There Your Heart Lies

by Mary Gordon

  “I worked as Tomas’s assistant. He really seemed to need my help; he needed someone with some education, who could speak Spanish and English. Even my mother-in-law couldn’t refuse him, because he was a priest, you see, and also wounded.”

  “Was he wounded in the war?”

  “No, he did it to himself. And to explain why he did that, I have to explain who he was. If I use the word ‘saint,’ Amelia, what would that mean to you?”

  Amelia feels a kind of panic: the examination that happens in all school-based nightmares, the question for which you are not, could not ever be, prepared.

  “I guess it would mean a very good person.”

  She sees by her grandmother’s face that the answer is not right.

  But she will not give up.

  “I guess it has something to do with religion. So, maybe not Nelson Mandela. But what about Martin Luther King?”

  “Maybe, maybe,” Marian says, “maybe King. But I think a saint can’t be particularly concerned with victory, with a particular outcome, a particular success, and King was certainly strategic.”

  “So what you’re saying is a saint is someone who has no strategies.”

  Her grandmother’s smile is so extravagant that Amelia ducks her head, closes her eyes, as if a blinding light were falling on her.

  “Yes,” Marian says, “yes, that’s exactly right. My poor Tomas had no strategies. It’s as if he was missing a protective skin that kept him separated from people, from their griefs, as if the layer separating him from other people was completely porous. He would absorb other people’s sorrows, he would become saturated with them, and somehow the grief was lessened for the other person; he had taken it in, it had become his.”

  “Was that because he was a priest, because he had faith?”

  “Oh, I guess he did have it. Faith. Although he said he wasn’t a person of faith, he was a person of hope. But he was never optimistic about things turning out well in this world. He did have some sense of another realm where things would turn out well, where, as he said, every tear would be wiped away. You see, Marian, he said to me once, ‘I believe in pie in the sky. Or, at least, I hope for it. A piece for everyone.’

  “He knew that for someone like me, who had no faith, who had lost all faith, or had renounced it deliberately, what he believed in was ridiculous. He admitted it was ridiculous, and he never tried to make anyone believe anything that he believed, particularly when, at that time, anyone speaking in the name of faith had so much blood on their hands. I don’t believe in God, I couldn’t believe in God after what I’d seen. My brother hanging from a rope, unbelievable cruelties inflicted by people on each other, often with the greatest pleasure, unbelievable suffering as a result of these cruelties or in defense of something believed to be the good, maybe even actually the good. But I believed in Tomas, or I believed in something he had access to that I refused to call God. It was a dimension that added a kind of depth to everything he did, a way he had of being with someone, of giving more than anyone could possibly ask anyone to give of themselves, giving his utmost, of wearing himself out, and then somehow going on, not from any kind of hope that we would recognize, but because he’d been somehow refreshed or refilled at some well I could never approach. I never met anyone like him; I don’t think there will ever be anyone like him again.

  “Are you beginning to understand, Amelia?”

  “I think so,” Amelia says, because there is nothing in her that would say she doesn’t understand; she’s afraid that it would create a breach between her and her grandmother that would be impossible to repair. She is not being untruthful, there are parts she understands, although she is frightened of what is to come, frightened of her own potential failures at understanding.

  “I need to believe you understand because when I tell you about what he did to himself, it’s going to be hard for you not to be revolted.”

  “Revolted,” Amelia thinks, remembering her Spanish and its Latin roots, means to turn away. And whatever else, she knows that she will never turn away.

  “He was tall, large, somewhat lumbering, he had very thick, very black, wavy hair and his eyes were a deep, deep blue. When you saw him, what you always saw first was sadness.

  “Which isn’t to say he was never happy. He took great joy in things. He would say, ‘Look at the charm of that’…about a flower, or a bird, or a seed.

  “He was a priest, but he was also a scientist, and you couldn’t separate the two because the natural world was a great source of his faith. And what threatened his faith was his awareness of what people suffered, and that was what his priesthood was about: to be of consolation. But his consolation was in the natural world. He went to Ireland because he knew he could get the kind of training he needed there, but he came back to Spain for the same reason that Isabel stayed—because he knew that people were desperate and that he was needed.

