The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  He had been right—we didn’t work together. Now that we had been apart for four months, longer even than we had managed to be happy together, I could see the truth in that. I could never have been fully myself with him, I would have had to suppress the core of who I am, the girl who searches for God on top of mountains, the girl who always looks, desperately, for a way that things might be good. But he had been wrong about one thing—I had loved him. I still loved him, despite knowing that we were completely ill equipped to make a life together. And I knew that, despite anything he said in a postelection rage, he had also loved me.

  It was only logical that I had crawled up a mountain in the desert trying to find the meaning in my life again, after having my heart so thoroughly broken. But for the first time it occurred to me that I might have chosen to become a nun not just to intercede for mankind, not to save my mother’s family from a curse, but because I had lost the man that I loved, and the world was so full of him that I did not know how to live in it again without him.

  A few days later, I received a broad manila envelope in the mail addressed in Mark’s familiar scrawl. I opened it on my bed and pulled out a recording that I quickly put on the stereo. Old-fashioned tango music floated out, and there he was, in my mind, gliding around the kitchen with his two hands in the air, holding an imagined partner and dancing.

  I reached inside again, and my fingers touched folded pieces of paper. One after another, I pulled out newspaper articles from the months during which we had not spoken to each other. There was an article on religion from the New York Times, a recipe, a few cartoons, and a single poem by one of my favorite poets, cut out from a recent edition of The New Yorker. He had underlined sentences and scribbled beside them—Thought you might like this or Reminded me of you—in watery blue ink. I remembered how often I used to crawl out of bed in Cambridge to find such small gestures left by him on the breakfast table on busy days.

  It was only after I read them that I thought to glance at the dates posted on the upper corners: the first and second weeks of November. It seemed impossible. In the moment in which I had felt most abandoned in the desert, someone in the world had been quietly saving newspaper articles for me. As though at any moment, I would walk through the kitchen door and find myself home again.

  I sat on the bed and I wept, not only for all of my losses, but for all of those treasures I had not even known that I had possessed. I could not help but wonder how much of my life had always been a secret, even to myself—how much had been far more beautiful than I had allowed myself to believe it might be. So this was the poetry Hassan had told me about, the poetry that exists even in the war, though we cannot see it. I understood it now. I understood my neighbors. I understood how a single recipe, cut out and left on the table, is enough to make the world good again.

  I crawled into bed. My flight back to Damascus was leaving in three days, and I wanted nothing more than to stay in America. But God had become the romantic relationship that I had fled a country to sever, and I had promised myself I was through with those days. I would not run away, not this time. I had to return and face God, at least sit across from him at the table and tell him I had changed my mind. I owed him that much.

  As for Mark, we had not been able to love each other, but for the first time in my life, I was certain that I was at last, finally, ready to love. I drifted off to the memory of tango music, dreaming of the life I would begin after Damascus, of all that it might still contain for me.

  I woke up the next morning with a raging fever, my chest sore and my body aching, barely able to breathe. That was two weeks ago.

  7.

  DAMASCUS GROWS COLDER AS JANUARY WEARS ON. I pass my days lying in bed and staring at the red flame inside of my sobba, working up the courage to return to the monastery. I know that I cannot avoid it forever, but I’m terrified. I am afraid of Paolo and afraid of God. I’m afraid of whatever or whoever has brought on this sickness. More than anything I am afraid of meeting my former self again in the desert. I don’t want to revert back to the girl I was in November, speaking to angels and offering up my life. I’m scared that if I see her I might touch her for a moment, might be seduced by her and the choices she made. I am afraid that I might accidentally become her.

  In the meantime, I turn twenty-eight years old. I lose fifteen pounds. I lie in bed and memorize the footsteps of my neighbors, climbing up and down the stairs of my house. I listen to the faint strains of Mexican soap operas sliding from beneath the Baron’s door and imagine a passionate drama playing out between a girl named Maria and a boy name Felipe and all of the tragic circumstances that keep them apart. And I dream of my room back home, and my family, and the big open sky, and short skirts that cling to the back of my knees, and grass on the front lawn, and being in love again.

  For lack of better reading material, I decide to reread the information package I was sent by the Fulbright program before setting out for my year in Syria, the set of instructions for how to survive a life abroad. I review subject headings I had written down in a spiral notebook during my September orientation: How to Change Dollars to Syrian Pounds, How to Access the Embassy Gym, Avoiding Health Problems.

  It strikes me that no one ever teaches us the most difficult things in life, the lessons we might actually find useful. I have no notes on preventing loneliness. There are no quick answers for how to cope with walking down the streets of Damascus, a citizen of an enemy country, burdened by the weight of war and refugees and a conflict escalating every day.

  There are no notes on what to do when you miss your family.

  There are no notes on surviving a broken heart.

  There are certainly no lessons on how to proceed after weeks of hallucinations, when you have promised your entire life to God in the desert but then decide that you want to back out of the deal.

  There are, however, directions to the nearest doctor’s office.

  This morning I pulled from my shelf the writings of St. Anthony, the famous Egyptian hermit and founder of desert monasticism, to see what he might tell me about my problems readjusting to life. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I found almost nothing about navigating the troubled earth. Instead, when I combed through his writings, I kept finding more and more advice on how to leave the world behind. “Hate the world and all that is in it,” he said to his followers. “Hate all peace that comes from the flesh. Renounce this life, that you may be alive to God.”

  But I don’t want to leave the world behind anymore. I want to go back to it again.

  I want to wake up in the morning and feel at home in my own body. I want to wake up in my own room, in my own language.

  Where is the spiritual guide who will teach me how to climb out of bed and sit down for breakfast, to just be human again?

  8.

  IT IS LATE JANUARY when I finally crawl out of bed, brush my hair, and change into clean clothes. I summon up all of the courage I have and pack my small black backpack, then once again make my way to the crowded bus station with its rows of rickety, decades-old buses. A crowd of jumpy men race out to meet me: Aleppo? Deir Ezur? Homs? Madame! Madame! Where do you want to go? I push past them all until I hear the voice, calling out from beside a minibus in the corner: Nebek! Nebek! Nebek! It is my very own call to prayer.

  A few minutes later we are traveling north. I watch out the window as the earth rolls away into desert hills and the blue sky intensifies. We pass tiny roadside villages, nothing more than a smattering of houses and a single minaret slicing the air. After two hours we turn onto the lonely, narrow desert road, and the smooth pavement changes to pebbles crackling beneath the wheels of the minibus. I am the only person left on board, and in front of me there is just endless open space and clouds of dust swimming before the dashboard. At last we stop at the foot of the mountain.

  The driver shakes his head as he hands me my bag. “It’s a long way up,” he says. He has no idea how long. I place my hand over my heart to say good-bye.


  I start walking. Above me, the light is catching on the red stones, making them seem to glow from within. My God, this place is beautiful. The stones haven’t changed at all, completely aloof as they are to all of us human beings. After fifteen hundred years on that cliff it must not matter to them what I choose. They are older than all of my choices, than all of us. Right now they seem older than the earth. I can no longer conceive of becoming a nun, and yet a voice from somewhere within me is saying, I’m home again.

  I am weak as I ascend the stairs, this climb up the mountain the first sustained effort I have attempted since I became sick. But the air at last feels crisp and clean in my lungs, and I can breathe again. Slowly, I settle into a rhythm, placing one foot in front of the other, and I try to imagine that I am ritually lifting myself above the last month of my life, leaving it behind altogether.

  Paolo is waiting for me in the courtyard wearing his gray wool cassock, rubbing his hands together and blowing on them. He embraces me with fatherly devotion. “Look at you, you’ve lost so much weight,” he laments, putting his hand on my forehead. “They don’t feed you enough in America.”

  He has no way of knowing that I gained five pounds in America, that Syria is solely responsible for the deterioration in my body that has left me looking like I was just scraped off the streets. Still, we don’t need to articulate that something has gone terribly wrong since the Spiritual Exercises. I was supposed to have returned here weeks ago.

  “You look good,” I tell him, even though he also looks ill, the circles under his eyes magnified beneath his enormous glasses, making him appear like a caricature of human exhaustion. We climb the narrow flight of stairs together up to his office and close the door behind us, and with the click of the latch we are alone, and I no longer need to be brave. I am simply a girl in front of my confessor, the man who had seen me to hell and back again, my own personal Virgil.

  “You’re tired, Stephanie,” he says.

  “I’m sick, Abuna.”

  He sighs. “For how long have you been sick? Why didn’t you tell us?”

  How long have I been sick? I can’t remember what life was like before this sickness.

  “I’m not sure, Abuna. Three weeks? Four weeks?” His eyes widen. “What is it that hurts?”

  My heart hurts, I want to tell him. “Everything hurts. My arms hurt and my legs, my back, my whole body. It hurts to breathe.” I laugh softly, trying to hold back my tears. “The neighbors say that I’ve caught Muridat-al-Huzn, the sickness of sadness.”

  He smiles faintly at my Arabic. “You know, you worked so hard during the Spiritual Exercises, you shouldn’t be surprised that you’re tired. It will just take time.”

  My heart falls inside my chest. It will just take time. Of course he thinks that I will still become a nun, that once this illness passes I will pack up my bags to begin a novitiate in the monastery. Why wouldn’t he? Two months ago I had been so sure.

  I take a deep breath. “Paolo, it’s all gone now.”

  There is no other way to put it. It’s all gone—my relationship with God, my religious calling, and my belief that I can discern the meaning of my life with clarity. She’s gone. She’s gone. That girl who gave up her heart in the desert no longer exists.

  Shhhh, he whispers.

  If I were a braver person, I would just tell him the truth: that one day during the Spiritual Exercises, I had climbed a mountain in the rain, shouting my life out to God. I had called out the prayer from the Psalms—Create in me a pure heart. Give me back my life—and God had listened, had given me everything back again, just at the moment when I had agreed to give everything away. I would tell him that the curse I once imagined I could undo with my promise doesn’t need my promise, and that I want my life back now. I want to be released from my vow.

  “You feel trapped, don’t you?” Paolo asks me, quietly. “Trapped in your choice?”

