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"There's no blame in this. You were children then, and children are cruel without knowing better. You wouldn't do that now. But now that I've reminded you, you can easily see an answer. You called him a dog, and so he became one. For the rest of his life. Hurting helpless people. Beating his wife. Speaking so cruelly and abusively to his son Miro that he drove the boy out of his house. He was acting out the way you treated him, becoming what you told him that he was."
You're a fool, thought Bishop Peregrino. If people only react to the way that others treat them, then nobody is responsible for anything. If your sins are not your own to choose, then how can you repent?
As if he heard the Bishop's silent argument, the Speaker raised a hand and swept away his own words. "But the easy answer isn't true. Your torments didn't make him violent--they made him sullen. And when you grew out of tormenting him, he grew out of hating you. He wasn't one to bear a grudge. His anger cooled and turned into suspicion. He knew you despised him; he learned to live without you. In peace."
The Speaker paused a moment, and then gave voice to the question they silently were asking. "So how did he become the cruel man you knew him to be? Think a moment. Who was it who tasted his cruelty? His wife. His children. Some people beat their wife and children because they lust for power, but are too weak or stupid to win power in the world. A helpless wife and children, bound to such a man by need and custom and, bitterly enough, love, are the only victims he is strong enough to rule."
Yes, thought Ela, stealing a glance at her mother. This is what I wanted. This is why I asked him to speak Father's death.
"There are men like that," said the Speaker, "but Marcos Ribeira wasn't one of them. Think a moment. Did you ever hear of him striking any of his children? Ever? You who worked with him--did he ever try to force his will on you? Seem resentful when things didn't go his way? Marcao was not a weak and evil man. He was a strong man. He didn't want power. He wanted love. Not control. Loyalty."
Bishop Peregrino smiled grimly, the way a duelist might salute a worthy opponent. You walk a twisted path, Speaker, circling around the truth, feinting at it. And when you strike, your aim will be deadly. These people came for entertainment, but they're your targets; you will pierce them to the heart.
"Some of you remember an incident," said the Speaker. "Marcos was maybe thirteen, and so were you. Taunting him on the grassy hillside behind the school. You attacked more viciously than usual. You threatened him with stones, whipped him with capim blades. You bloodied him a little, but he bore it. Tried to evade you. Asked you to stop. Then one of you struck him hard in the belly, and it hurt him more than you ever imagined, because even then he was already sick with the disease that finally killed him. He hadn't yet become accustomed to his fragility and pain. It felt like death to him. He was cornered. You were killing him. So he struck at you."
How did he know? thought half a dozen men. It was so long ago. Who told him how it was? It was out of hand, that's all. We never meant anything, but when his arm swung out, his huge fist, like the kick of a cabra--he was going to hurt me--
"It could have been any one of you that fell to the ground. You knew then that he was even stronger than you feared. What terrified you most, though, was that you knew exactly the revenge that you deserved. So you called for help. And when the teachers came, what did they see? One little boy on the ground, crying, bleeding. One large man-sized child with a few scratches here and there, saying I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. And a half-dozen others saying, He just hit him. Started killing him for no reason. We tried to stop him but Cao is so big. He's always picking on the little kids."
Little Grego was caught up in the story. "Mentirosos!" he shouted. They were lying! Several people nearby chuckled. Quara shushed him.
"So many witnesses," said the Speaker. "The teachers had no choice but to believe the accusation. Until one girl stepped forward and coldly informed them that she had seen it all. Marcos was acting to protect himself from a completely unwarranted, vicious, painful attack by a pack of boys who were acting far more like caes, like dogs, than Marcos Ribeira ever did. Her story was instantly accepted as the truth. After all, she was the daughter of Os Venerados."
Grego looked at his mother with glowing eyes, then jumped up and announced to the people around him, "A mamae o libertou!" Mama saved him! People laughed, turned around and looked at Novinha. But she held her face expressionless, refusing to acknowledge their momentary affection for her child. They looked away again, offended.
"Novinha," said the Speaker. "Her cold manner and bright mind made her just as much an outcast among you as Marcao. None of you could think of a time when she had ever made a friendly gesture toward any of you. And here she was, saving Marcao. Well, you knew the truth. She wasn't saving Marcao--she was preventing you from getting away with something."
