Origin

That night, alone and in pain, Ávila stared into the mirror. The man looking back at him was a stranger. The nun’s words had done nothing to ease his pain.

Forgiveness? Turn my other cheek!

I have witnessed evil for which there is no absolution!

In a growing rage, Ávila drove his fist into the mirror, shattering the glass, and collapsing in sobs of anguish on his bathroom floor.

As a career naval officer, Ávila had always been a man in control—a champion of discipline, honor, and the chain of command—but that man was gone. Within weeks, Ávila had fallen into a haze, anesthetizing himself with a potent blend of alcohol and prescription drugs. Soon his yearning for the numbing effects of chemicals occupied every waking hour, diminishing him to a hostile recluse.

Within months, the Spanish navy had quietly forced him to retire. A once powerful battleship now stuck in dry dock, Ávila knew he would never sail again. The navy to which he had given his life had left him with only a modest stipend on which he could barely live.

I’m fifty-eight years old, he realized. And I have nothing.

He spent his days sitting alone in his living room, watching TV, drinking vodka, and waiting for any ray of light to appear. La hora más oscura es justo antes del amanecer, he would tell himself over and over. But the old navy aphorism proved false over and over. The darkest hour is not just before the dawn, he sensed. The dawn is never coming.

On his fifty-ninth birthday, a rainy Thursday morning, staring at an empty bottle of vodka and an eviction warning, Ávila mustered the courage to go to his closet, take down his navy service pistol, load it, and put the barrel to his temple.

“Perdóname,” he whispered, and closed his eyes. Then he squeezed the trigger. The explosion was far quieter than he imagined. More of a click than a gunshot.

Cruelly, the gun had failed to fire. Years in a dusty closet without being cleaned had apparently taken a toll on the admiral’s cheap ceremonial pistol. It seemed even this simple act of cowardice was beyond Ávila’s abilities.

Enraged, he hurled the gun at the wall. This time, an explosion rocked the room. Ávila felt a searing heat rip through his calf, and his drunken fog lifted in a flash of blinding pain. He fell to the floor screaming and clutching his bleeding leg.

Panicked neighbors pounded on his door, sirens wailed, and Ávila soon found himself at Seville’s Hospital Provincial de San Lázaro attempting to explain how he had tried to kill himself by shooting himself in the leg.

The next morning, as he lay in the recovery room, broken and humiliated, Admiral Luis Ávila received a visitor.

“You’re a lousy shot,” the young man said in Spanish. “No wonder they forced you to retire.”

Before Ávila could reply, the man threw open the window shades and let the sunlight pour in. Ávila shielded his eyes, now able to see that the kid was muscle-bound and had a buzz cut. He wore a T-shirt with the face of Jesus on it.

“My name’s Marco,” he said, his accent Andaluz. “I’m your trainer for rehab. I asked to be assigned to you because you and I have something in common.”

“Military?” Ávila said, noting his brash demeanor.

“Nope.” The kid locked eyes with Ávila. “I was there that Sunday morning. In the cathedral. The terrorist attack.”

Ávila stared in disbelief. “You were there?”

The kid reached down and pulled up one leg of his sweats, revealing a prosthetic limb. “I realize you’ve been through hell, but I was playing semipro fútbol, so don’t expect too much sympathy from me. I’m more of a God-helps-those-who-help-themselves kind of guy.”

Before Ávila knew what had happened, Marco heaved him into a wheelchair, rolled him down the hall to a small gym, and propped him up between a pair of parallel bars.

“This will hurt,” the kid said, “but try to get to the other end. Just do it once. Then you can have breakfast.”

The pain was excruciating, but Ávila was not about to complain to someone with only one leg, so using his arms to bear most of his weight, he shuffled all the way to the end of the bars.

“Nice,” Marco said. “Now do it again.”

“But you said—”

“Yeah, I lied. Do it again.”

Ávila eyed the kid, stunned. The admiral had not taken an order in years, and strangely, he found something refreshing about it. It made him feel young—the way he had felt as a raw recruit years ago. Ávila turned around and began shuffling back the other way.

“So tell me,” Marco said. “Do you still go to mass at the Seville cathedral?”

“Never.”

“Fear?”

Ávila shook his head. “Rage.”

Marco laughed. “Yeah, let me guess. The nuns told you to forgive the attackers?”

Ávila stopped short on the bars. “Exactly!”

“Me too. I tried. Impossible. The nuns gave us terrible advice.” He laughed.