Prompt: Discussing religion
1628. New Spain.
Antonio knew it was time for the children to go to sleep from the tired way they rubbed at their eyes; he scooped them up, one in each arm, both as light as anything. "Bedtime," he told them, even when Maria's little mouth yawned open to argue that she wasn't sleepy, and that no, it was Pablo that needed to go to bed, not her.
It was easy to set them back down on their knobby, twiggy child legs beside their shared bed. The crucifix on the wall seemed to glow golden with the warm silver moonlight flowing in through the open window. Pablo's spectacles were crooked on the small round face until Maria adjusted them for him with a tired smile.
"Say your prayers," Antonio told them, leading them to the edge of the bed, "for all Catholic children go to Heaven if they remember to pray."
Immediately, Maria obediently went to her knees and folded her hands together, but Pablo blinked up at him with the wide eyes of innocence and asked that question that become the demise of children: "Why?"
For a moment, Antonio wasn't sure how to respond, and though he recalled converting many other colonies and heathens before, Pablo's childish inquiry shook him. He thought a moment for an equally childish response as Maria looked in horror at her brother.
"D-don't be stupid, hermano," she hissed, trying to tug the boy to his knees before the younger slapped at her hands. Antonio shushed her.
"Hush, mija, it's alright," he whispered, smiling. "Well... there are all kinds of beliefs on Earth, Pablo, but the Christian God is the only God that will lead you into Heaven when you die."
"But Mamá said that your God wasn't real," the boy argued. Again, Antonio felt surprised, this time at the fact that the children could remember anything of their Aztec mother.
Centehua had been beautiful, Antonio recalled, which of course is why he'd begun courting her in the first place. At the time, he'd simply overlooked her pagan, Godless lifestyle in favor of gaining her desire. Not even her love - he had no use for such things anymore.
Her lust was useful to him, and their King Montezuma had welcomed him into their land with open arms shortly after his children were born (Maria first, wailing with the shock of birth, but Pablo had been silent upon exiting the womb, deathly so). He'd wasted no time in Centehua's death, early and fast to raise the children under Spanish rule.
Now they seemed to older than six to the human eye, Pablo perhaps a year younger; they shouldn't have remembered their mother at all. But it was natural for children to question. He would right it soon enough.
"Your mother is gone," he told them, "because she didn't believe in God."
(1519. Tenochtitlan.)
"Is it you?" Antonio asked the man before him as strangely clad men adorned him in necklaces, and a small boy (his son) dressed the Spanish in flowers that wreathed their heads. A small girl (his daughter) showed the marquis all the necklaces of sparkling gold. "Are you he? Are you Montezuma?"
The man was tall, taller even than himself; and Centehua stood humbled beside him, dark-skinned and slight, and yet long-limbed and with her hair up in flowers and braids. She watched her children decorate the foreigners with a jubilant smile on her face.
"Yes, I am he," replied Montezuma, arising from his throne to approach and give a low, respectful bow. Then he pulled himself to his full height and addressed him, saying, "My lord, you must be tired, you must be weary. You have arrived in my city of Tenochtitlan. You have reached this mat and throne of yours that I have held for you briefly. I have been taking care of things for you."
He took up Antonio's hand and kissed it. He continued, "Gone are those rules of yours, Itzcoatl, Montezuma the elder, Tizoc, and Ahuitzotl, who briefly stood guard for you, governing this city. I, your servant, came after them. I wonder, can they look back and see over their shoulders? If only just one of them could see what I see, could marvel at what is happening to me now! I have gazed into the Unknown and have seen you coming out of the clouds."
The floral scent filled the air from the flowers about the necks of the men. The gold shimmered in the hot beaming sunlight, and the men smiled - Antonio smiled - and Centehua's eyes shined with joyful tears.
"Those kings used to say," Montezuma whispered in a voice choked with emotion, "they said that you would come back to your city and proceed to your mat and throne, that you would return to Centehua, to your new children that gift you now with flowers and gold. And this has come true. You are here, and you must be tired, you must be weary. Welcome to this land. Rest yourself. Go to the palace and rest your body."
The children now held the hems of his robes. His daughter smiled and his son looked quietly shy as they firsted their hands into the fabric, whispering, "papa, papa" again and again. Montezuma raised his arms as if to thank the Gods for this happiness.
"For our lords are welcome here."
Antonio sat the children up on the bed for the moment, both of them small and wrapped in Spanish quilts. Pablo folded his glasses closed and set them on the nightstand; Maria let her hair loose from her pigtails and burrowed silently into the blankets.
"It's very important that you're Catholic," Antonio said to them as he began tucking them in. "Very important. It's my duty to make sure the devil has no influence over your souls. Even men as great as your Montezuma were influenced by Satan. I must keep your souls pure."
