“Sit beside me,” Rosie said, patting the stone bench. Mauricio sat, and by the moonlight, he saw that she was crying. He reached for her face and wiped her tears with a soft caress. He had never been so close to her, fully awake, and his heart was pounding and his ears ringing.
“I love you,” he whispered to her.
“I love you,” she said back, her voice tinged with a heartbreaking sweetness, her bright eyes looking at him with an intensity that made him shiver, her hands seeking his. “I’ve never thought I could feel for someone the way I feel for you. I want you to remember this. I’ll always love you.”
“Rosie, my Rosie…” It was difficult to look at her and talk at the same time. He wanted to take her in his arms, but he didn’t move; her mere presence had him frozen. You’re my Goddess.
“You know what I’d like to do now?” she asked, freeing him from the spell.
“No, what would you like to do?” Mauricio smiled, remembering their previous conversations started with the same question.
“I’d like for us to have a date.”
“A date?” He didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Yes, like normal couples do.”
“What do you do in a date?”
“You go out—” She lowered her eyes for a moment.
“We are out.” He smiled at her. “What else?”
“People talk about their lives, what they like to do, about their youth, their pets…”
“What did you like to do when you were a kid?”
“Do you want to hear about that?” Rosie asked with the softest voice.
“Yes, please.”
Mauricio still remembered every single word she had spoken ten years earlier. He also remembered the way her intonation sounded different from the way the other women talked. She talked as if she was singing and pronounced every letter as if it mattered. He also remembered how her hands waved through the air while she was saying something about her childhood. He didn’t have anything pleasant to tell her about him, so he simply listened, enchanted by her grace. Mauricio had been happy, truly happy, during that hour.
“Would you like to build a stone sculpture with me?” she asked after having told him about her summers spent with her grandmothers at a resort by the sea.
“I don’t know what it is,” he answered.
Rosie explained to him what a stone sculpture was, while looking for rocks of different sizes.
“I like the smooth stones you can find on the shore,” she said, giving him a pile of small rocks. “I have been building stone sculptures as long as I can remember. Every little rock is a memory.”
They worked balancing three stones, one on top of the other, until she stopped his hand. “This is it. It’s done. It’s perfect.”
Mauricio looked at the rocks piled in a pyramid shape, and thought it was beautiful.
“This is you,” she said, touching the biggest rock sitting on the bottom. “This is me, and the small one on top is our Maurice.”
Rosie then told him about that one time when, looking for the perfect stone, she had climbed a wet rock wall and fell. “Guen is coming for you,” she said suddenly, after showing him the healed wound on her right knee.
“She’ll go with you and you’ll both be safe, far away from here.” Rosie’s tears were hurting him, but he understood that she didn’t want him to ask anything. “You’ll be free, and you’ll never have to come back here.” She continued pressing his hand on her heart. Mauricio could still remember how warm and alive she had felt under his fingers. Sometimes at night, when he missed her the most, he liked to imagine the texture of her skin on his.
“You’ll have a beautiful life,” Rosie said.
“But I want to be with you.” Mauricio hated hearing the sadness in her voice. “I’m not going anywhere without you,” he said, even though he knew he was talking nonsense. There wasn’t any life together for them. If he wanted to see her, even through bars, it meant going back to his cell, hoping that Rosie’s mothers would let her continue visiting.
“I feared so…”
“I prefer to go back if it’s the only way to see you,” Mauricio said truthfully. He didn’t care to be free that much. He didn’t even know what it felt like.
“You don’t have to go back. I—” Rosie paused for few seconds, collecting her words. “—will reach you. When the baby is born, I’ll leave everything behind and I’ll come to live with you.”
Mauricio didn’t say anything, but Rosie understood his silent question and answered immediately. “I can’t come with you right now, because the baby is not well. No—” She saw the panic in his face and hurried to reassure him. “—no, don’t worry. I’ll take good care of our daughter and when she is strong enough, we’ll reach you.”
