Evil is only what our reason hides and refuses to contemplate.
The real sin is to separate the sensible world from the spiritual world.
Then in a dream Ofelia Salamanca ceased to be a visible projection onto the animated wall of an Indian cavern, visible but untouchable, as delightful as his eyes announced it to be from a balcony in Buenos Aires that May night so far away.
Now she was the object of his touch (she was a single, unending animal wearing pulsating silk), of his hearing (she was a Mass in the desert, a voice outside of consciousness telling him from then on, without giving him an opportunity to reply, “You love me!” “You love me not!”), of smell (she was the most delightful stench, the stink without which there is no love, the perfume of a sullied clover leaf), and of sight: Ofelia Salamanca had eyes on her nipples that stared at him furiously, seductively, disdainfully, mockingly, until they made him wake up with a start.
The hammock stopped rocking. Ofelia Salamanca was the owner of the world.
[6]
Anselmo Quintana was standing before the altar. Baltasar Bustos’s silhouette materialized in the light at the entrance to the chapel, and the priest waited until the thudding of his boot heels on the floor of flaking bricks, too soft for this rainy climate, stopped. When he was near, Quintana put his hand on Baltasar’s shoulder and said to him, “Yesterday you didn’t let me say my confession. Today you are going to sit in my place in the confessional, and I am going to kneel at your side and speak in secret through the grating.
“I know you don’t believe in the sacrament. So it shouldn’t matter where we do this. Yet it does matter to me to be on my knees to speak to you. Today is Thursday, and from now until tomorrow, weekly, Jesus Christ dies again for us. Many forget it; I do not. The most important thing I do is to remind anyone who cares to listen that if we are here and live, it is because Jesus sacrificed Himself to give us life on earth. Bear in mind then, Baltasar, that what I am going to tell you is preparation for the supreme act of faith, which is the Eucharist. The Eucharist is inseparable from Christ’s sacrifice. And even though Calvary sufficed, each time I drink the blood and eat the body of Christ, I add to His sacrifice and act in the name of the quick and the dead. The Cross is the confluence of everything: sacrifice, life, death. Calvary, as they taught us in seminary, was sufficient in itself. But for me the Eucharist comes closest to that sacrificial sufficiency. I have no road more certain toward Christ than the Eucharist.”
Quintana’s words allowed for no response, and in any case the force with which he led Baltasar to the confessional precluded any appeal.
Baltasar fell into the seat of the confessor with a leaden sense that anchored him there as if in a loathsome jail cell, the mortal facsimile of the coffin whose worn-out velvet smelled of trapped cats.
Anselmo Quintana knelt down outside, by Baltasar’s unwilling ear.
“Yesterday you did not allow me to confess,” said the priest.
“But I told you I don’t believe in the power of absolution.”
“You think I want to talk about your sins, so you shut yourself off from me. But your sins do not interest me. Your fate does. And what I confess to you is also part of my fate. Let’s get started: I confess, brother, to having ordered the execution of a hundred Spanish soldiers held in jails and even in hospitals, in order to avenge the death of my eldest son at the hands of the royalists. I ordered their throats slit. The idea of forgiveness never even passed through my mind. I was blinded. Tell me if you would have forgiven me if I were your father and you my dead son.”
Baltasar said nothing. A feeling of growing modesty was taking control of him, inseparable respect and compassion for this man whose voice was becoming black, thick, guttural, reverting to ancient African roots, almost the voice of a psalmodist, which Baltasar did not want to interrupt until he’d heard everything, the same propitiatory act, perhaps, that would permit a believer to repeat the sacrifice on Calvary without taking the slightest bit away from the sufficiency of Christ’s martyrdom.
