You know as well as I do, everything about this mission has been damn near to miraculous. And Emilio is the key to it. I don’t want to muddy the waters! I don’t want him thinkin’ about me. Or Mendes either, far as that goes. I ain’t gonna make an issue of them workin’ together because they’re handlin’ it okay. And they’re doin’ some fine research. But, frankly, I’m holdin’ my breath."

  There was a silence, and Anne sat down, legs dangling over the ledge. D.W. stood for a while, less confident about the stability of the rock formation, but joined her at last and occupied his hands by flipping stones out into the void.

  "D.W, I’m not arguing with you. I’m just asking, okay?" He nodded, so she went on, "Let’s say the Age of Miracles hasn’t closed down altogether yet, okay? Just for argument’s sake. And we agree that Emilio is very special. But so is Sofia, right?"

  "No kick so far."

  "Well, it just seems to me that there is some pretty powerful theology on the side of love and sex and families. It seems to me that a fairly authoritative Personage once commented that it is not good for man to be alone. Rome, along with all closets," Anne pointed out archly, "is very far away. We have been gone almost two decades. Maybe priests can marry now! And in any case, I fail to see how Emilio would be cheating God out of anything by loving Sofia."

  "Annie, you are troddin’ a path that’s worn to bedrock." D.W. reached behind himself and scooped up another handful of pebbles. A spasm of pain crossed his face, but Anne put it down to the topic. "Oh, hell, I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t make a dime’s worth of difference. Maybe they’d just be happy and have a fine bunch of kids an’ God would love ’em all …"

  They sat for a time listening to the sounds of the river and staring at the western sky, blazing now with the colors of first sundown. D.W. seemed to be working something out, so Anne just waited until he spoke again.

  "Bear with me here, ’cause I’m just stirrin’ this around some with a stick. But, Anne," he said softly, "it seems to me that sainthood, like genius, is rooted in a sort of inspired persistence. It’s a consistent willing of one thing. It’s that kind of consistency and focus I see at work in Emilio."

  "D.W., are you serious?" Anne sat still, eyes wide open. "You think Emilio is a s—"

  "I didn’t say that! I’m talkin’ in the abstract here. But Marc and me, we been hashin’ it out and, yes, I see the potential for it, and it’s my job to protect that, Anne." He hesitated a moment before confessing, "Maybe I shouldn’t have but I did in fact use the S-word in one report back to Rome. I tole ’em I think we got us a gen-u-wine big-time mystic on our hands. ‘Wedded to God and at certain moments, in full communion with divine love,’ is how I put it." He dumped the last few rocks, brushed the dirt off his hands and leaned over to watch the pebbles clatter downward, elbows on his knees, the big-knuckled hands loose between his legs. "Hell of a management problem," he said after a time. "They don’t cover this one back home at the Famous Father Superiors School."

  Anne found there was nothing she could say. She stared at the clouds in the western sky, piled like whipping cream tinted by strawberries and raspberries, blueberries and mangos. She never got tired of the colors here.

  "And, Anne," D.W. continued thoughtfully, "I’m real concerned about Mendes in all this, too. I am awful fond of that girl and I don’t want to see her hurt. She’s all guts and brains on the outside, God love her, but there’s broken glass inside that child. If he’s gotta choose, Milio’s gonna choose God, and I hate to think how Sofia would take that. So don’t you go encouragin’ her to take the initiative, unnerstan’?" D.W. got to his feet. Anne noticed that he seemed a little pale, but his next remark startled her out of any inquiry. "Too bad Sofia didn’t take a shine to the Quinn boy or Robichaux."

  Anne stood up as well and frowned, confused. "Well, Jimmy, of course! But Marc? I thought he was—well, you know. I thought—"

  "You thought Robichaux was gay?" D.W. roared, and half a dozen coronaries rocketed into the air. He put a bony arm around Anne’s shoulders, obviously tickled by the notion. "Oh, my. No-o-o. Not by a wondrous long shot. Marc Robichaux," he informed her as they strolled along, "is in love with capital-N Nature and women are nature at its finest for ole Marc! He loves the ladies. Marc, in his own way, is a kind of mystic, too. God’s reality is everywhere for him. It’s almost an Islamic theology. Robichaux don’t separate the natural and the supernatural. It’s all one thing for him, and he adores it all. Specially if it’s female." He looked down at Anne, still gawping at him, and laughed at her. "Now, you talk about a management problem! Province had to put ole Marc to work in a boys’ school to keep him out of trouble. He never hit on anybody but he is a good-lookin’ sumbitch and one thing leads to another. Couldn’t say no if a woman came to him. And come they surely did. Best therapeutic lay in Quebec, is what I heard."

  "I’ll keep it in mind," Anne said, breathless now herself with laughter, but she couldn’t help saying, "So celibacy is optional."

