Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

by Highsmith, Patricia

  “Among the people, the picture in Latin American countries is similar,” the Spanish-speaking newscaster continued, as the screen showed a cathedral-backgrounded plaza that might have been in any one of scores of cities in South America. Men and women chanted “Arriba Sisto!” while soldiers, mainly relaxed soldiers, looked on amicably with rifle straps over their shoulders.

  The Pope with his remote control switched to another station, as his roast veal was brought in. This was a more serious program altogether: an elderly statesman was being interviewed in Rome in Italian. Sixtus recognized him at once, since his face was as familiar as that of a close relative by now, Ernesto Cattari, head of a minority conservative party which never got anywhere in the Italian government, but none the less was important as a symbol of money, titles, stability of the Church, anti-Communism.

  “. . . therefore we all hope that this curious statement is an aberration.” Here he gave a laugh in his short grey beard. “A result of the torrid sunlight, perhaps—and best forgotten.—We await, of course, further comment from His Holiness.”

  It was late in the evening in Rome, thought the Pope, and indeed Signor Cattari did look weary.

  Madrid. Evening. The screen showed the façade of an apartment building in what the announcer called “a rather poor working-class neighborhood.” Women, a few men, leaned out of nearly every window, waving, smiling, yelling “Arriba el Papa!” and “Thanks be to the Pope!” A TV man with a mike in his hand spoke to a young woman on the pavement. “You ask me?” she said in Spanish. “I cannot find words—just yet. Except to say that Pope Sixtus’s speech will change our lives—for the better, that’s for sure.”

  The Pope heard gunfire outside the aircraft some distance away, or so it sounded, and at the same time there was a knock at the door. One of the Pope’s secretaries stuck his head in.

  “Please excuse me, Your Holiness! We have just had an urgent request from the President—” the secretary gulped “—to leave the airport at once. The police are finding it difficult to restrain the crowds. People are walking to the airport—”

  The Pope understood, and put his knife and fork down. “Was that the shooting I heard? The police are shooting at them?”

  “Probably only warning shots, Your Holiness, but as I understand, it is wisest to depart at once for—” He stopped. “The aircraft is well fueled and ready for take-off, Your Holiness.”

  “For where?”

  “It would be best to go where we are not expected. We can ask permission in flight. Miami, Florida, for example.”

  “I prefer Bogotá, as scheduled, though we’re early. Ask if anyone wants to debark. To get off.”

  “Get off the plane, Your Holiness?”

  “You realize that it is dangerous,” said Sixtus, feeling that he said the obvious, but often it was necessary with his over-polite staff. “Just ask. There must be time—a few minutes, are there not?”

  The secretary disappeared.

  The plane’s engines started, its nose turned in another direction. The Pope switched the TV off. Out of a window he saw four, five male figures walking away with suitcases in hand. He didn’t recognize any of them, but he didn’t look closely. He smiled at Stephen.

  “Bogotá. I shall send a message appealing for calm—dignity—thoughtfulness. A quiet celebration of the red slipper.”

  The Pope did send such a message shortly after take-off, then closed his eyes in prayer and meditation in his comfortable chair. He had asked Stephen to interrupt him in case of important news, and had asked the Cardinal to report to Stephen. The Pope felt exhausted in a pleasant way and, if he dozed during his meditation, he would not reproach himself. Sometimes great ideas came in such moments, not to mention that he was going to need all his strength and ingenuity in the hours ahead.

  Stephen awakened him with a soft, “Your Holiness,” and handed him a folded piece of paper.

  The Pope read: “Respectfully advise not to proceed to Bogotá but return to Rome. Respectfully suggest revision of Mexico address be broadcast as soon as possible, or serious disorder can result.”

  This was a telegram from several cardinals in Rome, all of whose names, six or seven, were at the bottom.

  “A reply, Your Holiness?” asked Stephen, waiting.

  “Yes, thank you, Stephen. Say, ‘Bogotá is scheduled. I shall fulfill my duty.’”