It was Maria this time who protested, however timidly. "But Montezuma was a good leader. He was just confused. He wasn't evil."
Antonio smiled. "No, perhaps not. But he was a very prideful ruler, and pride is one of the deadliest of sins."
He pulled up one of the small chairs and laces his hands across his knees. "Let me tell you a story, children. Sit closer."
Maria and Pablo shuffled themselves closer to their father until they were perched at the edge of the bed. Maria's nightgown fell across her twiggy legs and Pablo wrapped his thin arms about his shins to listen. Antonio remembered the feel of flower petals about his forehead - Pablo still loved flowers, he realized. The boy was a natural farmer with his affinity for plants. He saw in that a connection, and began his story.
"There was a farmer once," he said, imagining his son a bit older, more loyal, in a sun hat and workman's clothes. Dirty and grinning and more broad, like his father. "He tilled the soil day and night, and loved to work more than anything else. With only the sun in the sky and a handful of earth, he created beautiful gardens for his people. He never worked for his own gain, and never asked anything of anyone but the small payment he received for his flowers and crops."
Perfect; he'd caught Pablo's attention. The boy listened with wide eyes and open ears, connecting with the farmer in the tale. Antonio smiled.
"One day, a magnificent eagle swept down out of the skies and gripped the humble farmer by the hair with sharp talons, and pulled him up until he was a mere speck amongst the clouds. Only when they had reached a mountain peak did the eagle's talons release him; the farmer was taken into a cavern where he heard the eagle say, 'Lord of all power, I have carried out your command.' Without seeing who spoke, the man heard a voice tell the eagle to bring him closer, and without seeing who took his hand, he was led into a dazzling chamber, where he saw King Montezuma lying unconscious on a bed."
Maria opened her mouth to ask a childish question, but Pablo nudged her in the ribs hard enough to keep her quiet.
Antonio went on, "The farmer was told to sit next to the king, and flowers were put into his hand - Maria, no hitting - and he was also given a smoking tube filled with tobacco. He was told to look at the miserable king who would feel nothing, so drunk with pride and with his eyes closed to the world, and the poor farmer was ordered to hold the lighted smoking tube against the king's thigh to see that he would not feel it."
And on and on, explaining how hesitant the boy was to touch the sacred king, but given the order, the farmer had held the hot tip of the tobacco pipe against the king's thigh and saw that he felt nothing, nor did he even stir.
"You see how drunk he was with his own power," he told the children, who nodded fervently. "It is for that reason that the farmer was brought there. He went back where he came from and told Montezuma what he had seen, and as proof, he asked the King to look at his thigh. Montezuma did, and the farmer explained that he'd been told that the king's time would be short, and to enjoy what was left."
Silence followed the end of the story and Pablo's grip around his knees slackened, and his green eyes softened significantly as though with pain.
"But... but Mamá said-"
Antonio put a finger up to the boy's lips and Pablo fell silent. Maria let out a soft sound and started to cry, but Antonio just smiled.
"Just remember that your mother was a Godless pagan," he whispered. "And you two will be good, Catholic children for me. Never practice polygamy, never worship any God but the one true God, and you shall go to Heaven. Never shall any children of mine suffer from being prideful, not like your King."
When he had calmed them down, the children were easy to tuck back into bed, pillowing their sheets around them and kissing them goodnight on their little foreheads, stroking the curls out of their eyes.
As he left their room and closed the door behind him, he thought he heard that confused little boy whisper, "But Mamá said."
1980. Mexico City.
"Sorry again for the mess," Pablo apologizes as he goes about cutting the vegetables for the soup. Alfred stands beside him, dressed in his usual T-shirt and jeans, with the familiar bomber jacket hung on the coat hook by the door. It's still strange to see Alfred without it on any occasion, but he supposes that it had to be removed, with this heat boiling the mere paint of the house. The knife clicks against the cutting board every time he cuts off a new square of carrot or celery, familiar with the vegetables but not as much with the knife, at least not related to the culinary arts.
Alfred looks to have made himself at home, Pablo notices, shoes toed off neatly beside the door and the larger body leaning casually against the counter, Alfred's eyes watching his hands work with the knife with clumsy inaccuracy.
"It's cool," he says, which must mean that Alfred's okay with whatever clutter has been left laying about by Maria's absence. "Where's your sister, anyway?"
He'd known it would be asked, and now rolls his eyes. "Overworking herself. She's still in a meeting with our president, probably discussing the movement of drugs in Columbia. She needs to relax, but she doesn't listen to me. She says I work too hard."
Alfred shrugs. "You do." The reply is short and simply stated, and Pablo knows that Alfred doesn't mean much by it. "What're we cooking again?"
"It's... supposed to be a green chili stew with pork, but... ah, I think I'm sort of... not doing it right." He blinks down at the lopsided slices of vegetables that litter the counter, and he hears Alfred sigh before he's suddenly nudged over. "Hey, what're you-"
"Just helping out. I'll cut these."
