Elders (20 page)

“That’s the hard truth,” the president said. “You ought to listen to your senior companion, Elder McLeod.”

“We’ll work with her husband more,” Passos said. “We’ll bring him around. She’ll help us. I know she will. She really is golden, President.”

“I’m sure she is. That’s why we want her baptism to be truly meaningful. We want it to be an important step toward the exaltation of her entire family. Our goal is to unite people in the eternities, not divide them. But that can only happen if a man and woman are sealed together in the temple. You both know this as well as I do, Elders.”

“Where was this ‘meaningful baptism’ talk eight months ago when we called you about a ten-year-old?” McLeod said. “Do you remember that? Do you remember you okayed it? The kid went in the front door and out the back. And now when we bring you a
real
investigator—”

“That’s precisely what we’re trying to have less of, Elder McLeod. In one door, out the other. We’re not asking your investigator not to be baptized—”

“Josefina. Her
name
is Josefina.”

“We are simply asking her to wait for her husband so that her baptism can be
truly—
”

“Yeah,” McLeod said, standing up from his chair, “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” and he walked out of the office and slammed the door behind him.

Out in the foyer Josefina said, “What’s wrong, Elder?” She sat straight-backed at the edge of a floral-patterned couch, her knees
together beneath her black skirt, shining with the light from the window like waxed fruit. Her white blouse hung loose over her stomach, much tighter over her chest. “What’s happening, Elder? What is it?”

He couldn’t look her in the face now, least of all now. He shook his head for her, slowly, and looked away.

Passos made no attempt
to hide his anger at McLeod, made no gesture at reconciliation the next day or the next. He and McLeod knocked doors in the afternoons and evenings, speaking in short clipped sentences when they did speak, which was rarely, and almost always about logistics. Where to? What next? Which bus? Little more than this.

When Josefina failed to show up at church on Sunday, the elders took Rose with them for a drop-in visit that night. They needed Josefina’s closest friend in the ward to help cheer her, help her put things in perspective, but they also needed Rose in order to comply with the mission’s newest rule: missionaries must bring a third party when visiting a woman alone in her home. Elder Passos didn’t like the rule any more than McLeod did, but he didn’t intend to copy McLeod’s idiotic strategy of shouting into the wind, spitting into it, then hanging his head when he got all hoarse and wet.

Head-hanging had become McLeod’s default posture. He hardly looked up from the floor during the entire visit at Josefina’s, his face dull, eyes vacant. He looked lobotomized. Worse yet was the way Josefina herself mirrored McLeod’s body language. She sat on the love seat, her back hunched, hands crossed in front of her knees, her gaze angled down at the bowl of pebbles on the coffee table, the untouched plate of
biscoitos
. Passos talked and talked
but he couldn’t get through to her. Only when Rose opened her mouth to speak did Josefina even shift her position on the love seat. Rose hesitated.

“Please,” Passos said. “Please.”

“Well, I just wanted to say,” she began, “and I’d meant to tell you this at the beginning, Josefina. I’m sorry Maurilho couldn’t be here with us tonight, but he finally got a job, a janitorial position at the town hall, and he has to work nights now, even Sunday nights. I know he’s a little embarrassed about it all. He’s not a prideful man, my husband, but he’s smart enough to run that town hall, and now he’s pushing a broom there. The Lord humbles us sometimes, to make us teachable. He has to break our hearts before he can rebuild them better.”

By now Josefina had looked up at her friend, her eyes sharpening slightly, and her posture too. When Rose finished, she nodded at Passos. He was searching for a particular verse in the Doctrine and Covenants to build on Rose’s point, to add to the Spirit suddenly warming the room. Was it section 131? The word of the Lord to the Prophet Joseph Smith: how his afflictions would be but for a small moment, and if he endured them well, the Lord would exalt him on high. It was section 121, he remembered.

Passos turned to the section, but before he could locate the verse Elder McLeod opened his mouth for the first time all visit.

“Where’s Leandro?” he said.

Passos looked up, startled to hear his companion’s voice, and saw him staring intensely into Josefina’s eyes.

“I don’t know,” Josefina admitted.

“When was the last time you saw him? Did he know we were coming here tonight?”

“I told him you were coming. I told him last night, but—”

“Was he sober?” McLeod said.

The visit ended a few minutes later. On the bus ride home McLeod and Rose exchanged a few polite words. Passos kept totally silent.

President Mason had been right about McLeod all along. The president was more clear-eyed about his companion, more blunt and honest. A difficult missionary. Arrogant. Stubborn. He needs a leader more than a friend, Elder Passos. The president had told him this in the bishop’s office the other day, and not for the first time, after McLeod had stomped out of the room trailing his
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
like a little boy dragging his baby blanket. His junior companion was acting worse than junior now, worse than
juvenile
. For he threw loud tantrums at the realities he disliked, then walked around with his nose in the air as if convinced of his own purity, untainted by compromise, by facts. McLeod suddenly embodied for Elder Passos some of America’s worst tendencies. He suddenly reminded him of Elder Jones: boorish yet haughty, naïve yet cynical, self-righteous despite such obvious cruelty.

