Elders (9 page)

Tiago turned around with a sudden tightness in his face, but a look at Passos seemed to reassure him.

Inside the house the missionaries sat opposite Passos and Tiago on chairs brought in from the kitchen. The paler missionary introduced himself as Elder James, an American from Salt Lake City. And Elder Dos Santos and his accent came from Porto Alegre, about as far from Recife as the country allowed. Passos introduced himself and Tiago, only nine then, shy and wounded, skittish. He mentioned Felipe, too, out on the pitch.

“Can I ask,” Elder James said when Passos had finished, “can I ask where the adults are?”

“Our father left and our mother died last month—of breast cancer,” Passos said, surprising himself with his directness. “Our grandmother takes care of us now. She’s at Mass this morning.”

The two elders nodded, grim little nods, their mouths going tight, their eyes soft, as if they’d prepared for this moment, like everybody else had. Then Elder James nodded to Dos Santos and Dos Santos’s face changed from sadness to a sort of pained urgency. He looked to Passos and his little brother, leaned forward in his chair, placed his elbows on his knees. “Cristiano, Tiago, we can’t imagine how hard this time must be for you. But we felt we needed to come here today and testify to you—to give you our word—that the Lord has provided a way for families to reunite in the next life, and to reunite
as
families, to be together forever. Our church truly believes that the grave has no victory—not over our bodies, not over our bonds of love. We want to teach you and your
family about the priesthood that God has restored in these latter days—how that priesthood can seal things on earth as in heaven, and how you can have these blessings in your own life. May we teach you this, Cristiano? Tiago?”

Passos’s little brother lifted up his face at him, a mix of fear and implicit trust. Passos looked at his brother, then back at the missionaries, and felt the emotion building in him again, a thousand tiny fists behind his eyes. He fought them back by dint of a violent furrowing expression; a wave of minor panic crossed the elders’ faces. His little brother’s expression wavered too. Passos felt himself slipping, going under, but before it could happen, before it happened again, he said, “Yes. Yes.”

Four years later Elder Passos told the story very differently. He left out the crying, for one. The surges of sickness. He left out most of the emotion, the
feeling
; he couldn’t bear to see it dull. Already he had taken some of the deepest pain of his life and blunted it through overexposure, the story of his conversion like a river stone shorn of its edges from years of turning over. He’d told an abbreviated version of it to all his companions, including to McLeod, and even to a few investigators: how the missionaries came at a bad, bad time, or rather in the very nick of time. Passos knew the language of the story as well as the language of the missionary lessons—it was rote by now, automatic. How he’d been taught in charismatic Catholicism that his love for his mother was a lesser love, that in heaven he would have God and His angels for family. It just didn’t seem right to Passos. He wanted more—he
needed
more—and the
Mormons promised it ardently. A gospel that could seal his family for eternity, steel it against the terrors of the grave.

And here Elder Passos left off his recitation. Here or a little earlier. Never later. He never included the baptism itself: the feeling of coming out of the water into an embrace. He’d only ever mentioned this part to his brothers, and only once, a week after the baptism. They each confided the same experience. Nana had been at the service too, though only to watch. She couldn’t have understood. The feeling belonged to experience only, not to language.

Then again, Elder Passos thought, so did most religious feeling; so did God, ultimately. The task of a missionary was to distill the infinite into the finite, the inexpressible into the expressible. Something always got lost in translation, but the effort still justified itself. It must. Only in his dark moods did Passos doubt this, only in his sloughs did he fret about roteness. Truth did not get less true by repeating it—it only seemed that way in the face of Opposition. Elder Passos felt it now, he realized, hunched over in the crook of his arms, on his desk, by himself. He felt an Opposer shudder down his back, and he immediately straightened in his desk chair. Head lifted, eyes wide, he focused on the two framed pictures on his desk: his grandmother and brothers standing in front of their house, and his mother sitting cross-legged in front of a dark green Christmas tree, holding up a snow-white sweater, and smiling into the future. Passos’s balance returned.

Why
shouldn’t
he think about the future? Why shouldn’t he pursue his righteous ambitions? President Mason himself had said that the Brazilians should practice English with their American companions—“to lay up in store, intellectually and professionally.”
Those were the mission president’s very words at the last zone leaders’ conference. Why would he say them if he didn’t mean them? And why, for that matter, would assistants to the mission president be eligible for scholarships to Brigham Young University if temporal welfare didn’t matter? He needed to lay up in store. To build a house on the rock, both spiritually and professionally. On the rock of salvation, and on a sure earthly foundation. Like Elder Dos Santos.

João
. He tried to get used to it. João had traveled to America after his mission to stay with Elder James (or Tyler) for a week, which turned into a few weeks, which turned into a few months, which led to his being admitted to BYU. He was finishing up school now, married and with a child, and with a good job already waiting in São Paulo on account of his language skills and his American degree.