  "Well, in some sense, it mighta been for Marc, early on. Came a time when he mended his ways. But, now, look here! This illustrates my point about Emilio," D.W. said emphatically. "For Emilio, the separation between natural and supernatural is basic. God is not everywhere. God is not immanent. God is out there somewhere, to be reached for and yearned after. And you’re gonna have to trust me on this, but celibacy is part of the deal for Emilio. It’s a way of concentrating, of focusing a life on one thing. And I happen to think it’s worked for him. I don’t know whether it’s he found God, or God come and got him …"

  They could see the hampiy shelter again now, sunlight like molten copper streaming in from the west. Askama was still in Emilio’s lap, asleep apparently. Sofia’s head was bent over her computer tablet. Emilio noticed them and raised a hand. They waved back. "Okay. Okay, I see your point," Anne said. "I’ll keep out of it. Maybe it will all work out."

  "I hope so. Lots at stake here, for both of ’em. For all of us." He pressed a hand into his belly and made a face. "Damn."

  "You okay?"

  "Oh, sure. Nerves. I react to everything with my belly. I knew you knew but sayin’ something’s different."

  "What’s your theology like, D.W.?" Anne asked, pausing at the top of the path that led down the cliff.

  "Oh, hell. On my best days? I try to keep my mind stretched around both experiences of God: the transcendent, the intimate. And then," he said, grinning briefly, "there are the days when I think that
underneath it all, God has got to be a cosmic comedian." Anne looked at him, brows up. "Anne, the Good Lord decided to make D. W. Yarbrough a Catholic, a liberal, ugly and gay and a fair poet, and then had him born in Waco, Texas. Now I ask you, is that the work of a serious Deity?" And, laughing, they turned down the steps toward the cut-stone apartment they now called home.

  THE OBJECT OF this conversation was unaware of the extent to which the exalted state of his soul was drawing notice. Emilio Sandoz was sweating buckets with Askama curled up on his lap, radiating heat like a fourth sun in the late afternoon. If, instead of assuming that he was meditating on the glory of God or synthesizing some new and closely reasoned model of Ruanja grammar, anyone had asked him directly what he was thinking about, he would have said, without hesitation, "I was thinking that I could really use a beer."

  A beer and a ball game on the radio to listen to with half an ear as he worked, that would have been perfection. But even lacking those two elements of bliss, he was and knew himself to be completely happy.

  The past weeks had been suffused with revelation. At home and in the Sudan and the Arctic, he had seen acts of great generosity, of selflessness and abundance of soul, and felt close to knowing God at those moments. Why, he had once wondered, would a perfect God create the universe? To be generous with it, he believed now. For the pleasure of seeing pure gifts appreciated. Maybe that’s what it meant to find God: to see what you have been given, to know divine generosity, to appreciate the large things and the small …

  The sense of being engulfed—saturated and entranced—had inevitably passed. No one exists like that for long. He was still staggered by the memory of it, could feel sometimes the tidal pull in some deep stratum of his soul. There had been times when he could not finish any prayer—could hardly begin, the words too much for him. But the days had passed and become more ordinary, and even that he felt to be a gift. He had everything here. Work, friends, real joy. He was swept sometimes with an awareness of it, and the intensity of his gratitude tightened his chest.

  There was great contentment in the simplest moments. Like now: sitting inside a hampiy tree with Sofia and Askama, out here on the plain, where they could work in the afternoons while the others slept, without so many interruptions and so much kibitzing. Chaypas had shown them how to make a wonderful breezy shelter simply by pruning out a corridor to the natural clearing inside the trees. The older plants were fifteen to twenty feet in diameter with thirty or forty straight stems, growing bushlike, leading to an umbrella of leaves. The leaf canopy was so dense that it prevented all but the heaviest rainfall from reaching the central region of the tree, and the internal stems died off naturally, leaving a ring of live ones around the outside. All you had to do was clean up the center a little and bring in cushions or hammocks to hang from the branches overhead.

  Lulled by the afternoon heat, the dull discussions and the peculiar foreign monotone, Askama would relax and he would feel her breathing slow and the sweet weight of her settling against him. Sofia would smile and nod at the child and their voices would drop even lower. Sometimes they would simply sit and watch Askama sleep, enjoying the rare silence.

  The others complained about the constant talk and the physical closeness the Runa liked, the way they crowded around one another and around the foreigners, back leaning against back, heads in laps, arms draped around shoulders, tails curled around legs in a muddle of warmth and softness in the cool cavelike rooms of the cliff. Emilio found it beautiful. He had not realized how starved he was for touch, how isolated he had been for a quarter of a century, wrapped in an invisible barrier, surrounded by a layer of air. The Runa were unselfconsciously physical and affectionate. Like Anne, he thought, but more so.

  Emilio pushed the hair off his forehead one-handedly and looked down at Askama, shifting in the hammock chair George had designed for him. Manuzhai made it, working from George’s sketch, going beyond the plans he provided, her astonishing hands weaving complicated patterns into the rush basketry. Manuzhai often joined him and Sofia and Askama out in the hampiy, and he loved the Runao’s low husky voice. Similar to Sofia’s, now that he thought of it, but unusual among Manuzhai’s people. And he loved the melody of Ruanja. Its rhythm and sound reminded him of Portuguese, soft and lyrical. It was a rewarding language to work on, full of structural surprises and conceptual delights …

  Sofia snorted and he knew he was right when she fell back against her chair and stared balefully at him. "Lejano’nta banalja," she read. "Tinguen’ta sinoa da. Both spatial."

