The Sparrow

'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 incomprehension. 'No,' he said acidly. 'I haven't felt much like touring. Sir.'

'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 human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering.'

'Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine,' Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. ' 'Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.' '

'But the sparrow still falls,' Felipe said.

They sat for a while, wrapped in their private musings.

'You know, he was always a good priest,' Felipe told them, remembering, 'but it must have been about the time that they were plan­ning the mission, something changed in him. It was like, I don't know, sometimes he would just—ignite.' Felipe's hands moved, making a shape like fireworks. 'There was something in his face, so beautiful. And I thought, if that's what it's like to be a priest…It was like he fell in love with God.'

'Offhand,' said the Father General wearily, in a voice dry as August grass, 'I'd say the honeymoon is over.'

The sun was already fairly high when Edward Behr awoke to the sound of a coffee cup rattling on a saucer. Blinking, he sat up in the wooden chair where he'd spent the night and groaned. He saw Emilio Sandoz standing by the night table, carefully setting the coffee down, the servos releasing his grip almost as quickly as natural movement might have.

'What time is it?' Ed asked, rubbing his neck.

'A little after eight,' Sandoz told him. Wearing a T-shirt and a pair of baggy pants, he sat on the edge of his bed and watched Brother Edward stretch and scrub at his eyes with his pudgy hands. 'Thank you. For staying with me.'

Brother Edward looked at him, sizing things up. 'How do you feel?'

'Okay,' Emilio said simply. 'I feel okay.'

Emilio stood and stepped over to the window, holding the curtain aside, but couldn't see much: just the