excerpt
I do. She sees goodness. She sees dependability. She sees gentleness. She sees devotion and love. And Padraig, you can’t buy qualities like those.”
Padraig lowered his head and felt ashamed of himself.
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He knelt by the side of the bed, a crucifix held between his outstretched hands. His head was raised but his eyes were closed. His heart was heavy. Sorrow, regret, desire, melancholy: all of these leaden emotions weighed him down like ballast in a ship that tossed about on swells of self-doubt and uncertainty. He felt sinking sensations that almost made him sick. He needed the sea-legs and stomach, the self-confidence and self-knowledge, of the seasoned sailor. What frightened him most was the realization that his mission had only just been launched. If he was queasy now, how would he endure the storms that lay ahead? If this was the mildness of May how would he fare in the wildness of December? Only God could help. Only God could quell the swelling doubt and grant to His servant Padraig the confidence and the strength he needed. The priest’s lips moved in silent prayer as fervent as Gethsemane’s. Then his head fell forward on the bed, his arms stretched before it, his fingers resting lightly on the crucified Christ.
A candle burned on the table with a steady flame. In the distance, downstairs perhaps, and somewhere in the back of time, Padraig heard voices. He sensed anger, rebuke, recrimination. Louder they grew. The speakers were approaching. Or he was approaching them. One bellowed out like thunder in the night. “You slept with the Devil, woman, and gave us Satan’s offspring.
“Get out. Get out of our house and take your misbegotten monster with you.”
Padraig raised his head from the bed. The room was small, close, enclosing like a white cocoon. The old brown wooden table and chest, the black and brass bed, the woollen rug on the floor, the homespun curtains, the crude painting of a ploughman on the walls: all of these and the candle-glow radiated warmth within the snowy whiteness of the walls.
Padraig wrapped the room around him like a rug, remembering vast nights of black and brittle coldness, huddled into nooks between the stone walls of empty fields. His mother’s face he scarce recalled: haggard, wasted, bluish-white, an alabaster mask in the cold clarity of a full moon’s light, her skin stretched tight across the jutting bones, her hollow cheeks so cool, like fishmonger’s marble. Her hands, when she held him close, were not of flesh…
Libros Libertad 