Chapter 10 #17
That had been yesterday, only twenty-four hours ago, but it feels like the distant past, and now it is a different day, the one in which he received the letter, the one in which his father is gone.
He slaps at a mosquito investigating his ear, coming to a stop between desk and window like a wound-down toy, his back to the boys.
Misgiving is moving through him like something hard to digest. Strange that Father Joseph would be the one to tell him of his father’s passing.
And how can his father be dead? A world without Tomás in it feels like an impossibility.
It doesn’t make sense to Liam. That he will never again be able to return, to walk into the village and up the hill, to find Tomás mending a wall or divining the direction of the wind or drawing maps at the table, is so peculiar that it makes Liam feel dismantled, unbalanced, as if he might fall if he took a step to the side.
The Provincial, this morning, had knelt by Liam and prayed with him, concluding that Tomás was now “in the Kingdom of Heaven, in company with Christ.” It was a sentiment that had caused Liam to let out a bark of laughter, which the Provincial had tactfully chosen to ignore.
Liam, pacing now between window and door, is struck anew by the ridiculousness of these words: Tomás was a man who believed only what was in front of him, what he could touch or see, the soil and the rock and so forth; he believed in pools imbued with ancient spirits, and where does the soul of such a person go? Will it be wandering for ever? Will he—
The thought that this is exactly what Tomás would have wanted stops him in his tracks.
Liam finds, as he stands in his classroom, that he is not harbouring the slightest concern about the state of his father’s soul, as a priest ought, and this is stupefying to him.
It is the same feeling of exposure he gets when he wakes from a nightmare of finding himself naked while conducting mass or hearing confession.
According to the doctrine of the Church, his unbeliever father will be wandering in Purgatory, perhaps even condemned to hellfire, but Liam cannot locate the smallest flicker of anxiety about this.
Because, and Liam must pick his way, tread carefully, has to query himself here—why?
How can he not feel concerned for his father’s eternal rest?
Because Tomás didn’t believe any of it. Because Tomás put his faith only in what was before him or under his feet.
Because none of it is real. Because Liam finds within himself only the absolute certainty that Purgatory, Hell, Heaven, none of it exists.
sum of the squares, the boys are saying, of the two adjacent sides—
None of it exists.
He recalls, suddenly, Father Joseph, in his schoolroom, saying to Liam that it was time for them to make a start on trigonometry.
The priest had been all excitement, laying out on Liam’s desk two wooden rulers at an angle to each other, but Liam had said, Oh, I have that learned already, my da taught me when I was his chainboy because we use it for the maps.
He had thought the priest would be impressed with his scholarship, but Father Joseph’s face had darkened with something akin to jealousy.
He had withdrawn the rulers. I see, he had said, in a cold voice. Very well.
None of it exists. Are those his words, his thoughts, or are they Tomás’s, projected into Liam’s brain from afar, along the beam of some powerful supernatural theodolite perhaps, from the graveyard where his mother and father lie alongside each other?
He sees, for the first time, in a dismaying rush of insight, that Father Joseph had only ever wanted one thing: to separate Liam from Tomás, to come between them, to replace one father with another. And Liam had allowed himself to be turned away from Tomás, from all his family.
How like his father’s his handwriting is becoming, as he gets older.
Liam can write a word on a page and he will think, in surprise, There is my father’s p and here is his f and how odd that it comes to a man one day that he cannot uproot his father from him, like an unwanted plant from the soil.
There are no boundary walls between them; the two are one and the same.
There goes another elephant, with a purple howdah this time. And an open carriage. Across the street, a servant wipes a table with a red cloth, and when he flaps it in the air, the stunted branches of a pruned almond tree release a nimbus of scolding green parakeets.
Liam is wondering if perhaps he is going mad.
Are these the ravings of a person who has taken leave of his senses?
A priest offended that his pupil already knew what he wanted to teach him; a priest who sought to sever the bond between father and son by steering the child towards taking holy orders.
