Page 671 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

He rose to his feet, vaguely aware that people were turning around to look at him.
"Haven't I?" His voice was thick, hard to understand, and he was doing nothing to make it any clearer. He took a halting step into the aisle, then turned to face her at last. "This is how you remember me?"
She looked up at him, aghast-- at what? At Miro's speech, his palsied movements? Or simply that he was embarrassing her, that it didn't turn into the tragically romantic scene she had imagined for the past thirty years?
Her face wasn't old, but it wasn't Ouanda, either. Middle-aged, thicker, with creases at the eyes. How old was she? Fifty now? Almost. What did this fifty-year-old woman have to do with him?
"I don't even know you," said Miro. Then he lurched his way to the door and passed out into the morning.
Some time later he found himself resting in the shade of a tree. Which one was this, Rooter or Human? Miro tried to remember-- it was only a few weeks ago that he left here, wasn't it? --but when he left, Human's tree was still only a sapling, and now both trees looked to be about the same size and he couldn't remember for sure whether Human had been killed uphill or downhill from Rooter. It didn't matter-- Miro had nothing to say to a tree, and they had nothing to say to him.
Besides, Miro had never learned tree language; they hadn't even known that all that beating on trees with sticks was really a language until it was too late for Miro. Ender could do it, and Ouanda, and probably half a dozen other people, but Miro would never learn, because there was no way Miro's hands could hold the sticks and beat the rhythms. Just one more kind of speech that was now useless to him.
"Que dia chato, meu filho."
That was one voice that would never change. And the attitude was unchanging as well: What a rotten day, my son. Pious and snide at the same time-- and mocking himself for both points of view.
"Hi, Quim."
"Father Estevao now, I'm afraid." Quim had adopted the full regalia of a priest, robes and all; now he gathered them under himself and sat on the worn-down grass in front of Miro.
"You look the part," said Miro. Quim had matured well. As a kid he had looked pinched and pious. Experience with the real world instead of theological theory had given him lines and creases, but the face that resulted had compassion in it. And strength. "Sorry I made a scene at mass."
"Did you?" asked Miro. "I wasn't there. Or rather, I was at mass-- I just wasn't at the cathedral."