The God Equation and Other Stories (13 page)

She asks him if she is still beautiful.

This catches him off guard. He had forgotten how musical and exciting her voice feels to his body as her question floats in the quiet air. “Of course, yes, you are the most beautiful woman I know.”

She crawls toward him on all fours, reaches out to him, placing both her hands on his shoulders to steady herself. She kisses him in the cheek.
“Go raibh maith agat,”
she whispers. May good things come to you. It is her way of saying “thank you,” except it
’
s more honest.

Her chestnut locks fall across his face, and the smell of cinnamon is stronger than ever, overpowering the scent of spirits that he imagined still lingered in her breath. Her
mantilla
drops casually to her waist, exposing her delicate collarbone and the cleft between her breasts. He blushes, and looks away. He points to the box and says, “Did he have a name?”

Without warning, she slaps him hard with a violence so intense he thought her hand had passed through his head and his eye had exploded out of its socket.

She screams at him in a language he has heard only in his dreams but cannot understand. “How dare you!” she seems to be telling him. “How dare you!” But in his heart he knew she meant, “How dare you reject me!”

She turns around and cries against the tree. Dusk is starting to set in, but he stands motionless, unable to speak, watching the young girl wail. He had never seen her cry like this before. Not like this. Her cry is half lamentation and half incantation, a summoning to the forest creatures to listen to her pain.

She crouches by the tree, rocking to and fro on her haunches, her back toward him, her shoulders shaking with each sob. One hand covers her face, the other curls around her knee. Her skirt is soiled with clay and moss. Her voice sounds strained, but eerily sonorous as it shifts from a sorrowful wail to an animal-like whimper and finally undulates into a series of sighs and moans the nature of which he had heard only once on a moonless night, outside the walls of his master
’
s house.

He climbs out of the hole, and sits next to her, unsure of what to do. His heart wants to take her at her most vulnerable but his mind wants to protect her, too. He convinces himself to put his arms around her bare shoulders to enjoy both possibilities. But instead he keeps his hands tucked beneath his armpits. He can only watch with nothing but his silence and his secret shame.

A firefly dances across her nape. Dusk has arrived. His own shadow starts to fade in the dying day. She, however, radiates a glow that seems to brighten the more distraught she becomes; it is the lone firefly that seems to cast a shadow on her skin.

He takes the lantern, and with a piece of flint and the edge of his spade, he starts a small flame. More fireflies arrive. The cicadas stop singing.

They sit in silence as the forest darkens about them. She glows brighter than the lantern light. Fireflies fly about them in respectful distance, as if warning the other insects not to disturb them.

H
e gets up, carefully
taking
the wooden box
with him as he
climbs back into the hole. He scrambles out again, and with his spade he begins to fill the hole with earth.

“Francisco,” she says finally.

He looks at her, trying to comprehend.

She tells him that the master wanted the child to be named Francisco, after his grandfather.

He looks at the tiny wooden box, made tinier now that it rests at the bottom of the hole. “He should be baptized then,” he says. “A priest could have carried out a simple ceremony.”

She shakes her head. She says that it was never his master
’
s right to name the child. He looks at her again, tries to find meaning in her face.

“Does this mean …” he stops, reconsiders, and says instead, “May I name the child?”

She stares at him. A crafty gaze, almost sinister. “It is not your right either,”
her eyes
seem to say. She remains silent
all throughout
.

He thinks for a moment, and says, “Pedro is also a good name.” He
also thinks
that it would be wise to name him after Saint Peter, who may then allow the infant soul to pass through the gates of heaven
, but h
e makes the wise decision not tell her this.

She agrees to name her stillborn child Pedro Francisco.

He recites five Pater Nosters and five Ave Marias. He doesn
’
t know the exact number required, but it is easier to count the prayers with his ten fingers.

She tells him that he would make a good priest. It is a strange statement to make, in the gloom, by the lantern light, against the ethereal glow of her alabaster complexion.

He nods; he has considered it before.

She asks him, almost commands him, to put his arm around her. It is chilly, she seems to say to him, although he continues to sweat.

He obeys.

The heat of her flesh instantly ignites his own, but his tunic remains intact.

She leans closer, their noses almost touching, her hot breath warming his skin. Her fragrant hair frames both their faces like a silken hood, and her eyes seem to glow in the growing darkness. She kisses him on one cheek, kisses him on the other. Then, she kisses him full on the mouth. And they embrace as two old friends, embrace as two young lovers, embrace with an understanding that although the cicadas have stopped singing, they will create their own song for the night.

* *
*

He finds himself alone at the bottom of the grave before dawn, with the wooden box as his pillow. Someone had untied the intricate leather knots, and he does not know how to re-tie them.

The lantern still burns, providing the only source of light and heat. He can find no trace of the mistress.  No footprints, no hair strands, no evidence of her presence.

He holds the lantern to illuminate the small box.

Its lid is slightly ajar. He expects to discover the odor of decay but smells only sweetness. Will the child resemble his master, he wonders, or will the child resemble him?

With steady hands, he lifts the lid.

He does not find Pedro Francisco. He does not find a premature infant, seven months old.

Instead he finds piles of paper and several old pens.