Can Liam really have been so blind as to allow this to happen?
The enormity of what he has lost, what was taken from him, surges through him like floodwater.
The parakeets are veering around the tiled roofs of the street, looking to Liam like the tail of a green comet.
And Liam is suffused with a longing to talk to his sister, Enda.
How he craves to see her again, just for a moment, even an hour.
She would know, she could tell him—she was there, she witnessed it all.
Where is she, exactly? He wishes fervently that she were here, that she might burst into this room, swinging the door open and covering the space between them with her quick stride to tap him on the shoulder so that he might turn and face her.
She would dismiss all these boys with a decisive wave of her arm.
Away and get yourselves into trouble, she would say, shooing them out into the streets, these small, scrubbed children.
And he, Liam, would take her to the chai house, where he would order the hot, thick, milky beverage for her, and a plate of the sticky, syrup-drenched sweets.
He would like to watch her devouring those in that way she has, which is pure pleasure, pure appetite, with not a thought given to how she looks.
He wishes they were all here, Enda and Rose and Eugene. With him, at the chai house, eating sweets and watching the birds and the elephants and the young girls, as the sun sinks down below the red-tiled roofs.
Liam is not meant to think these things, or feel them.
The Jesuit Order is his family. He has cut all ties with the world.
But as Liam looks down into the street, as the boys behind him go to the beginning of their recitation again, he wonders: Has he?
Has he cut all ties? Does his life and his heart belong only to God?
Or is he, in fact, losing his mind, overwhelmed by insights, like his father before him?
Is it not only his father’s handwriting he has within him but his propensity for madness as well?
Another tonga appears, going down the hill now, wheels squeaking, its bell sounding a jangling, insistent note. Sunlight glances in a series of lancing splinters off the polished brass on the horse’s harness, making Liam wince and cover his eyes.
When he opens them again, the scene below him is unchanged: the mammas on the benches in the shade, lorgnettes raised to their faces, men sorting their ginger root, the palm trees rattling their desiccated leaves, the young girls with their arms linked together.
The parakeets have settled in the branches of a different tree.
But, for Liam, it is as if he has never seen any of this before, as if he is a different person.
The sensation is akin to a sudden immersion in cold water on a hot day—a bodily shift, a sense of complete alteration or release, the passing from one element into another.
The word “relief” passes across his mind, like the shadow of a cloud on a landscape.
More than anything, he is aware of a curious sense of cessation somewhere within him, as if a rumbling battle in which he has long been engaged has come to its weary end, and he and his opponent are at last laying down their arms and calling off their troops.
For a moment or two, Liam cannot tell what has taken place, what has occurred within him: he is like a man who has misplaced something precious but cannot yet tell what it is.
Liam experiences an urge to pat down his pockets, searching for what might be missing, what has been stolen from him, watch or wallet, penknife or comb, until he remembers he has no pockets, that he no longer carries such items or, rather, is not permitted to possess them.
He turns one way, then the other, as if expecting to find a robber or a pickpocket behind him, dimly aware of a faltering in the boys’ recitations—the more alert of them have perceived that all is not well with their mathematics teacher—but there is nothing there, just a sea of parquet floor and an array of confused faces.
It occurs to him that it has gone, like a tide pulling off a strand: his faith, his trust, his belief, his conviction. It has simply vanished, drained out of him. He does not have a sense of why or how. All he knows is that it is no longer there, that his life as a Jesuit is over.
Weeks later, in Calcutta, Liam says precisely these words to the committee, over and over again.
It is hard to know exactly how long he has been held here because he has lost track of the passage of time; he was forced to travel for days and has been permitted to sleep only fitfully and given very little food.
The Jesuit fathers and spiritual advisers have come and gone, and others have taken their place at the long table with the candelabra, but he, Liam, has been obliged to remain on this bench.
The Jesuits do not like to let go of a man, once they have him; if Liam is to free himself, it will not be without a struggle.