Read Online Perla by Carolina de Robertis - Free Book Online Page A

like raspberries. Like wine. You are my light, you know that? As if without me he’d be stumbling in the dark. And so the star of me would shine that much brighter. My bare toes would revel in the sand between them. The sun was going to set soon, but it didn’t matter; I was light for my father, and the world was well.
    Except that now, in his study, I felt so far from him. The very word father raw and open in my mind, like a wound.
    Searching his mind for the strange flicker that he’d lost he thought of God and how he lost Him. When he first disappeared he had a God, and when the dark swallowed his mind he reeled and broke and soared out to find Him, pray to Him, God as final refuge. Save us from this hell, forgive my sins, forgive my crime of not protecting Gloria, send your angels please like flying armies to save her and the child she carries. Gloria is alive, she has to be, the red rag might have been a trick, after all, just a cloth with which they’d mopped the floor. You’ve protected her, haven’t You? Give us this day our daily bread and keep her safe? Because, in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit, if I could only fly to her I’d give my life to mend her body, offer myself to her like a needle for the sewing, mend the nest where baby was, no, is, still has to be. But I cannot fly, please go for me. And hallowed be Thy name. He had not prayed so much in years. He was a bad Catholic, too fond of soccer and slow sex on Sundays, but surely God remembered him, the child he’d been, the altar boy with his frock perfectly white, gazing piously at the candles, the bloodsoaked cross, the yeasty body of Christ breaking apart in the hands of priests. He had loved the cold air in the vaulted church, theceilings he would never ever be tall enough to touch, not even jumping, not even standing on the shoulders of ten men, and the stonecold air tautened his skin and made it tingle with the subtle gust of what must surely be God’s breath. And even though, when he grew up, he never bothered to pray, he had still felt God’s peculiar presence, in the colors of the dawn after a long night in the bars, the sway of wheat stalks in the country wind, the opening inside him as he opened a good book, the touch and sigh of Gloria, the memory of prayers pouring from his mother’s lips, by turns rapid and languid, mumbled in church pews, droned at home with the urgency of swarming bees, Pater noster qui es in caelis , at times in Latin, at times in Spanish, at times in the Italian she had gathered in slivers at her own mother’s heels, infused with magic power in every language, though who knew whether that power came from God or from the robust whip of his mother’s tongue. Everything his mother set her mind to either came to pass or spawned infinite warfare in which she unfurled all her weapons, word and will and fistful of rosary beads brandished alike and he could not would not think about what she might be doing now that he was gone from the normal world; what his absence was now doing to her; he could not bear to reach for his mother and so instead he reached for God, resurrecting the old prayers, Pater noster qui es in caelis our father who art in heaven save her, my Gloria, raise her from this place, I’ll go to mass each week for the rest of my life, I swear it, show me a sign. And then it came. He was on the machine. The explosions were in his mouth and on his genitals. And then they stopped, the hood raised up, he saw the composed face of a priest.
    Confess, my child.
    Father.
    You must cooperate.
    Father, please, tell them to stop, they’re going to kill me.
    My son, how can they stop when you won’t help them?
    I have nothing else to tell. I don’t know anything.
    Confess, my son. Confess.
    Please, I have a wife, don’t let them kill her.
    Death is in the hands of God.
    Then tell God not to kill her.
    The priest smiled sadly. God knows this is all for the good of the country.
    The hood went