  “For all his sadness, there was nothing more joyous than walking with Tomas in the countryside, helping him collect specimens. That was my job. It was all Isabel’s doing, she could do that, find solutions to things that seemed impossible, then shrug when you told her she’d done something impossible. ‘Nothing’s impossible if you have brains and guts,’ she’d say, not apologizing for claiming them for herself.

  “Tomas had the Seeing Eye; he could spot the differences in species when I couldn’t until he pointed them out, and the variety of the world delighted him. People were drawn to him as if they were living in a frigid climate and he was an open fire always available for them to warm themselves in front of. He would never judge; it was as if he felt judgment wasn’t an interesting category, or occupation. That’s another reason he liked getting out to the countryside, to get away from people. Because they were always after him, always wanted to be near him, always wanted to tell him something.

  “I said that what was most important about him was his sadness, and it was, in a way, but in another way, it was most important that he was a priest. How can I explain to you what a priest meant in that world, at that time? Now when you hear ‘priest’ the first word that comes into your mind is probably ‘pedophile.’ But at that time, both in Spain and in the world I grew up in—I mean the part of it that was Catholic—even though it was America, priests were like movie stars and generals and Supreme Court justices. Mothers wanted nothing more than for their sons to be priests. People deferred to them, they listened to them, even though a lot of them were fools or drunks or bigots…That kind of power, that kind of glamour, has to be corrupting. Some of them, a few of them, actually were what they were supposed to be, ‘servants of the servants of God.’ They were at the bedside of the dying, or they’d be the one to tell a mother her child had been killed, but most of them were spoiled and harsh and not very bright. So the whole idealized image of the priest, humble and self-sacrificing, is based on a few of them, the way the idea of the prostitute with the heart of gold is probably based on a few, probably there are a few whores with hearts of gold, but mostly they’re just hard and jaded.”

  “I don’t think anyone but you would come up with that analogy, Meme.”

  “I wonder what my father and my brothers would think of it. Well, they’re all dead. And all those priests with their well-cut suits and their white collars and their white hands. There was a kind of fetish about priests’ hands, we always had pure white linen towels available in the bathroom when priests came to visit, so that’s why the thing that Tomas did made so much sense, in its dreadful way.

  Marian goes silent. She doesn’t want to tell this story, or tell it wrong, so that Amelia will think Tomas is crazy or pitiable. She wants to tell her granddaughter that, even though what Tomas did goes against everything in the world she believes, it was a great act, a heroic act. The act of a saint.

  “Remember, I told you how important a priest’s hands were, how they were a kind of fetish, but it was a fetish that had been locked into law. Remember Tomas must have been in torment, absolute torment. He loved t
he Church, he really did see it as a mother. He was in torment over the horrors committed in the name of the Church he loved. But more than anything, he loved his sister, and he believed in her absolutely, as he believed in nothing and no one else, even the people in the Church in whom he was bound to believe under pain of sin. He also believed that being a priest, staying a priest, having kept away from the horrors safely in Ireland, he was complicit, complicit by his silence or his absence. So he decided that he had to do something with his own body to witness the horror and his complicity in it. Simply that. The only judgment would be against himself for being complicit and silent.”

  Marian wonders how much to tell. Should she describe the combine harvester, should she explain, as Tomas did in his letter, how he came to the decision, how he made it all happen? No, she will say it simply: “He deliberately cut his two middle fingers off in the workings of a farm machine. It was a part of a canon law that a priest had to have his thumb and middle finger intact to be able to consecrate the host.”

  Marian realizes that she’s using words that require translation.

  “To ‘consecrate the host.’ Let me see, how I explain this. You know that Catholics and some Protestants go to communion.”

  “Yes, Meme, when we lived in Mexico I used to go to church with my friends sometimes. I always wished I could go up to the front of the church with them and get whatever they were getting.”

