The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [217]
"You should go. There’s a series of sculptures there by Michelangelo that you should see. They are called The Captives. Out of a great formless mass of stone, the figures of slaves emerge: heads, shoulders, torsos, straining toward freedom but still held fast in the stone. There are souls like that, Reyes. There are souls that try to carve themselves from their own formlessness. Broken and damaged as he is, Emilio Sandoz is still trying to find meaning in what happened to him. He is still trying to find God in it all."
It took Felipe Reyes, blinking, several moments to hear what he’d been told, and if he was too stiff-necked to look at Giuliani for the time being, he was able at least to admit that he understood. "And by listening, we help him."
"Yes. We help him. He will have to tell it again and again, and we will have to hear more and more, until he finds the meaning." In that instant, a lifetime of reason and moderation and common sense and balance left Vincenzo Giuliani feeling as weightless and insubstantial as ash. "He’s the genuine article, Reyes. He has been all along. He is still held fast in the formless stone, but he’s closer to God right now than I have ever been in my life. And I don’t even have the courage to envy him."
THEY SAT THERE for a long while, in the late August afternoon, the light golden and the air soft, the small near sounds of the garden punctuated by a dog’s barking in the distance. John Candotti joined them after a time. He sat heavily on the ground across the garden walkway from their bench and put his head in his hands.
"It was hard," the Father General said.
"Yes. It was hard."
"The child?"
"The closest legal term might be involuntary manslaughter." John lay back, flattening some ground cover, unable to stay upright any longer. "No," he amended after a time. "It wasn’t an accident. He meant to kill, but in self-defense. That Askama was the one who died—that was an accident."
"Where is he now?"
Candotti, drained, looked up at them. "I carried him up to his room, sleeping like the dead. That’s an awful phrase. Anyway, asleep. Ed’s with him." There was a pause. "I think it did him good. It sure as hell didn’t do me any good to hear it, but I really think he’s better now." John put his hands over his eyes. "To dream of all that. And the children ... Now we know."
"Now we know," Giuliani agreed. "I’m sitting here trying to understand why it seemed less awful when I thought it was prostitution. It’s the same physical act." He wasn’t the Father General. He was just plain Vince Giuliani, with no answers. Unknowing, he trod the path of reason that Sofia Mendes had traveled all those years before. "I suppose a prostitute has at least an illusion of control. It’s a transaction. There is some element of consent."
"There is," Felipe Reyes suggested wanly, "more dignity in prostitution than in gang rape. Even by poets."
Giuliani suddenly put his hands to his mouth. "What a wilderness, to believe you have been seduced and raped by God." And then to come home to our tender mercies, he thought bleakly.
John sat up and glared red-eyed at the Father General. "I’ll tell you something. If it’s a choice between despising Emilio or hating God—"
Surprisingly, Felipe Reyes broke in, before John could say something he’d regret. "Emilio is not despicable. But God didn’t rape him, even if that’s how Emilio understands it now." He sat back in the bench and stared at the ancient olive trees defining the edge of the garden. "There’s an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists."
"So God just leaves?" John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. "Abandons creation? You’re on your own, apes. Good luck!"
"No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of