The Priest (6 page)

“When did you hear me?”

“Every night you sing… except for the last
two nights.” Mauricio hoped he hadn’t said too much.

“I was sick,” she explained.

“Oh… I hope you're better now.”
What can
I say to you?
He had never had a conversation with a woman
before.
I don’t even know how to speak to another man, for
Heavens' sake.
The only person he had exchanged words with
regularly had been his father, and he had loved him and protected
him. But his heart was beating faster and he really hoped that she
would keep talking to him.

“I am, thank you. What were you singing?”
she asked after a long pause, as if she was deciding what to say to
him.

“A song my father taught me when I was a
boy.”

“What does it say?”

“It’s a kid’s song.” He was surprised by her
question.

“I don’t know the language of the song.”

“It’s about a man talking to his little
kid.” Mauricio had never thought until that moment that women
wouldn't understand his father’s language. Maybe he shouldn’t have
said anything. A long lost memory of his father telling him to be
cautious when speaking their language around women resurfaced.

“It’s… beautiful.” Her voice broke a little.
“What does the word
pax
mean? You said it several
times.”

“Peace; the father wants his kid to live in
peace,” he answered without thinking, despite what he had just
remembered.

“I would like to hear some more,” she said
softly.

Mauricio couldn’t believe the girl had asked
him to sing for her. She was talking to him as if he were another
woman. Although he couldn’t be sure of how women talked among
themselves. He knew that she wasn’t talking to him as a man, in any
case. The realization was so shocking that he lost the use of his
tongue for several minutes.

“I already told you; I am not going to call
the guards if you talk to me.”

“But you did last time!” Mauricio couldn’t
help to retort and then regretted it immediately.

“What?” The girl sounded confused by his
outburst. “No! I can’t believe it… you are the slave who was found
in my room three months ago?” She was genuinely surprised, but not
angry. “It’s okay, as I already said, twice, I am not calling for
help. The last time I saw you, I screamed because I was coming out
of the anesthesia. You have to admit that your presence in my room
was rather upsetting.” Her tone was calm.

“I'm sorry if I scared you. It wasn’t my
intention,” he said defensively.

“I know. I saw the recording of what
happened that day. You were very… gentle.”

“I only wanted to see you.”

“Why?”

“I have heard you sing before, and I wanted
to see what you looked like.” Mauricio felt a strange urge of
telling the truth, even if he knew he was playing with fire.

“You heard me before?”

“I was left in a depository room next to
yours. Sound traveled through the wall.”

“What’s a depository room?”

Mauricio was taken aback by this question.
How was it possible that she didn’t know?

“You can’t say?” she pressed.

“No, it’s not that. I thought you knew. It’s
a place the guards bring me to fill my quota of semen for the day,”
he said slowly.

“What do you mean?” The girl seemed
interested.

“I am a semental.” Mauricio thought that the
name itself was enough explanation without having to be any more
detailed.

“What does a semental do?” she asked
instead.

Mauricio groaned. He really didn’t want to
say anything else about the topic. The other men had always treated
him like the plague for being a semental. He didn’t think that she
was going to regard him any better. Maybe that explained why she
was talking to him. She didn’t know who he was and what he did for
the guards.

“Guards use my semen to create fathered
women,” he said and his voice was angry.
Happy now?
he
thought.

“Oh! I didn’t know.” The girl’s voice came
as a barely audible whisper.

“It’s not that I like doing it. I have no
choice,” Mauricio said defensively and hurt.

“I studied physiology at school, but they
didn't explain to us how things work in detail. I didn’t know that
there were particular slaves who… do only that,” she said in a
conciliatory tone.

He was astonished by her ignorance and, most
of all, by the fact that she hadn’t run away by now.

“You seem different from the other slaves,”
she said, surprising him even more.

Mauricio didn’t know what to say after that.
He didn’t even know if she had meant it as a compliment. Probably
not. Women didn’t compliment slaves.

