City of Brick and Shadow

by Tim Wirkus

  He saw the two missionaries out and told them, again, to come back any time.

  To the missionaries’ great surprise, they arrived at church the following Sunday to find Marco Aurélio there, dressed in a shirt and tie, chatting amiably with Bishop Claudemir. During the meetings, he paid polite attention to the talks and the lessons, and at the end of the three hours, he approached the missionaries.

  “When can you two come over again?” Marco Aurélio said.

  Using his sternest voice, Elder de Assis explained that this wasn’t some kind of game. If they came over to his house, he would need to listen to the missionary lessons and uphold the various commitments that were extended to him: to give up cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, and any drugs, if applicable; to abstain from sex outside of marriage; to keep the Sabbath day holy; and so on. And ultimately, he would need to decide whether or not to be baptized in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

  “Okay,” said Marco Aurélio when Elder de Assis had finished.

  “Okay what?” said Elder de Assis.

  “Come on over after lunch, and we’ll see how it goes,” said Marco Aurélio.

  And so they began their visits to Marco Aurélio, teaching him the principles of the gospel and inviting him to repentance. During this time, Marco Aurélio entered into a battle of wills with the two missionaries. He agreed, for example, to obey the Word of Wisdom by giving up coffee, alcohol, and cigarettes. In the same visit, however, he refused to promise to pay tithing after being baptized in the church.

  “I don’t even know if I want to be baptized,” he said.

  “But if you were to decide to be baptized,” said Elder de Assis, “do you promise you would pay tithing?”

  “That’s too hypothetical,” said Marco Aurélio. “I can’t answer that question.”

  In another visit, he told the elders that he believed completely that God communicated with His children through a living prophet on the earth today. Then, later in the lesson, he said he thought that most of the Bible was completely bogus, and he couldn’t accept it as scripture—no one could write the word of God.

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” said Elder de Assis. “If you believe that a contemporary prophet can speak for God, then why can’t the Bible?”

  “I’m just telling you what I believe,” said Marco Aurélio.

  During many of these conversations, Elder Toronto remained silent, spectating. Marco Aurélio seemed to know just how far to push Elder de Assis before the bespectacled elder would jump up from the couch in frustration and head for the door. More than anything else, Marco Aurélio seemed to treat these conversations like a complex game, to which only he knew the rules.

  At the end of every visit, Elder de Assis invited Marco Aurélio to be baptized, and each time, Marco Aurélio refused, explaining that once God sent him a revelation telling him to be baptized, he would be baptized, but until then he wouldn’t do it.

  Due mainly to Elder Toronto’s insistence—he felt deeply responsible for Marco Aurélio’s spiritual well-being in a way that he couldn’t fully explain—the elders continued their visits. After the tug of war between Marco Aurélio and Elder de Assis had been going on for weeks, however, even Elder Toronto began to doubt their investigator’s sincerity. More and more, it seemed that Marco Aurélio was toying with them, but Elder Toronto couldn’t fathom to what end.

  Finally, one morning as they were evaluating the progress of the people they were teaching, Elder de Assis put his foot down—Marco Aurélio had ceased progressing. They were wasting their time with him and needed to move on. Reluctantly, Elder Toronto had to agree. Prepared to deliver their ultimatum, they arrived at Marco Aurélio’s cinderblock home to find their investigator in an uncharacteristically cheerful mood.

  “Have a seat,” he said, ushering them onto his dusty couch. “I’ll be right back.”

  He came back with two chilled glasses of lemonade.

  “Here you go,” he said with a smile. “I made lemonade.”

  “Listen,” said Elder de Assis. “Before we get any further—”

  “Wait,” said Marco Aurélio, taking a seat in his armchair. “I’ve got something exciting I want to tell both of you.”

  He said that the night before he had dreamed that he was in a large building—someplace stately—standing in front of a heavy wooden door. While he had been standing there, his grandmother had appeared at his side. She had smiled at him and had pushed open the door. Taking his hand, she had led him into a great room, in the middle of which had been a marble pedestal. Resting on top of the pedestal had been a leather-bound book.

