rain on the sea

“You have a wife,” he says again, but his mouth is dry. “A Japanese, like them.”

Ferreira says, “I do.” One of his hands rests against the blond-colored mat between them, heavy and knotted beneath his dark sleeve.

Rodrigues studies the backs of his knuckles. They have him studying the stars now, handling lenses, looking through telescopes from rooms just like these. His hands are soft, not weathered. You can almost smell the ink.

Neither of them will look at the other.

“You inherited her from your predecessor. Why don’t you go to her?”

Rodrigues slides two fingers beneath the back of his collar, creepingly exposed. They’ve given him other clothes to wear, not a priest’s clothes any more — their priests despise him, after all, even without the swarms of white lice infesting each progressive set of clothing the moment he puts them on. The old ones stank of incense and burned fat, threaded through with his own guilty sweat — he’s only begun to notice it again, here in this compound with its sliding doors. Everything here is swept clean and scented.

They keep Ferreira somewhere just like this wherever he’s staying, sealed up with his books and his Dutch physician’s telescope, poured into a room of the utmost simplicity — Ferreira must think of it as a prison cell too, but he’s only flattering himself. It’s furnished with soft things, and it’s soft. A single brazier isn’t enough to cut through the damp. It’s raining out in the courtyard and Rodrigues can feel the moisture crawling on the skin of his face.

“They practice sodomy here,” he says with only a sideways glance, and such casual permissiveness from his teacher makes Rodrigues’ throat clench. “They think I might require you.”

What does it matter — now that he’s lost if not to God then to the church, severed at his roots, impossibly far from the schoolroom and the seminary, as if those places never existed. This man is no longer his teacher. The two of them are apostates. They are strangers to each other.

He’s clean now, scrubbed now, stiff as straw.

Ferreira reaches for him, his hand is on the side of his neck. The motion is slow but Rodrigues still startles, bare feet sliding against the reed mat — he could leave, shout and sob his rebuke and flee before it gets worse, but what would that win him? Wander down the hallway and out into the courtyard, get cut down in the rain.

“I won’t do it.”

“This is for your own good. You’re cooperating.”

“I will not.”

“You will.” As if he already has — Ferreira has trod this path before, he knows. “Trust me. You aren’t saving yourself for anything now. You’ve already given up, you aren’t sparing yourself anything. Sebastião, please.”

No one has called him by name for what feels like years — decades. His heart stirs, his blood is fluttering in his veins. Ferreira unties his belt for him and Rodrigues lets it happen, too startled at first to respond until there’s a hand pressing past his waistband — Rodrigues thinks of the cross still hidden there, and startles, pulling back

He’ll have to undress himself or risk losing even that, a relic as small as a wooden bead or a pebble — but bigger than a mustard seed — he’s laughing now, as he stumbles back, fumbling with his burned fingers to keep that small carved cross bundled away in the layers of clothing as they’re removed. It’s humiliating to strip again, still clumsy in these clothes after weeks and months, and to have every freckle and rib exposed to someone as desolate as he is. Worse things can happen to a man’s body than this. He has nothing left of himself to hold back.

He doesn’t care about that any more. Fumbling at his naked hip, cloth brushing against naked skin. Shivering and louse-eaten — he hasn’t been touched without violence in so long and something in it quickens his breath at the warm pass of his teacher’s hand over his knobbled shoulder. His pity is a hateful thing — if he’d seen Garrpe maybe it would have moved him more, but there’s nothing to pity. They’ve been feeding him, haven’t they? He’s more useful alive than dead, as an object lesson in the frailty of priests.

Require him — and what’s that mean? A reward for Ferreira’s faithful service to the Inquisitor, like a songbird or a hunting dog. He isn’t even Ferreira any more — the honorable Sawano, an educated gentleman with a wife and children, with hard blue eyes set deep in a beardless tired face. This was the man he’d loved, more than any human thing.

Those hollow blue eyes are on his face now. He’s watching his face for any sign — for even the smallest sign of fear or noncompliance or lustful receptiveness. His attention is no longer kind but warped, distorted. It’s too much to bear.

He’d loved him once — might have assented to the proposition once and discarded celibacy altogether, in a reckless hour in a Lisbon seminary and not here in a lonely place, serving at the Inquisitor’s pleasure. Just as believably, he might have stood firm and saved himself, saved them both. Either one could have been true, in another life, one that’s lost to him now. He’d studied that face and those hands and those heavy sloping shoulders beneath a cassock; he’d loved and longed for it, he’d even have been happy to see him dead if in the end he’d died well, to have a scrap of black cloth or a burnt bone. There would have been a little ambiguity in that.

Rodrigues feels nothing but hate in his heart. He’s tired, and bloodless, and dirty in a way that hasn’t been scrubbed clean. A muscle is trembling at the corner of his mouth.

His teacher, his confessor. He must know Garrpe is dead — but he didn’t watch him die. He didn’t see his pupil suffer. He condones it. For all Rodrigues knows he engineered it as much as the Inquisitor did. One less priest.

“I won’t hurt you,” he begins again, levelly. Patient.

Rodrigues smiles at him with all his teeth. He must look demented, and in fact he hopes he does — abandoned, a derelict house without a resident.

“And if I refuse?”

