“What good can he do us!”
“He already has, Mother. Grego fell asleep embracing him, and Quara spoke to him.”
“Actually,” said Miro, “she told him that he stinks.”
“Which was probably true,” said Ela, “since Greguinho peed all over him.”
Miro and Ela burst into laughter at the memory, and the Speaker also smiled. This more than anything else discomposed Novinha– such good cheer had been virtually unfelt in this house since Marc o brought her here a year after Pipo's death. Against her will Novinha remembered her joy when Miro was newly born, and when Ela was little, the first few years of their lives, how Miro babbled about everything, how Ela toddled madly after him through the house, how the children played together and romped in the grass within sight of the piggies' forest just beyond the fence; it was Novinha's delight in the children that poisoned Marc o, that made him hate them both, because he knew that none of it belonged to him. By the time Quim was born, the house was thick with anger, and he never learned how to laugh freely where his parents might notice. Hearing Miro and Ela laugh together was like the abrupt opening of a thick black curtain; suddenly it was daylight again, when Novinha had forgotten there was any season of the day but night.
How dared this stranger invade her house and tear open all the curtains she had closed!
“I won't have it,” she said. “You have no right to pry into my husband's life.”
He raised an eyebrow. She knew Starways Code as well as anyone, and so she knew perfectly well that he not only had a right, the law protected him in the pursuit of the true story of the dead.
«Marc o was a miserable man,» she persisted, «and telling the truth about him will cause nothing but pain.»
“You're quite right that the truth about him will cause nothing but pain, but not because he was a miserable man,” said the Speaker. “If I told nothing but what everyone already knows– that he hated his children and beat his wife and raged drunkenly from bar to bar until the constables sent him home– then I would not cause pain, would I? I'd cause a great deal of satisfaction, because then everyone would be reassured that their view of him was correct all along. He was scum, and so it was all right that they treated him like scum.”
“And you think he wasn't?”
“No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.”
“If you believe that, then you're younger than you look,” said Novinha.
“Am I?” said the Speaker. “It was less than two weeks ago that I first heard your call. I studied you then, and even if you don't remember, Novinha, I remember that as a young girl you were sweet and beautiful and good. You had been lonely before, but Pipo and Libo both knew you and found you worthy of love.”
“Pipo was dead.”
“But he loved you.”
«You don't know anything, Speaker! You were twenty-two lightyears away! Besides, it wasn't me I was calling worthless, it was Marc o!»
“But you don't believe that, Novinha. Because you know the one act of kindness and generosity that redeems that poor man's life.”
Novinha did not understand her own terror, but she had to silence him before he named it, even though she had no idea what kindness of C o's he thought he had discovered. «How dare you call me Novinha!» she shouted. «No one has called me that in four years!»
In answer, he raised his hand and brushed his fingers across the back of her cheek. It was a timid gesture, almost an adolescent one; it reminded her of Libo, and it was more than she could bear. She took his hand, hurled it away, then shoved past him into the room. “Get out!” she shouted at Miro. Her son got up quickly and backed to the door. She could see from his face that after all Miro had seen in this house, she still had managed to surprise him with her rage.
“You'll have nothing from me!” she shouted at the Speaker.
“I didn't come to take anything from you,” he said quietly.
“I don't want anything you have to give, either! You're worthless to me, do you hear that? You're the one who's worthless! Lixo, ruina, estrago– vai fora d'aqui, nao tens direito estar em minha casa!” You have no right to be in my house.
“Nao eres estrago,” he whispered, “eres solo fecundo, e vou plantar jardim ai.” Then, before she could answer, he closed the door and was gone.
In truth she had no answer to give him, his words were so outrageous. She had called him estrago, but he answered as if she had called herself a desolation. And she had spoken to him derisively, using the insultingly familiar tu for “you” instead of o Senhor or even the informal voce. It was the way one spoke to a child or a dog. And yet when he answered in the same voice, with the same familiarity, it was entirely different. “Thou art fertile ground, and I will plant a garden in thee.” It was the sort of thing a poet says to his mistress, or even a husband to his wife, and the tu was intimate, not arrogant. How dare he, she whispered to herself, touching the cheek that he had touched. He is far crueler than I ever imagined a Speaker might be. Bishop Peregrino was right. He is dangerous, the infidel, the anti-Christ, he walks brazenly into places in my heart that I had kept as holy ground, where no one else was ever pennitted to stand. He treads on the few small shoots that cling to life in that stony soil, how dare he, I wish I had died before seeing him, he will surely undo me before he's through.
She was vaguely aware of someone crying. Quara. Of course the shouting had wakened her; she never slept soundly. Novinha almost opened the door and went out to comfort her, but then she heard the crying stop, and a soft male voice singing to her. The song was in another language. German, it sounded to Novinha, or Nordic; she did not understand it, whatever it was. But she knew who sang it, and knew that Quara was comforted.
Novinha had not felt such fear since she first realized that Miro was determined to become a Zenador and follow in the footsteps of the two men that the piggies had murdered. This man is unknotting the nets of my family, and stringing us together whole again; but in the process he will find my secrets. If he finds out how Pipo died, and Speaks the truth, then Miro will learn that same secret, and it will kill him. I will make no more sacrifices to the piggies; they are too cruel a god for me to worship anymore.
Still later, as she lay in bed behind her closed door, trying to go to sleep, she heard more laughter from the front of the house, and this time she could hear Quim and Olhado both laughing along with Miro and Ela. She imagined she could see them, the room bright with mirth. But as sleep took her, and the imagination became a dream, it was not the Speaker who sat among her children, teaching them to laugh; it was Libo, alive again, and known to everyone as her true husband, the man she had married in her heart even though she refused to marry him in the Church. Even in her sleep it was more joy than she could bear, and tears soaked the sheet of her bed.