Monsignor Quixote

by Graham Greene

  ‘We will wait till they drive away,’ the Mayor said.

  ‘What is wrong with us, Sancho? Why are they so suspicious?’

  ‘You must admit,’ the Mayor said, ‘that it is not very usual for a monsignor to lend his clerical collar . . .’

  ‘I will follow after them and explain.’

  ‘No, no, better wait here. They are waiting too. To see whether we are really going to Avila.’

  ‘Then to show them that we are let us drive on – to Avila.’

  ‘I think it would be better to avoid Avila.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They will have already warned the Guardia there.’

  ‘Of what? We are innocent. We are doing harm to no one.’

  ‘We are doing harm to their peace of mind. Let them get tired of waiting. I think we should open another bottle of wine.’

  They settled again among the débris of their meal and the Mayor began to pull a cork. He said, ‘If I could suspend my profound disbelief in God, I would still find it hard to believe that he really wanted those two Guardia to be born – not to speak of Hitler and the Generalissimo – or even if you like Stalin. If only their poor parents had been permitted to use a contraceptive . . .’

  ‘That would have been a grave sin, Sancho. To kill a human soul . . .’

  ‘Has sperm a soul? When a man makes love he kills a million million spermatozoa – minus one. It’s lucky for Heaven that there’s such a lot of waste or it might become severely over-populated.’

  ‘But it is against the Law of Nature, Sancho.’

  The cork came out with a pop – it was a very young wine.

  ‘I have always been mystified about the Law of Nature,’ Sancho said. ‘What law? What nature?’

  ‘It is the law which was put into our hearts at birth. Our conscience tells us when we break the law.’

  ‘Mine doesn’t. Or I’ve never noticed it. Who invented the law?’

  ‘God.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course you would say that, but let me put it in another way. What human first taught us that it existed?’

  ‘From the very earliest days of Christianity . . .’

  ‘Come, come, monsignor. Can you find anything about natural law in St Paul?’

  ‘Alas, Sancho, I don’t remember, I grow old, but I am sure . . .’

  ‘The Law of Nature as I see it, father, is that a cat has a natural desire to kill a bird or a mouse. All right for the cat, but not so good for the bird or the mouse.’

  ‘Mockery is not an argument, Sancho.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t deny the conscience altogether, monsignor. I would feel uneasy, I suppose, for a time if I killed a man without adequate reason, but I think I would feel uneasy for a whole lifetime if I fathered an unwanted child.’

  ‘We must trust in the mercy of God.’

  ‘He’s not always so merciful, is he, not in Africa or India? And even in our own country if the child has to live in poverty, disease, probably without any chance . . .’

  ‘The chance of eternal happiness,’ Father Quixote said.

  ‘Oh yes, and according to your Church the chance also of eternal misery. If his circumstances give him a turn to what you call evil.’

  The reference to Hell closed Father Quixote’s lips. ‘I believe, I believe,’ he told himself, ‘I must believe,’ but he thought too of the silence of St John, like the silence in the eye of a tornado. And was it the Devil who reminded him of how the Romans, according to St Augustine, had a god called Vaticanus, ‘the god of children’s crying’? He said, ‘You have helped yourself to a glass of wine but not me.’

  ‘Hold out your glass then. Is there a little cheese left?’

  Father Quixote searched among the rubble. ‘A man can restrain his appetite,’ he said.

  ‘The cheese?’

  ‘No, no. I meant his sexual appetite.’

  ‘Is that control natural? Perhaps for you and the Pope in Rome, but for two people who love each other and live together and have hardly enough to eat themselves, leave alone a young brat with an appetite . . .’

  It was the age-old argument and he had no convincing answer. ‘There are natural means,’ he said as he had said a hundred times before, aware only of the extent of his ignorance.

  ‘Who but moral theologians would call them natural? So many days in each month in which to make love, but first you must put in your thermometer and take the temperature . . . It’s not the way desire works.’