Elder Passos reached into his desk drawer—he felt a quick shot of fear, remembering the drawer’s contents—and carefully retrieved the photograph that had accompanied Dos Santos’s latest letter. It showed Dos Santos and his wife in front of the Salt Lake Temple, each of them cupping a hand under their one-year-old’s sweat-suited thigh. The chubby baby wore a blue pom-pom cap on his head, levitating between his parents. He reminded Passos of a smiling baby Buddha. Dos Santos and his wife (Renata—another expatriate) smiled too,
beamed
, their teeth as white as the snow in the background. “It’s winter here!” Dos Santos had penned in the bottom margin. The photograph reminded Passos of what he so liked in Dos Santos: his openness, his generosity, big enough to turn visible even in pictures. On the mission Dos Santos had been
a young zone leader, just like Passos, only Dos Santos had been universally loved, all the members of the ward and all the other missionaries bustling to be near him. Why couldn’t Passos be more like that? If he were more open, more sociable, he might become the type of missionary to be liked, not merely respected.

He looked up, craning around at the sound of bedsprings squeaking from the bedroom, a quick chorus of them. He heard bare feet slapping linoleum. A second later McLeod leaned his upper body into the yellow-green light of the hallway, looking surprised. “I thought for sure you’d have your head buried in a letter or something.” He gave a sideways grin. “Perhaps I should press my advantage.”

McLeod crossed the room with a large thin book in his hand. He took a seat in his desk chair, facing it toward Passos. He dropped the book on Passos’s desk. On the cover a cartoon boy balanced atop a skinny plateau-like structure of broad colored stripes: it looked like a giant sombrero.

“What’s this?”

“It’s yours if you want it,” McLeod said. “It was a farewell present from my mom, but I thought you could use it to practice English with. I’m sure it’s more interesting than that old grammar book you use. I’m pretty sure it’s mission-appropriate, too. It’s a children’s book.”

“Oh, the Places You’ll Go?”

“That’s it.”

“Am I pronouncing it right?” Passos asked.

“Perfect,” McLeod said.

Passos flipped through the first few pages: landscapes the color
of ice cream, the little boy traipsing through them in what looked like pajamas, and on each page a paragraph of clear, colloquial prose. He looked up at McLeod. “You’re giving this to me?”

“I figure you’ll make better use of it,” McLeod said, adding in English, “Good luck!”

Elder Passos felt something dislodge inside him, and spread. “Thank you, Elder. Really.”

“Oh don’t thank me yet,” McLeod said. “You see, I was sitting in the bedroom a few minutes ago, reading some old letters, and all of a sudden I got bored with that and started thinking about your letter instead. You never told me what it was about, did you? I hadn’t forgotten. I’ve decided to be nosy, you see.”

Passos smiled. “I didn’t think you had forgotten.”

“Well?”

He relented, though only for an abbreviated version: his grandmother, her ankle, his worries about her health. Nothing about his brothers, their truancy, their futures. Nothing much bigger than a few sentences could hold.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” his companion said. He looked serious, genuinely concerned. “If there’s anything I can do, I hope you’ll feel comfortable asking.”

“Thank you, Elder. Now your turn, right? What did you call it—your ‘reciprocal vulnerability’?”

“ ‘Collateral,’ I believe, but ‘reciprocal’ is pretty nerdy too.” McLeod smiled. “But no, I mean, it’s basically just—well, father problems. You know.”

“I don’t, actually.”

“Oh, that’s right. Sorry. I didn’t mean it like—”

“I know you didn’t. What kind of problems?”

“Well, for example, I was reading some of his letters in there. He doesn’t write often, but when he does it’s like, ‘Hi, how are you? How come you don’t bear your testimony in your letters home?’ My dad’s the bishop of the ward—I’m not sure if I told you that?—but it’s like he’s always wearing that hat when he writes. He wants me to come home like some Paul, some Peter—the kind of testimony that could send you to your martyrdom smiling. It’s never come as easy for me, though. But I love him. I don’t want to disappoint him … I don’t know.” After a long silence McLeod added, “That’s the abbreviated version anyway. More later maybe.”

Elder Passos nodded. “Me too.”

One morning in
late January, Passos asked McLeod to come over to his desk, where he pointed to a green-furred Seuss character holding a black, cone-shaped object, and said, “How do you say that?”

Passos asked the question in English, and McLeod once again felt a small jolt of surprise. “Your pronunciation,” he said, also in English. “I swear it’s getting better by the day.”

“ ‘I swear’?” Passos repeated, tilting his head, and smiling from the compliment.

McLeod translated the phrase.

“Ah, I see.” Passos nodded his thanks. Then he tapped at the strange object on the page again.

“It sort of looks like an umbrella,” McLeod said.

“How is it?”

“Umbrella.” Then slowly: “Um-brel-la.”

Passos repeated it even more slowly, weighing each syllable, seeming to taste the word. “Um-brel-la. Umbrella. Umbrella. Wow. What a beautiful word. It is too beautiful for English.”