  “Open it,” his grandmother had said.

  He had opened the book to find its pages filled with names. He had turned page after page after page before coming to one that had read Vila Barbosa along the top. Under the heading had been a list of the members of the Vila Barbosa ward—Claudemir, Fátima, Beatrice, all of them—and at the bottom had been his own name, written in his own handwriting.

  “The book is good,” his grandmother had said, and then he had woken up, feeling wonderful, feeling that pleasant burning in his chest that someone had described to him at church.

  “What I’m saying,” he said to the missionaries, “is that I’d like to be baptized.”

  CHAPTER 8

  They ended up being only five minutes late to district meeting, slipping in through the front gate, crossing the courtyard, and entering the cool, tiled interior of the Parque Laranjeira ward house just after ten o’clock. They found the other missionaries gathered in the Relief Society room, Elder J. da Silva stationed at the chalkboard and the other missionaries—Elder Christiansen, Elder Reis, and Elder Fontura—sitting in a semicircle of metal folding chairs facing the front.

  “Sorry we’re late,” said Elder Toronto. “We missed our normal bus.”

  In the presence of the other missionaries, Elder Schwartz realized how raggedy he and his companion must look. He glanced at Elder Toronto. With his hair uncombed, his skin oily, his face stubbled with a day’s beard, he looked—as was the case—like he had been up all night. And Elder Schwartz could practically see the wavy cartoon stink lines radiating from their wrinkled, sweat-soaked clothes.

  “Please,” said Elder Toronto. “Go on. We didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  He and Elder Schwartz set up a pair of chairs and joined the semicircle. The other missionaries stared at them.

  “That’s fine,” said Elder J. da Silva. “We’re just starting our weekly reports.”

  Elder J. da Silva, their district leader, was a few years older than the other missionaries, somewhere in his mid-twenties, and always wore a long-sleeved shirt to hide the tattoos that covered his arms. Before his mission, he had worked as a guard in one of the big prisons up north. It was there that he had first heard of the church, when an inmate’s cousin had tried—absurdly—to smuggle a small knife into the prison inside a hollowed-out copy of the Book of Mormon. The cousin had been arrested and da Silva had confiscated both the weapon and the book. During one of his breaks, da Silva had read through the first several pages of the book, which were still intact. What he read had piqued his interest, and he had asked his coworkers what they knew about the book. One of them had heard of the Mormons and had told da Silva to stay away from them, that they were a cult, not a group you wanted to get mixed up with. But da Silva had continued to read and reread the intact pages of his copy of the book during every break he had at work.

  Then one day he had run into the inmate’s cousin, now an inmate himself, who had brought the book into the prison in the first place. Da Silva had stopped him, had asked him what he knew about the Mormons. The cousin had shrugged and told J. da Silva that his family had belonged to the church for a while when he was younger, but they didn’t anymore and he couldn’t remember much about it. Da Silva had asked where the Mormons’s church was, and the cousin had told him there was one he used to pass every day on the way to work that wasn’t too far fr
om the prison.

  After that, everything had fallen into place for da Silva—he had gone to the church, met the missionaries, taken the lessons, and been baptized. A year later he had decided to serve a mission and now here he was. His background gave him a macho credibility among the other elders, a credibility that was only enhanced by his unrelenting geniality. He was, as they say, tough but fair.

  “We’ll start with our area,” said Elder J. da Silva, standing at the chalkboard. “We had an interesting week in Parque Laranjeira.”

  He said that Bete, an older lady they had been teaching for several weeks now, had told them she didn’t want any more of the lessons, that the elders could stop coming to her house. They had asked her why and she had been very vague about her reasons, but insistent. They wished they knew what the problem was, but it looked like they wouldn’t have another chance to meet with her. In better news, they had an appointment scheduled later today to follow up with a new couple they had started teaching, the husband a cobrador on the bus the elders sometimes rode home in the evenings.

