‘Is the shooting going to begin soon?’ the boy asked, moving restlessly against the wall. His mother went relentlessly on: ‘Juan unknown to all but his confessor was preparing himself for the evil days ahead with the most rigorous mortifications. His companions suspected nothing, for he was always the heart and soul of every merry conversation, and on the feast-day of the founder of the Order it was he . . .’
‘I know, I know,’ the boy said. ‘He acted a play.’
The little girls opened astounded eyes.
‘And why not, Luis?’ the mother said, pausing with her finger on the prohibited book. He stared sullenly back at her. ‘And why not, Luis?’ she repeated. She waited a while, and then read on; the little girls watched their brother with horror and admiration. ‘It was he,’ she said, ‘who obtained permission to perform a little one-act play founded on . . .’
‘I know, I know,’ the boy said, ‘the catacombs.’
The mother, compressing her lips, continued: ‘. . . the persecution of the early Christians. Perhaps he remembered that occasion in his boyhood when he acted Nero before the good old bishop, but this time he insisted on taking the comic part of a Roman fishmonger . . .’
‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ the boy said, with sullen fury, ‘not a word of it.’
‘How dare you!’
‘Nobody could be such a fool.’
The little girls sat motionless, their eyes large and brown and pious.
‘Go to your father.’
‘Anything to get away from this – this –’ the boy said.
‘Tell him what you’ve told me.’
‘This . . .’
‘Leave the room.’
He slammed the door behind him. His father stood at the barred window of the sala, looking out; the beetles detonated against the oil-lamp and crawled with broken wings across the stone floor. The boy said, ‘My mother told me to tell you that I told her that I didn’t believe that the book she’s reading . . .’
‘What book?’
‘The holy book.’
He said sadly, ‘Oh that.’ Nobody passed in the street, nothing happened; it was after nine-thirty and all the lights were out. He said, ‘You must make allowances. For us, you know, everything seems over. That book – it is like our own childhood.’
‘It sounds so silly.’
‘You don’t remember the time when the Church was here. I was a bad Catholic, but it meant – well, music, lights, a place where you could sit out of this heat – and for your mother, well, there was always something for her to do. If we had a theatre, anything at all instead, we shouldn’t feel so – left.’
‘But this Juan,’ the boy said. ‘He sounds so silly.’
‘He was killed, wasn’t he?’
‘Oh, so were Villa, Obregon, Madero . . .’
‘Who tells you about them?’
‘We all of us play them. Yesterday I was Madero. They shot me in the plaza – the law of flight.’ Somewhere in the heavy night a drum-beat. The sour river smell filled the room: it was familiar like the taste of soot in cities. ‘We tossed up. I was Madero: Pedro had to be Huerta. He fled to Vera Cruz down by the river. Manuel chased him – he was Carranza.’ His father struck a beetle off his shirt, staring into the street: the sound of marching feet came nearer. He said, ‘I suppose your mother’s angry.’
‘You aren’t,’ the boy said.
‘What’s the good? It’s not your fault. We have been deserted.’
The soldiers went by, returning to barracks, up the hill near what had once been the cathedral; they marched out of step in spite of the drum-beat, they looked undernourished, they hadn’t yet made much of war. They passed lethargically by in the dark street and the boy watched them out of sight with excited and hopeful eyes.
Mrs Fellows rocked backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. ‘And so Lord Palmerston said if the Greek Government didn’t do right to Don Pacifico . . .’ She said, ‘My darling, I’ve got such a headache I think we must stop today.’
‘Of course. I have a little one too.’
‘I expect yours will be better soon. Would you mind putting the books away?’ The little shabby books had come by post from a firm in Paternoster Row called Private Tutorials, Ltd – a whole education which began with ‘Reading Without Tears’ and went methodically on to the Reform Bill and Lord Palmerston and the poems of Victor Hugo. Once every six months an examination paper was delivered, and Mrs Fellows laboriously worked through the answers and awarded marks. These she sent back to Paternoster Row, and there, weeks later, they were filed: once she had forgotten her duty when there was shooting in Zapata, and had received a printed slip beginning: ‘Dear Parent, I regret to see . . .’ The trouble was they were years ahead of schedule by now – there were so few other books to read – and so the examination papers were years behind. Sometimes the firm sent embossed certificates for framing, announcing that Miss Coral Fellows had passed third with honours into the second grade, signed with a rubber stamp Henry Beckley, B.A., Director of Private Tutorials, Ltd, and sometimes there would be little personal letters typewritten, with the same blue smudgy signature, saying: Dear Pupil, I think you should pay more attention this week to. . . . The letters were always six weeks out of date.
‘My darling,’ Mrs Fellows said, ‘will you see the cook and order lunch? Just yourself. I can’t eat a thing, and your father’s out on the plantation.’
‘Mother,’ the child said, ‘do you believe there’s a God?’
The question scared Mrs Fellows. She rocked furiously up and down and said, ‘Of course.’
‘I mean the Virgin Birth – and everything.’
