‘My tooth,’ the chief wailed again. He said, ‘It poisons the whole of life. Today my biggest break was twenty-five.’
‘You will have to change your dentist.’
‘They are all the same.’
The lieutenant took the photograph and pinned it on the wall. James Calver, bank robber and homicide, stared in harsh profile towards the first communion party. ‘He is a man at any rate,’ the lieutenant said with approval.
‘Who?’
‘The gringo.’
The chief said, ‘You heard what he did in Houston. Got away with ten thousand dollars. Two G men were shot.’
‘G men?’
‘It’s an honour – in a way – to deal with such people.’ He slapped furiously out at a mosquito.
‘A man like that,’ the lieutenant said, ‘does no real harm. A few men dead. We all have to die. The money – somebody has to spend it. We do more good when we catch one of these.’ He had the dignity of an idea, standing in the little whitewashed room with his polished boots and his venom. There was something disinterested in his ambition: a kind of virtue in his desire to catch the sleek respected guest of the first communion party.
The chief said mournfully, ‘He must be devilishly cunning if he’s been going on for years.’
‘Anybody could do it,’ the lieutenant said. ‘We haven’t really troubled about them – unless they put themselves in our hands. Why, I could guarantee to fetch this man in, inside a month if . . .’
‘If what?’
‘If I had the power.’
‘It’s easy to talk,’ the chief said. ‘What would you do?’
‘This is a small state. Mountains on the north, the sea on the south. I’d beat it as you beat a street, house by house.’
‘Oh, it sounds easy,’ the chief moaned indistinctly with his handkerchief against his mouth.
The lieutenant said suddenly, ‘I will tell you what I’d do. I would take a man from every village in the state as a hostage. If the villagers didn’t report the man when he came, the hostage would be shot – and then we’d take another.’
‘A lot of them would die, of course.’
‘Wouldn’t it be worth it?’ the lieutenant demanded. ‘To be rid of those people for ever.’
‘You know,’ the chief said, ‘you’ve got something there.’
The lieutenant walked home through the shuttered town. All his life had lain here: the Syndicate of Workers and Peasants had once been a school. He had helped to wipe out that unhappy memory. The whole town was changed: the cement playground up the hill near the cemetery where iron swings stood like gallows in the moony darkness was the site of the cathedral. The new children would have new memories: nothing would ever be as it was. There was something of a priest in his intent observant walk – a theologian going back over the errors of the past to destroy them again.
He reached his own lodging. The houses were all one-storeyed, whitewashed, built round small patios, with a well and a few flowers. The windows on the street were barred. Inside the lieutenant’s room there was a bed made of old packing-cases with a straw mat laid on top, a cushion and a sheet. There was a picture of the President on the wall, a calendar, and on the tiled floor a table and a rocking-chair. In the light of a candle it looked as comfortless as a prison or a monastic cell.
The lieutenant sat down upon his bed and began to take off his boots. It was the hour of prayer. Black-beetles exploded against the walls like crackers. More than a dozen crawled over the tiles with injured wings. It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy – a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.
He lay down in his shirt and breeches on the bed and blew out the candle. Heat stood in the room like an enemy. But he believed against the evidence of his senses in the cold empty ether spaces. A radio was playing somewhere: music from Mexico City, or perhaps even from London or New York, filtered into this obscure neglected state. It seemed to him like a weakness: this was his own land, and he would have walled it in if he could with steel until he had eradicated from it everything which reminded him of how it had once appeared to a miserable child. He wanted to destroy everything: to be alone without any memories at all. Life began five years ago.
The lieutenant lay on his back with his eyes open while the beetles detonated on the ceiling. He remembered the priest the Red Shirts had shot against the wall of the cemetery up the hill, another little fat man with popping eyes. He was a monsignor, and he thought that would protect him. He had a sort of contempt for the lower clergy, and right up to the last he was explaining his rank. Only at the very end had he remembered his prayers. He knelt down and they had given him time for a short act of contrition. The lieutenant had watched: he wasn’t directly concerned. Altogether they had shot about five priests – two or three had escaped, the bishop was safely in Mexico City, and one man had conformed to the Governor’s law that all priests must marry. He lived now near the river with his housekeeper. That, of course, was the best solution of all, to leave the living witness to the weakness of their faith. It showed the deception they had practised all these years. For if they really believed in heaven or hell, they wouldn’t mind a little pain now, in return for what immensities . . . The lieutenant, lying on his hard bed, in the damp hot dark, felt no sympathy at all with the weakness of the flesh.
In the back room of the Academia Commercial a woman was reading to her family. Two small girls of six and ten sat on the edge of their bed, and a boy of fourteen leant against the wall with an expression of intense weariness.
‘Young Juan,’ the mother read, ‘from his earliest years was noted for his humility and piety. Other boys might be rough and revengeful; young Juan followed the precept of Our Lord and turned the other cheek. One day his father thought that he had told a lie and beat him. Later he learnt that his son had told the truth, and he apologized to Juan. But Juan said to him, “Dear father, just as our Father in heaven has the right to chastise when he pleases . . .”’
