Elders (16 page)

Passos said, “He’s proud of you. He is.”

The fire swallowed up the book, burning away the pages like
so much dross. In the clear morning light the flames were pale, unglowing, almost unnoticeable. You saw the fire mostly by its effects, the pages shrinking darkly, glowing a brief lantern-orange, then dimming to colorless ash.

It was morning again, and again McLeod noticed his companion’s absence from the darkened room. The bare pillow, the collapsed luminescent sheets. He thought, too, he smelled something faintly burnt on the air. McLeod hazarded out into the light of the hallway, half bracing himself for another confrontation, half expecting to see Elder Passos at his desk, rifling through his drawer for contraband that wasn’t there. What little he’d had still lay in a pile of ashes in the courtyard. Passos is fallen too, McLeod remembered. Josefina is pregnant. The world is not what it seems.

“Good morning, birthday boy! Well, slightly belated birthday boy.”

The voice called out from the kitchen. McLeod craned his head to see down the hallway into the cramped little light-poor room: Passos stood in the center of it, fully dressed, and aproned. “I was just about to wake you up. Are you hungry?” He made a face, mocking his own question. “Let me put it this way: Could you be made to eat?”

McLeod nodded.

“Good,” Passos said. “Do what you need to do and come join me in the kitchen. I’ve got something for you.”

A minute later McLeod left the lighted bathroom, the pictures on the mirror like sentinels now, and stepped into the redoubled
darkness of the apartment. The hall and kitchen lights had been extinguished.

“McLeod?” Passos called. “Follow my voice, okay? Trust me—it’s for effect.”

McLeod palmed his way along the cool hallway wall toward the kitchen, following Passos’s “I’m here, I’m here,” and the rising smell of flour and sugar, somehow sharp. In the kitchen proper McLeod came to a stop. Passos said, as if answering the smell, “I’m not much of a baker, I guess. Or I’m a whole lot better at cheese bread than birthday cake. But—” The meager lightbulb came on and revealed a single-layer chocolate cake resting, rather sunken, in the middle of a plate in the middle of the kitchen table. The rounded slab looked something like a porcupine, covered in quills that on closer inspection—McLeod bending forward, peering, chuckling—turned out to be matches, twenty-one of them, stuck heads-up in the cake.

“You made this for me?” McLeod said, still chuckling. He didn’t know how else to react.

“I used some of your Nutella,” Passos said. “I hope that’s okay.” Then he said, “What? Why are you laughing?”

“Was this your plan all along?” McLeod said. “To burn my book one morning, then make me a cake the next?”

“Not just your book—”

“I know, I know. It’s just … How early did you get up?”

“Early.” Then again: “Why are you laughing?”

“You’re insane, Passos.”

“Why am I insane? Why would you say that?” His companion’s brows knitted halfway to the
V
.

“It’s just a joke,” McLeod said. “I’m just saying—we burned
the books, and now this cake here, which looks ready to blaze too, by the way.”

“So you’d make that joke to Sweeney? You’d say that to a friend?”

“You
are
my friend, Passos. And of course I’d say that to Sweeney—I do. He’s certifiable.”

Elder Passos considered this for a moment. He wore a look of distracted concentration, as if he might be doing a math problem in his head. Then his stern face broke; he smiled at the cake. “It does look dangerous, doesn’t it?”

“Who needs candles?” McLeod said.

“Oh and here,” Passos said, retrieving from the chair beside him a small package wrapped in teaching pamphlets.

McLeod felt surprised, and a little exposed. He tore the wrapping away quickly to not make too much of the moment: it was a blue hardback book,
Vocabulário e gramática avançada
, and it really was advanced, Passos was saying, sounding rushed and exposed as well, which endeared him to McLeod. He didn’t want to suggest that McLeod needed the practice, Passos was saying. He spoke so well already and so this book was more geared toward difficult reading—it had example passages from some of Brazil’s greatest writers; Passos himself had used a book just like it in his secondary school—and he figured it might be a nice introduction to Brazilian literature that was still within the mission rules. He knew that McLeod liked literature.

Passos said, “So that’s that,” and took a matchbook out of his pocket.

“Hey.” McLeod waited for Passos to look up at him. “I really like it, companion. Thank you.”

“Well, good,” Passos said, and he smiled. He hit the light and struck a match in the darkness, touching it to a match head in the very center of the cake. The elders watched the little bloom of fire spread to the match head beside it and the one beside it, moving out and out, until the cake looked constellatory.

Late Sunday morning
they started for church on foot, through bright and bus-less streets, unpeopled but for the occasional aproned bartender setting up folding chairs at the edge of a dark-mouthed
barzinho
. Elder Passos could see the hunched forms of men inside—solider darknesses in the darkness. In t minus an hour the final would begin. In t minus two hours church would begin. This meant that sacrament meeting would overlap the game’s second half almost exactly, and Passos himself had been asked to speak. A personal visit from the bishop late last night. The concluding speaker had come down with something.

The elders passed another assembling
barzinho
and Passos muttered, “I wish
I
could come down with something.” He sensed McLeod’s eyes on him. “I’m not complaining, I’m just saying. On a day like today who
wouldn’t
come down with something?”

“ ‘To whom much is given,’ right?” McLeod said. He chuckled.

Passos didn’t see humor in the situation, and he said as much. Only an outsider could insist on holding church services at the same time as the finals, as President Mason had done. Passos wasn’t sure a mission president even had that authority. Wouldn’t the authority reside with the local bishop? In any case, the president had made it known he’d be in attendance at the ward that afternoon, as if to intimidate it into obedience. And again, Passos wasn’t complaining—

“You’re just saying,” McLeod said.