Pablo pouts a little, but not long enough to receive a comment about it, before he's watching Alfred slice the celery with much better accuracy than himself. He knows from experience that Alfred isn't the best cook in the world (a trait no doubt inherited from growing up with Inglaterra), but he at least knows his way around food better than Pablo does. Judging from Alfred's weight and height, that shouldn't be such a surprise to him.
"I never really learned to cook much," Pablo explains quickly, though Alfred doesn't seem to be mocking him at all for the lack of skill in this particular area.
Instead, Alfred turns and smiles at him. "No problem, man. I didn't either, really. Growing up, I always had servants to cook things for me - wet nurses, I think that's the term for it. Women that take care of other people's kids."
Pablo doesn't know much about that either. He and Maria had always lived together; he supposes that perhaps Maria is close to what Alfred's describing, but he can't imagine living full-time with strangers. The women who had taken care of him as a child were the neighbors and the village, never nurses hired to pamper them.
"That must have been nice."
Alfred shrugs again. His shoulders are thick like the rest of him, but his face is still boyish sometimes even after knowing Alfred for so very long. "I didn't know any different at the time. The nurses were all I had. They taught me to bathe myself properly, taught me to write the first few letters of my alphabet, and they read the Bible to me."
Immediately, Pablo feels an uncomfortable prickle in his spine. He hasn't thought much about religion since the Cristero War against Maria, the two of them screaming at each other until their voices were shot, arguing about the rights of priests instead of the rights of the poor.
"I... used to read the Bible a lot," Pablo confesses softly.
"Yeah?" Alfred's smiling again. Pablo loves his smile, but can't see what there is to smile about. "Me too. I was a bit of a nut about it. Once I learned to read it, that was it. I remember the first book ever printed in the colonies was a book of psalms... I read it so often that the pages were falling out."
That's an amusing mental image: a much younger Alfred - the thought looked like a mirror image of the Alfred that Pablo had first met, which he knows isn't accurate given the time period Alfred speaks of - curled up on a small bed with his nose buried in a book about religion.
Pablo feels like he's missing something. "You don't seem to be religious."
Alfred laughs softly, though his smile also dims. "I'm not as religious anymore. I used to live my entire life by the teachings of the Bible, though. I was a regular little Puritan." Pablo knows that he still is, in a sense, just from the way Alfred makes sure the person he's with is single before he makes any kind of move, how he blushes when Pablo asks for different positions in bed, how Alfred gets so damn ignorant about cultures outside of his own. "I mean, I still pray sometimes, and I go to church on Easter and Christmas. I'm just not as... er..."
"Obsessed?"
"-devout as I once was," Alfred finishes. Pablo watches him scrape the vegetables into the pot, and he takes over again, remembering what Maria had once taught him as he adds more water and starts to stir. "What about you two? Still Roman Catholics?"
Pablo almost laughs but remembers his manners and bites his tongue to keep from doing so. No, not anymore, but he isn't sure how to explain it to his ignorant neighbor. "Maria is," he replies. "She's always been serious about her faith. I, er... I don't believe anymore, though. It's hard to keep believing when you go through so much shit in your life."
"I went through an atheist phase in my Civil War and... well, a long time after that, but I just can't see how anyone can live without God in their life-"
"Maybe because God is like a mass delusion," Pablo can't help but snap, and regrets it the second he sees that look of surprise in Alfred's eyes. "I- I just mean, if someone on the street claims that he's talking to invisible people that tell him right from wrong, they're called crazy and locked away. But if that person says they're talking to God, then they're just called religious, and they're praised for it."
It isn't going well. He can tell that much from the look on Alfred's face. "W-well," Alfred stammers, "what do you think happens when you die?"
Pablo blinks at him. "Honestly?" Alfred nods, and Pablo takes a bit of a breath before pushing on, "Nothing. If you think of it scientifically..."
Alfred looks confused, and possibly offended. Pablo doesn't want to offend him, mostly because he knows what happens when the United States gets offended. Certain words get used, or insults thrown about, or possibly even blows for those inexperienced in dealing with Alfred's temper. Pablo knows Alfred's buttons, though, and knows his limits as well; he's not stupid enough to let this get out of hand.
"Whatever," Alfred says, much to Pablo's surprise, and returns to leaning against the counter.
"When you said you didn't believe in God, did you mean it?"
Alfred's voice is a whisper in the near-darkness. The light of the nightlight is the only thing keeping the darkness from enveloping the room, a small pineapple shape plugged into the wall and emanating a soft golden light that makes Pablo's heart twist to remember when he'd first received it, wrapped in a small box that was clutched in Cuba's large brown hands and thrust into his own.
