Page 348 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

was Novinha's delight in the children that poisoned Marc o, that made him hate them both, because he knew that none of it belonged to him. By the time Quim was born, the house was thick with anger, and he never learned how to laugh freely where his parents might notice. Hearing Miro and Ela laugh together was like the abrupt opening of a thick black curtain; suddenly it was daylight again, when Novinha had forgotten there was any season of the day but night.
How dared this stranger invade her house and tear open all the curtains she had closed!
"I won't have it," she said. "You have no right to pry into my husband's life."
He raised an eyebrow. She knew Starways Code as well as anyone, and so she knew perfectly well that he not only had a right, the law protected him in the pursuit of the true story of the dead.
"Marc o was a miserable man," she persisted, "and telling the truth about him will cause nothing but pain."
"You're quite right that the truth about him will cause nothing but pain, but not because he was a miserable man," said the Speaker. "If I told nothing but what everyone already knows-- that he hated his children and beat his wife and raged drunkenly from bar to bar until the constables sent him home-- then I would not cause pain, would I? I'd cause a great deal of satisfaction, because then everyone would be reassured that their view of him was correct all along. He was scum, and so it was all right that they treated him like scum."
"And you think he wasn't?"
"No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins."
"If you believe that, then you're younger than you look," said Novinha.
"Am I?" said the Speaker. "It was less than two weeks ago that I first heard your call. I studied you then, and even if you don't remember, Novinha, I remember that as a young girl you were sweet and beautiful and good. You had been lonely before, but Pipo and Libo both knew you and found you worthy of love."
"Pipo was dead."
"But he loved you."
"You don't know anything, Speaker! You were twenty-two lightyears away! Besides, it wasn't me I was calling worthless, it was Marc o!"
"But you don't believe that, Novinha. Because you know the one act of kindness and generosity that redeems that poor man's life."