The boy rubbed his face impatiently against the whitewash and the mild voice droned on. The two little girls sat with beady intense eyes, drinking in the sweet piety.
‘We must not think that young Juan did not laugh and play like other children, though there were times when he would creep away with a holy picture-book to his father’s cow-house from a circle of his merry playmates.’
The boy squashed a beetle with his bare foot and thought gloomily that after all everything had an end – some day they would reach the last chapter and young Juan would die against a wall shouting, ‘Viva el Christo Rey.’ But then, he supposed, there would be another book; they were smuggled in every month from Mexico City: if only the customs men had known where to look.
‘No, young Juan was a true young Mexican boy, and if he was more thoughtful than his fellows, he was also always the first when any play-acting was afoot. One year his class acted a little play before the bishop, based on the persecution of the early Christians, and no one was more amused than Juan when he was chosen to play the part of Nero. And what comic spirit he put into his acting – this child, whose young manhood was to be cut short by a ruler far worse than Nero. His class-mate, who later became Father Miguel Cerra, s.j., writes: “None of us who were there will ever forget that day . . .”’
One of the little girls licked her lips secretively. This was life.
‘The curtain rose on Juan wearing his mother’s best bathrobe, a charcoal moustache and a crown made from a tin biscuit-box. Even the good old bishop smiled when Juan strode to the front of the little home-made stage and began to declaim . . .’
The boy strangled a yawn against the whitewashed wall. He said wearily, ‘Is he really a saint?’
‘He will be, one day soon,
when the Holy Father pleases.’
‘And are they all like that?’
‘Who?’
‘The martyrs.’
‘Yes. All.’
‘Even Padre José?’
‘Don’t mention him,’ the mother said. ‘How dare you? That despicable man. A traitor to God.’
‘He told me he was more of a martyr than the rest.’
‘I’ve told you many times not to speak to him. My dear child, oh, my dear child . . .’
‘And the other one – the one who came to see us?’
‘No, he is not – exactly – like Juan.’
‘Is he despicable?’
‘No, no. Not despicable.’
The smallest girl said suddenly, ‘He smelt funny.’
The mother went on reading: ‘Did any premonition touch young Juan that night that he, too, in a few short years, would be numbered among the martyrs? We cannot say, but Father Miguel Cerra tells how that evening Juan spent longer than usual upon his knees, and when his class-mates teased him a little, as boys will . . .’
The voice went on and on, mild and deliberate, inflexibly gentle; the small girls listened intently, framing in their minds little pious sentences with which to surprise their parents, and the boy yawned against the whitewash. Everything has an end.
Presently the mother went in to her husband. She said, ‘I am so worried about the boy.’
‘Why not about the girls? There is worry everywhere.’
‘They are two little saints already. But the boy – he asks such questions – about that whisky priest. I wish we had never had him in the house.’
‘They would have caught him if we hadn’t, and then he would have been one of your martyrs. They would write a book about him and you would read it to the children.’
‘That man – never.’
‘Well, after all,’ her husband said, ‘he carries on. I don’t believe all that they write in these books. We are all human.’
‘You know what I heard today? About a poor woman who took to him her son to be baptized. She wanted him called Pedro – but he was drunk that he took no notice at all and baptized the boy Brigitta. Brigitta!’
‘Well, it’s a good saint’s name.’
‘There are times,’ the mother said, ‘when I lose all patience with you. And now the boy has been talking to Padre José.’
‘This is a small town,’ her husband said. ‘And there is no use pretending. We have been abandoned here. We must get along as best we can. As for the Church – the Church is Padre José and the whisky priest – I don’t know of any other. If we don’t like the Church, well, we must leave it.’
He watched her with patience. He had more education than his wife; he could use a typewriter and knew the elements of book-keeping: once he had been to Mexico City: he could read a map. He knew the extent of their abandonment – the ten hours down-river to the port, the forty-two hours on the Gulf to Vera Cruz – that was one way out. To the north the swamps and rivers petering out against the mountains which divided them from the next state. And on the other side no roads – only mule-tracks and an occasional unreliable plane: Indian villages and the huts of herds: two hundred miles away, the Pacific.
She said, ‘I would rather die.’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘of course. That goes without saying. But we have to go on living.’
The old man sat on a packing-case in the little dry patio. He was very fat and short of breath; he panted a little as if after great exertion in the heat. Once he had been something of an astronomer and now he tried to pick out the constellations, staring up into the night sky. He wore only a shirt and trousers; his feet were bare, but there remained something unmistakably clerical in his manner. Forty years of the priesthood had branded him. There was complete silence over the town: everybody was asleep.
The glittering worlds lay there in space like a promise – the world was not the universe. Somewhere Christ might not have died. He could not believe that to a watcher there this world could shine with such brilliance: it would roll heavily in space under its fog like a burning and abandoned ship. The whole globe was blanketed with his own sin.