“In the recording, you stood there, watching
me sleep. It felt like you were protecting me,” she continued.

He was completely at loss for words.

“I must go now.” The girl concluded her
soliloquy without adding anything else.

Mauricio heard her steps moving away and
wondered what had just happened.
I just had a conversation with
a woman.
He kept thinking about that all night, playing the
exchange over and over again. When the tall guard came to pick him
up, he was still dazed by the events of the night before. He also
hadn’t slept at all and he felt hunger beyond bearing, but he
smiled at the tall woman who still regarded him with disdain. He
followed her to the depository room and even managed to fill the
cup as requested. He didn’t make it back to his cell, though. Black
spots danced before his eyes when he stood up and then fainted.

“What did I tell you regarding
this
semental?” Several voices talking at the same time woke Mauricio
up, but only the Priestess’ voice overpowered all the others. He
lay quietly and awaited his fate, while trying to assess where he
was. The place was unfamiliar—too clean and too bright. He half
closed his eyes, too curious to shut them down, but cautious enough
not to let the women know he had come around.

“Your Holiness, I was just following the
rules. The slave wasn’t producing at all, and I punished him by
giving him less to eat,” the tall guard said.

Mauricio, even lying down, was still
lightheaded. He followed the conversation, thinking the whole
situation would have been rather amusing if the women hadn’t been
talking about the propriety of starving him to death.

The Priestess shook her head. “You obviously
don’t understand, do you? You can’t reduce his food without asking
my permission.” She was talking exceedingly slow, accentuating
every word.

“My apologies, Your Holiness. I thought
that… the handbook says to punish slaves if… but I realize now I
should have known better given that he is—” The tall guard lowered
her head to stare at the floor when the Priestess raised one hand
to silence her.

“You are demoted, immediately.” The
Priestess’ voice was calm. “From now on, I will personally hire all
guards for the semental wing.” She was now talking to another
guard.

“As you wish, Your Holiness.” The guard, a
woman Mauricio hadn’t seen before, lowered her head in
deference.

“What I wish is to have guards with an
education for a change. How can you hire someone who doesn’t know
anything about slaves?” the Priestess asked the audience, betraying
her anger. “Did you, at least, give him his daily ration of water?”
She singled out the tall guard, who was trying to disappear near
the back of the room.

The tall guard briefly looked at the
Priestess, her face twisted in a terrified expression. “I’m… not
sure…” she answered, voice broken.

“You aren’t sure, or you know you didn’t
give him his daily ration of water?” The Priestess’ voice boomed in
the room.

“I might have… reduced the water.”

“Have you even read the handbook you
mentioned? Do you know what it says regarding withholding
water?”

“I…” The tall guard began sobbing.

“Get her out of here. I can’t bear
stupidity.” The Priestess waited as the woman was escorted outside,
then looked around, giving each and every guard left in the room a
piercing stare and then continued, “The handbook clearly states
that it is critical, I repeat, critical
not
to reduce the
amount of water allotted daily to slaves. The slave’s productivity
suffers from lack of water in their bodies. Semen production
suffers without proper hydration. Now, do you have the slightest
idea of what I am trying to say here?” She paused and low murmurs
filled the silence.

Mauricio heard the words ‘this semental’,
‘the President’s daughter’, and ‘semen’ repeated several times by
the scared guards.

“Exactly! I see that you aren’t completely
useless. So, my question is, if the President’s daughter loses the
baby, what are we going to do without his semen?” the Priestess
stated.

At the Priestess’ words, Mauricio almost
revealed he was full awake and listening.
This isn’t possible…
what she’s saying… did I hear correctly?

“I need him fully functional, and quickly.
Give him something to hydrate him and, instead of three meals, give
him six small meals today.” The Priestess wrote down her
instruction and passed the tablet to a nurse.