“Well, it’s true, Elder. Do you doubt it?”

“I don’t, actually. I’m just not used to you bad-mouthing the mission president. You of all people.”

“I’m not bad-mouthing the mission president. And what does that mean—‘you of all people’?”

“Nothing,” McLeod said. “I didn’t mean to offend.”

“I’m not offended. I just don’t know what you mean.”

“I misspoke.”

A few minutes later Elder Passos banked left at the approach of the drive-through, detouring through the streets behind it. McLeod looked confused. “Why the scenic route?”

“Use your imagination,” Passos said.

His companion squinted in concentration.

“Not literally,” Passos said. “You know what I mean. You’re a real comedian this morning, aren’t you?”

“What?”

The elders passed the supermarket, the bank, the shops along the main street, all the windows mirrorlike in their darkness. The yellow-green banners spanning the intersections reminded Passos of the crossbeams over the Israelites’ doors. The Lord’s Passover. Obedience. Sacrifice. Elder Passos had fished the theme for his talk out of the preoccupations already swimming in his mind. Last night and this morning he’d made as many notes as time allowed, getting down the few complete sentences as they came to him. He intended his words for the whole congregation, of course, but specifically for Josefina. He felt certain she’d be there today. He felt certain Leandro would not be. Or maybe it wasn’t quite certainty; maybe it was fear. Creeping doubt. Something to be guarded against, combated. He couldn’t lose hope.

Passos and McLeod had agreed to continue working so that Leandro might change his heart, and soon, that he and his wife might be baptized together. The Lord intended for a family to be joined for time and all eternity, but only members of the church could undergo the sealing ordinances. Baptizing Josefina without Leandro risked alienating Leandro completely, and cutting him off, everlastingly, from his wife and now his child. The point of the gospel, Passos meant to tell Josefina, was
eternal
family unity. He would tell her today. After sacrament meeting. After his talk on obedience and sacrifice. This is
your
sacrifice, Josefina. To wait just a little while longer. In the scheme of eternity, time is meaningless, and to have your family by your side is meaning itself.

By the time the elders finally got downtown the aluminum grandstands had filled. People milled about the square, everyone in yellow, a giant convocation of bees crowding the hive: above their heads, a corridor of complicated light that ran from a high projecting booth behind the grandstand to a giant screen hanging from the town hall façade, showing pregame. The footage alternated between shots of a panel of suited men and a series of highlights from previous games, the field onscreen like a vast swimming pool of green, the figures streaking across it like water bugs … For a second Passos lost himself and stopped walking, awash in beauty.

“Obedience and sacrifice?” McLeod said, looking back.

“Indeed,” Passos sighed. “Indeed.”

They funneled into an alleyway on their way out of the square, passing a group of young people the elders’ age, and all of them in the uniform of the day. Passos half put his head down, expecting ridicule—
What, going to church? Today?
—but the faces looked right past him toward the giant screen. Passos realized he’d
actually been hoping for a little ribbing. He would have preferred it, almost any abuse, to this: this sense of invisibility, this sense of foreignness in his own country.

They arrived well early at the church, just after the trumpetlike burst of air horns had announced kickoff. Elder Passos stopped in the chapel’s doorway and watched the bars at either end of the street: how they writhed with a sort of frantic attention, the folding chairs all empty as the wall of latecomers strained at the mouth of each bar, more like fish than bees now, a yellow school of them, each member bristling for a better view. Passos felt another stab of dislocation, and he couldn’t help thinking—the idea breached despite him—that he’d given up something of himself, something important, to be a member of what was still an American-controlled church, on an American-controlled mission, under an American mission president, a man who could look at an entire culture and see a game, merely, who could look at a countrywide communion and see a crowd.

During sacrament meeting President Mason and Sister Mason, a plump, pale couple that could have been brother and sister as easily as husband and wife, sat in the otherwise empty front row, their pew upholstered, like all the pews, in a muted orange fabric that must have seemed fashionable or timeless at one point; it was neither now. From Elder Passos’s vantage—he sat on a dais at the front of the chapel—the pew backs and seats looked uglier than usual. His view of the room let Passos see just how few the bodies were to cover up or distract from the upholstery. He did notice Maurilho and Rose (but not Rômulo) in their usual place in the
middle pews. Several other members Passos knew by sight sat scattered around them, to the left and right.

Josefina sat in the very back pew, to Passos’s great relief, and his companion sat beside her. McLeod leaned over several times during the opening hymn, then the sacrament hymn, whispering to Josefina. He couldn’t know what McLeod was saying, of course, but the very fact of his whispering into her ear struck Passos as inappropriate no matter how didactic the look on his face.

Elder Passos felt eyes on him—President Mason’s, small and blue—and he returned his attention to his hymnbook. After the sacrament hymn only three deacons stood up to distribute the broken bread and water, but they were more than adequate to the size of the congregation. Then the bishop, a balding, murmuring man, went to the pulpit at the front of the dais and introduced the speakers. José Melão, their youth speaker, went first, taking less than five minutes on the subject of faith. José’s mother, Sister Melão, followed him, treating the same subject in more adult terms, though not, Passos was startled to realize, in much longer ones. She started into her talk-ending testimony (“I know these things are true …”) after only ten minutes at the pulpit, which meant that Passos needed to fill—a wide-eyed stare at the wall clock, panicked calculation—some thirty-five minutes, or fifteen minutes in excess of the twenty he had only felt vaguely prepared to fill in the first place.