The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [127]
"Stop it."
"Excuse me?" Giuliani looked up from the tablet he was reading, blinking, unaccustomed to being addressed in this manner, even in private, even by a man whose nights were now a part of his own, whose dreams interrupted his own sleep.
"Stop it. Leave me something." Sandoz was trembling. "Don’t pick over my bones, Vince."
There was a long silence, as Giuliani looked into the terrible eyes and absorbed the implications. "I’m sorry, Emilio," he said. "Forgive me."
Sandoz sat looking at him a while longer, his head turned away slightly, still shaking. "You can’t know what it’s like. There’s no way for you to understand."
It was, in its own way, a sort of apology, Giuliani realized. "Perhaps if you tried to explain it to me," the Father General suggested gently.
"How can I explain what I don’t understand myself?" Emilio cried. He stood abruptly and walked a few steps away and then turned back. It was always startling when Sandoz broke down. His face would hardly move. "From where I was then to where I am now—I don’t know what to do with what happened to me, Vince!" He lifted his hands and let them fall, defeated. Vincenzo Giuliani, who had heard many confessions in his years, remained silent, and waited. "Do you know what the worst of it is? I loved God," Emilio said in a voice frayed by incomprehension. The crying stopped as suddenly as it had begun. He stood for a long while, staring at nothing Giuliani could see, and then went to the window to look out at the rain. "It’s all ashes now. All ashes."
And then, incredibly, he started to laugh. It could be as shocking as the sudden tears.
"I think," the Father General said, "that I could be of more help to you if I knew whether you see all this as comedy or tragedy."
Emilio did not answer right away. So much, he was thinking, for keeping silent about what can’t be changed. So much for Latino pride. He felt sometimes like the seedhead of a dandelion, flying apart, blown to pieces in a puff of air. The humiliation was almost beyond bearing. He thought, and hoped sometimes, that it would kill him, that his heart would actually stop. Maybe this is part of the joke, he thought bleakly. He turned away from the windows to gaze across the room at the elderly man watching him quietly from the far end of the beautiful old table.
"If I knew that," Emilio Sandoz said, coming as close as he could to the center of his soul and to an admission that shamed him, "I don’t suppose I’d need the help."
IN A WAY, Vincenzo Giuliani considered it a great and terrible privilege to try to understand Emilio, now, at this stage of their bizarrely disjointed lives. Dealing with Sandoz was as fascinating as sailing in dirty weather. One had to make constant adjustments to endless changes in force and direction and there was always the danger of foundering and going under. It was the challenge of a lifetime.
In the beginning, he had dismissed Yarbrough’s assessment of Emilio’s spiritual state. Discounted it as inaccurate or overwrought. He distrusted mysticism, despite the fact that his order was founded upon it. And yet, he was willing to take as a working hypothesis the notion that Emilio Sandoz saw himself as a genuinely religious man, a soul looking for God, as Ed Behr had put it. And Sandoz must have felt, at some point, he had found God and betrayed Him. The worst of it, Sandoz said, was that he had loved God. Given that, Giuliani could see the tragedy: to fall so far from such a state of grace, to be on fire with God and let it go to ashes. To have received such a blessing and to repay it with a descent into whoredom and murder.
Surely, Giuliani thought, there must have been some other way! Why had Sandoz turned to prostitution? Even without his hands, there must have been some other way. Beg, steal food, anything.
Pieces of the puzzle were clear to him. Emilio felt himself to be unfairly condemned by