  Elder Toronto, who had been staring out the window during the entire report, turned and nudged Elder Schwartz. “This may have been a tactical error,” he said under his breath. “We’re wasting time.”

  “Come on,” Elder Schwartz whispered back. “You have to pay attention. You’re going to make everyone suspicious.”

  “But I never pay attention at district meeting,” whispered Elder Toronto. “It would be suspicious if I did.”

  Although this was true, his disregard for the meeting was never quite as flagrant as it was today.

  “You’re going to blow it,” whispered Elder Schwartz.

  “What was that, Elder Schwartz, Elder Toronto?” said Elder J. da Silva.

  “We didn’t say anything,” said Elder Toronto.

  Elder J. da Silva looked concerned for a moment, and then moved on.

  “Okay,” he said. “Who wants to report next? Elder Fontura and Elder Reis?”

  Elder Fontura nodded and stood up. He said that Carlos, one of their longtime investigators, was scheduled to be baptized this coming Sunday, and that everyone in the ward was really excited about it. Also, they had started teaching one of Carlos’s cousins, João, a young man who was engaged to a Mormon girl from another ward and played the clarinet in a local band. Their other investigators were all doing well, more or less—Erika was still trying to quit smoking, Paulo had traded shifts with someone at work so he could come to church on Sundays, Chiquinho and Ana Paula were looking into what they needed to do to get married, Guilherme was finally reading in the Book of Mormon, and Nina had prayed to know if this was the church of Jesus Christ and had told the elder she had received an answer that it was.

  “So that’s us,” said Elder Fontura, sitting down.

  Throughout Elder Fontura’s report, Elder Toronto had been tapping his pen insistently against his leg. The other missionaries stared at him, but he didn’t notice. They looked at Elder Schwartz, who only shrugged.

  “Thank you, Elder Fontura,” said Elder J. da Silva. “That leaves Vila Barbosa.”

  Elder Schwartz elbowed Elder Toronto, who stopped tapping his pen and looked around, eyes red-rimmed, at the other missionaries.

  “Are we done, then?” he said.

  “No,” said Elder J. da Silva. “We’re not. It’s your turn tell us how things are going in your area.”

  “Oh,” said Elder Toronto, “sure.”

  He tucked in his grimy, wrinkled shirt and straightened his tie. He said that he and Elder Schwartz had had better weeks in the past. They had lost every single one of their investigators, and Marco Aurélio, who had been baptized recently, had disappeared—hadn’t come to church and they could never catch him at home. But they were doing everything they could to get back in touch with him. The other missionaries nodded.

  “Any idea what the problem is?” said Elder J. da Silva.

  “We’re not sure,” said Elder Toronto.

  Elder J. da Silva said they should be sure to stay on top of this. President Madvig was very concerned with retention these days, and whatever was going on with Marco Aurélio—if someone at church offended him, or if he was doing something he was ashamed of, or if neighbors were giving him anti-Mormon propaganda—it was important to catch the problem early on and work with the bishop to help Marco Aurélio resolve it.

  “We’ll do everything we can,” said Elder Toronto.

  “Sounds good,” said Elder J. da Silva. “Next up we have a treinamento from Elder Fontura.

  Elder Toronto groaned, not quietly. “This was a mistake,” he whispered to Elder Schwartz.

  “Elder Toronto?” said Elder J. da Silva.

  “It’s fine,” said Elder Toronto, waving a hand dismissively. “Go ahead.”

  For the next half hour, the missionaries, led by Elder Fontura, discussed the most effective ways to make a street contact, and practiced incorporating a miniature lesson into their approaches. Throughout the treinamento, Elder Toronto fidgeted with the knot in his tie, scratched impatiently at his earlobe, and tapped his pen against his knee. He clearly wasn’t listening to a word his fellow missionaries said. Again, this was not unprecedented behavior from Elder Toronto, but it still made Elder Schwartz nervous. He didn’t want to be found out.