He hasn't seen Cuba in almost a decade now; that thought saddens him even further. For now, however, he blinks his eyes slowly open and turns to see Alfred better, curled up next to him as a mass of warmth against his side.
"Yes," he answers simply.
Alfred frowns; that much is apparent even in the dark. "Are you Buddhist or something?"
He can't help it when he hears himself laugh. It's a rare thing to get Pablo to laugh, so he hopes Alfred at least appreciates that much. "No. No, Alfred, I'm atheist. I don't believe in anything."
The words hang in the air between them, but Pablo doesn't mind it. He and Maria have had this fight before, so it comes to him now with practiced ease. He knows precisely what to say to whatever argument that's thrown at him, knows how to defend his beliefs, or lack thereof.
"But... why?" Alfred asks, confused and lost, and normally Pablo would be offended by the question - why is anyone atheist? Why does religion exist at all? - but then he simply sighs, knowing precisely when he lost his religion, knowing the exact moment when he lost his faith in God.
He isn't sure Alfred wants to hear about that, though.
Again, Alfred asks, "Why can't you believe in God?"
Pablo has no choice but to tell him at least part of the story. His hands pull the blankets up a bit higher so they cover Alfred's shoulder, and he buries his head right underneath Alfred's chin, finding warmth in the steady heartbeat he hears through Alfred's chest.
"Your Revolution was really tame, when you think about it," Pablo begins. "Nobody was maimed, really. Those who died, died in a humane manner. Arthur was kind to you about it, whether you believe me or not. So it's natural that you should believe God was on your side when you won."
Alfred's arms drape casually across him. "But you won yours too. You won against Spain - wasn't God on your side too?"
Pablo laughs again, but this time it's bitter, not Alfred's joyous laugh that often makes Pablo's heart stutter. "No," he whispers again. "No. My victory was all my own and Maria's. God doesn't exist anymore, at least not for me."
"But... you believed once. How does that just go away?"
He goes quiet, he can't help that. How is he supposed to explain to Alfred that the Inquisition has the ability to cause faith to evaporate as well as hope? Pablo exhales a soft breath and pulls back a bit, returning his head to his own pillow and looking at Alfred, who looks younger without his glasses, rounder and soft-featured.
"You've seen the scars before, haven't you?" he asks in a quiet tone, holding out one of his long arms to Alfred, who simply nods with that look of embarrassment on his face. "Do you know what those purple lines are?" A shake of the head; blessed ignorance, that Alfred doesn't know that kind of torture, that Alfred had never had to go through it himself. "Stretch marks, jefe. My elbows were pulled out of joint. Do you know what the rack is?"
At least Alfred appears to be somewhat aware of his history, since he nods again and says, "It was that wooden machine that they'd tie people to and-" There we go. Alfred's eyes widen and he looks to Pablo's arms again, the purple marks that make the skin ugly, and Pablo feels relieved, strangely. "They... did that to you?''
"Antonio did this to me." He doesn't go much further than that, merely pulls the blankets higher, all the way to their chins, watches Alfred's face depict pity and sorrow. "Don't feel sorry for me. I'm not... pitying myself or anything. I'm just explaining why I don't believe in God. Kind of hard to believe in anything divine when you're strapped to that thing."
Alfred makes no sound and instead just rubs his hand up and down Pablo's shoulder in an almost comforting gesture. He's not used to being worried over, at least not since when Cuba would wrap him up in a towel and carry him off to bed when Pablo got drunk over a decade ago. Ten years seems so long to him now, young and alive and yet feeling old too, somehow.
"I'm sorry," Alfred apologizes under his breath. Pablo doesn't expect it when there's a kiss right at the corner of his mouth, which, why should he? Alfred is bipolar with his affections with Mexico, one moment beating Pablo with the butt of a gun and building a wall to keep him out, the next moment wrapping him in blankets and giving him tender kisses.
But Pablo kisses him back anyway, if only because he's never known how to do much else than love Alfred in all of his idiocy and ignorance. Pass over the flaws - of which there are many - in favor of the soft golden sweep of hair, the innocence still in Alfred's limitless blue eyes, the height that still made Pablo feel small and secure to be... held.
Kissed.
Anything to maybe pretend that Alfred loves him in return.
He doesn't, but that's okay. Pablo lets him pull away after the tender kiss, lets Alfred brush the curly fringe out of his eyes and smile at him in all of his American brilliance.
"Even if you don't believe in God," Alfred whispers, "I still thank Him for creating you at all."
The words are touching, and they shake him to the core, even if they aren't true. It's a kind gesture, too kind of a thing to say when Pablo's been so awful to Alfred at times. When Alfred's been so awful to him in return.
Still, he feels himself go warm and he curls closer into Alfred's side, and that night, he dreams of believing in something - believing in Alfred - even if he can never again believe in God.