Elders (28 page)

The rain kept up.
It thickened and bowed. It swept the streets in gusting scrims, making a mockery of all umbrellas, as the three elders descended at the stop near the drive-through. The crosstown bus went no closer to home. Elders Passos and Nunes and Batista would have to take the rest on foot. The bus pulled away, sprouting thick crescents of water from the wheel wells. Passos and Nunes stepped back under the awning. Batista stood planted in the coursing gutter, pushing little wavelets up and over his rubber overshoes. “Oh, are my feet in the water?” he said. “Didn’t even notice, brethren. Didn’t even notice.”

He laughed, and Nunes laughed too, but said how ridiculous Batista looked in those things, like a circus clown. They spent several seconds back-and-forthing the pros and cons of overshoes until Passos put an end to the conversation. “I’ve only ever seen Americans wearing them. Come on.”

Elder Passos led a spirited run-walk for several minutes as Nunes and Batista tittered behind him. They kicked up puddles at each other, like children, some of the water splashing the backs of Passos’s pant legs, which were already soaked. At moments he almost regretted being rid of McLeod in exchange for these childish greenies—child
ish
, not child
like
.

They reached the bus stop closest to the apartment, paused under the awning to catch their breaths. The rain on the cement slab above them sounded like TV static at full blast. Elder Nunes
raised his voice almost to a shout and Passos still couldn’t quite hear what he said.

“What was that?” Passos shouted.

“I said I sure hope you didn’t leave your laundry out in this.”

Elder Passos slumped his head into his palm, remembering.

“Did you really?” Nunes said. “I was just kidding.”

“Great,” Passos said. “Some P-Day.”

“You didn’t know it was going to rain today?”

“How would I have known that, Elder?”

“You just feel it, man. You’re Brazilian.”

“He’s from the northeast,” Batista said. “They’re all Bedouins up there.”

More tittering from Nunes and Batista. More soaking rain as they made the final dash for home. They turned off the main road onto the elders’ street, running along the rivers that gushed at the curbsides and deposited trash and mango leaves at the eddying flooded drain grates. Passos jumped the river onto the sidewalk as he neared his front gate. He thrust his hand into the mail slot, came away with a clutch of envelopes. In the courtyard the rain boiled in several centimeters of standing water. Passos and Nunes, and even Batista with his overshoes, started stepping and stepping like flamingoes, trying to keep their feet dry as they tore down the morning’s laundry from the clothesline. Elder Passos had a mind to leave McLeod’s laundry out, but Nunes and Batista had already grabbed indiscriminate handfuls of garments socks shirts pants ties, mixing the just with the unjust. Inside, the laundry took over the apartment, laid out to dry, or re-dry, on chair backs, tables, desks, countertops, doorknobs, door edges, anything and everything. An hour later a dank fungal stench suffused the air and
the elders had to push through still-dripping clothes as if through jungle brush just to move about the apartment. Elder Passos spent the first part of the afternoon reading the letter Nana had sent, responding to it, then encouraging Nunes and Batista to do the same. Had they already written their letters home? he asked. Didn’t they have people worrying about them, wondering?

Passos spent the second half of the afternoon cutting out pictures of Jesus from church magazines and redoing the mirror, making it thick with images. Jesus in the manger. Jesus in the temple. Jesus with the woman at the well, with His disciples. Jesus with the little children,
heirs of the kingdom of heaven
, He said, and also
Allow them to come to me
. Allow them to be childlike, not childish, not inane, laughing at who knows what in the bedroom, swapping wisecracks, just like McLeod and his set of jokesters. They should be writing their families to let them know they’re alive, to bear testimony to them, to be
missionaries
. Why was he so surrounded by idiots? Why did they all think they were here? To tell stupid jokes? To win popularity contests? Jesus at the Last Supper, the washing of the feet. Jesus atoning in Gethsemane, the agony on His face, His betrayal by Judas. Elder Passos arranged each picture so that it just overlapped the one beneath it, so that he could fit as many pictures in as possible. He looked at all of the cutouts so far, the mounting sweep of them, one image bleeding into another into another, a sort of kaleidoscopic montage of His Life and Passion.

Passos’s grandmother still ailed. This was the word she used. “I am still ailing, my little son. Unfortunately.” She said she’d thought enough time had passed, but after a day behind the counter her ankle had swelled up again, even bigger than before, round and dark as an avocado. The pain laid her low for another week.
She couldn’t even think anymore. Felipe and Tiago had to all but carry her onto the bus to go to the doctors. White-coated scoundrels, all of them. The endless waiting rooms, the flat-faced receptionists. And then, adding insult to injury, they kept her there, said she ailed from more than a sprain—an ill-healed fracture, they said. Had to break it again to set it right. Could he believe it? She was writing him from the convalescence ward now. She’d be there a week, they said, maybe more. Tiago visited often, even Felipe. They were both good boys. She ought to sue the city. They’d promised pavement more than a year ago, and now the scoundrels said she’d need to use a walker for six weeks—either that or some motorized cart, probably some old golf cart from the States. Ha!