“I love you,” Mauricio said again, feeling that the hour had already expired, and he had so many things he wanted to tell her. “I have something for you… a gift.”
“You have a gift for me?” Rosie’s eyes were bright with tears, already.
“I want to give you something.” He took her hands in his. “It means a lot to me, and after what you have told me tonight, it’s the perfect gift for you.”
“What is it?” Rosie asked before opening her hands to see what was inside them.
“My freedom,” he answered.
“It’s beautiful.” She slowly caressed the smooth surface of the pebble Mauricio had given her.
“I picked it up from the ground the first time I set foot outside. I kept it on me this whole time; you can build a sculpture with it, if you want.”
“Thank you… this is the most beautiful gift I have ever received. I’ll never part from it.” Rosie couldn’t contain her emotions anymore. “You are the love of my life.” She leaned ever so slowly and raised her lips to meet his.
Mauricio had never been kissed before. The softness of her mouth met his cracked skin and restored him fully. He felt the air leaving her body and it smelled sweet. His arms went around her, embracing her tiny body, and she said his name. It sounded pure. To this day, he never let anyone call him Mauricio again. Nobody else had that right. It was hers. He was Mauricio only for Rosie, for the rest of the City of Men, he was simply the Priest.
“Priest?” Lucas asked with a worried face, and Mauricio came back from the past.
“Yes, Lucas.” Everybody knew that his mind tended to wander aimlessly, but only the kids complained about it. The adults were too intimidated by his persona.
“You haven’t answered my question about what you are going to teach tomorrow.” Lucas was the smartest kid in his class; he always had an abundance of questions when he entered the classroom each morning.
“Tomorrow, we are going to study the Ethical Rights on which our City of Men is based,” Mauricio said, in his best formal tone. He loved that lesson. He couldn’t wait for the right time of the year when he taught about their constitution. Normally, Guen and Arias made an appearance for the occasion; otherwise, they preferred to stay at the Sanctuary with their daughter, Cordelia. Even in the City of Men, where everybody was free, married couples of different genders weren’t widely accepted. Mauricio was still fighting that battle and it pained him that his friends weren’t integrated inside the city they had helped build. But at least they lived close to the city, still outside its borders, but close enough.
Compared to Lucas’ home, Guen and Arias’ Sanctuary was just around the corner. When he was born, Lucas’ parents had decided to move to the Caves, a big natural compound with a system of caves—hence the name—and springs. They weren’t the only ones there; other families who didn’t feel safe in the City of Men had joined them. Nobody knew exactly how many families were there. They remained separated, but at least Mauricio had convinced the Cavers to send the kids to school. Everybody trusted the Priest’s words. He had promised that the kids would be safe with him, and so they were.
While walking Lucas safely home, he wondered, as he often did when he was with
kids around ten years old, how his daughter was doing. Maurice was ten now, and he imagined her as a small replica of his beloved Rosie. He pictured Maurice with chestnut hair, hazel eyes, and maybe freckles on her nose. She would be funny, smart, and talk with her mother’s lilting accent. Mauricio had never stopped waiting for Rosie, even if he knew deep inside what she had bargained that night to give him freedom: Rosie had given up her own.
He had kept in contact with Ginecea, and he had read with tears in his eyes of the ecstatic news about the First Daughter’s wedding. He had built a web of spies in all the slaves’ facilities, and they were good at reporting anything he asked. And he had asked to know anything regarding the First family, anything at all. He had a box full of clippings from magazines that he opened every night before going to bed. There weren’t many pictures of Rosie after she had married; she and her wife conducted a photographer-shy life somewhere on the marine coast, away from the bright lights of Ginecea. If Rosie’s pictures were few, Maurice’s were none. Rosie had never given permission to snap photos of the baby. And so Mauricio had to imagine what his daughter looked like, but he knew about her through what the press wrote. He knew that she was a good student, that she was kind to her mothers, and that she liked to visit the First House. He knew she took ballet lessons and that her dream was to become the youngest President of Ginecea one day.