  Aside from the tension of keeping the previous night’s events secret from the other missionaries, Elder Schwartz didn’t enjoy the treinamento any more than his companion did. The role plays in which they practiced the skills they learned were yet another occasion for him to broadcast his shoddy Portuguese skills to the world. In casual conversation with other missionaries, he could do just fine. Sure, his American accent was as thick as ever. Sure, he still misconjugated verbs and stumbled over half-remembered vocabulary. But the other missionaries, even the native Portuguese speakers, all had enough experience with elders who struggled to learn the language that they could follow what he said. And knowing that helped Elder Schwartz to keep it together, to keep from collapsing into complete incomprehensibility.

  Any time the speaking situation became even remotely formal, however, Elder Schwartz fell apart—street contacts, lessons, interactions with church members, conversations with store owners, even these ridiculous role plays in front of other missionaries. It wasn’t that Elder Schwartz didn’t work at learning the language. The problem was that in the line of fire, all his practiced skills left him, rendering him flummoxed and incomprehensible. When he saw the look of absolute confusion in the eyes of his listener, he might struggle through a few more words or phrases and then his mind would stop up and he would fall silent.

  When his turn came to practice making a contact—in the scenario, he was waiting in line to pay his power bill, and decided to strike up a conversation with the man in front of him, played, in this case, by Elder Reis—he stumbled through the interaction as best he could. When it was over, he sat back down, tongue-tied and sweaty. Elder J. da Silva leaned in and told Elder Schwartz that his Portuguese was really improving.

  They practiced a few more times with a few more staged scenarios—waiting for a bus, buying groceries, walking home for the night—and then wrapped up their meeting with a prayer from Elder Toronto which lasted all of seven seconds. Elder J. da Silva distributed the mail he had picked up from the mission office, and also gave new bank cards to Elder Schwartz and Elder Toronto to replace the ones that had been stolen from them.

  “The secretary at the mission office said that he’ll have to make an appointment for you two with the Polícia Federal to get some new papers, but until then, just carry these photocopies,” said Elder J. da Silva, handing them both a folded piece of white paper. Elder Toronto thanked him and said they’d try not to get mugged again.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” said Elder J. da Silva.

  “Yeah?” said Elder Toronto, already walking backward out the door, pulling Elder Schwartz along with him.

  “President Madvig is going to spend a few da
ys visiting your area this week. He’d like you to show him around Vila Barbosa.”

  “What?” said Elder Toronto, stopping in his tracks. Elder Schwartz stumbled into him. “No. Not this week.”

  “Why not?” said Elder J. da Silva. “Is something going on?”

  “Why can’t he come next week?” said Elder Toronto.

  “Next week is transfers.”

  “So he’s just dropping by for a surprise inspection, then?” said Elder Toronto, striking an indignant pose. “What is this, a police state? You know, I would really prefer it if my leaders—”

  “Elder Toronto,” said Elder J. da Silva. “You asked him to visit. He’s coming on your request.”

  “What?” said Elder Toronto. “That’s ridiculous. I never requested anything like that.”

  “You did,” said Elder J. da Silva. “I was there. It was at the last mission conference. During lunch. We were all sitting at the same table and you told President Madvig that you knew he was thinking of shutting down missionary work in Vila Barbosa. And you laid out a whole big case explaining why he shouldn’t. And then you told him that at the very least, he should come see the area for himself before he made any final decision. On the phone this morning, he told me you had convinced him, and he’d like you to show him around.”

  “I don’t remember any of that,” said Elder Toronto, eying Elder J. da Silva suspiciously.

  “Elder Toronto,” said Elder J. da Silva, lifting his hands in exasperation. He turned to Elder Schwartz. “You were there, Elder Schwartz. You remember.”

  “Well,” said Elder Schwartz.

  “Look,” said Elder J. da Silva, shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter. Wednesday morning, President Madvig is coming to see your area. Okay?”

  Elder Toronto hitched up his pants and all but rolled his eyes.

  “Wednesday morning, you say?” he said.

  “That’s right,” said Elder J. da Silva.

  “Fine,” said Elder Toronto. “We’ll plan on it.”

  CHAPTER 9