He decided to hear him through to the end without arguing, to listen to him speaking there on his knees, his face like an old ball that has been kicked around: “I understand your silence, Baltasar, I understand your reticence, but understand mine; I share your fear of our weaknesses, and I fear as you do that a word spoken in confidence will be taken away by the one who listens to us, will get lost with our secret in the multitudes, and that we shall be left at his mercy if one day, out of despair or necessity, he repeats it to others; if you don’t believe in me, in my priestly investiture or in my power to pardon sins, I shall repeat that I understand you, and for that reason I ask not that you confess formally to me but that you accept my humility as I kneel before you, exposing myself to you as the one who carries away my secret and, not believing in the sacrament, gives my secret to the world. I offer myself to you as an example. I confess before you, Baltasar, because yesterday you said things for which I have to assume some responsibility, and it does not seem right that the burden of our relationship, which has barely begun, which may not last very long, should fall upon me: one day we shall give an accounting not only of ourselves but of each one of the people to whom we have said something or from whom we have heard something. I ask you to accept this and not to believe that yesterday only you spoke, unburdening your conscience, and that today only I will do the same: your responsibility, yours and mine together this morning, is to give an accounting of all the beings who have done us the favor of listening to us. Would you like to know something? I told you my crime against the prisoners, and you should understand that, just as you do when you sin, I committed a crime against universal morality. St. Paul explains that sin is an assault on the natural law inscribed in the conscience of each human being. In my own case, it was also a violation of the vows of the priesthood, which include forgiveness, mercy, and respect for the will of God, who alone is able to give and take away life. Because of what I had done, I feared the punishments of hell that day when I avenged my poor son, a twenty-year-old boy who gave himself to the fight for independence, a gallant fellow with a red kerchief tied on his head, which made it difficult to see the blood when the ferocious Spanish Captain Lorenzo Garrote executed the sentence. Garrote saved his own life and embittered mine … But I realized, Baltasar, that I did not fear the ordinary hell of flames and physical suffering but the hell I imagined, and that hell is a place where no one speaks: the place of eternal, total silence forever; never more a voice, never a word. For that reason I kneel before you and beg you to listen to me, to postpone that inferno of silence, even if you do not speak to me, even if there is a hint of disdain in your stubborn silence. It does not matter, my little brother, I swear it does not matter, as long as we do not let our language die. Listen to me, then: I admit that I rebelled because I was unhappy when I lost my living, but now my rebellion has gone far beyond that. My rebellion led me to one gain after another: this is what I want to communicate to you; this is what you should understand. I gained rational faith without losing religious faith: I could have said, simply, ‘I am a rebel priest; those who excommunicate me are right. I am going to deliver myself over to independence, to the wisdom of the age, to faith in progress; I am simply going to damn religious faith.’ Everything was joining against my faith: my rage when they declared me a heretic and blasphemer, my fear when they denied me the Host, my rancor when they killed my son, my temptation to be only a rationalist rebel. This has been my most terrible struggle, worse than any military battle, worse than all the spilled blood and the obligation to execute: not to give in before my judges, not to admit they were right or give them the pleasure of saying, ‘Look, we were right, he was a heretic, he was an atheist, he deserved to be excommunicated.’ They ask me to repent. They don’t know that that would mean delivering myself to hell. It would mean admitting the absolute evil in me—reason without faith—because I can lose the Church that has expelled me, but I cannot lose God; and to repent would be exactl
y that, to return to the Church but to lose God—not reason, which can coexist with the Church, but God who can exist without the Church and without reason.”