‘My dear, what a thing to ask. Who have you been talking to?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking, that’s all.’ She didn’t wait for any further answer; she knew quite well there would be none – it was always her job to make decisions. Henry Beckley, B.A., had put it all into an early lesson – it hadn’t been any more difficult to accept then than the giant at the top of the beanstalk, and at the age of ten she had discarded both relentlessly. By that time she was starting algebra.
‘Surely your father hasn’t . . .’
‘Oh no.’
She put on her sun-helmet and went out into the blazing ten o’clock heat to find the cook – she looked more fragile than ever and more indomitable. When she had given her orders she went to the warehouse to inspect the alligator skins tacked out on a wall, then to the stables to see that the mules were in good shape. She carried her responsibilities carefully like crockery across the hot yard: there was no question she wasn’t prepared to answer; the vultures rose languidly at her approach.
She returned to the house and her mother. She said, ‘It’s Thursday.’
‘Is it, dear?’
‘Hasn’t father got the bananas down to the quay?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know, dear.’
She went briskly back into the yard and rang a bell. An Indian came. No, the bananas were still in the store; no orders had been given. ‘Get them down,’ she said, ‘at once, quickly. The boat will be here soon.’ She fetched her father’s ledger and counted the bunches as they were carried out – a hundred bananas or more to a bunch which was worth a few pence. It took more than two hours to empty the store; somebody had got to do the work, and once before her father had forgotten the day. After half an hour she began to feel tired – she wasn’t used to weariness so early in the day. She leant against the wall and it scorched her shoulder-blades. She felt no resentment at all at being there, looking after things: the word ‘play’ had no meaning to her at all – the whole of life was adult. In one of Henry Beckley’s early reading-books there had been a picture of a doll’s tea-party: it was incomprehensible like a ceremony she hadn’t learned: she couldn’t see the point of pretending. Four hundred and fifty-six. Four hundred and fifty-seven. The sweat poured down the peons’ bodies steadily like a shower-bath. An awful pain took her suddenly in the
stomach – she missed a load and tried to catch up in her calculations: she felt the sense of responsibility for the first time like a load borne for too many years. Five hundred and twenty-five. It was a new pain (not worms this time), but it didn’t scare her; it was as if her body had expected it, had grown up to it, as the mind grows up to the loss of tenderness. You couldn’t call it childhood draining out of her: of childhood she had never really been conscious.
‘Is that the last?’ she said.
‘Yes, señorita.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, señorita.’
But she had to see for herself. Never before had it occurred to her to do a job unwillingly – if she didn’t do a thing nobody would – but today she wanted to lie down, to sleep: if all the bananas didn’t get away it was her father’s fault. She wondered whether she had fever, her feet felt so cold on the hot ground. Oh well, she thought, and went patiently into the barn, found the torch, and switched it on. Yes, the place seemed empty enough, but she never left a job half done. She advanced towards the back wall, holding the torch in front of her. An empty bottle rolled away – she dropped the light on it: Cerveza Moctezuma. Then the torch lit the back wall: low down near the ground somebody had scrawled in chalk – she came closer: a lot of little crosses leant in the circle of light. He must have lain down among the bananas and tried to relieve his fear by writing something, and this was all he could think of. The child stood in her woman’s pain and looked at them: a horrible novelty enclosed her whole morning: it was as if today everything were memorable.
The Chief of Police was in the cantina playing billiards when the lieutenant found him. He had a handkerchief tied all round his face with some idea that it relieved the toothache. He was chalking his cue for a difficult shot as the lieutenant pushed through the swing door. On the shelves behind were nothing but gaseosa bottles and a yellow liquid called Sidral – warranted non-alcoholic. The lieutenant stood protestingly in the doorway. The situation was ignoble; he wanted to eliminate anything in the state at which a foreigner might have cause to sneer. He said, ‘Can I speak to you?’ The jefe winced at a sudden jab of pain and came with unusual alacrity towards the door; the lieutenant glanced at the score, marked in rings strung on a cord across the room – the jefe was losing. ‘Back – moment,’ the jefe said, and explained to the lieutenant, ‘Don’t want open mouth.’ As they pushed the door somebody raised a cue and surreptitiously pushed back one of the jefe’s rings.
They walked up the street side by side, the fat one and the lean. It was a Sunday and all the shops closed at noon – that was the only relic of the old time. No bells rang anywhere. The lieutenant said, ‘Have you seen the Governor?’
‘You can do anything,’ the jefe said, ‘anything.’
‘He leaves it to us?’
‘On conditions,’ he winced.
‘What are they?’
‘He’ll hold you – responsible – if – not caught before – rains.’
‘As long as I’m not responsible for anything else . . .’ the lieutenant said moodily.
‘You asked for it. You got it.’
‘I’m glad.’ It seemed to the lieutenant that all the world he cared about now lay at his feet. They passed the new hall built for the Syndicate of Workers and Peasants: through the window they could see the big bold clever murals – of one priest caressing a woman in the confessional, another tippling on the sacramental wine. The lieutenant said, ‘We will soon make these unnecessary.’ He looked at the pictures with the eye of a foreigner: they seemed to him barbarous.
‘One day they’ll forget there ever was a Church here.’