He was proud of his Maurice and would have given anything to talk to her. One step at the time, he used to remind himself when he had bouts of melancholy. Every time he freed a slave, it was a step closer to a better Ginecea. A Ginecea where slavery was illegal. One day, men and women would live together, free to love whomever they wanted. But, it was too much to ask in a single generation. He knew that. It would take decades to change current society, but someone had to start it. Someone had to take the first step toward the realization of such a dream.
He had taken that first heavy step, and with that step, he had laid the foundation for a better world; he had also destroyed any chance to see Rosie and his daughter again. He hadn’t known that when he started his journey of exile and self-preservation he would create a place where dreams could finally be dreamed. He hadn’t realized that because he was too busy living for the first time in his life. The first nucleus of the City of Men had been created by three desperate fugitives who had nothing to lose and a courageous woman who had nothing to gain by staying with them.
“Yes?” Mauricio looked down at Lucas, pointing at his midsection with a laughing smile.
“It has been ringing for more than five minutes.” The boy couldn’t help to be amused by the Priest’s ability of losing track of reality.
Mauricio followed the boy’s finger and saw his cell phone illuminated. He smiled at Lucas and opened the battered phone.
“Leander?” Mauricio acknowledged the other man’s easily recognizable voice.
“You’re late.” Leander was one of the few, along with Guen and Arias, who wouldn’t call him Priest. But Leander also avoided, if possible, calling him Mauricio, since he knew that name was painful for his friend to hear.
“I need to escort an important person to his home first,” Mauricio answered, winking at Lucas, whose smile widened.
“Say hi to Lucas for me. Then hurry back to the well.” Leander had the happiest tone.
“Is it working?” Mauricio asked.
“Yes, we’re waiting for you to do things officially.” Leander’s voice was light. After so many months, almost a full year of working double shifts, the new well was ready to give potable water to the growing population of the City of Men. They had managed ten years with several small wells that didn’t reach deep enough, but had produced an adequate amount of rationed water for the first group of citizens. At the beginning, it had been difficult to find aquifers. They didn’t have any instrument to locate water, only a strong will to survive. They had become thieves by necessity. They had only stolen what they needed from the women’s facilities under Mauricio’s direct orders.
“It’s bad enough we can’t even beg for what we need the most, but we will not, under any circumstances, succumb to the temptation of taking what is superfluous. We will educate ourselves, and we will thrive, thanks to our labor. We will go to bed every night knowing that we did our best with what we have been dealt. Little or much. And we will wake up every morning with the certainty that what we do is going to make a difference.” Leander had written down what was universally known as the Priest’s first speech. The nickname had come soon after, when people realized that, while everybody was looking for their soulmates, he simply thought about building the foundation for what would one day become the City of Men. Mauricio’s asceticism, his gift with words, his sharp mind, and most of all, his devotion to the mission of creating a better world for everybody, had granted him the title Priest.
Mauricio had always found his nickname ironic. It was the male counterpart for the word “Priestess,” and he wanted nothing to do with her, not even by a distant phonetic connotation. She was everything that was wrong with Ginecea, and whereas she had built her power on a castle of lies and prevarications against one race, Mauricio wanted to free peoples' minds and teach them the truth. He didn’t want power; he didn’t like that the desert community of fugitive men and rejected women looked at him as their leader. He only wanted to have a family. Like Guen and Arias. Like Lucas and his parents. Like Leander and Julius. He wanted love, like everybody else.
Instead, he went to his apartment alone every night, as Lucas had pointed out. He always had a meal on the table. The community cared for him, and he didn’t need anything in terms of food, clothing, or shelter. But he longed for the family that would never be and rarely accepted invitations to share his free time with others. It was too painful to watch parents interact with their kids or couples trying to hide their affection for fear of wounding him. What was left for him was to dedicate his celibate and indefatigable mind to the betterment of their society.
