This was true according to canon law when there was no time for delay. And maybe there was a defiance in it for her — the male authority and so on. So with water from the bright steel black-and-white thermos jug beside the bed and the medical machinery, she did it. She poured the ice water over her hand and tried to hold it a second, warm it just a little. Three cups of the hand invisibly sheeted with ice shards, a viaticum, Father, Son, Spirit. And then the girl’s mother wanted the same, and Jo did it. To the child’s father, Jo said, “Sir?”
It was absolutely not her business. It was a presuming intrusion, patronizing, diminishing. She thought he was feeling that as strongly as she was. He also knew, as did she, that he would not hold it together, that the sacrament would lay him down and out and break him in half. Which made it even more intrusive, and so she properly went away. Yet when she did, her heart was soaring. Any good at all, she thought. The hope of it even. Even the slim fancied appearance of an invisible notion was better than nothing, suggested some significance for naked pain. On the college shuttle bus back to her office she felt guilty and cried.
At the top of the hill, a block or two from the hospital, four young Andeans were playing bamboo flutes. Jo had been vaguely aware of them for a few days and was used to the stratospheric pitch and spectral tunes, and to hearing them played around the campus. Three boys and a girl were busking there. Two of the boys wore tweed caps like old-fashioned British shepherds. The girl and the third boy wore beat-up fedoras. At their feet was a woven basket of the sort that was used all over the Americas for carrying fruit. These youths were not in costume — they were the real thing — Indians of the montaña. Watching them, Jo could almost place their valley, tucked into some high borderland, alternating the tropical and the alpine, speaking a language that was almost exclusive to that valley. All at once Jo realized that she could recognize the song they were playing. It was called “Sora,” a song all children knew and could sing in several versions. She did not know the meaning of the words, only that the song somehow concerned the Milky Way, which in some of the mountain languages was known as the Sea of Fat.
Students had stopped to watch and listen, and a few took places among the Andean players. The music of the flutes was as hypnotic as it always had been. One flute, she noticed, was made of plastic instead of bamboo.
Jo could vividly remember an occasion from her days in the mountains, children on the edge of a village where she was staying, singing “Sora” with voices as innocent and clear as fresh rain sounding in the broadleaf palms along the dry-season forest trails. After the children’s song the villagers were addressed by two men, an elderly white professor from the nearest provincial college and a local schoolteacher who spoke in the villagers’ language.
What that experience had aroused in Jo Carr, then a young nun thousands of miles and so many years away, was fear and rage. Fear first, because she had mastered the local trails and her motorbike well enough to understand what was going on in the valley around her. The rage nourished itself afterward. In the montaña that evening she had assumed, as a listener, an expression of benign approval. People were watching her and she was very afraid. The people in the village crowd, she knew, were also afraid. It occurred to her now, standing on the manicured hillside of the college, that she was assuming the same complacent expression.
When the children had finished singing “Sora,” the speakers explained the situation, the big picture. The collectives the government had established on confiscated estancias were a cheat and a lie. The people must know this. When things had been explained to them, the judgment of the people was never wrong. No one could arrogantly pretend to be above or outside it. And only those whom history had summoned to leadership could interpret the people’s judgment. Why? Because only they understood history completely.
Nor could that judgment be appealed, based as it was on absolute mathematics and philosophy. The knowledge commanded by the leaders’ chief was the opposite of lies. It was like the lines across the stars. They had been known to the people who had built pyramids all over the world. The lines led from a point near the Sea of Fat into the deepest desert, measured to a degree more correct than anyone on earth could perceive. Liars pretended knowledge.
The night birds had begun their trills and flutings. Night came suddenly at that latitude. The week before in a nearby village a number of people, peasants and local grocers whom the leaders called “the rich,” had been boiled alive in rubbing alcohol after witnessing their children being eviscerated. They were accused of being spies for the auxiliary police, a charge that no one in the village really believed. After the killings, the army of the people had taken as much money as they could find and distributed it to the deserving poor.
“We are Robin Hood,” shouted one of the people’s soldiers, who in his bourgeois life had gone often to the cinema. He would subsequently be denounced over his previous indulgences and murdered with what was, then, still unbelievable cruelty. “Look at the pictures of the rich on the money,” cried another. At a meeting at the edge of the village the people cheered, screamed actually, a sound that, like “Sora” and the speeches, Jo would remember for the rest of her life.
So there she stood on the hillside listening to the flutes and pretending to enjoy the concert, all over again.
Her experience in the valley had left Jo with variations on a recurring dream. Its setting was always the same, cobbled together out of recollections of the montaña and its valleys. Its contours were probably made partly from memories of what different local leaders of the movement had claimed life would be like after the only historically correct revolution in history. The dream was also composed of random images from the montaña, the villages, the Struggle, the visions of promise that the movement’s leaders laid out for the imaginations of its supporters, and of her own early denial and finally nameless dread.
In the dream it is early evening, showing a quarter moon. The sky is far away. “So blue” was her dreaming thought. The clouds are transparent. Smoke from a dung fire rises to a point, the height at which the wind disperses it. The Four sound their flutes around a fire the color of the sky. “Sora.” She never learned the words. So sweet but their meaning is unspeakable. The breath of the fluting marks the four directions of the winds. On high is Sirius and the stars near it in Canis Major where the Sacred Lines meet. Also the stars of Pictor, called by Western astronomers the Easel.
Canis Major was on the banner of the Struggle. The Spanish priests had believed that secret human sacrifices were made to Sirius and other stars. Surely they — practitioners of auto-da-fé—had also believed that the spectacle of ceremonial homicide was edifying. Everyone in Jo’s dream is smiling at the sky.
In an empty space where some malefactor’s house had stood there are panels of light blue plastic around a square of the exquisite sky. It is a window with no house. A sign under it reads: SORA. Maybe it meant freedom, or perhaps Sirius. I could sing it in my sleep if I knew the words, Jo always thinks before waking up.
Shivering beside the science building, she stood among the student audience. In the cooling early winter dusk, the young people smiled and applauded. Jo stayed with them, listening until some of the students wandered off and the musicians stopped playing. She was still standing on the hill when a colder wind settled in the valley and the college students began to drift off. One of the musicians, a light-skinned, delicately featured young woman, was taking contributions from the audience in her large broad-brimmed hat, embroidered on the crown with what looked like morning glory vines. There were many bills forthcoming. Finally the young woman looked Jo in the eye, tensing with a small smile.