His face does not express shock, only confusion, then realization, as he leafs through the sheets, scanning his master
’
s distinct handwriting… fragments of novels… complete poems and songs
… a recipe for
paella
and
sinigang
… a grimoire… a page of prophesies
… a partial draft of a surreal yet unfinished novel, written in Spanish and English, telling of two great wars
that have not yet come to pass
… a 400-page alchemical manual deceptively entitled
Descripciones de Plantas Medicinales, Maderas de Contruccion Especies Olcoginosas o Resinosas y Algunos Metales, Heteropsidos y Antopsidos de una Coleccion Naturalista
…
and
the end of a short story…

Before him are pages and pages of his master
’
s fertile and unrestrained mind. He can find no politics in any of these drafts, no real science, no psychology, sociology, or any other “ologies,” only passion and honesty. These drafts and notes are not about understanding what nature is, but appreciating what it could be, without artifice, without method.

And yet his master chose to bury it.

Perhaps
his master had already found his inspiration years before she crossed his path. By publishing two novels, he had proven that his own muse already resides inside him. There was never room for another.

She had mistakenly offered his master her love. She had offered him her freedom. She had offered him her eternal spirit.
And still he rejected her.
So she became his slave, his plaything, his scribbled drafts, waiting to be passed on to the next man and the next, until she can find the one person who will return her love.

He picks up a page folded like a letter. It is a poem of thirteen stanzas. The boy remembers that his master had applied to the Governor General to allow him to travel to Cuba and serve as a doctor for the Spanish military, a selfish gambit to end his exile. His master was confident that his application would be accepted, and he had written a poem entitled, “El Canto del Viajero,” the Song of the Traveler, in the event of positive news.

“El Canto del Viajero” is a light, frivolous poem, nothing compared to the powerful verses that now present themselves before him. How strange that his master would choose to reject this version.

Such a shame, he thinks, to bury divinely inspired talent.

But the poem feels incomplete. Without a second thought, he takes a pen and writes a fourteenth and final stanza, mimicking his master
’
s cursive penmanship.

Much better.

Yet, yet … something else is missing. A poem of this magnitude deserves a worthy title. But he cannot think of any at the moment.

Leaving the poem untitled, he waits for the ink to dry. He folds the paper, and tucks it into the bottom of the lantern for safekeeping; he will also need to keep the lantern, a token of his own awakening.

He takes one of the pages in the box, a sketch of a bird, and climbs out of the hole one last time. He opens the lantern, exposes its naked flame, and sets the page on fire. He drops the burning page into the hole. The other manuscripts, which he had strewn and scattered about, immediately catch fire. A more skeptical mind would have questioned the efficacy of burning paper at the bottom of a pit since there would not be enough oxygen to sustain an even blaze. But the bright blue flame does not seem to mind.

He watches the fire grow as dawn approaches, and he continues watching until it consumes all the paper, including the wooden box, and the leather straps that once held the lid in place.

He looks at his right ring finger. The wound, somehow, had completely healed, leaving a faint scar around the base.

He takes his spade and begins to fill the hole.

Somewhere in the distance, he hears a child laugh.

* *
*

“
Often the sorrowing pilgrim is envied / Circling the globe like a seagull above / Little, ah, little they know what a void / Saddens his soul by the absence of love.
”

- Dr.
José
Rizal, “El Canto del Viajero,” 1896

December, 1896.

It is a cold morning on the field of Bagumbayan. His master stands several yards away from the rifle squad, his back toward them, dressed impeccably with his black trousers, coat, and bowler hat. Despite the rope that binds his elbows to his sides, his master cuts a noble silhouette to all the witnesses present.

“Fuego!”
came the order, followed by the near simultaneous report of gunfire.

His master turns to face his accusers one last time. Then he falls; a martyr to his contemporaries, a hero to a generation yet unborn.

Not much is known about the exact fate of his mistress. Some say she fought in the Revolution of 1898. But most say she went on to marry a prominent Cebuano, and settled in Hong Kong, where she gave birth to a daughter. Yet the girl hardly knew her mother, for she was barely two years old when her mother passed away on the Ides of March, 1902.

Doña Josefina Abad, as she now calls herself, lies on a simple cot in a Hong Kong hospital. “Consumption,” was the word the doctors had used to describe her malady. They had also instructed her husband to keep their daughter away from her. The disease, they cautioned, was infectious, caused by bacteria in her lungs.

But she did not want to die alone, so she called for a priest. Her confessor, her friend, the boy who became a man. The doctor allowed him to stay with her only if he agreed to wear a medical mask.

Father Spada, as he now calls himself, sits by her side. He had just been ordained the previous year. She holds on to his warm, familiar hand, the same hand he had cut years ago, softer now than when she first held it.

She asks him if he can read her the poem he had rescued from the grave.

“I remember it by heart,” he says.

She tells him that she truly loved his master. That she loved him deeply, but his destiny would not allow him to fade like the others. She is glad to have found another.

Father Spada removes his mask, touches her forehead, kisses it gently. He then whispers the last poem into her ears. She closes her eyes just as he reaches the end:

Adiós, mi dulce extranjera / mi amiga, mi alegría

Adiós, queridos seres / morir es descansar.

Silence follows. He sits with her awhile. Father Spada then removes his rosary and lays it on her chest, placing her cold hands over it.

He stands up, inspects the room, and sees her waiting for him by the doorway.