The jefe said nothing. The lieutenant knew he was thinking, what a fuss about nothing. He said sharply, ‘Well, what are my orders?’
‘Orders?’
‘You are my chief.’
The jefe was silent. He studied the lieutenant unobtrusively with little astute eyes. Then he said, ‘You know I trust you. Do what you think best.’
‘Will you put that in writing?’
‘Oh – not necessary. We know each other.’
All the way up the road they fenced warily for positions.
‘Didn’t the Governor give you anything in writing?’ the lieutenant asked.
‘No. He said we knew each other.’
It was the lieutenant who gave way because it was he who really cared. He was indifferent to his personal future. He said, ‘I shall take hostages from every village.’
‘Then he won’t stay in the villages.’
‘Do you imagine,’ the lieutenant asked bitterly, ‘that they don’t know where he is? He has to keep some touch – or what good is he?’
‘Just as you like,’ the jefe said.
‘And I shall shoot as often as it’s necessary.’
The jefe said with facetious brightness, ‘A little blood never hurt anyone. Where will you start?’
‘His parish, I think, Concepción, and then – perhaps – his home.’
‘Why there?’
‘He may think he’s safe there.’ He brooded past the shuttered shops. ‘It’s worth a few deaths, but will he, do you think, support me if they make a fuss in Mexico City?’
‘It isn’t likely, is it?’ the jefe said. ‘But it’s what –’ he was stopped by a stab of pain.
‘It’s what I wanted,’ the lieutenant said for him.
He made his way on alone towards the police station, and the chief went back to billiards. There were few people about; it was too hot. If only, he thought, we had a proper photograph – he wanted to know the features of his enemy. A swarm of children had the plaza to themselves. They were playing some obscure and intricate game from bench to bench. An empty gaseosa bottle sailed through the air and smashed at the lieutenant’s feet. His hand went to his holster and he turned; he caught a look of consternation on a boy’s face.
‘Did you throw that bottle?’
The heavy brown eyes stared sullenly back at him.
‘What were you doing?’
‘It was a bomb.’
‘Were you throwing it at me?’
‘No.’
‘What then?’
‘A gringo.’
The lieutenant smiled – an awkward movement of the lips. ‘That’s right, but you must aim better.’ He kicked the broken bottle into the road and tried to think of words which would show these children that they were on the same side. He said, ‘I suppose the gringo was one of those rich Yankees . . .’ and surprised an expression of devotion in the boy’s face; it called for something in return, and the lieutenant became aware in his own heart of a sad and unsatisfiable love. He said, ‘Come here.’ The child approached, while his companions stood in a scared semicircle and watched from a safe distance. ‘What is your name?’
‘Luis.’
‘Well,’ the lieutenant said, at a loss for words, ‘you must learn to aim properly.’
The boy said passionately, ‘I wish I could.’ He had his eye on the holster.
‘Would you like to see my gun?’ the lieutenant asked. He pulled his heavy automatic from the holster and held it out: the children drew cautiously in. He said, ‘This is the safety-catch. Lift it. So. Now it’s ready to fire.’
‘Is it loaded?’ Luis asked.
‘It’s always loaded.’
The tip of the boy’s tongue appeared: he swallowed. Saliva came from the glands as if he smelt food. They all stood close in now. A daring child put out his hand and touched the holster. They ringed the lieutenant round: he was surrounded by an insecure happiness as he fitted the gun back on his hip.
‘What is it called?’ Luis asked.
‘A Colt .38.’
‘How many bullets?’
‘Six.’
‘Have you killed somebody with it?’
‘Not yet,’ the lieutenant said.
They were breathless with interest. He stood with his hand on his holster and watched the brown intent patient eyes: it was for these he was fi
ghting. He would eliminate from their childhood everything which had made him miserable, all that was poor, superstitious, and corrupt. They deserved nothing less than the truth – a vacant universe and a cooling world, the right to be happy in any way they chose. He was quite prepared to make a massacre for their sakes – first the Church and then the foreigner and then the politician – even his own chief would one day have to go. He wanted to begin the world again with them, in a desert.
‘Oh,’ Luis said, ‘I wish . . . I wish . . .’ as if his ambition were too vast for definition. The lieutenant put out his hand in a gesture of affection – a touch, he didn’t know what to do with it. He pinched the boy’s ear and saw him flinch away with the pain; they scattered from him like birds and he went on alone across the plaza to the police station, a little dapper figure of hate carrying his secret of love. On the wall of the office the gangster still stared stubbornly in profile towards the first communion party. Somebody had inked round the priest’s head to detach him from the girls’ and the women’s faces: the unbearable grin peeked out of a halo. The lieutenant called furiously out into the patio, ‘Is there nobody here?’ Then he sat down at the desk while the gun-butts scraped the floor.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 1
The mule suddenly sat down under the priest. It was not an unnatural thing to do, for they had been travelling through the forest for nearly twelve hours. They had been going west, but news of soldiers met them there and they had turned east; the Red Shirts were active in that direction, so they had tacked north, wading through the swamps, diving into the mahogany darkness. Now they were both tired out and the mule simply sat down. The priest scrambled off and began to laugh. He was feeling happy. It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.