There was even a time when Jimmy had considered becoming a Jesuit himself. His parents, second-wave Irish immigrants to Boston, left Dublin before he was born. His mother was never vague about their motive for the move. "The Old Sod was a backward, Church-ridden Third World country filled with dictatorial, sexually repressed priests sticking their noses into normal people's bedrooms," she'd declare whenever asked. Despite this, Eileen admitted to being "culturally Catholic," and Kevin Quinn held out for Jesuit-run schools for the boy merely on the basis of the discipline and high scholastic standards. They had raised a son with a generous soul, with an impulse to heal hurts and lighten loads, who could not stand idly while men like Emilio Sandoz poured out their lives and energy for others.
Jimmy sat a while longer, thinking, and then went quietly to the debit station, punching in perhaps five times the amount needed to pay for their meals this evening. "Lunches all week, okay? And watch him while he eats, right, Rosa? Otherwise he'll give the food away to some kid." Rosa nodded, wondering if Jimmy noticed that he himself had just eaten half of the priest's meal. "I'll tell you his problem," Quinn continued, oblivious. "He's got two-hundred-pound ideas about getting things done, and a hundred and thirty pounds to do it with. He's gonna make himself sick."
Over in the corner, Sandoz, eyes closed, was smiling. "Si, Mamacita," he said, mingling sarcasm with affection. Abruptly, he hauled himself to his feet, yawned and stretched. Together, the two men left the bar and walked out into the soft sea air of La Perla in early spring.
If there was anything that might have strengthened Jimmy Quinn's faith in the ultimate reasonableness of authority, it was the early career of Father Emilio Sandoz. Nothing about it made much sense until you got to the end and saw that the collective mind of the Society of Jesus had been working patiently in a direction mere individuals could not perceive.
Many Jesuits were multilingual but Sandoz more than most. A native of Puerto Rico, he'd grown up with both Spanish and English. His years of Jesuit formation tapped the rigorous riches of a classical education and Sandoz became nearly as proficient in Greek as in Latin, which he'd not just studied but used as a living language: for daily communication, for research, for the sheer pleasure of reading beautifully structured prose. That much was not far out of the ordinary among Jesuit scholastics.
But then, during a research project on the seventeenth-century missions to Quebec, Sandoz decided to learn French, in order to read the Jesuit Relations in the original. He spent eight intense days with a teacher, absorbing French grammar, then built vocabulary on his own. When his paper was complete at the end of the semester, he was comfortable reading in French, although he made no effort to learn to speak the language. Next came Italian, partly in anticipation of going to Rome someday and partly out of curiosity, to see how another Romance language had developed from the Latin stem. And then Portuguese, simply because he liked the sound of it and loved Brazilian music.
The Jesuits have a tradition of linguistic study. Not surprisingly, Emilio was encouraged to begin a doctorate in linguistics immediately after ordination. Three years later, everyone expected Emilio Sandoz, S.J., Ph.D., to be offered a professorship at a Jesuit university.
Instead, the linguist was asked to help organize a reforestation project while teaching at Xavier High School on Chuuk in the Caroline Islands. After only thirteen months of what would ordinarily have been a six-year assignment, he was moved to an Inuit town just below the Arctic circle and spent a single year assisting a Polish priest in establishing an adult literacy program, and then it was on to a Christian enclave in southern Sudan, where he worked in a relief station for Kenyan refugees with a priest from Eritrea.
He grew accustomed to feeling inexpert and out of his depth. He became tolerant of the initial frustration of being unable to communicate with grace or speed or humor. He learned to quiet the cacophony of languages competing for dominance in his thoughts, to use pantomime and his own expressive features to overcome barriers. Within thirty-seven months, he became competent in Chuukese, a northern Invi-Inupiak dialect, Polish, Arabic (which he spoke with a rather good Sudanese accent), Gikuyu and Amharic. And most important from his superiors' point of view, in the face of sudden reassignment and his own explosive temperament, Emilio Sandoz had begun to learn patience and obedience.
"There's a message from the Provincial for you," Father Tahad Ke-sai told him when he returned to their tent one sweltering afternoon, three hours late for what passed as lunch, a few weeks after the first anniversary of his arrival in Sudan.
Sandoz came to a halt and stared, tired and green-faced under the tent fabric. "Right on schedule," he said, dropping wearily onto a camp stool and flipping open his computer tablet.
"Maybe it's not a reassignment," Tahad suggested. Sandoz snorted; they both knew it would be. "Goat shit," Tahad said irritably, mystified by the way their superiors were handling Sandoz. "Why won't they let you serve out a full assignment?"
Sandoz said nothing so Tahad busied himself sweeping sand back out to the desert, to give the other priest a little privacy as he read the transmission. But the silence went on too long and when Tahad turned to look at Sandoz, he was disturbed to see that the man's body was beginning to shake. And then Sandoz put his face in his hands.
Moved, Tahad went to him. "You've done good work here, Emilio. It seems crazy to keep pulling you from hill to valley…" Tahad's voice trailed off.
Sandoz was, by this time, wiping tears from his eyes and making, terrible whining sounds. Wordlessly, he waved Tahad in closer to the screen, inviting him to read the message. Tahad did, and was more puzzled than ever. "Emilio, I don't understand—"
Sandoz wailed and nearly fell off the stool.
"Emilio, what is so funny?" Tahad demanded, bewilderment turning to exasperation.
Sandoz was asked to report to John Carroll University outside Cleveland in the United States, not to take up a post as a professor of linguistics, but to cooperate with an expert in artificial intelligence who would codify and computerize Sandoz's method of learning languages in the field so that future missionaries would benefit from his wide experience, for the greater glory of God.
"I'm sorry, Tahad, it's too hard to explain," gasped Sandoz, who was on his way to Cleveland to serve as intellectual carrion for an AI vulture, ad majorem Dei gloriam. "It's the punchline to a three-year joke."
As many as thirty or as few as ten years later, lying exhausted and still, eyes open in the dark long after the three suns of Rakhat had set, no longer bleeding, past the vomiting, enough beyond the shock to think again, it would occur to Emilio Sandoz to wonder if perhaps that day in the Sudan was really only part of the setup for a punchline a lifetime in the making.
It was an odd thought, under the circumstances. He understood that, even at the time. But thinking it, he realized with appalling clarity that on his journey of discovery as a Jesuit, he had not merely been the first human being to set foot on Rakhat, had not simply explored parts of its largest continent and learned two of its languages and loved some of its people. He had also discovered the outermost limit of faith and, in doing so, had located the exact boundary of despair. It was at that moment that he learned, truly, to fear God.