Elders (5 page)

McLeod crossed the room, said “What were you watching?,” and stuck out a hand—all too casual, Passos thought. Then he remembered his resolve to curb such thoughts.

“Postgame,” Leandro said. He shook McLeod’s hand, put a tentative smile on his lips.

“Your team win?”

Josefina said, “Brazil doesn’t play again for a few days. Can I get you two some water? Cookies? Please, Elders, have a seat.”

She directed them to a sunken plaid couch catty-corner to the love seat where Leandro sat. She went into the kitchen, reemerging a moment later with two glasses of water and a plate of white wafers. She handed them the glasses and held the plate while each of them took a
biscoito
with thanks. She placed the rest of them on a shelf of a mostly empty bookcase that stood beside the couch: a few old textbooks, magazines, a Jehovah’s Witnesses tract, and
two volumes of the
World Book Encyclopedia
, one marked
E–F
, the other
M–N–O
. A red throw rug in the center of the room took the edge off the poured-concrete floor. A potted plant adorned one of the corners. Passos recognized these attempts at making do—his family made them as well—and for a moment he felt exposed in front of his American companion. He looked over at him as if in fear of being caught out. McLeod sat facing Leandro and Josefina, making small talk, something about the offside rule.

“So you’re the American then,” Leandro said.

McLeod nodded.

“Did I hear you guys do this for two whole years?”

Another nod.

“Do you get to go home at all, see your families? Do you get to have girlfriends or anything?”

The questions were more for McLeod than Passos, who began to feel wary, as he often did, of too much conversation before a lesson. He hadn’t made his teaching preferences clear to McLeod in the week they’d been together, mostly because, he now realized, they hadn’t sat down for a full lesson until tonight. (A dazed, possibly homeless woman had listened to them on a bench a few days earlier, but Passos didn’t count that.) He liked to come into an investigator’s home and let the message, the Spirit, do the talking. He preferred to be a vessel—no more, no less.

But now Leandro was waiting for his companion to answer, and McLeod was flushing pinker than usual, eyes averted. “Well, no,” he said. “We don’t have girlfriends. Not during these two years at least.”

“And your families?” Josefina said. “You don’t get to see them at all?”

“Well, we write them every week,” McLeod said. “And we call them on Christmas and Mother’s Day.”

“That’s all?”

“It’s a sacrifice, certainly,” Passos interjected. He smiled and gave a firm nod as if to mark the end of one phase of the conversation, the beginning of another, the real conversation. “But we make these sacrifices”—he leaned forward in his seat, resting his elbows on his knees—“we make them because we believe very strongly in the message of the restored gospel. We’d like to share that message with you now. May we do that, Leandro? Josefina?”

Leandro looked surprised to hear his name. “What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing for now. We just wanted to ask your permission.”

“Oh. Oh, sure. Go ahead.”

“Please,” Josefina said.

Passos looked to McLeod, nodded, and turned back to Leandro and Josefina, their faces open, a little nervous.

“Well, first,” McLeod said, “just to get to know you guys better, let me ask you a few questions …” Passos stiffened, marveled—his junior companion had never seemed more junior—as McLeod proceeded to ask the couple how long they’d been in the area (“Our whole lives”), how long they’d been married (“Three years”), how old they were even, how
old
(“I’m twenty-nine, he’s thirty-two”), and several other questions wholly irrelevant to the first missionary discussion. Passos thought of a frightened boxer, moving in too close to his opponent, leaning against him in the early rounds, stalling. Not that Josefina and Leandro were opponents, but listen to him! What was Leandro’s construction job like? What did it entail? Was it hard? Was it dangerous? Did he enjoy it? Leandro
answered each question at some length, and Josefina said, “I just thank God one of us has work, you know? There isn’t very much of it—”

“So you believe in God,” Passos cut in. “What are your thoughts on God? Do either of you belong to a church?”

He clamped his eyes on Josefina and Leandro and reached a hand over to his companion’s knee as if searching for the Off button. Passos wouldn’t make the mistake of inviting McLeod, open-ended, into the lesson again.

“We’re both Catholics,” Josefina answered, “and we believe in God, but you know …”

“We go every once in a while,” Leandro said. He turned to his wife. “We go. Right?”

Josefina kept her eyes on Passos. “We believe in God, and we believe He’s good. Merciful. Is that what you meant?”

