Read Well in Time for Free Online

white porcelain bowl holding apples, on the coffee table before them. “It’s Chinese, from the Ming Dynasty. Did it pass along the Silk Road in a camel caravan, I wonder? Was it held in the hands of a noble or a thief? How did it get those little chips, and where? In a hut in the Gobi Desert? In a villa in Italy? And how did it end up in the thrift shop in Berkeley where I bought it? And now, it’s here in Chihuahua. It’s seen far more of life than we have, Walter, in its five- or six-hundred years. And it will continue, after we’re gone. Yet its life is a mystery to us.”
    She leaned forward and ran a fingertip along the pitted edge of the vessel. “And I wonder the same kinds of things about the locket. Except that I know a few of the details about it that I’ll never know about this bowl.”
    She stopped and glanced at Hill, a mysterious smile playing over her lips. “And so, Walter, at your insistence, the tale begins…” She wiggled her eyebrows teasingly, then bent to pick up a manuscript box from the floor and withdrew a handful of pages.
*
    §
*
Guadalajara, Mexico, 1963
*
    §
*
The Story of Father Roberto Villanova y Mansart Continues
*
    In an exclusive suburb of Guadalajara, behind a high stone wall and curly iron gates, beyond a garden anointed by a five-tiered fountain of pinkish-gray stone, stands to this day the villa of the Villanova y Mansart family. It is such an interesting architectural blend of the older Spanish Colonial style with the more recent French Colonial, that students from the local college are often brought there on field trips to pay particular attention to it. Of special noteworthiness and delicate refinement are the long French doors set into deeply carved, heavily ornamented
chiaroscuro
of stone, leading onto balconies of the most finely wrought and cast iron.
    It was on one of these balconies, with a frolicking spring wind picking up the corners of the lace draperies and flipping them out toward the parrot-green buds of the trees, that Roberto, then aged five, and his mother stood.
    “Berto, my sweetest darling,” his mother crooned in French, her accent slightly tinged with Spanish that was like salsa picante to her speech, “this is the most beautiful spring I shall ever see.
Malheureusement
, it is also likely to be the last.”
    Roberto looked up at her quickly, his dark eyes wide and serious. She was so beautiful, with her auburn hair sparkling gold in the sun. He gazed at her eyes but could not catch them. Her glance slipped off, following the hopping of a bird.
    “
¿
Que dices, Maman?
” he asked, mixing languages, as he was apt to do. “What are you saying?”
    “I am sick, Roberto,” she said, switching to Spanish. “The doctor has just found it out. It seems I have a cancer in my brain. A horrid thing, like a big, red balloon slowly being blown up inside my skull.”
    Roberto began to cry. The fear he felt at that moment was terrible. He sensed in her announcement all the loss in the world—a rending so awful that words could never say it. And he also felt guilty for having pestered her in recent days about the locket.
    “Roberto, my love, I know you must cry. I have prayed to God for a way to comfort you at this moment. I have always believed that my prayers are answered, but this time I have gone without response. In God’s wisdom and mercy, He sometimes leaves us comfortless. Perhaps, He knows that out of our misery will come our greatest growth into Spirit.”
    Roberto listened as deeply as his child’s heart was able. Between her utterances, the silence was so complete that he was aware of the faint sibilance of water trickling in the fountain and of the distant, muted clinking of lunch preparations in the kitchen, on the floor below. He leaned into these silences, awaiting words that would bring sense to this moment.
    “I want desperately to leave you with something that will nurture and love and support you for a lifetime, the way I would if I