Quintana lowered his head, and Baltasar saw the tawny-colored cloth of his celebrated cap hiding his curly dark hair, which the priest revealed so as not to stand out from the other men in the encampment, but in so doing he revealed himself with more fanfare than if he’d proclaimed it aloud: only Anselmo Quintana wears a cap amid all these top hats worn by the lawyers and the red kerchiefs worn by the troops; thus, Anselmo Quintana is the man who does not use a cap to disguise himself but who, by the same token, does not wear frock coats or tie kerchiefs on his head and who stares intensely at two bottles in order to choose between good and bad alcohol just as he might choose between reason and the Church. But you can’t just choose God: God is, with or without the Church, reason, or believers. “That’s where I have concentrated my real rebellion,” the priest Anselmo continued. “I’m telling this to you, Baltasar, because you are like my younger brother in the world and you are also rebelling against its laws, but you remain open to new persuasions. My real rebellion was to suffer the Calvary of losing my Church but not my God … Imagine what went through my soul when I took up arms on the Gulf Coast, angry over the loss of my living. Imagine me pug-nosed and blind, just ten years ago, consumed with lust, in love with gambling, with women, a horse’s ass of a priest, with a troop of bastards scattered all over the place, a seducer of women who came to kneel next to me and who thought that, to receive my forgiveness, they had to give themselves to me, and from time to time I did not discourage them … I took up arms, my boy, being the kind of man I was, and then excommunication hits along with the rain of labels: apostate against the Holy Catholic religion, libertine, seditious, revolutionary, schismatic, implacable enemy of Christianity and of the state, deist, materialist, and atheist, guilty of divine and human treason, seducer, impenitent, lascivious, hypocrite, traitor to king and country. They didn’t omit a one, Baltasar. The Holy Inquisition did not omit a single crime. They threw all of them at my poor head, and every time an accusation struck me between the eyes, I would say, ‘They are right; they must be right. It’s true, I deserve this, and my poor, damned motive for rebelling makes me a criminal in all those other things, and that, too, must be true…’ But I think, brother Baltasar, that the Inquisition, as usual, went too far; they accused me of too many things, some right, others outlandish, and I said to myself then, ‘God cannot look on me with as much injustice as my judges. In God’s vocabulary there are probably few words for me, but there most certainly must be a dictionary common to Jesus Christ and His servant Anselmo Quintana. They throw so many words at me, but not enough that every week, from Thursday to Friday, you, Lord, cannot still speak, my Jesus, with the most lascivious, impenitent seducer among your servants…’
“The word is the only thing that links us when everything else becomes useless, treacherous, threatening. The word is the ultimate reality of Christ, His vigil among us, what allows us, without pride, to say, ‘I am like Him…’”
Quintana raised his voice as he said this, as if his faith could all be reduced to these few words, and Baltasar, in the half light of the confessional, saw through the grating not the fluttering earflaps of Father Anselmo Quintana’s cap but the head of Gabriela Cóo, crowned with clouds and weeds. He had to dispel that adorable vision because the voice of the priest continued, lower now, but more certain as well: “From that time I only spoke with Him, but He was more severe than all my judges put together, because no one can fool Him. There are no little tricks with Him. God is the Supreme Being who knows all, even what we imagine about Him, and steals the march on us and imagines us first; and if we go about thinking that it depends on us to believe or not in Him, He steals the march on us once again and finds the way of telling us that He will go on believing in us no matter what happens, even if we abandon Him and deny Him. That is the voice I listened to during the night when my soul suffered tribulation because of the edicts of expulsion from the Church and the calls for me to repent: the voice of Christ saying to me, ‘I am going to go on believing in you, Anselmo Quintana, even if you are a seducer, lascivious, a libertine, a hypocrite, which you are; why deny it? But what you are not, Anselmo, my son, is an apostate, a heretic, an atheist, or a traitor to your country, that you are not…’
“‘Listen to me carefully, your God says to you: there is no way that I’m going to allow that lie to pass.’”
He raised his eyes to tell Baltasar that all he needed to hear from God’s voice were those words, to fight for ten years, “to not yield in my battle for my country or in my other struggle for the love and confidence of my Creator. Imagine what one thing would have been without the other—neither the nation nor God; that most certainly would have been my anguish, and they know it, which is why they call me a heretic, excommunicate me, and ask me to repent and come back to the sheepfold. But Jesus said to me, ‘Anselmo, my son, don’t be a comfortable Christian; make life hell for the Church and the king, because they adore tranquil Christians. I, on the other hand, adore rampaging Christians like you; you gain nothing by being a Catholic without problems, a simple believer, a man of faith who doesn’t even realize that faith is absurd and is faith and not reason because of that. Reason cannot be illogical; faith is and has to be, because you have to believe in me against all evidence, and if I were a logician, I wouldn’t be God. I wouldn’t have sacrificed myself. I would have accepted all the temptations in the desert and would be’—are you listening to me, Anselmo, my son, are you listening to me, brother Baltasar?—‘the very same long-tailed, incorrigible Devil who invented the statement “I think, therefore I am.”’ What pretension! Not even my thoughts are my own, not even my very existence. I neither think nor exist alone. I share each word with God, with you, Baltasar, and each heartbeat as well. Then I learned something else, that it was my obligation, in the name of the simple people of this world, to be complicated; just ask yourself right now as I look at you and listen to you, if you aren’t too comfortable in your philosophy, because I think you are being very simple with your own secular faith in reason and progress. You are as foolishly devout as those women who grow old in churches, sweeping and lighting candles every single day. Please, Baltasar, always be a problem, be a problem for your Rousseau and your Montesquieu, and all your philosophers. Don’t let them pass through your soul without paying something at the spiritual customs house; don’t give your faith to any ruler, any secular state, any philosophy, any military or economic power without adding your confusion, your complication, your exceptions, your damned imagination that deforms all truths.