“God is good in very deed,” Passos said. “That’s the first principle we teach. There is a God in heaven who loves us very much. He wants us to be happy in this life. And the greatest happiness and the greatest growth come from following His commandments, but how do we know God’s commandments?”

Passos heard the inflection of his voice curl upward out of habit—too upward for now. “I meant that rhetorically,” he said. He removed his Bible from his shoulder bag and opened to an underlined, age-yellowed page. “My companion is going to read a scripture from the book of Amos, in the Old Testament, that answers this question. He’s just going to read it.” He passed the book to McLeod and pinioned a stiff forefinger over the verse.

McLeod recited Amos 3:7 from memory, ignoring Passos’s Bible.
“ ‘Surely the Lord God will do nothing without first revealing it to His servants the prophets.’ ”

“Thank you, Elder,” Passos said. “And that’s the answer. We learn about God’s will and God’s commandments from the prophets He calls. He has called them throughout all human history. Noah, Enoch, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Amos, John the Baptist, Jesus Himself. All these people were prophets, called to pass along messages from God to man. Does that make sense?”

It was another reflexive question, though for now he let it hang in the air, an act of faith.

“So that means Jesus,” Josefina said, “was a prophet of God and the Son of God at the same time, right?”

“Absolutely,” Passos said. “Absolutely.”

Josefina smiled, and Leandro too—a little uncertain, Leandro’s smile, but at least he seemed attentive. They both did. Engaged even. And how long had it been? How long since he had sat before two intelligent, interested investigators, and a couple at that, a young family?

“That’s absolutely
right
,” Passos said with sudden feeling, that old, good feeling. “God is good and God is merciful in very deed, and in His mercy He called prophets to lead us back to Him. And in the meridian of time, as it is rightly called, He rose up John the Baptist—a rude man, a locust eater—to make straight the way of the Lord, the very Son of God.” Passos felt the Spirit building in him, a different energy, and he began to lift—he did it unconsciously—into the familiar registers of the charism priests of his youth, their rhythms, their bouncing cadences. This music rose in Passos at moments of excitement, heat—it rose alongside
the excitement, like a bright shirt bleeding freer as the wash water warms.

“The prophet John the Baptist prepared the way for the Son of God, the Only Begotten Son, who gave His life, as we read in John, that those who believe in Him and His words, His
prophecies
, might not perish but have everlasting life. Ever. Lasting.
Life
,” Passos repeated, getting warmer still, and suddenly a muted “Amen” came from Josefina, and another, a second later, from Leandro.

“Amen indeed,” Passos said, “for He is life itself. He is the way, the truth,
the
life. He paid the last, the very last farthing for our sins, our waywardness, our baseness, our corruption, our lusting and groping after darkness, and can any man doubt it? No! The Lord came to earth and established His perfect church that we may know how to live worthy to return to Him. But what happened to this church? My friends, there is a ‘but.’ Here, sadly, tragically, there is a great and terrible ‘but.’ It came in the form of wicked men who drove away the pure, simple truth of that church and replaced it with the philosophies of the day, the corruptions of the day. I am sad to testify that the very truth forked away into paths choked with thorns and thistles, covered in mists of thick darkness. Every man began following after his own light, and not the Lord’s light, not
the
light, until soon, and it was very soon—it was only a few generations after the Lord’s ascension—soon the saving truth in all its purity and grace was lost, and the world lay in darkness for long centuries.”

Elder Passos paused. He let the world lie in darkness for several seconds. He felt his companion’s eyes move to him—a curious smile too, he thought, though he couldn’t be sure. Passos was looking straight ahead at Josefina and Leandro, their faces arched, waiting.

“But we have come with good news,” he said softly. “We have come with
the
good news. We proclaim that in the spring of 1820 the Lord saw fit to raise up a new prophet, in the fullness of times, in these the latter days. He called a young boy of only fourteen years—an American farm boy, unschooled, simple—a prophet like John the Baptist before him, rude and despised of the world. For the Lord God says He will make the weak things strong, confounding the wise and the haughty with the ignorant, confounding them even out of the mouth of babes, out of the mouth of a simple farm boy, an American. And that’s just what the Lord did, my friends, in His wisdom, in His infinite,
infinite
mercy—”

“Amen,” Josefina said, a little louder than before.

