‘Sleep yourself,’ the priest said, wiping a little sweat off his face with his sleeve.
‘I am so cold.’
‘Just a fever. Would you like this shirt? It isn’t much, but it might help.’
‘No, no. I don’t want anything of yours. You don’t trust me.’
No, if he had been humble like Padre José, he might be living in the capital now with Maria on a pension. This was pride, devilish pride, lying here offering his shirt to the man who wanted to betray him. Even his attempts at escape had been half-hearted because of his pride – the sin by which the angels fell. When he was the only priest left in the state his pride had been all the greater; he thought himself the devil of a fellow carrying God around at the risk of his life; one day there would be a reward. . . . He prayed in the half-light: ‘O God, forgive me – I am a proud, lustful, greedy man. I have loved authority too much. These people are martyrs – protecting me with their own lives. They deserve a martyr to care for them – not a man like me, who loves all the wrong things. Perhaps I had better escape – if I tell people how it is over here, perhaps they will send a good man with a fire of love . . .’ As usual his self-confession dwindled away into the practical problem – what am I to do?
Over by the door the mestizo was uneasily asleep.
How little his pride had to feed on – he had celebrated only four Masses this year, and he had heard perhaps a hundred confessions. It seemed to him that the dunce of any seminary could have done as well . . . or better. He raised himself very carefully and began to move on his naked toes across the floor. He must get to Carmen and away again quickly before this man . . . the mouth was open, showing the pale hard toothless gums. In his sleep he was grunting and struggling; then he collapsed upon the floor and lay still.
There was a sense of abandonment, as if he had given up every struggle from now on and lay there a victim of some power. . . . The priest had only to step over his legs and push the door – it opened outwards.
He put one leg over the body and a hand gripped his ankle. The mestizo stared up at him. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I want to relieve myself,’ the priest said.
The hand still held his ankle. ‘Why can’t you do it here?’ the man whined at him. ‘What’s preventing you, father? You are a father, aren’t you?’
‘I have a child,’ the priest said, ‘if that’s what you mean.’
‘You know what I mean. You understand about God, don’t you?’ The hot hand clung. ‘Perhaps you’ve got him there – in a pocket. You carry him around, don’t you, in case there’s anybody sick. . . . Well, I’m sick. Why don’t you give him to me? or do you think he wouldn’t have anything to do with me . . . if he knew?’
‘You’re feverish.’
But the man wouldn’t stop. The priest was reminded of an oil-gusher which some prospectors had once struck near Concepción – it wasn’t a good enough field apparently to justify further operations, but there it had stood for forty-eight hours against the sky, a black fountain spouting out of the marshy useless soil and flowing away to waste – fifty thousand gallons an hour. It was like the religious sense in man, cracking suddenly upwards, a black pillar of fumes and impurity, running to waste. ‘Shall I tell you what I’ve done? – It’s your business to listen. I’ve taken money from women to do you know what, and I’ve given money to boys . . .’
‘I don’t want to hear.’
‘It’s your business.’
‘You’re mistaken.’
‘Oh no, I’m not. You can’t deceive me. Listen. I’ve given money to boys – you know what I mean. And I’ve eaten meat on Fridays.’ The awful jumble of the gross, the trivial, and the grotesque shot up between the two yellow fangs, and the hand on the priest’s ankle shook and shook with the fever. ‘I’ve told lies, I haven’t fasted in Lent for I don’t know how many years. Once I had two women – I’ll tell you what I did . . .’ He had an immense self-importance; he was unable to picture a world of which he was only a typical part – a world of treachery, violence, and lust in which his shame was altogether insignificant. How often the priest had heard the same confession – Man was so limited he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization – it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt. He said, ‘Why do you tell me all this?’
The man lay exhausted, saying nothing; he was beginning to sweat, his hand loosed its hold on the priest’s ankle. He pushed the door open and went outside – the darkness was complete. How to find the mule? He stood listening – something howled not very far away. He was frightened. Back in the hut the candle burned – there was an odd bubbling sound: the man was weeping. Again he was reminded of oil land, the little black pools and the bubbles blowing slowly up and breaking and beginning again.
The priest struck a match and walked straight forward – one, two, three paces into a tree. A match in that immense darkness was of no more value than a firefly. He whispered, ‘Mula, mula,’ afraid to call out in case the half-caste heard him; besides, it was unlikely that the stupid beast would make any reply. He hated it – the lurching mandarin head, the munching greedy mouth, the smell of blood and ordure. He struck another match and set off again, and again after a few paces he met a tree. Inside the hut the gaseous sound of grief went on. He had got to get to Carmen and away before that man found a means of communicating with the police. He began again, quartering the clearing – one, two, three, four – and then a tree. Something moved under his foot, and he thought of scorpions. One, two, three, and suddenly the grotesque cry of the mule came out of the dark; it was hungry, or perhaps it smelt some animal.