Nana bucked up for him, he knew. She tried to make a joke of things—“Ha!”—but it wasn’t funny. Elder Passos could see the writing on the wall. On the mirror. Jesus before Pilate, before the Pharisees and Sadducees, fattened snarling men. Jesus amid the jeering Roman soldiers.
To this end was I born
, He said. It was not a funny message. Elder Passos could see into the mirror and beyond it, could see through the glass, for a moment, clearly. Tiago and Felipe visited Nana often, which meant that neither of them went much to school or church. It had been this way for two months now, more. They took turns behind the counter during the day, one bringing in what little business the street offered while the other played pickup football games. At night they helped Nana, or now visited her in the hospital. In two months more, maybe longer, Nana would start walking again, tending the store again—a trickle of customers, a river of bills. The street would stay dusty and unpaved, the life meager. There was nothing there for them. Jesus at Golgotha, on the cross. Jesus risen up on the
morning of the third day.
Touch me not
, He said,
for I have not yet ascended
. Then Jesus with the apostles before his final ascension, and the commandment to
go into all the world and take the gospel to every creature
. Jesus beside the Father, in the clouds of glory, and the promise that He will soon come again. From birth to death to rebirth, the whole story, and all of it staring him in the face, a premonition.

He knew his companion couldn’t be trusted, couldn’t be counted on. The silence meant the end of the basement apartment—he felt sure of it. Passos couldn’t untell the lies McLeod had no doubt told his parents about him. He couldn’t undo that damage. He needed the assistantship, the BYU scholarship. Elder Passos thought of the opening talk he would give at Tuesday’s zone conference—a standing assignment, the talk, that in the hands of many zone leaders became little more than a précis for the president’s longer address. The president had assigned Passos to discuss the new rules about family-oriented teaching from a practical, missionary standpoint. But Passos would do much more than that. He would get President Mason’s attention; he would
convert
the missionaries of his zone to the procedural by way of the doctrinal, by way of the spiritual. The noise of the world. The shelter in inspired rules. The small means by which great things come to pass. Elder Passos removed a note card from his breast pocket and jotted down another idea. The great and eternal blessings of obedience, which is all the Lord asks of us, remember—obedience: no more or less than that.

Passos repeated this last phrase aloud, slowly, and with oratorical emphasis, in the finished bathroom mirror: “Obedience: no more or less than that.”

At a little after nine o’clock that night Elder McLeod arrived with his friends in tow, the three of them ashen and funereal, Passos saw, at the prospect of reuniting with their assigned companions. He ought to address companionship unity in his talk as well. He ought to stress that.

Elders Batista and Kimball and Nunes and Sweeney filed away into the night a few minutes later, leaving the apartment to descend back into its pall of silence. But Passos felt confident he could handle it. If things went according to plan, he’d only have to deal with McLeod for two more weeks. True, they hadn’t been together for very long, not even two transfers yet, but in order for Passos to serve as an assistant for any significant length of time he needed to move up to the mission office soon, and why not this transfer? He might even hint at this to the president in his upcoming interview. That and the BYU scholarship. He could mention how he’d always dreamed of going there, but of course the money and the distance and all that bureaucracy … Let President Mason reassure him. Then let Passos respond with a well-turned bit of English, something very American, something to demonstrate his growing mastery of the language.

The next day the elders were more tentative in their silence. They gestured to each other, made occasional eye contact. More than once Elder Passos thought McLeod might just say something. He would have welcomed the change, any move toward reconciling, if only for the purpose of the interview with the president. He hadn’t yet figured out how to describe the silence in terms that would absolve him, as the senior companion, of all blame.

They lunched unceremoniously at a
padaría
downtown, eating cheese bread, sitting on a pair of folding chairs. Leaving the store, Passos saw Josefina studying the wares in a shop window on a nearby corner. A woman about Josefina’s height, in any case, in a loose-fitting blouse. The same posture, the same dark hair—or was it? Passos quickened his step, and McLeod beside him. When they were half a block away the woman glanced in their direction, made a face, her pinched features not at all like Josefina’s, and hurried into the shop. Passos and McLeod slowed down together, nearly stopped, as if they’d entered a slower, thicker medium.

By Friday the silence had hardened again. On Saturday it seemed more impenetrable than ever, though it also seemed to float free of the elders, independent of each of them, a poisonous gas that flushed up from depths neither had anticipated or really intended. At times Elder Passos felt he could almost see it, sense it staining the air around them like squid’s ink. Sunday passed like that. Then Monday. Passos felt himself start to resent even the sound of McLeod’s breathing. He thought McLeod probably resented the sound of his too.

At seven o’clock Tuesday morning Elder Passos stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind him, making sure of his privacy, though his companion was still very much asleep. Passos took out the three-by-five note cards he had prepared for his talk at zone conference that afternoon. The cards were filled to the bottom edge with tiny, tidy script. He read aloud through the first card, practicing pace and cadence. He read through the second,
too, and only on the third—he looked up into the mirror for brief, meaningful eye contact—did he realize that McLeod had torn down all his Jesus pictures again. He must have done it sometime during the night. To anger me. Try to throw me off-kilter for the talk he’s watched me prepare, hour after hour, night after night. It won’t work. It won’t.

And it didn’t. That afternoon at the conference Elder Passos mastered his concentration as he moved through the cards with a calm, unhurried, confident air, addressing the twenty or so missionaries, and of course the mission president, who had gathered in Belo Horizonte to receive instruction and edification. Passos first outlined the zone’s numbers as compared with those from two months ago at the last zone conference. They had fallen off rather precipitously, “though not alarmingly,” Passos pronounced. For consider how the new emphasis on family-centered teaching had caused retention numbers to rise mission-wide. He transitioned into the doctrine, saying, “And consider how every great move toward progress—eternal progress—encounters opposition, especially at the beginning. Consider how the Evil One tried to overwhelm the young Joseph Smith when he first prayed to His Heavenly Father aloud, in the earnestness of his soul. ‘Immediately,’ Joseph wrote, ‘I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.’ And consider, too—and this is the take-home—how the Prophet freed himself from this Enemy of All Righteousness: ‘I exerted all my powers to call upon God to deliver me …’