  The aircraft refueled in Costa Rica. By then it was dark, 11 in the evening. The Pope saw a small crowd, hardly more than “spectators” would number at any commercial airport. That was a good omen as to control. The aircraft’s crew had negotiated in the preceding hour for refueling in San José. Now they were due in Bogotá, Colombia, around 8 am. The craft lingered at San José, in no hurry. A mechanic stammered to someone on the jet that he was honored to assist in the refueling of Pope Sixtus’s aircraft. The Pope heard this through an open door of the airplane.

  Before dawn, a message came from a government official in Bogotá: ‘We welcome the Most Holy Sixtus VI to our soil and will do our utmost to assure his safety.” It sounded a bit anxious to the Pope.

  The crackling of gunfire blended with the hum of the aircraft’s motors, as the jet landed at Bogotá’s airport. A double ring of soldiers on foot faced the main buildings of the airport as the jet taxied.

  Floodlights had been turned on. The Pope saw an army tank or two and military transport vehicles at the airfield’s edge. A message telephoned to the pilot politely requested the Vatican plane to wait with doors closed for security reasons, until further notice.

  The Pope showered and breakfasted. It was just after 8:30 a.m., and there was no rush. By 11, he supposed, he would have given his address on the steps of a cathedral of the capital. The day promised strong bright sunshine. Dr. Maggini came in to look at the Pope’s toe. The split in the skin was closing and hardly pink any longer. Still, the doctor gave it another dash of penicillin powder.

  At 11, a little later than promised by telephone, an armed guard arrived, escorting the President of Colombia, a sturdy man of about sixty with salt-and-pepper hair. He wore a white suit, and he greeted the Pope courteously, if tensely, after the Pope stepped off the gangway. The Pope smiled, then knelt and kissed the ground, rose and walked calmly toward the limousines which stood ready. These limousines had glass roofs, no doubt bullet-proof. Stephen, Cardinal Ricci and Dr. Maggini were near the Pope.

  “The people are very excited,” said the perspiring President after he and the Pope and the other men had settled themselves in one limousine.

  “But happy, I trust. It is always so,” replied the Pope pleasantly.

  A roar of human voices went up when the limousine came within a hundred yards of the cathedral. Here were walls of soldiers holding the crowd back, and helicopters circled and hovered, making a terrible din. How was he to make himself heard over the ’copters?

  The Pope got out of the car. He sensed the crowds pressing toward him from beyond the barrier of soldiers.

  “. . . Papa! . . . Sisto! . . . La zapatilla roja! Dónde está . . .” Where is the red slipper? they were demanding good-naturedly.

  Sixtus smiled and raised both arms. “Bless you! Bless you all in the name of the Lord!”

  Slowly, then in a burst of color, the red slippers came out. Children pulled folded red paper from their pockets. A row of teenagers unfolded a cloth slipper at least three meters long, and held it before themselves at waist level. All were laughing and chattering. Some soldiers who had been standing with linked arms got pushed to the ground, and they dragged other soldiers with them from both sides. There were shouts and threats then, in Spanish, which the Pope heard and understood. Stand back, keep back or we must use batons.

  “Speak to our landlords, Sisto!” a man’s voice shouted.

  “Speak to our bosses!”

  “My husband was killed by a soldier, Your Holiness! For growing . . .”

  For growing cocoa? The Pope knew that a lot of Colombians grew cocoa for the cocaine ind
ustry, because otherwise they would not have enough money to eat. The matter was too complex to be addressed at the moment.

  “My people!” the Pope began on the cathedral’s stone steps. The people quietened down, but not the helicopters. The Pope turned toward the President, but spoke to a man nearer. “These helicopters—”

  “We regret! They may become necessary, Your Holiness! Security . . .”

  “We want the Pope to come to our fields! Our fields!” This chant came from a sidestreet, and the Pope saw a couple of hundred—maybe more—men and boys advancing, their front men carrying a red slipper artifact a meter or so long above their heads. Soldiers blew whistles, and the military pointed their guns toward this advance from the sidestreet.

  “Back! Keep back!” the soldiers yelled.

  A helicopter dropped a canister which wobbled down, struck hard ground and sent up a cloud of whitish smoke. The crowd groaned disapproval at this. The soldiers yelled back. Sixtus saw soldiers level their rifles, not yet firing, but he saw nervousness in their shifting feet.