A woman called from the only room he possessed, ‘José, José.’ He crouched like a galley-slave at the sound; his eyes left the sky, and the constellations fled upwards: the beetles crawled over the patio. ‘José, José.’ He thought with envy of the men who had died: it was over so soon. They were taken up there to the cemetery and shot against the wall: in two minutes life was extinct. And they called that martyrdom. Here life went on and on; he was only sixty-two. He might live to ninety. Twenty-eight years – that immeasurable period between his birth and his first parish: all childhood and youth and the seminary lay there.
‘José. Come to bed.’ He shivered: he knew that he was a buffoon. An old man who married was grotesque enough, but an old priest. . . . He stood outside himself and wondered whether he was even fit for hell. He was just a fat old impotent man mocked and taunted between the sheets. But then he remembered the gift he had been given which nobody could take away. That was what made him worthy of damnation – the power he still had of turning the wafer into the flesh and blood of God. He was a sacrilege. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he defiled God. Some mad renegade Catholic, puffed up with the Governor’s politics, had once broken into a church (in the days when there were still churches) and seized the Host. He had spat on it, trampled it, and then the people had got him and hung him as they did the stuffed Judas on Holy Thursday from the belfry. He wasn’t so bad a man, Padre José thought – he would be forgiven, he was just a politician; but he himself, he was worse than that – he was like an obscene picture hung here every day to corrupt children with.
He belched on his packing-case shaken by wind. ‘José. What are you doing? You come to bed.’ There was never anything to do at all – no daily Office, no Masses, no Confessions, and it was no good praying any longer at all: a prayer demanded an act and he had no intention of acting. He had lived for two years now in a continuous state of mortal sin with no one to hear his Confession: nothing to do at all but to sit and eat – eat far too much; she fed him and fattened him and preserved him like a prize boar. ‘José.’ He began to hiccup with nerves at the thought of facing for the seven hundred and thirty-eighth time his harsh housekeeper – his wife. There she would be lying in the big shameless bed that filled half the room, a bony shadow within the mosquito-tent, a lanky jaw and a short grey pigtail and an absurd bonnet. She thought she had a position to keep up: a Government pensioner: the wife of the only married priest. She was proud of it. ‘José.’ ‘I’m – hic – coming, my love,’ he said and lifted himself from the crate. Somebody somewhere laughed.
He lifted little pink eyes like those of a pig conscious of the slaughter-room. A high child’s voice said, ‘José.’ He stared in a bewildered way around the patio. At a barred window opposite three children watched him with deep gravity. He turned his back and took a step or two towards his door, moving very slowly because of his bulk. ‘José,’ somebody squeaked again. ‘José.’ He looked back over his shoulder and caught the faces out in expressions of wild glee; his little pink eyes showed no anger – he had no right to be angry: he moved his mouth into a ragged, baffled, disintegrated smile, and as if that sign of weakness gave them all the licence they needed, they squealed back at him without disguise, ‘José, José. Come to bed, José.’ Their little shameless voices filled the patio, and he smiled humbly and sketched small gestures for silence, and there was no respect anywhere left for him in his home, in the town, in the whole abandoned star.
CHAPTER 3: The River
Captain Fellows sang loudly to himself, while the little motor chugged in the bows of the canoe. His big sunburned face was like the map of a mountain region – patches of varying brown with two small blue lakes that were his eyes. He composed his songs as he went, and his voice was quite tuneless. ‘Going home, going home, the food will be good for me-e-e. I don’t like the foo
d in the bloody citee.’ He turned out of the main stream into a tributary: a few alligators lay on the sandy margin. ‘I don’t like your snouts, O trouts. I don’t like your snouts, O trouts.’ He was a happy man.
The banana plantations came down on either bank: his voice boomed under the hard sun: that and the churr of the motor were the only sounds anywhere – he was completely alone. He was borne up on a big tide of boyish joy – doing a man’s job, the heart of the wild: he felt no responsibility for anyone. In only one other country had he felt more happy, and that was in wartime France, in the ravaged landscape of trenches. The tributary cork-screwed farther into the marshy overgrown state, and a vulture lay spread out in the sky; Captain Fellows opened a tin box and ate a sandwich – food never tasted so good as out of doors. A monkey made a sudden chatter at him as he went by, and Captain Fellows felt happily at one with nature – a wide shallow kinship with all the world moved with the blood-stream through the veins: he was at home anywhere. The artful little devil, he thought, the artful little devil. He began to sing again – somebody else’s words a little jumbled in his friendly unretentive memory. ‘Give to me the life I love, bread I dip in the river, under the wide and starry sky, the hunter’s home from the sea.’ The plantations petered out, and far behind the mountains came into view, heavy black lines drawn low-down across the sky. A few bungalows rose out of the mud. He was home. A very slight cloud marred his happiness.