The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [216]
There was a sound that began as laughter, as shocking and outrageous as anything they could see or smell, and ended as something more difficult to listen to. The crisis went on for some time. Even after the hysteria was exhausted, they got nothing sensible from the man.
"WHY, JOHN? WHY did it all happen like that, unless God wanted it that way? I thought I understood ..." His voice trailed off, and Candotti waited, not sure what to say or do. "How long has it been for you, John?"
John, the sudden shift taking him by surprise, frowned at Sandoz and shook his head, wanting to understand, but not able to follow the train of thought.
"I figured it out once. Twenty-nine years. I get confused about the time, but I was fifteen and I’m supposed to be forty-five now, I think." The frayed nerves holding him up snapped abruptly, and he sank to the floor. John went to him and knelt nearby and listened, and Emilio wept as he whispered, the words thin and silvery. "See, I know a lot of men make accommodations. They find someone—someone ... to help them. But, the thing about this is: I didn’t. And I—I thought I understood. It was a path to God, and I thought I understood. There are moments, John, when your soul is like a ball of fire, and it reaches out to everything and everyone equally. I thought I understood."
And then suddenly, Emilio wiped his eyes and pulled in a shuddering breath and when he spoke again, his voice was normal and ordinary and tired and, for that reason, sadder than anything John Candotti had heard before. "So, anyway, I was about forty-four, I guess, when it— when... it happened, so it must have been about twenty-nine years." His lips pulled back into a terrible smile, and he began to laugh, the glistening eyes bleak. "John, if God did this, it is a hell of a trick to pull on a celibate. And if God didn’t do it, what does that make me?" He shrugged helplessly. "An unemployed linguist, with a lot of dead friends."
His face hardly moved, but the tears began again. "So many dead, because I believed. John, they’re all dead. I’ve tried so hard to understand," he whispered. "Who can forgive me? So many dead ..."
John Candotti pulled the smaller man to him and took Sandoz in his arms and held him, rocking, while they both cried. After a time, John whispered, "I forgive you," and began the ancient absolution, "Absolvo te—absolvo te ..." but that had to be enough, because he couldn’t say the rest.
"THAT WAS AN abuse of power," Felipe Reyes hissed. "You had no right— My God, how could you do that to him?"
"It was necessary." The Father General had left the building, walking swiftly from his office down the long echoing hallway, throwing open the French doors and passing outside to the garden, hoping to pull his thoughts together in sunshine and in quiet. But Reyes had followed him, furious, outraged that Emilio Sandoz had been made to speak with so many witnesses.
"How could you do that to him?" Reyes persisted, implacable. "Did you get some kind of perverse pleasure from listening to—"
Giuliani rounded on him and silenced the other priest with a look that froze the words on his lips. "It was necessary. If he were an artist, I’d have ordered him to paint it. If he were a poet, I’d have ordered him to write it. Because he is who he is, I made him speak of it. It was necessary. And it was necessary for us to hear it."
Felipe Reyes looked at his superior for a moment longer and then sank abruptly onto the cool stone of a garden bench, surrounded by summer blossoms in dazzling sunlight, shaken and sickened and unconvinced that any of it was necessary. There were sunflowers and brilliant yellow daylilies, delphinium and liatris and gladioli, and the scent of roses from somewhere nearby. The swallows were out now, as the evening approached, and the insect noise was changing. The Father General sat down beside him.
"Have you ever been to Florence, Reyes?"
Felipe sat back, open-mouthed with disgusted