The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [93]
There was another silence, as he tried to decide how much to tell her, where to start. She waited, watching him, pleased to see the color come back and then touched to realize that he was blushing. Self-disclosure is almost like sex, she thought. It isn’t easy to bare your soul.
"You have to understand, Anne, I’m not one of those guys who decided to be a priest when he was seven. I started out—well, you’ve seen La Perla, right? But you can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up there." There was another pause, as the memories crowded in. "Anyway, the Jesuits, D.W. especially, they showed me a different kind of life. I’m not saying that I became a priest because I was grateful. Okay, I admit, that was probably part of it. But I wanted to be like them. Like D.W."
"Not a shabby ambition," she said, eyes steady.
He took a deep breath. "No. It was a good ambition. And it wasn’t all hero worship. I wanted this life and I have no regrets. But—Anne, do you remember when I said that it’s difficult to tell from the way people behave whether or not they believe in God?" Emilio watched her carefully, looking for shock or disappointment, but she didn’t seem horrified or even terribly surprised. "You’d make a good priest, you know."
"Except for that celibacy shit," she laughed. "And the popes keep saying I have too many X chromosomes. Don’t change the subject."
"Right. Right." He hesitated again, but finally the words began to come for him. "I was like the physicists you talked about. I was like a physicist who believes in quarks intellectually, but doesn’t feel quarks. I could make all the Thomist arguments about God and discuss Spinoza and say all the right things. But I didn’t feel God. It was not a thing of the heart for me. I could defend the idea of God but it was all from hearsay evidence, a lawyer would call it. None of it had any emotional truth for me. Not like it does for guys like Marc." He hugged himself and leaned forward over his knees. "I mean, there was a place in me that wanted God to be in it, but it was empty. So, I thought, Well, not yet. Maybe someday. And to be honest, I sort of looked down on that kind of thing. You know how there are people who’ll tell you that Jesus is a close personal friend of theirs, yes?" His voice was very low and he made a face that said, Who are they kidding? "I always thought, Sure, right, and you probably see Elvis at the laundromat."
"Hey! What’s wrong with that!" Anne cried, offended. "I have personally seen Keith Richards at a grocery store in Cleveland Heights."
He laughed and moved back onto the bed so he could sit against the wall. "Okay. So, one day, I get this call at four in the morning. And then we’re all sitting in Jimmy’s office, listening to this incredible music and I say, I wonder if we could go there? And George and Jimmy and Sofia say, Sure, no problem, just do the math. And you thought we were crazy? Well, so did I, Anne. I mean, at first, it all was sort of a game! I was just toying with the idea of it’s being God’s will, really." Anne remembered the playfulness. It had seemed so strange at the time. "I kept expecting the game to stop, and everyone would have a good laugh at my expense, and I’d go back to trying to get Ortega to give me that house for the preschool and arguing with Richie Gonzales and the council about the sewers in the east end and all the rest of it, right? But it just kept going. The Father General and the asteroid and the plane and all these people working on this crazy idea. I kept waiting for someone to say, Sandoz, you idiot, what a lot of trouble for nothing! But everything kept happening."
"Like D.W. said, a whole hell of a lot of turtles showing up on a whole hell of a lot of fenceposts."
"Yes! So I’m lying in bed, night after night, and I can’t sleep anymore, and you know me—I used to fall asleep in the middle of a sentence. All night long, I would be thinking, What is happening here? And part of me would say, God is trying to tell you something, you dumb bastard. And another part of me would say, God