Colum McCann - Thirteen Ways of Looking

A clean, plain silence rolls along the shore, made cleaner and plainer still by the occasional screech of gulls. It seems to her that some vast hand lies behind the dunes flinging the birds in patterns out over the Atlantic. Far out on the horizon, a tanker disappears from view, as if dropping off the edge of the sea.

Beverly has crumpled her last cigarettes in the cardigan pocket. She likes the feel of the grains, the fall of them from her fingers, sprinkling them now in the cold sand. She cannot remember a time, even in captivity in the jungle, when she went without cigarettes. She places a few grains of tobacco upon her tongue. Raw. Bitter. They will be of no comfort. What was it about his appearance that had corralled her so easily? Why had she stayed up so late with the other Sisters? Why had she watched the Spanish-language news? The odd little magpie of the mind. Nothing is finally finished, then? The past emerges and re-emerges. It builds its random nest in the oddest places.

She struggled for so many years with absolution, the depth of her vows, poverty, chastity, obedience. Working with doctors, experts, theologians to unravel what had happened. Every day she went to the chapel to beseech and pray. Hundreds of hours trying to get to the core of it, understand it, pick it apart. Forgiveness for herself first, they told her. In order, then, to forgive him. Without hubris, without false charity. Therapy sessions, physical exams, spiritual direction, prayer. The embrace of Christ’s agony. The abandonment at the hour. Opening herself to compassion. Trying to put it behind her with the mercy of time. The days slipping by. Small rooms. Long hours. The curtains opening and closing. The disappearance of light. The blackened mirrors. The days spent weeping. The guilt. She sheared her hair. Swept the rosary beads off the bedside table. Took baths fully clothed. No burning bush, no pillar of light. More a pail of acid into which she wanted to dissolve. And here he is, back now, once more. Or perhaps she has simply dreamt it? One of those momentary aftershocks, rippling under the surface? A small pulse of the wound where there used to be a throb?

They had told her, years ago, that it might happen. In Saint Louis, in the convent hospital, along the dark waters of the Mississippi. The anger. The shame. The false pride. The disgrace. It would return. She built up a wall of prayer. Neither life nor death, nothing can separate me from Your love and mercy. If I pass through raging waters in the sea, Lord, I shall not drown. She repeated the prayers over and over. Stone upon stone. A finished wall. Yet why is it now that she has allowed him to scale it? He is, after all, only a man on television, the image of an image. But so well dressed. So poised. So public. What right does he have to talk about peace? What had he done to achieve such grace?

Back along the roadway, she passes a deckchair left over from the summer, its innards fluttering in the wind. The sand blows in swirled patterns on the footpath. She pulls the padded hood up around her face, reaches up and presses the bridge of her nose between her fingers.

A two-mile walk back to the convent house. She has, at least, a sturdy pair of shoes.

Flip-flops. Made from car tires. Slapping against the soles of her feet. She was dragged from the jeep. Blindfolded, driven away. Rushed down a mud road. A clearing in the bamboo. On the first night her feet swelled with insect bites. By the second night, they had bled and festered. Eventually they gave her rubber boots for the marches. Always on the move. From one clearing in the jungle to the next. They thought her first a human-rights worker. She wore lay clothes. She worked alone. Word filtered out on the radio: she was a Maryknoll, a nun. He didn’t believe it. He ripped the wooden cross from her neck. She said nothing. Other nuns had been shot. She was nothing special. He spat when she prayed. He was so young then. No more than twenty-three, twenty-four. Already a commander and the hatred had hardened in him, but she thought for sure that she could find some point of tenderness. She used to imagine dropping her words behind his eyes to find a soft point, in his memory, some prayer, some word, something maternal she could jolt from him. He knew none of the rhythms of prayers: he had grown up without them. No nursery rhymes. Only the right-wing paramilitary songs, none of which she knew. She would somehow reach him, she was sure of it — but he remained aloof, absent. Even when there were others alongside her in captivity, aid workers, radicals, professors, and once, for a few days, a left-wing senatorial candidate. Five months in the jungle, four weeks in a safe house — six months in all. His ability to stare. That thousand-yard remove. He had a mole on his cheek. Was it still there? Last night she had reached out and touched the ghost of his face, the television static. Surely she would have noted the absence of the mole. Why had she not thought of it before? Why hadn’t she recorded the program? She could have destroyed it, rid herself of him. What have I done? Forgive me, Lord.

Once he took off his bandana and stuffed it in her mouth to stop her from making noise, so that toward the end she just lay there, compliant, a vague freedom in the shame, the thought of elsewhere, the west of Ireland, the stone walls, the rain permanent across the fields, her mother’s face, flushed with disgrace, the shape of her father moving out into the laneway, her brother walking down the road, away from her, that childhood, gone, a bead of his sweat dripping down on the bridge of her nose, puta, he pushed her head down against the dirt, puta, the sound of his voice, quiet and controlled, puta .

She is startled by the toot of a horn behind her and the hiss of car tires. It has begun to gently drizzle.

— Coming home?

As if in synch, Sister Anne and Sister Yun lean toward her, earnest, expectant. Such an odd word, home. She finds herself trying to speak, but the words are lodged inside her somehow, not so much in her throat but in the hollow of her stomach, and when she responds she is startled by the rise of the sounds through her: Sí, gracias, a casa, es un poco frío, so incongruent and displaced, she has no idea how she has lapsed so easily into Spanish, how she has allowed him so immediately back into her life, when she was sure that he had died, or faded into the jungle again, or disappeared.

Carlos had escaped. Rumors of death squads, retribution. She kept up on the news in sporadic bursts, but she never allowed it to slip under her skin, not since Saint Louis anyway. After that, a shelter in Baltimore, then the girls’ home in Houston. Deeper wounds, other lives. The life of a Maryknoll. There were some over the years who had tried to make of her a heroine, a figurehead, a political autograph, and she knew that they whispered behind her back, of book deals, movie contracts. Even her brother in England had wanted to make a radio documentary, but she preferred to think of other things, life in the village before she was captured, the volume of blue sky, the children in the schoolhouse, the fall of rain on the tin roof, the dust rising from the dirt floor of her shack, the yellow barrel at the back of the classroom, the wooden ladle dipping for rainwater, the stick of chalk in her cigarette box, the faulty carburetor in the jeep, she was always trying to fix it, she leaned across the engine, the chalk dissolving in the rain.

— Hurry up now, Beverly.

She slips her hands from the pockets of her cardigan, slides into the backseat. The window powers up.

— You’ll catch your death.

On the front dashboard Sister Yun performs a little drumroll with long thin fingers.

— We must not miss the three o’clock.

The Hour of Great Mercy, the most fervent of her prayers, the time of Christ’s dying on the cross. In the jungle she would listen for a guard’s radio, and it grew so that she could almost tell the time by the angle of sun through the trees.