“Console-toi, tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m’avais trouvé, isn’t that so?” she said softly. “ ‘You would not seek me if you had not found me’?”
“Exactly. You’ve read Pascal. Nobody begins the search unless they’ve already found what they’re looking for. And no one finds what they’re looking for—the One they’re looking for—if that One doesn’t take the initiative and allow Himself to be found. It’s a game in which one player holds all the cards.”
“You make it sound as if belief was impossible to resist, but that’s not true. You can say no. The child can say to the adult: ‘I’m not playing, leave me alone.’ ”
The Man in the Wing Chair drained his cup. Then, adjusting his position, he stared directly at his employee.
“Of course you can say no. And in many ways that makes life much simpler. It’s common even for someone who says yes to look back and realize that he’s said no many times during his life.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Life is much simpler when you say no? Life is much simpler and easier to bear if you believe itdoesn’tend in a coffin underground. You can’t deny it; it’s common sense.”
He got up and tended the fire again.
“As a theoretical belief it can serve as a wild card for a time, undoubtedly. But theoretical beliefs don’t save anyone. Faith isn’t theoretical, Prudencia. Conversion is about as theoretical as a shot to the head.”
Miss Prim again bit her lip. The conversation was not going as she’d hoped. This was all proving very revealing, but she didn’t want to talk about conversion, she didn’t want to talk about religion at all. The only thing she wanted to know was why the “shot to the head” had caused his relationship with Herminia Treaumont to end.
“So was that the reason?” she asked stubbornly. “Was that why you left her?”
He looked at her in silence for a few seconds, as if trying to guess what lay behind the question.
“Would you think it ridiculous if it were?”
“I’d think you didn’t really love her.”
“No, that’s where you’re wrong,” he said firmly. “I did love her. I loved her very much. But the day came, or maybe the moment, I don’t know, when I realized that she was asleep, whereas I was fully, absolutely, and totally awake. I’d climbed like a cat up onto a roof and I could see a beautiful, terrible, mysterious landscape stretching out before me. Did I really love her? Of course I did. Perhaps if I’d loved her less, cared for her less, I wouldn’t have had to leave her.”
Miss Prim, who had begun to feel a familiar pain in her stomach, cleared her throat before replying.
“I thought the religious were closer to other people than anyone else.”
“I can’t speak for anyone else, Prudencia. I only know what it’s meant to me and I don’t claim to speak for others. It’s been my touchstone, the line that’s split my life in two and given it absolute meaning. But I’d be lying if I said it’s been easy. It’s not easy, and anyone who says it is is fooling themselves. It was catharsis, a shocking trauma, open-heart surgery, like a tree torn from the ground and replanted elsewhere. Like what one imagines a child experiences during the beautiful, awesome process of birth.”
The Man in the Wing Chair paused.
“And there’s something else,” he continued, “something to do with looking beyond the moment, with the need to scan the horizon, to scrutinize it as keenly as a sailor studies his charts. Don’t be surprised, Prudencia. My story is as old as the world. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last. I know what you’re thinking. Would I turn back if I could? No, of course not. Would a newly awoken man willingly go back to the sleepwalking life?”
Miss Prim pulled her dressing gown tightly around her and stared at her hands, toasted pink by the heat of the fire. So in the end, it was all true. How naive she’d been to think that it was only a part of his personality. How dim of her not to sense that whatever it was that had changed him, it was something powerful, something profound and troubling. Herminia was right. She had never seen that look blazing in his eyes before. The force, the conviction, the strange, savage joy.
“Then there’s no hope,” she whispered with regret. “Is there?”
He gave her a long, pensive look before replying.
“Hope, Prudencia? Of course there’s hope. I have hope. My whole life is pure hope.”
She rose and picked up the tray.
“It’s very late. If you don’t mind, I’m going back to bed. I’m tired and, unlike you, I do lack hope tonight.”
Before the Man in the Wing Chair could reply, Miss Prim had closed the library door quietly behind her.
3
Prudencia Prim folded her jade-green kimono neatly and laid it in her suitcase. The reality was, she thought sadly as she slipped a pair of shoes into a cotton shoe bag, her work no longer detained her. Her employer’s library was now perfectly catalogued and organized. The history books stood on the history shelves, the tomes on philosophy were lined up where they should be, and all the volumes of prose and poetry were in their proper sections; science and mathematics were now in their rightful places to the millimeter; and the section on theology—the great passion in that house, the absolute ruler of the library—shone imposingly, neat, and perfect. Glimpsing her red-rimmed eyes in the mirror from time to time, she recalled her first conversation, months earlier, with the Man in the Wing Chair.
Do you know what this is, Miss Prim?