  Father Quixote remembered a phrase from one of the old books he valued most, Augustine’s City of God: ‘The motion will sometimes be importunate against the will, and sometimes immovable when it is desired, and being fervent in the mind, yet will be frozen in the body. Thus wondrously does this lust fail man.’ It was not a hope to be relied on.

  ‘I suppose that your Father Heribert Jone would say that to make love with your wife in safety after her menopause was a form of masturbation.’

  ‘Perhaps he would, poor man.’

  Poor man? He thought: At least St Augustine wrote of sex from experience and not from theory: he was a sinner and a saint; he was not a moral theologian; he was a poet and even a humorist. As students how they had laughed at one passage in The City of God: ‘There are those that can break wind backward so artificially that you would think they sung.’ What would Father Heribert Jone have thought of that? It was difficult to visualise a moral theologian having his morning stool.

  ‘Give me another bit of cheese,’ Father Quixote said. ‘Listen. Here comes the jeep.’

  The jeep drove slowly past them. The fat Guardia was at the wheel and the thin one looked penetratingly towards them as though he were a naturalist observing two rare insects which he must remember to describe with accuracy. Father Quixote felt glad that he was again wearing his clerical collar. He even pushed out a foot to show the purple socks which he hated.

  ‘We have conquered the windmills,’ the Mayor said.

  ‘What windmills?’

  ‘The Guardia revolve with every wind. They were there with the Generalissimo. They are there now. If my party came to power they would still be there, turning with the wind from the East.’

  ‘Shall we take the road again now they are gone?’

  ‘Not yet. I want to see if they come back.’

  ‘If you don’t want them to follow us to Avila, what way shall we take?’

  ‘I’m sorry to deprive you of St Teresa’s ring finger, but I think Segovia would be better. Tomorrow we will visit in Salamanca a holier shrine than the one you prayed at today.’

  The first chill of the evening had touched them. The Mayor moved restlessly to the road and back again: no sign of the Guardia. He said, ‘Were you never in love with a woman, father?’

  ‘Never. Not in the way you mean.’

  ‘Were you never tempted . . .?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Strange and inhuman.’

  ‘It’s not so strange or inhuman,’ Father Quixote replied. ‘I have been protected like many others. It is a little like the taboo of incest. Not many are tempted to break that.’

  ‘No, but there are always so many alternatives to incest. Like a friend’s sister.’

  ‘I had my alternative too.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘A girl called Martin.’

  ‘She was your Dulcinea?’

  ‘Yes, if you like, but she lived a very long way from El Toboso. All the same her letters reached me there. They were a great comfort to me when things were difficult with the bishop. There was one thing she wrote – I think of it nearly every day: “Before we die by the sword, let us die by pin stabs.”’

  ‘Your ancestor would have preferred the sword.’

  ‘All the same, perhaps, in the end it was by pin stabs that he died.’

  ‘Martin – from the way you pronounce it she was not a Spanish girl?’

  ‘No, she was a Norman. You mustn’t misunderstand me. She was dead many years before I knew her and grew to lo
ve her. You have heard of her perhaps under another name. She lived at Lisieux. The Carmelites there had a special vocation – to pray for priests. I hope – I think – she prays for me.’

  ‘Oh, you are talking about that St Thérèse – the name Martin confused me.’

  ‘I’m glad there’s a Communist who has heard of her.’

  ‘You know I was not always a Communist.’

  ‘Well, anyway, perhaps a true Communist is a sort of priest, and in that case she prays undoubtedly for you.’

  ‘It’s cold waiting around here. Let’s be off.’

  They drove for a while in silence back along the road they had come. There was no sign of the jeep. They passed the turning to Avila and followed the sign towards Segovia. The Mayor said at last, ‘So that is your love story, father. Mine is rather different, except that the woman is dead too, like yours.’

  ‘God rest her soul,’ Father Quixote said. It was an automatic reflex when he spoke, but in the silence that descended on both of them he prayed to the souls in Purgatory: ‘You are nearer God than I am. Pray for us both.’