A communal well had been his pet project for some time now. He had needed new geology texts to get an idea about what was necessary to drill deeper than they had before. A particularly thankful group of ex-slaves had helped him with the logistics of getting the texts. They had stolen the books for him from Sundial, a facility that was dangerously close to their dwelling. He had studied the texts every night until his brain could take no more, and finally, he had come out with a feasible plan. Finding the perfect spot had been equally strenuous, but Mauricio loved the challenges that filled his time and his mind with positive energy. And now it was finally done. Water would be available for everybody at least once a day. It was a great step forward for the City of Men. It was the turning point that Mauricio had been waiting for. Finally, they could start plowing fields large enough to supply food for the whole community. Nothing fancy at first, just basic starches and grains.
“I’ll come as soon as I drop off Lucas.” Mauricio smiled and then added, “Thanks, Leander.”
“For?” Leander’s voice was muffled by the sound of cheering people.
“For being with me from the beginning,” Mauricio said, remembering the night a young man had risked everything to help him escape.
“I got the best part out of the deal,” Leander answered with sincerity and ended the conversation before Mauricio could reply. Leander always felt guilty when talking with him. As if Mauricio had gotten the short end of the stick, while he had won the jackpot. Over the years, the sentiment had become ingrained in their friendship, like a ghost haunting their happy moments. Mauricio had tried to explain to Leander that he was happy for him and that he deserved every moment of joy he had so strenuously worked for. The Priest had celebrated Leander and Julius’ union, and he was also the godfather of Ariane, the orphan girl they had adopted. But no amount of reassurance on Mauricio’s end could make Leander feel any better.
“And if you find someone whom you love even more?” Lucas asked after some woolgathering of his own. It seemed that while Mauricio was ta
lking to Leander, the boy had kept thinking about the Priest’s solitude.
“I discovered long ago that I’m a man who has been blessed with one true love.”
“But you could try to live with someone and maybe, after a while, discover that this person is nice. Maybe even nicer than the other one you are always thinking of.” Lucas had put a few thoughts together about fixing the Priest’s lonely life.
Mauricio was sure that the kid had also written down a few possible names. “Well, I see your point… but it wouldn’t be fair for this person you have in mind.”
“Why not? He is nice enough!” Lucas said with great conviction.
“I am sure that he is more than nice. But I am also sure that he is someone else’s soulmate, and as you can understand, it would be a disgrace if he got stuck with me when he could be with someone he could love with all his heart. Don’t you agree with me?” Mauricio patiently explained.
“Yes, but…” Lucas was pouting now.
“Don’t you want for me the same that your mom and dad have?” Mauricio asked softly.
“Of course I want that!” Lucas seemed surprised by the Priest’s question.
“Then I can’t simply share my life with someone I know isn’t my true love.” Mauricio was glad to see the entry to the Caves looming ahead of them. Lucas was in the mood to keep going for hours, and he simply wasn’t. “You’ll see. One day it will make absolute sense.” Mauricio rested his arm on the kid’s shoulder.
“I hope you’re right.” Lucas wasn’t convinced.
“I see your mom.” Mauricio waved his hand in the direction of a young woman waiting for them just inside the entry of the Caves' system.
“Thanks!” She waved back.
“See you tomorrow.” Lucas hugged the Priest before running toward his mom’s outstretched hands.
Mauricio stayed there a few seconds more, looking at the maternal scene. His eyes filled with tears, but he didn’t avert them from the loving embrace of mother and son. It was beautiful, and he couldn’t have enough of it, even if he was supposed to hurry back. When, with a last salute, Lucas disappeared inside the entry, Mauricio finally turned around and started walking briskly toward the fields. Leander and the well crew were waiting for him to pump the first bucket of water. Later, the entire community was going to celebrate in the central area that constituted the heart of the City of Men. He was proud of the work his men and women had done to transform an arid patch of desert into something worth fighting for. They reclaimed life where none was to be had. They shaped the rocks and the sand into something that they could call their own.
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