Mauricio’s stomach started rumbling on cue;
he was relieved when the Priestess left without having looked at
him once the whole time. A nurse took his vitals and then punched
his skin with a needle that was connected to a pipe that led to a
bag full of a transparent fluid. Mauricio saw the liquid substance
dripping inside the pipe, drop by drop, until it reached the
needle. He couldn’t help gasping when the cold liquid started
pouring inside him. The feeling was, at first, unpleasant, but
after few minutes, Mauricio noticed that he could think better. The
fog that had swamped his thoughts was clearing fast. The nurse took
his vitals again, read the numbers on a display at the end of his
bed, and nodded, satisfied. She fussed over the machines in the
room, waited until all the liquid in the bag had found its way
inside Mauricio’s body, hooked another full bag with a different
liquid substance to the pipe and then left.

He soon felt better than he had in a month
and was ready to go back to his cell. He didn’t like the room he
was in. It smelled of that clean, citrus scent that, in Mauricio’s
mind, was connected with that day, four years earlier, when the
women had chosen him to be a semental. He was fully immersed in his
memories when the door opened and a woman came in. Out of habit, he
lowered his head and closed his eyes. Years of servitude had shaped
him like that.

“I heard that you fainted,” a familiar
feminine voice said with a hint of concern. Mauricio opened his
eyes and saw the girl looking at him. She walked toward his bed but
stopped when she realized that she was too close to him. “How are
you now?” the girl asked.

“Better. This water is miraculous.” Mauricio
raised his hand to show her the needle and the pipe with the light
green substance dripping down.

“I tried it, too. It’s good stuff,” she said
and then laughed.

Mauricio felt a foreign satisfaction at the
fact that she was laughing. He didn’t understand why it meant
something to him, but it did. “What’s your name?” he asked
suddenly.

“Rose. But everybody calls me Rosie. What’s
yours?” If she was surprised by his question, she didn’t show
it.

“My dad used to call me Mauricio.” His voice
broke. He hadn’t expected her to be interested in knowing his name.
He had been a string of twelve digits for the last twenty-two years
and had hated that number ever since a guard had made him memorize
it.

“What a unique name.” Rosie seemed to think
about it for a few seconds and then said, “I like the sound of
it.”

“I like your name, too.” Mauricio said,
feeling that, as replies went, this wasn’t the greatest.

“My mom has a penchant for flowers.” Rosie
was playing with her hands.

Mauricio thought the way her fingers toyed
with a ring on her right hand was nice.

“I don’t know anything about flowers,”
Mauricio said automatically, his eyes lingering on her hands.

“Oh—” Rosie looked at him with wide eyes and
then said, “A rose is a flower with many petals that comes in
different colors.”

“It must be nice to look at.” He slowly
raised his head.

“Yes, roses are the prettiest flowers and
they also smell wonderful.”

“What’s it like?” His eyes were now openly
staring at her.

“A rose smells like sweet and spice, and
sometimes also like dew. When I was born, my moms planted hundreds
of roses under my bedroom’s window, and when the buds opened I
could smell the perfume drifting to my bed; their scent was almost
intoxicating at night.”

“I’d like that…”
To sit at night with
you, surrounded by roses
. His heart made a somersault in his
chest, his lungs suddenly seeking air.
Is this what feels like
to be intoxicated?

“You’d love it.”

“I’m sure.”

“I—” She silently looked at Mauricio for a
few seconds before lowering her head. Her ring slipped from her
finger and fell to the floor, sliding toward Mauricio’s bed.

He reached for it at the same time she did,
and for a moment, their hands touched. “Here,” he said, placing the
ring on her palm.

“Thanks. I should be more careful with this.
It has the Layans crest on it,” Rosie explained. When he didn’t say
anything back, she added, “It’s my family ring.” She waited for him
to acknowledge her words, but he wasn’t looking at the ring
anymore.

“Just beautiful,” he commented, his eyes now
firmly on her.

“Thanks,” she repeated.

Mauricio would have sworn that she was
blushing.

“What happened to you?” she asked, changing
topic abruptly.

“I haven’t eaten a lot in the last three
days,” he said drily.