It was tethered a few yards behind the hut – the candle-flame swerved out of sight. His matches were running low, but after two more attempts he found the mule. The half-caste had stripped it and hidden the saddle. He couldn’t waste time looking any more. He mounted, and only then realized how impossible it was to make it move without even a piece of rope round the neck; he tried twisting its ears, but they had no more sensitivity than door-handles: it stood planted there like an equestrian statue. He struck a match and held the flame against its side – it struck up suddenly with its back hooves and he dropped the match; then it was still again, with drooping sullen head and great antediluvian haunches. A voice said accusingly, ‘You are leaving me here to die.’
‘Nonsense,’ the priest said. ‘I am in a hurry. You will be all right in the morning, but I can’t wait.’
There was a scuffle in the darkness and then a hand gripped his naked foot. ‘Don’t leave me alone,’ the voice said. ‘I appeal to you – as a Christian.’
‘You won’t come to any harm here.’
‘How do you know with the gringo somewhere about?’
‘I don’t know anything about the gringo. I’ve met nobody who has seen him. Besides, he’s only a man – like one of us.’
‘I won’t be left alone. I have an instinct . . .’
‘Very well,’ the priest said wearily, ‘find the saddle.’
When they had saddled the mule they set off again, the mestizo holding the stirrup. They were silent – sometimes the half-caste stumbled, and the grey false dawn began; a small coal of cruel satisfaction glowed at the back of the priest’s mind – this was Judas sick and unsteady and scared in the dark. He had only to beat the mule on to leave him stranded in the forest; once he dug in the point of his stick and forced it forward at a weary trot, and he could feel the pull, pull of the half-caste’s arm on the stirrup holding him back. There was a groan – it sounded like ‘Mother of God’, and he let the mule slacken its pace. He prayed silently, ‘God forgive me.’ Christ had died for this man too: how could he pretend with his pride and lust and cowardice to be any more worthy of that death than the half-caste? This man i
ntended to betray him for money which he needed, and he had betrayed God for what? Not even for real lust. He said, ‘Are you sick?’ and there was no reply. He dismounted and said, ‘Get up. I’ll walk for a while.’
‘I’m all right,’ the man said in a tone of hatred.
‘Better get up.’
‘You think you’re very fine,’ the man said. ‘Helping your enemies. That’s Christian, isn’t it?’
‘Are you my enemy?’
‘That’s what you think. You think I want seven hundred pesos – that’s the reward. You think a poor man like me can’t afford not to tell the police . . .’
‘You’re feverish.’
The man said in a sick voice of cunning, ‘You’re right, of course.’
‘Better mount.’ The man nearly fell: he had to shoulder him up. He leant hopelessly down from the mule with his mouth almost on a level with the priest’s, breathing bad air into the other’s face. He said, ‘A poor man has no choice, father. Now if I was a rich man – only a little rich – I should be good.’
The priest suddenly – for no reason – thought of the Children of Mary eating pastries. He giggled and said, ‘I doubt it.’ If that were goodness . . .
‘What was that you said, father? You don’t trust me,’ he went ambling on, ‘because I’m poor, and because you don’t trust me –’ he collapsed over the pommel of the saddle, breathing heavily and shivering. The priest held him on with one hand and they proceeded slowly towards Carmen. It was no good; he couldn’t stay there now. It would be unwise even to enter the village, for if it became known, somebody would lose his life – they would take a hostage. Somewhere a long way off a cock crew. The mist came up knee-high out of a spongy ground, and he thought of the flashlight going off in the bare church hall among the trestle tables. What hour did the cocks crow? One of the oddest things about the world these days was that there were no clocks – you could go a year without hearing one strike. They went with the churches, and you were left with the grey slow dawns and the precipitate nights as the only measurements of time.
Slowly, slumped over the pommel, the half-caste became visible, the yellow canines jutting out of the open mouth; really, the priest thought, he deserved his reward – seven hundred pesos wasn’t so much, but he could probably live on it – in that dusty hopeless village – for a whole year. He giggled again; he could never take the complications of destiny quite seriously, and it was just possible, he thought, that a year without anxiety might save this man’s soul. You only had to turn up the underside of any situation and out came scuttling these small absurd contradictory situations. He had given way to despair – and out of that had emerged a human soul and love – not the best love, but love all the same. The mestizo said suddenly, ‘It’s fate. I was told once by a fortuneteller . . . a reward . . .’
He held the half-caste firmly in the saddle and walked on. His feet were bleeding, but they would soon harden. An odd stillness dropped over the forest, and welled up in the mist from the ground. The night had been noisy, but now all was quiet. It was like an armistice with the guns silent on either side: you could imagine the whole world listening to what they had never heard before – peace.
A voice said ‘You are the priest, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ It was as if they had climbed out of their opposing trenches and met to fraternize among the wires in No Man’s Land. He remembered stories of the European war – how during the last years men had sometimes met on an impulse between the lines.