  The great Roman aqueduct of Segovia loomed ahead of them, casting a long shadow in the evening light.

  They found a lodging in a small albergue not far from the Church of St Martin – that name again – the name by which he always thought of her. She seemed closer to him then than in her trappings as a saint or under her sentimental nickname of the Little Flower. He would even sometimes address her in his prayers as Señorita Martin as though the family name might catch her ear through all the thousands of incantations addressed to her in all tongues by the light of candles before the plaster image.

  They had drunk enough by the roadside and neither was in the mood to seek a restaurant. It was as though two dead women had been travelling with them during those last kilometres. Father Quixote was glad to have a room to himself, minute though it was. It seemed to him that his journey had already extended across the whole breadth of Spain, though he knew he was not much more than two hundred kilometres from La Mancha. The slowness of Rocinante made a nonsense of distance. Well, the furthest that his ancestor had gone from La Mancha in all his journeys had been the city of Barcelona and yet anyone who had read the true history would have thought that Don Quixote had covered the whole immense area of Spain. There was a virtue in slowness which we had lost. Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.

  Before he went to sleep Father Quixote read a little because he was still haunted by his dream. He opened as was his custom St Francis de Sales at random. Even before the birth of Christ men had taken the sortes Virgilianae as a kind of horoscope and he had more faith in St Francis than in Virgil – that rather derivative poet. What he found in The Love of God astonished him a little, but all the same it encouraged him. ‘Among the reflections and resolutions it is good to make use of colloquies, and speak sometimes to our Lord, sometimes to the Angels, to the Saints and to oneself, to one’s own heart, to sinners, and even to inanimate creatures . . .’ He said to Rocinante, ‘Forgive me. I have driven you too hard,’ and fell into a dreamless sleep.

  VI

  HOW MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE AND

  SANCHO VISIT ANOTHER HOLY SITE

  ‘I am glad,’ the Mayor said as they took the road to Salamanca, ‘that you have at last consented to put on that bib – what do you call it?’

  ‘A pechera.’

  ‘I was afraid that we might find ourselves in prison if those Guardia checked too quickly in Avila.’

  ‘Why? For what?’

  ‘The reason is unimportant, it’s only the fact which counts. I had some experience of prison during the Civil War. There was always a certain tension in prison, you know. One’s friends went away and never came back.’

  ‘But now – there’s no war now. Things are better.’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps. Of course in Spain one has always found that the best people have been for a while in prison. It’s possible that we would never have heard of your great ancestor if Cervantes had not served his time that way more than once. The prison gives you even more chance to think than a monastery where the poor devils have to wake up at all sorts of ungodly hours to pray. In prison I was never woken up before six o’clock and at night the lights went out usually at nine. Of course interrogations were apt to be painful, but they took place at a reasonable hour. Never during the siesta. The great thing to remember, monsignor, is that unlike an abbot an interrogator wants to sleep at his usual hour.’

  In Arévalo there were some old torn posters of a travelling circus on the walls. A man in tights displayed arms and thighs of an exorbitant size. El Tigre he was called – ‘The Great Wrestler of the Pyrenees’.

  ‘How little Spain changes,’ the Mayor said. ‘You would never feel in France that you were in the world of Racine or Molière, nor in London that you were still close to Shakespeare’s time. It is only in Spain and Russia that time stands still. We shall have our adventures on the road, father, much as your ancestor did. We have already battled with the windmills and we have only missed by a week or two an adventure with the Tiger. He would probably have proved as tame when challenged as your ancestor found the lion.’

  ‘But I am not Don Quixote, Sancho. I would be afraid to challenge a man of such a size.’

  ‘You underrate yourself, father. Your faith is your spear. If the Tiger had dared to say something derogatory of your beloved Dulcinea . . .’

  ‘But you know I have no Dulcinea, Sancho.’

  ‘I was referring of course to Señorita Martin.’

  Another poster which they passed exhibited a tattooed lady almost as large as the Tiger. ‘Spain has always loved monsters,’ Sancho said and he gave his strange yapping laugh. ‘What would you do, father, if you had to be present at the birth of a monster with two heads?’

