The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [38]
"Shall I go down and bring him back?" Edward called on his way back to the balcony.
"No," John yelled. "I’ll get him. Grab a coat for him, okay? He must be freezing."
Brother Edward trundled off to get three coats. Returning minutes later, he helped John into the biggest one, handed him another to bring to Sandoz and pulled one on himself as John started down the long line of stairs that zigzagged downhill to the Mediterranean. Before he’d gotten far, Brother Edward stopped him with a shout.
"Father? Be careful."
What an odd thing to say, John thought, wondering for a moment if Brother Edward was concerned about his slipping on the damp stone stairs. Then John remembered the way Sandoz had come at him, that first day, back in Rome. "I will. It’ll be okay." Brother Edward looked doubtful. "Really. If he hasn’t done anything to himself, I don’t think he’d hurt anyone else."
But he sounded more sure of that than he was.
THE WIND WAS carrying the sound of his footsteps away from Sandoz. Not wanting to startle him, John cleared his throat and made as much noise as he could, scuffling through the gravelly sand. Sandoz didn’t turn but he stopped moving and waited near a large stone outcropping, part of the geological formation that had tithed its substance to the ancient buildings on the hill behind them.
John stopped as he drew even with the man and looked out over the water himself, watching shorebirds wheel and dip and settle on the gray water. "I have been suffering from horizon deprivation," he declared conversationally. "Feels good to be able to focus on something that’s far away." John’s own face and hands ached with cold. He was shuddering now and did not understand how Sandoz could be so still. "You gave us a scare, man. Next time, let somebody know when you’re going out, okay?" He took a step closer to Sandoz, the jacket held casually in one outstretched hand. "Aren’t you freezing? I brought you a coat."
"If you come near me," Sandoz said, "you’ll bleed for it."
John let his arm drop, the coat brushing the rocky sand, unnoticed. Closer now, he saw that what he had taken for stillness was a coiled tension, wound too tightly to be seen from a distance. Sandoz turned away and reached out toward a line of fist-sized stones placed along the edge of a natural shelf in the rocks, the brace gleaming suddenly as the sunlight came at last over the bluff. His own body tensing in sympathetic concentration, John watched the muscles in Sandoz’s back, outlined by sweat-dampened cloth, knotting convulsively as he worked to bring his fingers around a stone.
Sandoz turned back toward the Mediterranean, sparkling now in the morning light, and with the grace of an old ballplayer, cocked and threw. The fingers did not loosen in time and the rock thudded into the sand. Methodically, he went back to the shelf and once again gripped a stone, turned, stanced and threw. When he exhausted his supply of rocks, he went out to collect them again, leaning from the waist, grasping them with his left hand, gasping sometimes with the effort, but releasing them carefully one by one, in a row on the rocky shelf.
Most of the stones, heartbreakingly, were only a few steps from where he stood to throw them.
BY THE TIME the sun was overhead, Candotti had discarded his own coat, and he now sat on the beach, watching silently. Brother Edward had joined him and he watched as well, the tears rolling down his plump cheeks drying quickly in the wind off the sea.
Around ten o’clock, when the bruises had broken through to frank bleeding, Edward tried to talk to Sandoz. "Please, Emilio, stop now. That’s enough." The man turned and looked through him as though one of them did not exist, the dark eyes unfathomable. John saw then that there was nothing to do except bear witness, and gently drew Ed away.
For two hours more, he and Brother Edward marked the painful progress Sandoz made, his fingers working more consistently for him,