‘Yes,’ he said again, and the mule plodded on. Sometimes, instructing children in the old days, he had been asked by some black lozenge-eyed Indian child, ‘What is God like?’ and he would answer facilely with references to the father and the mother, or perhaps more ambitiously he would include brother and sister and try to give some idea of all loves and relationships combined in an immense and yet personal passion. . . . But at the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery – that we were made in God’s image. God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex. He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God’s image had thought out, and God’s image shook now, up and down on the mule’s back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and God’s image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats. He said, ‘Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so hot?’ and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God’s image.
The man didn’t answer, as the mule’s backbone slid him first to one side, then the other.
‘It isn’t more than two leagues now,’ the priest said encouragingly – he had to make up his mind. He carried around with him a clearer picture of Carmen than any other village or town in the state: the long slope of grass which led up from the river to the cemetery on a tiny hill where his parents were buried. The wall of the burial-ground had fallen in: one or two crosses had been smashed by enthusiasts: an angel had lost one of its stone wings, and what gravestones were left undamaged leant at an acute angle in the long marshy grass. One image of the Mother of God had lost ears and arms and stood like a pagan Venus over the grave of some rich forgotten timber merchant. It was odd – this fury to deface, because, of course, you could never deface enough. If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures – you had to kill yourself among the graves.
He said, ‘Are you strong enough now to hold on?’ He took away his hand. The path divided – one way led to Carmen, the other west. He pushed the mule on, down the Carmen path, flogging at its haunches. He said, ‘You’ll be there in two hours,’ and stood watching the mule go on towards his home with the informer humped over the pommel.
The half-caste tried to sit upright. ‘Where are you going?’
‘You’ll be my witness,’ the priest said. ‘I haven’t been in Carmen. But if you mention me, they’ll give you food.’
‘Why . . . why . . .’ The half-caste tried to wrench round the mule’s head, but he hadn’t enough strength: it just went on. The priest called out, ‘Remember. I haven’t been in Carmen.’ But where else now could he go? The conviction came to him that there was only one place in the whole state where there was no danger of an innocent man being taken as a hostage – but he couldn’t go there in these clothes. . . . The half-caste held hard on to the pommel and swivelled his yellow eyes beseechingly, ‘You wouldn’t leave me here – alone.’ But it was more than the half-caste he was leaving behind on the forest track: the mule stood sideways like a barrier, nodding a stupid head, between him and the place where he had been born. He felt like a man without a passport who is turned away from every harbour.
The half-caste was calling after him, ‘Call yourself a Christian.’ He had somehow managed to get himself upright. He began to shout abuse – a meaningless series of indecent words which petered out in the forest like the weak blows of a hammer. He whispered, ‘If I see you again, you can’t blame me . . .’ Of course, he had every reason to be angry: he had lost seven hundred pesos. He shrieked hopelessly, ‘I don’t forget a face.’
CHAPTER 2
The young men and women walked round and round the plaza in the hot electric night, the men one way, the girls another, never speaking to each other. In the northern sky the lightning flapped. It was like a religious ceremony which had lost all meaning, but at which they still wore their best clothes. Sometimes a group of older women would join in the procession with a little more excitement and laughter, as if they retained some memory of how things used to go before all the books were lost. A man with a gun on his hip watched from the Treasury steps, and a small withered soldier sat by the prison door with a gun between his knees and the shadows of the palms po
inted at him like a zareba of sabres. Lights were burning in a dentist’s window, shining on the swivel chair and the red plush cushions and the glass for rinsing on its little stand and the child’s chest-of-drawers full of fittings. Behind the wire-netted windows of the private houses grandmothers swung back and forth in rocking-chairs, among the family photographs – nothing to do, nothing to say, with too many clothes on, sweating a little. This was the capital city of a state.
The man in the shabby drill suit watched it all from a bench. A squad of armed police went by to their quarters walking out of step, carrying their rifles anyhow. The plaza was lit at each corner by clusters of three globes joined by ugly trailing overhead wires, and a beggar worked his way from seat to seat without success.
He sat down next to the man in drill and started a long explanation. There was something confidential, and at the same time threatening, in his manner. On every side the streets ran down towards the river and the port and the marshy plain. He said that he had a wife and so many children, and that during the last few weeks they had eaten so little – he broke off and fingered the cloth of the other’s drill suit. ‘And how much,’ he said, ‘did this cost?’
‘You’d be surprised how little.’
Suddenly as a clock struck nine-thirty all the lights went out. The beggar said, ‘It’s enough to make a man desperate.’ He looked this way and that as the parade drifted away down hill. The man in drill got up, and the other got up too, tagging after him towards the edge of the plaza: his flat bare feet went slap, slap on the pavement. He said, ‘A few pesos wouldn’t make any difference to you . . .’
‘Ah, if you knew what a difference they would make.’
The beggar was put out. He said, ‘A man like me sometimes feels that he would do anything for a few pesos.’ Now that the lights were out all over town, they stood intimately in the shadow. He said, ‘Can you blame me?’
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