They nodded and smiled knowingly, those people whose overtures of friendship she had just rebuffed. That's Dona Novinha, the Biologista, too good for any of the rest of us.
"Marcos didn't see it that way. He had been called an animal so often that he almost believed it. Novinha showed him compassion, like a human being. A pretty girl, a brilliant child, the daughter of the holy Venerados, always aloof as a goddess, she had reached down and blessed him and granted his prayer. He worshipped her. Six years later he married her. Isn't that a lovely story?"
Ela looked at Miro, who raised an eyebrow at her. "Almost makes you like the old bastard, doesn't it?" said Miro dryly.
Suddenly, after a long pause, the Speaker's voice erupted, louder than ever before. It startled them, awoke them. "Why did he come to hate her, to beat her, to despise their children? And why did she endure it, this strong-willed, brilliant woman? She could have stopped the marriage at any moment. The Church may not allow divorce, but there's always desquite, and she wouldn't be the first person in Milagre to quit her husband. She could have taken her suffering children and left him. But she stayed. The Mayor and the Bishop both suggested that she leave him. She told them they could go to hell."
Many of the Lusos laughed; they could imagine tight-lipped Novinha snapping at the Bishop himself, facing down Bosquinha. They might not like Novinha much, but she was just about the only person in Milagre who could get away with thumbing her nose at authority.
The Bishop remembered the scene in his chambers more than a decade ago. She had not used exactly the words the Speaker quoted, but the effect was much the same. Yet he had been alone. He had told no one. Who was this Speaker, and how did he know so much about things he could not possibly have known?
When the laughter died, the Speaker went on. "There was a tie that bound them together in a marriage they hated. That tie was Marcao's disease."
His voice was softer now. The Lusos strained to hear.
"It shaped his life from the moment he was conceived. The genes his parents gave him combined in such a way that from the moment puberty began, the cells of his glands began a steady, relentless transformation into fatty tissues. Dr. Navio can tell you how it progresses better than I can. Marcao knew from childhood that he had this condition; his parents knew it before they died in the Descolada; Gusto and Cida knew it from their genetic examinations of all the humans of Lusitania. They were all dead. Only one other person knew it, the one who had inherited the xenobiological files. Novinha."
Dr. Navio was puzzled. If she knew this before they married, she surely knew that most people who had his condition were sterile. Why would she have married him when for all she knew he had no chance of fathering children? Then he realized what he should have known before, that Marcao was not a rare exception to the pattern of the disease. There were no exceptions. Navio's face reddened. What the Speaker was about to tell them was unspeakable.
"Novinha knew that Marcao was dying," said the Speaker. "She also knew before she married him that he was absolutely and completely sterile."
It took a moment for the meaning of this to sink in. Ela felt as if her organs were melting inside her body. She saw without turning her head that Miro had gone rigid, that his cheeks had paled.
Speaker went on despite the rising whispers from the audience. "I saw the genetic scans. Marcos Maria Ribeira never fathered a child. His wife had children, but they were not his, and he knew it, and she knew he knew it. It was part of the bargain that they made when they got married."
The murmurs turned to muttering, the grumbles to complaints, and as the noise reached a climax, Quim leaped to his feet and shouted, screamed at the Speaker. "My mother is not an adulteress! I'll kill you for calling her a whore!"
His last word hung in the silence. The Speaker did not answer. He only waited, not letting his gaze drop from Quim's burning face. Until finally Quim realized that it was he, not the Speaker, whose voice had said the word that kept ringing in his ears. He faltered. He looked at his mother sitting beside him on the ground, but not rigidly now, slumped a little now, looking at her hands as they trembled in her lap. "Tell them, Mother," Quim said. His voice sounded more pleading than he had intended.
She didn't answer. Didn't say a word, didn't look at him. If he didn't know better, he would think her trembling hands were a confession, that she was ashamed, as if what the Speaker said was the truth that God himself would tell if Quim were to ask him. He remembered Father Mateu explaining the tortures of hell: God spits on adulterers, they mock the power of creation that he shared with them, they haven't enough goodness in them to be anything better than amoeb
