Elders (8 page)

Out in the living room Elder McLeod and Josefina sat quietly, not quite looking at each other, sipping from glasses of water. Passos’s glass sat on the coffee table in a hoop of settled liquid. He took a seat beside his junior companion, took a long draft of the drink. He showed a weak, apologetic smile to Josefina.

“Are you feeling all right?” she said.

“I’m okay,” Elder Passos said in a voice meant to suggest he really wasn’t, was merely bearing up well.

“Well,” Josefina said, “drink up. This summer heat can test even you northeasterners, can’t it?”

Passos smiled, put the glass of water to his lips again, finishing most of it.

“Anyway,” McLeod came in, “as I said, we just wanted to drop by for a few minutes and make sure that you’re doing okay, Josefina. Is there anything you need? Anything we can do for you?”

“Just keep doing what you’re doing.” She smiled. “Our next lesson is Saturday, right? Should Leandro and I read anything in specific? Which number is it?”

“Nothing specific,” Passos said. He paused. He had the impression that Josefina wanted them to leave, though at the moment he didn’t actually mind. An unannounced visit in the middle of the morning? A P-Day morning at that? It must be as inconvenient for her as for them. What had gotten into McLeod anyway? Had Passos created a monster? Josefina looked at him, still waiting. “No, nothing specific to read. Just keep reading the Book of Mormon every night. We’ll start in on the fourth discussion this Saturday. That’s the green pamphlet we gave you, if you want to preview it.”

“We already have,” Josefina said. “We read all the preview pamphlets together. The green pamphlet is all about how alcohol
and drugs defile the body, right? How the body is a temple? Leandro and I read that again just recently.”

“That’s excellent,” Elder McLeod said. “We love to hear about that kind of initiative.”

“Yes,” Passos said, “yes, we do.”

The elders finished their waters and thanked Josefina for her time, leaving her with a prayer. On the way back to the bus stop McLeod thanked Passos for indulging him. “I just wanted to make sure things were going all right for them, you know? Josefina said everything was fine, and that was all I needed to hear. I just got nervous, I guess.”

“You had a ‘feeling,’ you said. In the shower.”

“It came to me there. I guess it was a prompting.”

“A prompting? That doesn’t sound like you, Elder. No offense.”

“Well what about you?” McLeod said. “What’s gotten into you in the last, I don’t know, the last fourteen hours? What was in that letter last night?”

“Complications.”

“You can tell me, Passos. I’m your friend, right?”

“Maybe later.”

“How about now, Elder? Before I lose you to your letters again.”

He did need to get back to them, Elder Passos thought. Nana. Tiago. Felipe. Dos Santos. They hummed in his head like heated molecules. The elders took a left onto the main street just as the six bus pulled away ahead of them. “Hey!” Passos ran after it, waving his arms, but it didn’t slow down. A few seconds later his companion caught up to him at the bus stop. McLeod sat down on the bench, patted the spot beside him. “It’s okay, right? We’re staying in tonight. You can write letters to your heart’s content,
but while you’re here why don’t you explain to me all the radio silence. I know something’s worrying you, and I think that’s why you should tell me. At the very least I’m your companion, and we’re supposed to support each other, right? ‘Succor’ each other? Doesn’t it say that somewhere?”

Passos dropped down beside McLeod, still breathing hard. He wasn’t exactly stalling, but after a moment McLeod added, “I can offer some collateral vulnerability, if that sweetens the deal.”

Passos laughed. “Where did you learn a phrase like ‘collateral vulnerability’?”

“You’re not the only one who studies another language, you know.”

“Ah, yes, very good,” Passos said in English. “Very good.”

Just then another six bus turned onto the main street and Passos stood up and started waving it down like a taxi, to make sure.

He realized he
didn’t even know which ankle Nana had sprained, and he’d neglected to ask in his letter, now sealed. It lay on the desk in front of him in a fanned-out pile: long letters to Tiago and Felipe, his letter to Nana, and a brief update to Elder Dos Santos, whom he’d meant to call João. He’d been meaning to for months. Passos didn’t
think
Nana had mentioned which ankle. Had she? For the fourth time he took up the letter, the sheet sharp-creased at three places, unevenly spaced apart. The overhead bulb behind him could only hold back the darkness so much. The letter’s creases caught shadows, cradled them, like little dark pools that Passos had to tip this way and that to empty out so he could see to the words underneath.

Cristiano, meu filhinho
, Nana’s letter began, though Passos was not her little son and not Cristiano, either, at least not for these two years. He considered his title of “Elder” a privilege, and a temporary one at that; he wished his grandmother would use it, referring to him the way he referred to himself:
Love, Elder Passos
. But of course he couldn’t out-and-out tell Nana, make more demands on a woman whose whole life was demands. He also feared she might take it the wrong way. She wasn’t a member of the church, after all. So much of the life of a missionary, of any Mormon, must have seemed strange to her, cultish even, as he knew her parish friends used to whisper.