  "Note, if you will," Emilio Sandoz said, face grave, eyes alight, "the awe-inspiring lack of smugness with which I greet your news."

  Sofia Mendes smiled prettily at a man she was very nearly content to call colleague and friend. "Eat shit," she said, "and die."

  "Dr. Edwards has had a lamentable influence on your vocabulary," Emilio said with starchy disapproval, and then continued without missing a beat. "Now that you mention it, shit would, of course, fit the general rules for spatial versus nonvisual declension, but what about a fart? Would a fart be declined as a nonvisual, or would a Runao consider such odors to be in a category that implies the existence of something solid? Your levity is uncalled for, Mendes. This is serious linguistic inquiry. We can get another paper out of this, I promise you."

  Sofia was wiping tears away. "And where shall we publish it? The Interplanetary Journal of Intestinal Gas and Rude Noises?"

  "Wait! There’s another category. Noise. Easy. Nonvisual. Has to be. Well, maybe not. Try enroa."

  "That’s it! I’m quitting. I have had enough," Sofia declared. "It’s too hot, and this has become entirely too silly."

  "At least it isn’t smug," he pointed out.

  Askama, roused by the laughter, yawned and craned her neck to look at Emilio. "Sipaj, Meelo. What is smug?"

  "Let’s look it up," Sofia suggested airily, playing at using the tablet dictionary and deliberately talking over Askama’s head. "Here it is! Smug. It says, Sandoz comma Emilio; see also: insufferable."

  Ignoring Sofia, Emilio looked down at Askama and assured her with perfect aplomb, "It is a term of endearment."

  THEY GATHERED UP Askama’s toys and the computer tablets and Sofia’s coffee cup, which she emptied with a toss, and started back toward the cliff dwellings in the slanting light, one sun down, another dropping fast, and only the third and much dimmer red sun relatively high in the sky. For all the heat of these days, Jimmy Quinn was of the opinion that the weather might well turn soon. The rainfall was decreasing from torrential to merely soaking, and the heat lately had been drier, less enervating. The Runa were uninformative. The weather was just there, not much commented upon, except during thunderstorms, which scared them and seemed to provoke a lot of talk.

  Sofia arrived at the apartment long before Emilio and Askama, undelayed by the swarm of children that coalesced around Sandoz, wheedling and teasing, hoping for some new delight or astonishment to appear in his hands. Most of the VaKashani napped during the heat, and the village was just waking up for the second round of daily activities. Emilio stopped to talk to people along the narrow walkways, lingering in terraces, admiring a toddler’s new skill or flattering a youngster with a question that allowed the child to show off some new competence, accepting small bits of food or a sip of something sweet as he made his way home. It was dusk by the time he got there and Anne had already lit the camplights, a source of muted interest among the Runa, who might have been dismayed by the tiny eyes of their single-irised guests, but who merely observed the technical compensation for this handicap with sly, shy glances.

  "Aycha’s little one is walking already," Emilio announced as he ducked in from the terrace, accompanied by Askama and three of her friends, attached to various of his limbs, all talking.

  Anne looked up. "So is Suway’s. Isn’t it darling? Just when a human child would plump down on its behind, these kids shoot those little tails out and catch themselves. There are few things quite as charmi
ng as the inept functioning of an immature nervous system."

  "Has anyone seen an infant?" Marc asked from his corner of the large irregular room. He’d completed an approximate census that morning; to be honest, he had trouble telling individuals apart. "The population structure here is quite odd, unless there is a distinct breeding season—there are age cohorts with long gaps between them. And seems to me that there should be many more children, given the number of mature adults."

  "It seems to me that there are a multitude of children," said Emilio wearily, talking a little loudly above the amazing clamor that four small kids could produce. "Legions. Hordes. Armies."

  Anne and Marc launched into a discussion of infant mortality, which Emilio tried to follow but couldn’t because Askama was pulling on his arm and Kinsa was trying to climb onto his back. "But they all seem so healthy," Anne was saying.

  "Healthy and loud," Emilio said. "Sipaj, Askama! Asukar hawas Djordj. Kinsa, tupa sinchiz k’jna, je? George, please, ten minutes? Jimmy?"

  George scooped Askama up and Jimmy distracted the other kids long enough for Emilio to go down to the river and wash up in some privacy before dinner. When he got back to the apartment, he found that the household numbers were somewhat reduced that evening. Askama had left to play with her friends, as she often did if Emilio was out of sight for a while. Manuzhai had gone visiting. She might not come back at all; equally likely, she might return with five or six guests who’d spend the night. Chaypas was away on some errand, for some unspecified length of time. People often disappeared like that, for hours or days or weeks. Time seemed unimportant to the Runa. There were no calendars or clocks. The nearest Emilio had come to finding vocabulary for the idea was a series of words having to do with ripening.

  "Miz Mendes here says you spent the day bein’ brilliant," D.W. drawled as Emilio sat down to eat.