“Well!” shouted Father Quintana in a flash of good humor. “Wouldn’t I have been better off losing my faith and avoiding all that anguish? No sir, because then I wouldn’t have fought for independence. It’s as simple as that. I would have let myself be beaten in the first fight. My faith in the nation that I want, free, without slaves, without the horrible need for thousands and thousands of bottom dogs, ignorant, dying of hunger, all this, Baltasar, would not have been possible without my faith in God. You may have your own formula. This is mine. I’m not asking you to believe as I do. I’m not that simple. I am asking you to complicate your own secular faith. You’ve come from far, far away, and this continent is very large. But we have two things in common. We understand each other because we speak Spanish. And, like it or not, we’ve had three centuries of Catholic, Christian culture, marked by the symbols, values, follies, the crimes and the dreams of Christianity in the New World. I know fellows like you: they’ve all passed through here; you’ve already seen them, although the ones you saw were a bit more beaten up than you, like the lawyers, scribes, authors of laws and proclamations in my own company. I’ve talked with all of you for ten years. You have given me the education which, sadly, I never had. My parents were mule drivers from the coast. I was in a religious seminary when I was young, and now that I’m grown up, I’m i
n the secular seminar with all of you. But let’s get on with it. I’m not foretelling anything—I have it right under my nose, as pugged and battered as it may be. All of you would like to put an end to that past which seems unjust and absurd to you, to forget it. Yes, how good it would have been to be founded by Montesquieu instead of Torquemada. But it didn’t happen that way. Do we want now to be Europeans, modern, rich, governed by the spirit of the laws and the universal rights of man? Well, let me tell you that nothing like that will ever happen unless we carry the corpse of our past with us. What I’m asking you is that we not sacrifice anything, son, not the magic of the Indians, not the theology of the Christians, not the reason of our European contemporaries. It would be better if we gathered up everything we are in order to go on being and to be, finally, something better. Don’t let yourself be divided and dazzled by a single idea, Baltasar. Put all your ideas on one side of the balance, then put everything that negates them on the other, and then you’ll be closer to the truth. Work counter to your secular faith, brother. Put next to it my divine faith, but as ballast, weight, contrast, and a part of your secularism. I do the same thing, working from my faith, with yours … Take me into account more, much more tomorrow than today, and think seriously that if I not only joined but forwarded the revolution until the end, it was so that history would not leave the Church behind—my church. See to it that you don’t leave your own church of romantic, anticlerical philosophers behind. I don’t want to find out ten years from now that you became just one more man made sick by frustrated Utopias, by betrayed ideals. And don’t think I don’t thank you all for your skepticism, my good company of lawyers. But I have what you lack, let me say it with forgiveness and humility. I had to burn the midnight oil reading St. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, St. Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus. Rousseau and Voltaire are a corrective for me, even an emetic. But you modern fellows, what will you use as a corrective for what you’ve learned? Experience, of course. But experience without ideas does not become a destiny, a soul … And what is the soul, St. Thomas wonders, but the form of the body? Think about it and you’ll see that that’s no paradox: the soul is the form of the body. Without the soul, the body would not last, would begin instantly to stink and disintegrate … Give soul to your body, Baltasar, and let’s hope we see each other again in ten years … Bah, perhaps tomorrow I’ll be captured, and perhaps that’s why I felt the need to talk with you today. I want you to think about me when you hear about my end. I also want you to take charge of my memory.”
The Campaign Page 23