  “Well, what they were getting was a little piece of bread, usually a flat, white wafer, which a priest said some words over, and people believe, they have to believe, that it’s not really bread anymore: it’s the body of Jesus. People killed each other over whether it was still bread or not, whether its nature had been completely transformed. God knows what people will kill each other for.”

  “So, because he couldn’t make communion he couldn’t be a priest?”

  “You don’t say ‘make communion.’ You say ‘consecrate the host.’ And no, in fact, he had thought all that out. What he did would prevent him from participating in the ancient ritual, the public ritual that was a communal celebration. But what he could do, and what he did, and it nearly took his life, was hear confessions. That would be private. You were allowed, even in that awful environment of fascist surveillance, to go to confession to whatever priest you wanted. And the local priest in Altea, who was a perfectly nice, rather stupid, frightened man, was glad to have Tomas’s help, because he knew he would have to hear things in confession he didn’t want to know about, and he was glad he didn’t have to live with Tomas, because he was a very intense guy, Tomas, and brilliant, and the other priest was glad he didn’t have to try to keep up with him. You’ve probably heard of the seal of confession.”

  “No.”

  “No? You’ve never seen those movies about priests who won’t give up murderers to the police? Montgomery Clift, I think. Oh, never mind. Or in a million cop shows, the cops want the priest to give them the clue that would nail the man who hacked up ten women in motel rooms, but the priest won’t ‘break the seal.’ So people knew they could tell Tomas everything they’d done, and they knew his kindness and that he wasn’t someone who would judge them, and they knew he would keep their secrets till his death. And in that time, in that place, people had dreadful secrets. It nearly killed him.”

  —

  Her grandmother had warned her that she might be revolted, and she had promised herself that she wouldn’t, she had promised her grandmother. But how can she understand what she’s just heard? Nothing in her life has prepared her for this. Her grandmother is right; she is, if not revolted, then appalled that she can only see it as a pathological act, a masochistic act, but that is what her grandmother, grabbing her wrist like a cuff, has said she must not do. Perhaps this is the time to lie. Her grandmother says that in a situation of two bad choices, one has to choose the least bad. But she has no practice in lying, and she’s sure her grandmother will see through her. She must think of something to say that has at least something of the truth in it.

  “It’s a very sad story. It might be the saddest story I’ve ever heard.”

  Her grandmother looks up: startled, pleased. “Yes,” she says, “yes, that’s exactly right. The saddest story. A story that happened because of a time of insanity and violence. In another time, in another place, Tomas would have been the kindly priest who disappeared into the mountains to collect specimens, maybe something of a joke among the people because of his devotion to weeds. And, of course, you can say that what he did was mad, but maybe madness in a mad time isn’t madness. Maybe it’s the only alternative to silence, to the silence that allows you somehow to prosper from the defeat of the innocent, the victory of the guilty. Because I know that the right were more guilty, that they were always on the side of the rich against the poor, and that the atrocities they committed—maybe it was only because of the accident of being better armed, but I don’t think so—were greater than the other side, the numbers were greater, and, to my mind, and certainly Tomas’s, they were worse because they were performed in the name of God. So, yes, the saddest story. Sadness is difficult; people will do anything rather than be sad. Anger is exciting, it’s enlivening, and judgment is bracing: your spine straightens, your head is up, and you walk with a new purpose. But sadness—you must just be still with no idea how to move anywhere. That’s why it’s important to me that you don’t use terms like ‘sick’ or ‘self-hating’ to explain what Tomas did. Those words are off the mark, given the times. But sadness, I think maybe when it comes to the history of the world, sadness is always the right thing to say.”

  Amelia sits at her grandmother’s feet and puts her head in her grandmother’s lap. Marian strokes the fine, fair hair. Her father Jeremy’s. Her grandfather Theo’s.

  “I thought I’d stay in Spain forever, and then one day, when Tomas and I were collecting specimens in the mountains, a blond angel appeared. The angel was your grandfather, Theo, who was, of course, not an angel, just an adorable young man.