  I close my eyes tightly. “There is no choice anymore, Abuna. It was there and then it was gone.”

  9.

  THE MONASTERY COURTYARD IS ABANDONED, and the only sound is the faint ringing of bells in the distance as goats clamber along the nearby hills. Everything else is quiet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this place so quiet in my life.

  At the entrance to the chapel I remove my shoes before pulling back the heavy sheepskin blanket that covers the door. The familiar smell of smoke and wool and incense meets me. I enter without a sound, afraid to penetrate the silence that seems to have settled over the earth, and find a space to rest among the frescoes. With each breath, the silence settles into my bones, a balm rubbing its way deep into my exhausted limbs. On the wall above me, Samson busies himself wrestling with a lion, his body lifting off the ground so that the two bodies merge into one, lion and man. Behind me Elijah is sailing into the heavens in his chariot of flames. Everyone seems to be flying, on the path to somewhere else. Only we humans are bound so firmly down to the earth.

  What was it that Rilke had written? If only we too could discover a pure, contained, human place.

  A beam of light shines through the small arched window above the altar, illuminating the faces on the far wall. As the day continues the light will travel, lighting up different faces and leaving others to sleep. It is never the same church from one moment to the next.

  I had forgotten this silence. I close my eyes and attempt to walk through it, a series of long white corridors extending out over the earth toward eternity. My arms and legs start to remember themselves. But nothing will remove the knot of pain that has locked itself into my chest.

  It was not true, what I had said to Paolo. My calling did not simply disappear. I had held on to it, at least the faintest kernel of it, despite the divide of thousands of miles, and even when I no longer felt the desire to pray. I had held it in my heart as one holds the memory of a lover who leaves to fight a war, and even though you cannot remember his face, or his voice, or what it felt to speak to him alone, you know someplace in your heart that the love must have been real.

  I had held on to it. It was not until I had seen my mother that the calling had truly vanished.

  I had been dreading seeing her that Christmas. Even after I descended the steps of the mountain, I could never completely shake the vision of my mother, small and frightened, trembling in hell. There she was, shivering at the bottom of a very cold room, calling my name. It haunted me. I dreamed of that vision at night.

  It propelled me forward. Each time I saw her in agony, I felt a physical pain that made me want to leap to the bottom of that chasm and carry her out in my arms. I had never wanted anything quite so much. For all of my doubts, for all of my longings to hold on to my life, I would still give it up entirely if I could save her and her family.

  I wasn’t at all ready for the woman who came to meet me one December afternoon in a coffee shop in San Antonio. My mother was slightly late, and she arrived wearing jeans and an oversized red sweater, with a necklace of Christmas tree lights around her neck. She ran up to embrace me. “Stephanie Celeste!” she crowed. “I’m so happy to see you!” Then she smiled a real smile, a smile I don’t remember having seen before, and hugged me with such vigor that I thought the air would be pressed right out of me.

  That was when I knew that something had gone terribly wrong on the mountain.

  We spoke for hours. She told me about her new house, with wooden floors and a front porch with a swing. She described a recent voyage to Spain, when she had spent weeks walking on remote paths that ran near the sea. She talked about the Thanksgiving feast she had cooked for her entire extended family, and the students she taught in her classes, and the way she often thought of me across the world and hoped I’d come home again.

  Then I knew. She wasn’t the woman I had imagined trembling in hell. I had offered up my life to save someone who didn’t exist.

  A week later, I was at the Cantu family’s annual Christmas party. I had been running away from them for years, scared of them and their curse. Ye
t they looked familiar to me, despite the distance. I had seen them all in a vision, only a month before, lying side by side in the mountains on that first night of the Exercises, almost dying. They had enough strength left in their arms simply to hold out their hands, to ask the angels for their pieces of bread.

  Yet now, they looked just like people. My aunt Geri, who had traveled all over the world and could ask for directions in ten languages, showed up in an Indian sari, followed by my aunt May, an artist who cooked three-tiered wedding cakes, and my ponytailed uncle Carlos. Wallace, the husband of my aunt Loretta, who had been killed by that bus, made me a drink. In the wings I met violin-playing uncles and aunts with legendary singing voices, and a cousin who had just returned from digging up Mayan cities in Mexico.

  They weren’t dying. I suppose no one would have blamed them if they were, if they had gone over the edge and never come back again. But that’s not what had happened, after all.

  “When is it going to end?” my cousin had once asked me, fifteen years before, sobbing at a funeral.

  “I don’t know,” I said to her, because I didn’t know if it would ever end, if that was too much to ask for.

  But it had ended, somehow, during those years when I had been absent. If it had not ended, then it had at least become muted, bearable. Otherwise they could not have been there, in a kitchen in my hometown, passing cups of coffee back and forth to one another. Both were true. They were somehow on that mountain, calling, and yet still on the earth, alive. What I had decided on the mountain hadn’t changed that. They had done that on their own.

  And the dead were dead. There was no bringing them back, not to this world. My grandmother and my grandfather and my aunt were dead, and there was nothing that I could do. No sacrifice on the mountain could save them.