Passos paused, reread the first lines, for the fifth time now, as if he hadn’t already memorized them. The standard salutation, the talk of a “struggle,” Nana’s inevitable word. Then the news of the ankle. No mention of which one. She moved straight to the politicians, another inevitability.

Passos stopped, as he had every time he’d read the line. It set his jaw on edge, perhaps more so now as he saw how close it came to the end of the letter. A gratuitous add-on—a slap, and a sort of brag. Elder Passos knew, if only for a pained illumined instant, that he hated Nana’s mention of his father because she had known him and he really hadn’t. In Passos’s memory his father was a big loud man enveloped in an alcoholic cloud, then a ghost, a memory even in his memory. Tiago knew him only through photographs, which Elder Passos imagined must be easier. He envied that purity—the purity of blankness. Tiago held in his head no half-formed memories to swirl into the mix at the mention of their father, or at the suggestion that one or all of them might be like him in some way, this ghost, this faded man who had gone out of state in search of work, or so their mother had said for a long time. Passos must have been twelve or thirteen when she finally abandoned the story and started dating again. He was fourteen when she got sick.

Elder Passos held the letter above his desk, dropped it, watched it waft down in two swinging arcs to the wood. It depressed as it settled back against the desk. Not a single mention about his brothers’ schooling, not a word about church. Passos tried again to worry if they were going to either; he worried out of a kind of thin hope, for worry relies on at least the possibility of good outcomes; it needs that to tauten the line. But the line couldn’t hold. His brothers were in free fall. Nana couldn’t catch them. Neither could Passos, of course. He was here. Two thousand kilometers from home while his earthly house sank into the sand. What was he doing here? What was he
really
doing? Why was he dabbling in English, angling for the assistantship, when his own family needed him more than ever? It all seemed so suddenly petty and small and dislocated, the mission—or his did, anyway. It felt like a springboard, a means to some worldly end. He felt ashamed of himself.

Passos was sixteen when the missionaries knocked on his door. It was a Saturday afternoon, almost a month to the day since the funeral. The fact of that. The unyielding fact. The smell of cancer still seeping from the walls of the house, like spoiled food, and riding on top of it a trace of stale flowers from the homeopathic experiments of the final withering months. The little house felt cavernous to Passos, oppressive, and though a knock came at the
front door instead of a clap from behind the barred front gate, Passos got up and answered it right away, if only to reprieve the gloom. The sun flooded in, bright white, such that Passos had to shield his eyes as they adjusted to the two tall silhouettes in the doorway. They must have let themselves in past the outer gate, or maybe Felipe had left it open en route to the dirt field where he played more football now than ever.

Passos’s eyes adjusted all the way as the silhouettes resolved into two young men, in business clothes, not much older than Passos, in fact—one of them pale, the other dark. They smiled like salesmen. They looked briefly behind him.

“Good afternoon,” the darker one said, a Brazilian, though from his accent clearly not a northeasterner.

Passos knew he looked younger than his sixteen years, so he put on his adult voice, a bit cagey, a bit suspicious. “Yes? Can I help you?”

The Brazilian introduced them—they were missionaries, they taught about the restored gospel of Christ. Then the paler one spoke for the first time, his words thick as fists. “Is your mother here? Your father?”

Passos felt the air go out of his chest. “What?”

“Is your mother or father home? Can we speak with one of them?”

“My mother?”

“Yes.”

“My mother?”

“Well … yes.”

And all of a sudden he was covering his face, bent forward, feeling his shoulders convulse up and down. The moment rushed
over Passos like a sickness, a sudden surge, as if his body were poised to empty out its toxins but nothing came out and nothing came out. He felt an involuntary tightness in his stomach, heard the Brazilian, “Hey, are you all right, hey, we’re sorry …” and it was all Passos could do to close the door.

The next morning he stayed home from Mass, Tiago too. Of course Felipe stayed home. Felipe had been at the pickup field since sunup. On weekends now he barely left that field. He’d come home for a quick lunch bearing bloody dirt stains on his calves, his shins, since he didn’t wear guards. Last Saturday he had showed up with a thick streak of dried blood running from his nostril all the way to his chin. He said he’d left it like that, all morning, as a message. He’d slide tackle anybody, the biggest kid on the field. He didn’t care, and didn’t back down from a sucker punch.

Passos and Tiago sat on the couch now, playing a card game in the dim grainy light of the floor lamp. The metal blinds let in sunlight that lay on the concrete floor in slowly broadening pinstripes. Passos could tell from the sharpness of the lines how bright and hot the morning must be. The sound of clapping came at the outer gate. Tiago went to the door and opened it into the glare and after a moment Passos could recognize, even from the couch, the missionaries, their white shirts and dark slacks, their smiles. Felipe had closed the gate behind him, apparently, or maybe Nana had on her way to the parish. In any case the two young men had respected it. The Brazilian one lifted his voice from across the dirt courtyard, making the same introduction to Tiago that he’d made to Passos the day before. Then the gringo asked if anyone else was home with him. His older brother maybe? They’d met yesterday.