  “I speak first to the women!” the Pope began strongly once more. “Our mothers—our sisters—our beloved wives!”

  Here the cheers seemed to rise to heaven, not only from the higher voices of women, but from men also.

  “Women are not slaves but partners with men!” he shouted. Again the crowd yelled its agreement, and the Pope knew that he did not have to utter the words “abortion” and “birth control” for the populace to understand. “Women are not slaves to their bodies either,” the Pope continued. “Best if life is not created—if it is not wanted—if it cannot be fed and housed in decency.”

  “Olé!” Applause and cheers.

  The Pope sensed that his time for speaking was going to be short. The President was fairly pacing on one of the middle steps of the cathedral. Microphones boomed the Pope’s words into sidestreets, and he could see ever more people advancing on foot toward the cathedral.

  “I as your shepherd shall show the way!” the Pope went on, hoping for the best among those before him. “There must be no violence! Our Savior showed no violence! We must walk in his path, in his footsteps!” A little abstract, Sixtus realized, but the people responded, applauded with happy faces. The Pope had one last important message. “Pay attention and listen to your padres—your priests—the ones who speak to you as man to man!”

  That did it. Suddenly the scene was like a huge beehive of swirling, leaping figures, women who reached happy soprano notes, men with throaty cheers, and they knocked the soldiers down as they advanced. Sixtus saw a faint smile on the face of a soldier who had got a bloody nose.

  “Your Holiness,” Stephen whispered quickly into the Pope’s ear. “So many people from the outside—coming—”

  The President took courage. “You will be crushed, Your Holiness, even inside the cathedral. We won’t be able to keep the doors closed!”

  And it was plain to the Pope that the President did not want the Pope to die on his soil for lack of security and protection. More canisters fell, and a few women screamed. Police began firing over the heads of the crowd. The objective was to make the oncomers halt, at least.

  “It is best for Your Holiness to go to the airport! I am afraid for your life!” The President looked afraid for his own life too.

  A hovering helicopter let down a plastic benchlike seat for two persons, with straps, and the President gestured for the Pope to get in.

  “Stephen?” said Sixtus, gesturing to a seat.

  “No, Your Holiness. Perhaps the President?” Stephen replied.

  “There are other helicopters!” said the President. “No problem! Do not delay!”

  The Pope got into a seat alone, leaving the second seat empty, and fastened his belt. It was good theater, he thought, like an assumption, almost, yet with considerably more danger, because he was still flesh and blood and mortal, and bullets were flying.

  “To our fields! Our fields!” yelled a big group below.

  Sixtus swung gently, gripped a seat arm with one hand and raised the other to salute the crowd. What a view! Faces turned up to him, smiling, staring, as if to fix the image of the Pope of the Red Slipper for ever in their memories. The Pope was slowly winched upward, into the body of the helicopter.

  “Are we going to the fields? El Re Verde, perhaps?” the Pope asked. El Re Verde was a huge plantation of cocoa and coffee, much in the news because of the fact that workers had to be separated from their wives and children in order to be employed there, so vast was the land. Its cocoa production was said to be entirely for cocaine. A Colombia government agent of the anti-drug squad had been shot dead for trying to investigate El Re Verde.

  “Not safe—El Re,” said the shy and embarrassed co-pilot. “The owner does have a private bodyguard—army—it is true, but—” The poor man did not know how to say no to the Pope.

  “Let us go there,” said the Pope. “You can let me down just as you picked me up.”

  The co-pilot picked up a telephone. “Reinforcements!” he said several times.

  Word would get out quickly, the Pope supposed, that he was heading for El Re Verde. A soldier at the office with which the co-pilot was speaking would tell someone else and so on. A few minutes later, when the helicopter reached El Re Verd’s fields, the Pope heard gunfire.

  “It is not safe—Sire,” said the co-pilot. “The patrón is firing on the—the workers now, because they are attacking.”

  “Attacking?” The Pope could see fallen figures, perhaps six, on the ground between the low white buildings which surely were “the headquarters” and a semi-circle of advancing peasants. Puffs, small clouds of smoke came from the white buildings, where soldiers or guards were apparently firing from the roofs.

