The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [219]
"Yeah. I slept well. I’ll bet poor John Candotti didn’t, but I did." Emilio smiled but added, "John was great. Thank you for bringing him here. And Ed. And Felipe. Even Voelker. I couldn’t have—" He grimaced and turned away for a moment but came back almost immediately. "It was like—like vomiting poison, I suppose." Giuliani said nothing, and Emilio continued, with only a little irony, "Seems to me I heard somewhere that confession is good for the soul."
The corners of Giuliani’s mouth twitched. "That, certainly, was the principle upon which I was operating."
Emilio went to the windows. The view was better from this office than from his room. Rank hath its privileges. "I had a dream last night," he said quietly. "I was on a road and there was no one with me. And in the dream I said, ’I don’t understand but I can learn if you will teach me.’ Do you suppose anyone was listening?" He didn’t turn from the windows.
Without answering, Giuliani got up and went to a bookcase. Selecting a small volume with a cracked leather binding, he paged through it until he found what he wanted and held it out.
Sandoz turned and accepted the book, looking at the spine. "Aeschylus?"
Wordlessly, Giuliani pointed out the passage, and Emilio studied it a while, slowly translating the Greek in his mind. Finally, he said, " ’In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’"
"Show-off."
Sandoz laughed but, turning toward the window again, he read the passage over. Giuliani walked back to his desk and sat down, waiting for Sandoz to speak again.
"I was wondering if I could stay here a while longer," Emilio said. He had no idea he was going to ask this. He’d meant to leave. "You’ve been very patient. I don’t mean to impose."
"Not at all."
Sandoz didn’t turn back to look at the Father General, but Giuliani heard his tone change. "I don’t know if I’m a priest. I don’t know if— I don’t know ... anything at all with certainty. I don’t even know if certainty is what I should want."
"Stay as long as you like."
"Thank you. You’ve been very patient," Emilio repeated. He moved to the door and the braced fingers closed neatly over the lever.
"Emilio," the Father General called out to him, voice pitched low, carrying easily in this quiet room. "I’m sending another group out. To Rakhat. I thought you ought to know that. We could use your help. With the languages."
Sandoz went motionless. "It’s too soon, Vince. I can’t think about that. It’s too soon."
"Of course. I just thought you should know."
He watched Sandoz leave. Unaware of his own movement, schooled by old habit, Vincenzo Giuliani rose and went to the windows, and stood looking, for how long he had no idea, across a grassy open courtyard to a complex panorama of medieval masonry and jumbled rock, formal garden and gnarled trees: a scene of great and beautiful antiquity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AS A FORMER academic, I feel uneasy without footnotes and a huge bibliography; even as a novelist, I believe several of the hundreds of sources I used must be named. Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory taught me how scholarship boys feel. The gorgeous prose of Alain Corbin in his book The Foul and the Fragrant was the inspiration for the Reshtar’s early poetry. And Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? but D.W. could, so I thank Ms. Ivins for insight into Texans, turtles and armadillos. The notion of predator mimicry comes from Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs, as does the snakeneck, which I found too charming an idea not to propagate. Emilio’s moment of illumination in the last chapter derives from Arthur Green’s theology in Seek My Face, Speak My Name. Finally, Dorothy Dunnett may consider The Sparrow one long thank you note for her splendid Lymond series.
Thanks also to my mother, Louise Dewing Doria, whose "Just do it" attitude long predates the sneaker commercial, and to my father, Richard Doria, who’s always taken me seriously. Maura Kirby believed in this book long before