There’s faint amusement in his face, in the corners of his eyes creasing. “It won’t matter. You’ll spend the night and in the morning you’ll be led away until you’re needed. Someone else will have the honor. I don’t know when.”

A wife, or a stranger, or several strangers. He’s seen his soul, he’s seen him apostatize, he’s seen him denounce Christ. Xavier denounced sodomy on these shores and look how well that worked.

When he lays him down against the coverlet it stands to be shown whether he’ll take him like a boy, or on his back like a woman — or cradled on his bony side, as he situates him with his hipbone pressing into the made-up bed, though the lack of padding over the bone makes it as uncomfortable as bare ground. Cloth coming untied — he shuts his eyes and reaches out to scrape the rush mats with his fingertips.

He’s very tired — he may faint here. Naked, bedded down on silk. Their interior world is graying at the edges, with the blurred quality of damp paper. He’d be better off sleeping on a dirt floor with the backs of his hands for a pillow, it’d be less skin-crawlingly unclean than all these respectable politenesses, the brazier and the pillows and the coverlet and another man’s hands mauling affectionately at him, pity or novelty, old times’ sake.

It’s difficult to imagine whatever perverse desire could possibly be excited by such thin arms, such a sunken chest, spindly legs. Ferreira’s build is less solid than he remembers, pinched by former hunger, but he explores the hollow planes of Rodrigues’ body with something like pity — ruined pity, because he isn’t sparing him anything, pity and desire.

Like fumbling at an old wound. He squirms, unsettled, sweating in the cold air.

The flat of a hand is introduced between his thighs, and then a member — the muscles in his legs must flinch, because Ferreira is whispering sweet things to him now, sweet things in no language Rodrigues can understand in the whirl of disgust and desire, and his protests catch in his throat. He can’t call him Father, now.

This is his punishment for wanting him, for seeking him out and finding him.

Rodrigues twists back against him, stiff-jointed and sore, betrayed and needing — Ferreira’s big hand holds his knee in place, keeping his thighs where he needs them, and it’s not hard at all to keep still so Ferreira can do his work — face buried against his teacher’s shoulder, smothered in the spill of his robes.

The friction and slide between his legs is foreign and frightening; the warmth of another body against his back is inescapably pleasing, and he cringes from it.

It’d be easier if it hurt. The man could have made it hurt.

There’s no kisses and no embraces, only the unbearable pressure of being touched — he trembles, as Ferreira rearranges his limbs for his own convenience, and stifles a prayer. All the prayers he knows are obscenities now.

Enumerate the saints who were beheaded — James and Paul, Christopher, Agnes. He’s seen it happen, and it was quick — so quick. That’s the best he can hope for, Christ’s forgiveness and a quick death. If he’s lucky they’ll scatter his bones. Leave him to be eaten by dogs. He doesn’t recall having seen a single dog since coming to Japan — only cats, big bedraggled herds of cats. Imagine being picked clean by cats.

His own throat makes small choking sounds, animal sounds.

His teacher’s voice a low rumble, familiar as the classroom and the chapel. The palm of his hand is hot between Rodrigues’ legs and to his dull disgust he finds he’s quickening there, sticky like a sore. The voice issues from somewhere behind his ear.

“This burden isn’t necessary. I care for you, I want you to be safe. I only want to show you—”

His hair has fallen in his eyes, sticking to his mouth. A big hand snakes up to cinch his throat, or to soothe him — he smells like balsam and clove, sweet and clean and unfamiliar.

Still, he’s going about this like a lover. He wants comfort as much as he wants to injure him. He wants to be consoled by the thought that he’s no longer alone, as much as Rodrigues does. By severing his ties to the Church in one stroke, ruining everything they’ve worked for in one terrible day.

Laid against his thighs, finding satisfaction there — one big thumb swipes at Rodrigues’ cheek. Rodrigues bites his wrist hard and Ferreira flinches back, pressing him against the spread coverlet until his thrashing stops. It stifles his sobs down to a dull quaking.

The thought crosses his mind whether Christ would condone this — turning his sobs to laughter, how gracious of his old teacher to ignore it. All his teeth are beginning to feel loose in his head; he’s losing even the integrity of his body. There isn’t much fight in him, and what there is is quickly spent. His elbow juts out and the heel of his hand presses into his eye socket, simply for something else to fix his thoughts on — there are sounds that escape his mouth and he lets them happen. A delirium, a fever-dream. He crumbles into unconsciousness like sleep, into a sleep like death.

*

Afterward, Ferreira takes a razor and water and shaves his face for him. There’s an ornamental pattern on the razor’s handle like the rill of a brook and an edge on the blade that would be more than enough — but he never seizes it from his heavy veined hand and he never drags it across his own throat. He watches him do it, the way he must do for himself — or he has servants for the task now that they’ve made a hostage out of him. It’s difficult to tell with every cautious movement of the blade past Rodrigues’ chin, past the corner of his pinched mouth. His teacher’s beardless face is grave, but patient.

If he didn’t look so somber, it would be easier. It’d be easier if he were cruel.

Rodrigues is ruined now, and entirely compliant. He sits perfectly still while the hot water steams and the wind whistles in the rafters and his scraped-clean face runs with tears