  “Can you let me down somewhere in the fields?” asked the Pope.

  These were Sixtus Vl’s last words, except for “Peace! Peace between brothers—in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ!” which he uttered as he stood for a few seconds on uneven but soft soil, among astounded peasants. Some of the workers carried sticks, some machetes, but the latter could have been for their work. All paused to look at him, this man, this Pope whom they recognized, descended from a Colombian army helicopter like a deus ex machina. They stopped advancing, yes, and their intention, one man said to the Pope, was “to talk with los patrónes . . .” about their housing, their wages.

  But the patrónes had guns, or their bodyguards had, and one bullet got the Pope in the throat. He lived for a minute or so, surrounded by shocked and chattering workers, whose group became a target for the gunmen in the company headquarters. A few workers lifted Sixtus up to carry him “away,” anywhere away from the main buildings whence came the firing. And as the word passed that the Pope had been hit, the real Pope of the Red Slipper, the peasants rallied, heedless of bullets, and stormed the main buildings, one of which was a fine hacienda-style two-story house, where the patrón, his family and executives could work and sleep if need be.

  The peasants’ onslaught was met by a storm of bullets, many fired by machineguns. Not one of the peasants in the open field was left standing. But some at the edges got away to tell the tale.

  From then on it was army and landowners against the people, and not merely in Bogotá, but in Mexico City, Chiapas, Lima, and in Chile’s capital Santiago, where Sixtus had been due. Father Stephen got to Santiago, and quite on his own, as the Vatican jet returned to Rome the night of the Pope’s assassination. Stephen was listened to: he had been at Sixtus’s side in the Pope’s last days, had touched the hem of his robe, as it were. Stephen preached over and over again, “Peace—and discussion of all problems. Dignity of man and of woman too.” But the authorities did not like Father Stephen, and he was tolerated for a minimum of time (six hours), given no protection from over-loving crowds, except that volunteered by understanding and sympathetic policemen. Stephen had the definite idea that the leaders of this country would have been delighted if he had suffered the same fate as t
he Pope, but they hadn’t had time to scrap the police guard, Stephen supposed. At any rate, Stephen boarded a Pan-Am aircraft and flew tourist class, safe and sound, toward Miami, Florida. He knew he was looked at askance by some North American churchmen as well as by some South American, but he felt that he had a charmed life, that he would escape bullets, that he could make his “church” on any street corner, if he chose, and that he would find listeners and believers.

  A slow revolution was sweeping the world, but unfortunately causing a great number of deaths. In the next many approaches or attacks of the peasantry, even in the Philippines, the peasants and workers were more numerous than they had been in the skirmish in Bogotá that had killed the Pope, because they had had time to assemble. The haciendas, factories, residential enclaves were prepared too with tear gas, fire hoses, tall steel gates, and machineguns, but the fact was, there were even more peasants and workers than bullets. In many battles, the workers rushed over the bodies of their fallen, entered houses and took them over. Then began “confrontation,” talking. The people were in the main calm, realizing their number and their power, and they frequently cited the Church and God as being on their side.

  There were brawls in Ireland, in Belfast and Londonderry, fistfights and minor riots in Manhattan, as people tried to take account of an unusual event that all knew to be an injustice: the assassination of a Pope who had spoken out for justice for humanity and the individual. The Pope had asked for “Peace” in his last moments, and it seemed that humankind hated itself for striking the Pope down, for allowing his death to happen. But ostensibly, the riots and squabbles were over abortion versus the anti-abortionists, for instance, rather specific issues.

  Only a very few wealthy men with private armies in South America and elsewhere won against the workers, physically speaking, and managed to smile and to tell one another verbally or by their attitudes that they had done “the right thing” against “militant Communists.” But the core of the revolution was in the core of the Catholic Church, and that was changed forever. The workers might be back at work, but their conditions were better now, and the workers had a confidence that the landowners lacked. Of course, liberation theology priests and priests who had not mingled in such strife before had come out in such force and number, no state would have dared to try to shoot them, lock them up or even shut them up. European liberals were behind them, and so was the majority of the United Nations.