These thoughts of Passos’s coincided, and not coincidentally, with the news of America’s buildup to war. Neither Passos nor McLeod had violated the missionary rules against reading newspapers or magazines, watching TV, listening to the radio. The talk of war with Iraq simply pervaded the air around them, like humidity before a thunderstorm. Already a unanimous vote in America’s Congress. Troop movements in Kuwait. Refugees at the border. Signs of the times, Elder Passos thought.

On Thursday afternoon the elders knocked a door and an oldish woman answered it. Tracting had improved with the end of the championships, but the harvests still came in meager, and opened doors still rather surprised the missionaries. Elders Passos and McLeod straightened up as the woman tucked long strands of gray behind her ear, smiling slightly, straddling the threshold of the door. Yes? Could she help them? Passos gave the more extended introduction in which he anticipated common questions—“Elder” was a title; they came from Recife and Boston, respectively—then he asked the woman if they could come inside to share their message.

The woman hesitated.

“It won’t take long at all,” Passos added.

She opened the door a little wider, stepping aside to make room for the missionaries to enter her dirt courtyard.

“Oh, actually,” Passos said. “Are you alone, ma’am? Is your husband or anyone else home with you?”

McLeod snorted, muttered under his breath, in English, “She’s like sixty, dude.”

“Shut up,” Passos said. He too spoke in English. He turned to the woman. “I sometimes have to translate for him. Excuse us.”

The woman nodded. “My son is here.”

Inside the darkened living room the elders sat opposite the woman on a pair of chairs brought in from the kitchen. She called out to her son more than once as the three of them made small talk, waiting. After a minute more the woman shrugged and told the elders they might as well begin. Elder Passos hesitated a moment—did the rule require that the third party actually be in
the room?—and in that space McLeod started into the first lesson, reciting memorized lines on God as a loving Heavenly Father who calls prophets, and so on. Passos took up the next two sections, providing his own variations on the themes of God’s Son and His atoning sacrifice and the original church He established on the earth. The missionaries were halfway through the next section on that church’s eventual apostasy—“saving truths were lost or corrupted,” McLeod was reciting—when a big shirtless man stepped into the room, immense brown belly first. The man stood generously proportioned throughout, but especially at his middle, so bowed out and smooth as to look ceramic. No sooner had he dropped down beside his mother on the couch than he leveled a stare at Elder McLeod. “Are you American?”

McLeod gave a slow nod.

“How about that fucking president of yours?”

In the instant Passos felt McLeod straighten beside him, bristle. He spoke quickly. “Sir?” he said. “Sir.” He explained about the gospel message they were sharing with his mother. They’d been talking about the attributes of God. Would he like to tell them how
he
imagined God?

“God is good,” the man said. His eyes returned to McLeod. “And God ain’t greedy either. He don’t want to bomb poor little countries just to get their fucking oil. He don’t want—”

Passos cleared his throat loudly. He stood up and shook the woman’s hand, then the man’s. He thanked them for their time and at the doorway exchanged a few last pleasantries, a few
God bless you
s. McLeod kept notably quiet. He waited until they rounded a corner away from the house before he said, sounding confident of
Passos’s accord, “Talk about an ignoramus, huh? Anyway, thanks for sticking up for me back there. I appreciate it.”

Passos answered in English: “I did not say I disagree with him.”

A week more passed like that, two weeks. The elders visited Josefina several times, with Rose or Rômulo in tow. Most of the visits devolved into planning sessions, strategic brainstorms. How to get Leandro interested? How to get him to show up at all? What about a casual meeting one night, just a chance to relax and talk? What about a dinner at Rose and Maurilho’s? They needed to reestablish their friendship with Leandro, needed to properly apologize for their run-in after the championships. Or what if they dropped by unannounced? A surprise visit?

Most of the suggestions came from Passos, some from Rose, some from Josefina herself. McLeod did little except to naysay, as Passos saw it. His companion took up each suggestion like a pawnshop jewel appraiser, holding it to the light and finding something to disparage: too transparent, too murky, too sneaky, and weren’t they supposed to be missionaries first, friends second? Wasn’t that another of the things they’d talked about?

Things between Passos and McLeod hadn’t healed in the last weeks so much as scabbed over—they’d resigned themselves to each other’s formalities—though on some nights Elder Passos’s frustrations still rose to a boil, causing him to compose in his head long lists of McLeod’s faults:
pride, negativity, hypercriticism, petulance, arrogance, self-absorption …
He even began to take private pleasure in the carfuls of men shouting out at them “Bin Laden,
Bin Laden!” or “Imperialists!” or “Warmongers!” Passos knew that many of these drive-by critics probably lumped him in with the whitey at his side, but he considered this a bearable price to pay for the sight of McLeod’s jaw gripping, the flaring in his eyes. Of course Elder Passos did not hate his companion. Nor did he feel apathetic toward him. His feelings now lived in a shifting middle space, a place that could accommodate affection and hope—that the offer of a stay in McLeod’s basement still stood, for example—but that could also make room for scorn, spite, bitterness, resentment, hopes of comeuppance.

On another day, toward the end of February, the missionaries tracted a rich neighborhood. To give them a chance, Passos thought, though he knew from long experience not to expect much from the worldly and vaunted. In the richer neighborhoods electric fences topped the property walls instead of broken bottles. On some of the walls, on the white glaring stucco, local vandals spray-painted looping insignia. Others left messages of protest: