Monsignor Quixote

by Graham Greene

  ‘Have I complete belief?’ Sancho asked. ‘Sometimes I wonder. The ghost of my professor haunts me. I dream I am sitting in his lecture room and he is reading to us from one of his own books. I hear him saying, “There is a muffled voice, a voice of uncertainty which whispers in the ears of the believer. Who knows? Without this uncertainty how could we live?”’

  ‘He wrote that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They returned to Rocinante.

  ‘Where do we go from here, Sancho?’

  ‘We go to the cemetery. You will find his tomb rather different from the Generalissimo’s.’

  It was a rough road out to the cemetery on the extreme edge of the city – not a smooth road for a hearse to travel. The body, Father Quixote thought as Rocinante groaned when the gears changed, would have had a good shaking up before it reached the quiet ground, but as he soon discovered there had been no quiet ground left for a new body – the earth was fully occupied by the proud tombs of generations before. At the gates they were given a number, as in the cloakroom of a museum or a restaurant, and they walked down the long white wall in which boxes of the dead had been inserted until they reached number 340.

  ‘I prefer this to the Generalissimo’s mountain,’ Sancho said. ‘When I am alone, I sleep more easily in a small bed.’

  As they walked back to the car Sancho asked, ‘Did you say a prayer?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The same prayer as you said for the Generalissimo?’

  ‘There’s only one prayer we need say for anyone dead.’

  ‘So you’d say it for Stalin?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And for Hitler?’

  ‘There are degrees of evil, Sancho – and of good. We can try to discriminate between the living, but with the dead we can’t discriminate. They all have the same need of our prayer.’

  VII

  HOW IN SALAMANCA MONSIGNOR

  QUIXOTE CONTINUED HIS STUDIES

  The hotel in which they lodged in Salamanca was in a little grey side street. It seemed quiet and friendly to Father Quixote. His knowledge of hotels was necessarily limited, but there were several things about this hotel which particularly pleased him and he expressed his pleasure to Sancho when they were alone and he was sitting on Sancho’s bed on the first floor. Father Quixote had been lodged on the third, ‘where it will be quieter’ the manageress had told him.

  ‘The patrona was truly welcoming,’ Father Quixote said, ‘unlike that poor old woman in Madrid, and what a large staff of charming young women for so small a hotel.’

  ‘In a university city,’ Sancho said, ‘there are always a lot of customers.’

  ‘And the establishment is so clean. Did you notice how outside every room on the way up to the third floor there was a pile of linen? They must change the linen every evening after the time of siesta. I liked to see too when we arrived the real family atmosphere – all the staff sitting down to an early supper with the patrona at the head of the table ladling out the soup. Really, she was just like a mother with her daughters.’

  ‘She was very impressed at meeting a monsignor.’

  ‘And did you notice how she quite forgot to give us a ficha to fill in? All she was concerned with was our comfort. I found it very moving.’

  There was a knock on the door. A girl entered with a bottle of champagne in an ice-bucket. She gave Father Quixote a nervous smile and got out of the room again quickly.

  ‘Did you order this, Sancho?’

  ‘No, no. I don’t care for champagne. But it’s the custom of the house.’

  ‘Perhaps we ought to drink a little just to show that we appreciate their kindness.’

  ‘Oh, it will be included in the bill. So will their kindness be.’

  ‘Don’t be a cynic, Sancho. That was a very sweet smile the girl gave us. One can’t pay for a smile like that.’

  ‘Well, I’ll open it if you like. It won’t be so good as our manchegan wine.’ Sancho began a long struggle between the cork and his thumb, turning his back on Father Quixote for fear of shooting him with the cork. Father Quixote took the opportunity to roam around the room. He said, ‘What a good idea. They provide a foot-bath.’

  ‘What do you mean, a foot-bath? This damned cork won’t come out.’

  ‘I see a little book of Marx on your bed. May I borrow it to read before I sleep?’

  ‘Of course. It’s The Communist Manifesto I recommended to you. Much easier to read than Das Kapital. I don’t think they mean us to drink the champagne. The damned cork won’t come out. They’ll charge for it just the same.’

  Father Quixote had always been inquisitive in small ways. His greatest temptation in the confessional box was to ask unnecessary and even irrelevant questions. Now he couldn’t resist opening a little square envelope which was lying on Sancho’s bedside table – it made him think of his childhood and the tiny letters his mother would sometimes leave for him to read before sleep.

  There was an explosion, the cork cracked against the wall, and a fountain of champagne missed the glass. Sancho swore and turned. ‘What on earth are you doing, father?’

  Father Quixote was blowing up a sausage-shaped balloon. He squeezed the end with his fingers. ‘How do you keep the air in?’ he asked. ‘Surely there should be some sort of nozzle?’ He began to blow again and the balloon exploded, less loudly though rather more sharply than the champagne bottle. ‘Oh dear, I’m so sorry, Sancho, I didn’t mean to break your balloon. Was it a gift for a child?’

  ‘No, father, it was a gift for the girl who brought the champagne. Don’t worry. I’ve got several more.’ He added with a kind of anger, ‘Have you never seen a contraceptive before? No, I suppose you haven’t.’

  ‘I don’t understand. A contraceptive? But what can you do with a thing that size?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been that size if you hadn’t blown it up.’

  Father Quixote sank down on Sancho’s bed. He asked, ‘Where have you brought me, Sancho?’

  ‘To a house that I knew as a student. It’s wonderful how these places survive. They are far more stable than dictatorships and war doesn’t touch them – even civil war.’

  ‘You should never have brought me here. A priest . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry. You won’t be bothered in any way. I’ve explained things to the lady of the house. She understands.’

  ‘But why, Sancho, why?’

  ‘I thought it was a good thing to avoid a hotel ficha for at least tonight. Those civil guards . . .’

  ‘So we are hiding in a brothel?’

  ‘Yes. You could put it that way.’

  A most unexpected sound came from the bed. It was the sound of strangled laughter.

  Sancho said, ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you laugh before, father. What’s so funny?’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s really very wrong of me to laugh. But I just thought: What would the bishop say if he knew? A monsignor in a brothel. Well, why not? Christ mixed with publicans and sinners. All the same, I think I had better go upstairs and lock my door. But be prudent, dear Sancho, be prudent.’

  ‘That’s what they’re for – those things you call balloons. For prudence. I suppose Father Heribert Jone would say that I am adding onanism to fornication.’

  ‘Please don’t tell me, Sancho, don’t ever tell me, about such things. They are private, they belong only to you, unless, of course, you wanted to confess.’

  ‘What penance would you give me, father, if I came to you in the morning?’

  ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, but I have had very little practice in dealing with that kind of thing in El Toboso? I am afraid perhaps, that people are afraid to tell me of anything serious because they meet me every day in the street. You know – of course you don’t know – I don’t like the taste of tomatoes at all. But suppose Father Heribert Jone had written that it was a mortal sin to eat tomatoes and the old lady who lives next door to me came to me in the church to confess she had eaten a tomat
o. What penance would I give her? As I don’t eat tomatoes myself I wouldn’t even be able to imagine how deep her depravity might be. Of course a rule would have been broken . . . a rule . . . one can’t avoid knowing that.’

  ‘You are avoiding my question, father, what penance . . .?’

  ‘Perhaps one Our Father and one Hail Mary.’

  ‘Only one?’

  ‘One, said properly, must surely be the equal of a hundred run off without thought. I don’t see the point of numbers. We aren’t in business as shopkeepers.’ He lifted himself heavily from the bed.

  ‘Where are you going, father?’

  ‘Off to read myself to sleep with prophet Marx. I wish I could say goodnight to you, Sancho, but I doubt whether yours will be what I would call a good night.’

  VIII

  HOW MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE HAD

  A CURIOUS ENCOUNTER IN

  VALLADOLID

  Sancho, there was no doubting it, was in a very morose mood. He showed himself unwilling to make any suggestion as to which road they should take out of Salamanca. It was as though he had been soured by the long night that he had spent in the house of his youth. How dangerous it always is to try to recapture in middle age a scene from one’s youth, and perhaps he resented also the unusually high spirits shown by Father Quixote. For want of a more cogent reason for going anywhere Father Quixote suggested they take the road to Valladolid in order to see the house where the great biographer Cervantes had completed the life of his forebear. ‘Unless,’ he hesitated, ‘you think we may possibly encounter more windmills on that route?’

  ‘They have more important things to think about than us.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Haven’t you read the paper today? A general has been shot in Madrid.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘In the old days they would have blamed it on the Communists. Thank God, now it’s always the Basques and ETA.’

  ‘God rest his soul,’ Father Quixote said.

  ‘You don’t need to pity a general.’

  ‘I don’t pity him. I never pity the dead. I envy them.’

  Sancho’s mood remained. He spoke out only once during the next twenty kilometres and then it was to attack Father Quixote. ‘Why don’t you speak up and say what you think?’

  ‘Think about what?’

  ‘Last night, of course.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll tell you about last night when we have lunch. I was very pleased with the Marx you lent me. He was a really good man at heart, wasn’t he? I was quite surprised by some of the things he wrote. No dull economics.’

  ‘I’m not talking about Marx. I’m talking about me.’

  ‘You? I hope you slept well?’

  ‘You know perfectly well that I wasn’t sleeping.’

  ‘My dear Sancho, don’t tell me you lay awake all night long?’

  ‘Not all night long, of course. But far too much of it. You know well enough what I was up to.’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’

  ‘I told you clearly enough. Before you went to bed.’

  ‘Ah but, Sancho, I’m trained to forget what I’m told.’

  ‘It wasn’t in the confessional.’

  ‘No, but it’s very much easier if one is a priest to treat anything one is told as a confession. I never repeat what anybody tells me – even to myself if possible.’

  Sancho grunted and fell silent. Father Quixote thought that he detected a sense of disappointment in his companion and felt a little guilty.