  ‘I would baptize it, of course. What an absurd question.’

  ‘But you would be wrong, monsignor. Remember I have been reading Father Heribert Jone. He teaches that if you doubt whether you are dealing with one monster or two, you must strike an average and baptize one head absolutely and the other conditionally.’

  ‘Really, Sancho, I am not responsible for Father Jone. You seem to have read him far more closely than I have ever done.’

  ‘And in the case of a difficult birth, father, when some other part than the head is presented first, you must baptize that, so that in the case of a breech birth . . .’

  ‘Tonight, Sancho, I promise you that I will take up the study of Marx and Lenin if you will leave Father Jone alone.’

  ‘Then begin with Marx and The Communist Manifesto. The Manifesto is short and Marx is a much better writer than Lenin.’

  They crossed the River Tormes into the grey old city of Salamanca in the early afternoon. Father Quixote was still unaware of the object of their pilgrimage, but he was happy in his ignorance. This was the university city where he had as a boy dreamt of making his studies. Here he could visit the actual lecture room where the great St John of the Cross attended the classes of the theologian Fray Luis de León, and Fray Luis might well have known his ancestor if the Don’s travels had taken him to Salamanca. Looking up at the great carved gateway of the university, with the chiselled Pope surrounded by his cardinals, the heads in medallion of all the Catholic kings, where even Venus and Hercules had been found a place, not to mention a very small frog, he muttered a prayer. The frog had been pointed out by two children who demanded payment in return.

  ‘What did you say, father?’

  ‘This is a holy city, Sancho.’

  ‘You feel at home here, don’t you? Here in the library are all your books of chivalry in their first editions, mouldering away in old calf. I doubt if any student draws one out to blow the dust away.’

  ‘How lucky you were to study here, Sancho.’

  ‘Lucky? I’m not so sure of that. I feel very much an exile now. Perhaps we should have travelled east towards the home I’ve nev
er known. To the future, not to the past. Not to the home I left.’

  ‘You went through this very doorway to your lectures. I’m trying to imagine the young Sancho . . .’

  ‘They were not lectures by Father Heribert Jone.’

  ‘Wasn’t there at least one professor whom you were prepared to listen to?’

  ‘Oh yes. In those days I still had a half-belief. A complete believer I could never have listened to for long, but there was one professor with a half-belief and I listened to him for two years. Perhaps I would have lasted longer at Salamanca if he had stayed, but he went into exile – as he had already done years before. He wasn’t a Communist, I doubt if he was a Socialist, but he couldn’t swallow the Generalissimo. So here we’ve come to see what’s left of him.’

  In a very small square, above folds of rumpled green-black stone, an aggressive head with a pointed beard stared upwards at the shutters of a little house. ‘That’s where he died,’ Sancho said, ‘in a room up there sitting with a friend before a charcoal burner to keep him warm. His friend saw suddenly that one of his slippers was on fire and yet Unamuno had not stirred. You can still see the stigmata of the burnt shoe in the wooden floor.’

  ‘Unamuno.’ Father Quixote repeated the name and looked up with respect at the face of stone, the hooded eyes expressing the fierceness and the arrogance of individual thought.

  ‘You know how he loved your ancestor and studied his life. If he had lived in those days perhaps he would have followed the Don on the mule called Dapple instead of Sancho. Many priests gave a sigh of relief when they heard of his death. Perhaps even the Pope in Rome felt easier without him. And Franco too, of course, if he was intelligent enough to recognize the strength of his enemy. In a sense he was my enemy too for he kept me in the Church for several years with that half-belief of his which for a while I could share.’

  ‘And now you have a complete belief, don’t you? In the prophet Marx. You don’t have to think for yourself any more. Isaiah has spoken. You are in the hands of future history. How happy you must be with your complete belief. There’s only one thing you will ever lack – the dignity of despair.’ Father Quixote spoke with an unaccustomed anger – or was it, he wondered, envy?