“Amen,” Leandro said.

Elder Passos took the sudden injection of energy—energy upon energy, line upon line—and let it slingshot him down the final stretch of his speech. “In God’s infinite wisdom and mercy He has given us another chance to embrace the truth, the full truth, the full and saving truth. He restored His true church through the Prophet Joseph Smith, beginning in the year 1820, and now, a hundred and eighty-three years later, we—Elder McLeod and I—we represent that very church. We are young elders of this church, down from Recife, down from Boston, and there are thousands more like us all over the world, overspreading the four corners of the earth to bring the good news once again, in all its fullness. We proclaim absolutely that God lives, that Jesus Christ paid the price for our sins, and that the latter-day gospel, the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospel contained in the church we represent, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—we proclaim that this gospel is true indeed! Amen!”

“Amen!” Josefina all but shouted.

“Amen and amen!” Passos did shout.

Then Leandro: “Amen!”

And Josefina a second time: “Amen!”

And Passos turned to McLeod. The curious smile gone wondering now, the blue eyes bright with amusement or Spirit or both. Too caught up to care, Passos nodded his assurances,
It’s okay, it’s okay to let go
. Then even McLeod, the
brancão
beside him, even he said “Amen,” though he said it like an experiment, a question. And Passos answered it: “Amen!”

He rode that feeling for the rest of the night and into Tuesday morning, and Tuesday afternoon, where he needed it. The unbroken sun, the unanswered doors, the unpeopled abandoned streets—all of it tried even Passos’s patience, Father Abraham notwithstanding. But at least he had something to focus on now; he could cheer himself with the thought of Josefina and Leandro. The two had agreed to a second discussion early next week, having promised to read from the Book of Mormon and pray about it.

“You know,” Passos said at one point, as much to himself as to McLeod, “I think this couple might be golden.”

“Which couple?” McLeod said, but then he smiled.

In midafternoon the elders went to knock a neighborhood close to downtown, passing a gauntlet of pornographic newsstands en route. Passos noticed how McLeod kept his eyes to the ground—a good technique, he observed aloud, but not ironclad. You still ran the risk of glimpsing pages rain-plastered to the sidewalk. What was best was to look straight ahead, not focusing. Passos glanced at
McLeod. He wondered if he’d said too much, rushed to judgment once again. But his junior companion nodded.

Then two more hours of fruitless knocking. The dusk still hovered an hour away, and given the championships, the postgame shows, the celebrations, Passos held out little hope for the dusk. At a few minutes before six o’clock he suggested they get off their feet, maybe stop for a restaurant dinner. Passos knew something of his own reputation in the mission, and tonight he wanted to counteract it. So how about the
rodízio
downtown, the one by the post office?

“Really?” McLeod said. “That’s allowed?”

“We need to eat, don’t we?”

McLeod smiled. “Okay then! I’m buying!”

Passos smiled himself, a little uncertainly, acknowledging the joke. He thought it was a joke, anyway. On the way to the restaurant he noted McLeod’s buoyant stride and his light, carefree humming. Of course it was a joke. How could it matter who bought for whom? He and McLeod, all the missionaries in the mission, received the same stipend each month from the church’s general missionary fund, a vast communal pot that each mission drew from, each according to its relative costs, each according to its needs. Elder Passos thought of the fund in just these terms—Marxist ones, ironic ones. The fact was that American missionaries and their families filled the coffers most of the way, and then the Americans got the same amount in the field as everyone else, even people like Passos, too poor to pay anything into the general fund. It intrigued Passos that such an anticapitalist system should count on the support of so many Americans—it originated in America, in Salt Lake City—and, really, it surprised him. He tried to bear that
surprise in mind, storing it alongside Father Abraham. He thought of his teachers who had held forth on the bottom-line evils of Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush, and he thought
Yes, but
. Let that be his mantra. For as he sat down in a restaurant booth across from McLeod, Passos knew that America, in a sense, had already picked up the tab, for which he felt vulnerable, if also grateful, especially since McLeod had not personalized the debt. Elder Passos still burned to think of the time his only other American companion, Elder Jones, had garbled something about footing the bill for Passos and all the other freeloaders, and was it too much to ask for a simple thank-you? In the person of Jones he had hated America. In the person of McLeod—what did he feel, exactly?