  In a restaurant called the Valencia, off the Plaza Mayor, sitting in a little patio behind the bar and drinking a glass of white wine, he felt his high spirits begin to return. He had enjoyed the visit they had first paid to the house of Cervantes which had cost them fifty pesetas each (he wondered whether he might have enjoyed a free entry if he had given his name at the desk). Some of the furniture had actually belonged to the biographer; a letter in his own hand addressed to the King dealing with the tax on oil was hung on the white lime-washed wall which he could well imagine splashed with blood on that terrible night when the bleeding body of Don Gaspar de Ezpeleta had been carried inside and Cervantes had been arrested on the false suspicion of having been an accomplice in his murder. ‘Of course he was let out on bail,’ Father Quixote told Sancho, ‘but think of going on with the Life of my ancestor under the weight of that threat. I sometimes wonder whether he had that night in mind when he wrote of how your ancestor, after he became governor of the island, ordered a youth to sleep a night in gaol and the youth replied, “You haven’t enough power to make me sleep in prison.” Perhaps those were the very words that the old man Cervantes used to the magistrate. “Suppose you order me to prison and put me in chains and shut me in a cell, all the same if I don’t wish to sleep, you haven’t the power to make me.”’

  ‘The Civil Guard today,’ Sancho said, ‘would know how to answer that. They would put you to sleep fast enough with one blow.’ He added with gloom, ‘I could do with some sleep.’

  ‘Ah, but your ancestor, Sancho, was a kindly man and he let the youth go. And the magistrate did the same with Cervantes.’

  Now in the patio, while the sunlight touched with gold the white wine in his glass, Father Quixote’s thoughts returned to Marx. He said, ‘You know, I think my ancestor would have got on well with Marx. Poor Marx – he had his books of chivalry too that belonged to the past.’

  ‘Marx was looking to the future.’

  ‘Yes, but he was mourning all the time for the past – the past of his imagination. Listen to this, Sancho,’ and Father Quixote took The Communist Manifesto out of his pocket. ‘“The bourgeoisie has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations . . . It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” Can’t you hear the very voice of my ancestor mourning for lost days? I learnt his words by heart when I was a boy and I remember them, though a bit roughly, still. “Now idleness triumphs over labour, vice over virtue, presumption over valour, and theory over the practice of arms, which only lived and flourished in the golden age of knights errant. Amadis of Gaul, Palmerin of England, Roland . . .” And listen to The Communist Manifesto again – you can’t deny that this man Marx was a true follower of my ancestor. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their chain of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newfound ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” He was a true prophet, Sancho. He even foresaw Stalin. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned . . .”’

  A man who was lunching alone in the little patio paused with a fork raised to his lips. Then, as Sancho looked across the floor at him, he bowed his head and began again hurriedly to eat. Sancho said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t read quite so loudly, father. You are intoning as though you were in church.’

  ‘There are many holy words written which are not in the Bible or the Fathers. Those words of Marx demand in a way to be intoned . . . “Heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour . . . chivalrous enthusiasm.”’

  ‘Franco is dead, father, but all the same do please show a bit of prudence. That man over there is listening to every word you say.’

  ‘Of course, like all the prophets, Marx does make mistakes. Even St Paul was liable to error.’

  ‘I don’t like the man’s brief-case. It’s an official sort of brief-case. I can smell the secret police from thirty metres away.’

  ‘Let me read you what I think is his biggest mistake. The origin of all the other mistakes to come.’

  ‘For God’s sake, father, if you must read, read in a low voice.’

  To please the Mayor, Father Quixote almost whispered the words. Sancho had to lean close to him in order to hear, and they must have had the air of two conspirators. ‘“The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industrial labour has stripped him of every trace of nat
ional character.” Perhaps that seemed true when he wrote, Sancho, but surely the world has taken a very different route. Listen to this too: “The modern labourer, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper.” You know, once some years ago I took a holiday with a friend – a priest – his name was – oh dear, how one forgets names after a glass or two of wine. He had a parish on the Costa Brava (it was when Rocinante was very young) and I saw the English paupers – so Marx calls them – lying in the sun on the beaches there. As for not having a national character, they had forced the local people to open what they called fish-and-chip shops: otherwise they would have taken their custom elsewhere, perhaps to France or Portugal.’

  ‘Oh, the English,’ Sancho said, ‘forget the English – they never conform to any rules, not even of economics. The Russian proletariat are no longer paupers either. The world has learnt from Marx and Russia. The Russian proletariat have their holidays paid for them in the Crimea. It’s just as good as the Costa Brava.’

  ‘The proletariat I saw on the Costa Brava were paying for their own holidays. You have to look at the Third World, Sancho, to find any paupers now. But that’s not because of the triumph of Communism. Don’t you think all this would have happened without Communism? Why, it was already beginning to happen when Marx wrote, but he didn’t notice. So that’s why Communism had to be spread by force – force not only against the bourgeoisie, force against the proletariat too. It was humanism, not Communism, which turned the pauper into the bourgeois and behind humanism there’s always the shadow of religion – the religion of Christ as well as the religion of Marx. We are all bourgeois today. Don’t tell me that Brezhnev is not just as much a bourgeois as you and me. If the whole world becomes bourgeois, will it be so bad – except for dreamers like Marx and my ancestor?’

  ‘You make the world of the future sound like Utopia, father.’