  “He was only twenty-four, ten years younger than I, walking through Spain with his notebook and pencils, sketching. This man, who was so much a boy, lifted my heart, and I came alive again, although Isabel and Tomas had done most of the work—I’d been with them for seven years. But your grandfather’s sweetness, his beauty, his wonderful hands and feet, and the smell of him…which I could never get enough of…well, that brought me to life in a new way.

  “I was ready to leave Spain, and it wouldn’t have been possible without your grandfather.

  “We came to this house; he became a cabinet maker. I met Helga, and we started the nursery. We were very happy. We didn’t exactly mean for me to get pregnant. Or maybe we did—I don’t know. And then I had your father. And the last part of my life was given to me. I knew I wasn’t a monster. I could love a child. I could marry a good man, have good work, make sense of the world. We were very happy for thirty years, your grandfather and I, and your father—he went off to college and your grandfather and I had ten years alone together in this house. And then he died, just there; see that apple tree, he was pruning it and he had a heart attack. I found him, just at the foot of the tree. So like him, to die without a fuss, to die in a place where he had just been useful and happy.

  “And there you are. You wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t lived my life exactly as I did. And so this is the end of the story, Amelia. The story you wanted to hear.”

  But what is the story? That Meme went to Spain to support the Republic, that she married a man who died, that she had a baby, that she was drugged, that she lived in terror in Franco’s Spain, that she had two friends whom she loved, one of whom mutilated himself…but she is calling him a saint…that she met the angel Theo, my grandfather, that my father was born. But what about your son? Amelia wants to ask. Do you know what happened to him? Do you know where he is? Did you ever try to get in touch with him? Is he still alive? Is he just one part of the story? And maybe not the most important part? How can that be, Meme? It can�
��t be. That you have forgotten a child.

  Her grandmother looks at the photograph of Isabel one more time, then replaces it in the cardboard box, covering it with a kind of finality, satisfied that something has been finished. But Amelia knows nothing has been finished. No, Meme, she wants to say. Nothing is finished. Something, I think, has just begun.

  SPAIN, 2009

  AVONDALE, RHODE ISLAND, 2009

  A VOICE is saying in a language that is not hers, but that she understands, that the plane is about to land in Madrid. Only half awake, she is confused. It doesn’t seem likely that she would be arriving in Madrid. Then she remembers: this is the thing she has to do. She knew it almost from the beginning, from the time she knew who her grandmother was.

  Amelia knew that she would have to lie. There was no choice. She must go to Spain, find Ignacio Ortiz, her uncle, Meme’s son, and bring him back for reconciliation with his mother before it’s too late for both of them.

  She has saved five thousand dollars. It wasn’t very difficult. She didn’t pay any rent; Meme provided most of her meals; she did her laundry in her grandmother’s washer. Occasionally, she’d have a meal out with her friends. She’d bought herself a shearling coat and a pair of sheepskin-lined boots. She’d bought Meme a cashmere shawl, a deep red with a pattern of bronze roses, and her mother a silver brooch in the shape of a dragonfly. Other than that, most of her salary went into her savings account.

  She found Altea on the map. She would fly to Madrid and take a plane from there to Alicante. From there, a bus to Benidorm, and then a taxi. She hadn’t done it herself. Rachel had helped her. Rachel was the first she tried her lie on, or one version of it. She told Rachel her friend from California was getting married in Altea. She told Meme that her friend was getting married in Madrid. In the middle of the night, she woke up in a sweat: suppose Rachel and Meme spoke and discovered the difference in the stories. Then she remembered: Meme was very sick; she couldn’t drive anymore. She wouldn’t be going into town, and it wasn’t like Rachel to visit a sick person. Sickness of any kind “just creeps me out,” she said, knowing herself to be a hypochondriac. It was one reason she was very careful about the ingredients in her breads and cakes. She wouldn’t, for example, let Amelia use anything but natural food colorings. Sometimes this frustrated Amelia, but she went along with what Rachel wanted.