(1940)

Characters
The Priest	Unnamed for the entirety of the novel, the priest or "the whiskey priest" as he sometimes refers to himself, is the protagonist and the character upon whom the novel's most important moral questions center. He spends the majority of the novel on the run from the police, friendless and homeless and searching for some sense of purpose in his life. His decadent, indulgent life as a parish priest takes place before the novel begins, but it is present in his thoughts throughout the novel as a source of deep humiliation. He spends the novel pursued by the police who believe the Church exploits the poor, and tormented by his own sense of guilt. He meets his daughter, the product of a secret affair with one of his parishioners, and finds that his love for her makes it impossible for him to repent the sin of conceiving her. He often chastises himself for impulses and reactions that are very normal and very human.
The Lieutenant	A believer in the law, a staunch opponent of the Catholic Church, and the priest's pursuer. The lieutenant's hatred of the Church stems from a traumatic event in his childhood, and it is a memory he wishes to eradicate along with all vestiges of religion. He lives a modest, almost monastic life, uninterested in any kind of sensual pleasure and desiring only the attainment of his goals. His "dapper", well-kept appearance stands in striking contrast to the confusion and grime that surround him. The ruthless tactics he employs in his pursuit of the priest seem to contradict his left-wing political and social ideals. But his conversations with the priest and a few of his more generous gestures at the novel's close indicate that he is a conflicted person, capable of empathy and perhaps even change.
The Mestizo	A person the priest meets about halfway through his journey and who continues to reappear throughout the last half of the novel. The mestizo is from the very beginning an untrustworthy character who seems intent on betraying the priest. Impoverished, occasionally delirious and always calculating, the mestizo sees in the outlawed priest an opportunity to make money. His yellow eyes and fangs are noteworthy physical features that suggest menace and evil. Like Judas in the story of Christ, the mestizo becomes an unwitting participant, even catalyst, in a story about one man's path to glory.
Coral Fellows	Coral is a young American girl whom the priest meets early on in the novel when she discovers him hiding on her family's property. Independent-minded and responsible, she anchors her family emotionally and takes charge of the business when her hapless father neglects it. Although a self-professed atheist since the age of ten, Coral is deeply affected by her brief encounter with the priest, and she, in turn, remains a presence in the priest's mind during his journeys.
Mr. Tench	An Englishman living in Mexico and working as a dentist. Mr. Tench is living a life of apathy and vacancy. A portrait of spiritual deadness, estranged from his wife and filled with a low-level loathing of Mexico, Tench is the first character the reader encounters.
Captain Fellows	Coral's father. Captain Fellows is a benign, if ineffectual, plantation owner, who tries to remain cheerful and optimistic in the face of difficult times and an isolated existence. He is unhappy when he learns that the priest is hiding in his barn, but turns a blind eye to his daughter when she insists upon assisting him. He and Mrs. Fellows leave Mexico after Coral's death.
The Boy	A youngster growing up in this violent and impoverished land. The boy listens with skepticism to stories about Juan, a martyred boy. He meets the priest in the beginning of the novel and, by the end, is impressed that the man he encountered has become a martyr for his faith. He represents the human ability to better itself by teaching its youth.
Brigida	The priest's illegitimate daughter. Brigida meets with her father briefly during his stay at her village. Mocked because of her ignominious parentage, she is less than thrilled to meet her long-lost father, and their brief exchange is a tense one. The priest worries about how she will fare in the dangerous, cruel world, and fears that her heart has already become hardened by what she has been through.
Maria	Brigida's mother and the woman with whom the priest had a brief but extremely significant affair. Maria is unhappy to see the priest return, although she helps him to escape capture when the police come to her village.
Padre Jose	The only other priest in the novel besides the protagonist. Padre Jose opted to renounce his faith rather than flee the state or face execution. Forced to marry, Padre Jose is allowed to remain in his town as a symbol of the weakness of the priesthood. He is mocked regularly by the children in his neighborhood and feels a deep and abiding sense of shame over the choices he has made.
The Gringo	An American outlaw, and the other "hunted man" in this novel. The gringo is wanted for murder. Although his reputation seems to fill people with a strange admiration, when we finally encounter him near the novel's end, he turns out to be little more than a common criminal.
Mrs. Fellows	Coral's mother. Mrs. Fellows is a neurotic, hysterical woman who confines herself to her bed out of fear of death.
Mr. Lehr	A German-American living in Mexico. Mr. Lehr is the first to come upon the priest after he crosses the border. A Lutheran who is mildly disapproving of Catholicism, he engages the priest in muted religious debate, but is basically a kind person living a rather easy life.
Miss Lehr	Mr. Lehr's sister who came to join her brother in Mexico after his wife died. Miss Lehr is somewhat more curious and also somewhat more naïve than her brother.
The woman	Nameless like her son, she tries to keep her children in touch with the Catholic faith by reading them stories of saints' lives. She is concerned that her young son, the boy, is losing interest in religion.
Juan	A young man whom we encounter in this novel only through the stories that are told about him. Juan lives his life with perfect piety and generosity, and faces death with bravery and with perfect composure.
The pious woman	A person the priest meets during his night in jail. The pious woman is too proud of herself and her convictions to be truly pious. She looks down on the priest for having sympathy for the other prisoners in the cell.
The jefe	The lieutenant's boss. The jefe is not nearly as concerned about the capture of the priest as his crusading underling, and is content to play billiards and delegate authority.

Part One

Chapter 1: The Port
Chapter 2: The Capital
Chapter 3: The River
Chapter 4: The Bystanders

Part Two

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

Part Three

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

Part Four

Chapter 1




PART ONE




CHAPTER 1: The Port



Mr Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican
sun and the bleaching dust. A few vultures looked down from the roof with
shabby indifference: he wasn't carrion yet. A faint feeling of rebellion stirred
in Mr Tench's heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering
finger-nails and tossed it feebly towards them. One rose and flapped across
the town: over the tiny plaza, over the bust of an ex-president, ex-general,
ex-human being, over the two stalls which sold mineral water, towards the river
and the sea. It wouldn't find anything there: the sharks looked after the
carrion on that side. Mr Tench went on across the plaza.

He said "Buenos dias" to a man with a gun who sat in a small patch of
shade against a wall. But it wasn't like England: the man said nothing at all,
just stared malevolently up at Mr Tench, as if he had never had any dealings
with the foreigner, as if Mr Tench were not responsible for his two gold
bicuspid teeth. Mr Tench went sweating by, past the Treasury which had
once been a church, towards the quay. Half-way across he suddenly forgot
what he had come out for--a glass of mineral water? That was all there was
to drink in this prohibition state--except beer, but that was a government
monopoly and too expensive except on special occasions. An awful feeling of
nausea gripped Mr Tench in the stomach--it couldn't have been mineral
water he wanted. Of course his ether cylinder . . . the boat was in. He had
heard its exultant piping while he lay on his bed after lunch. He passed the
barbers" and two dentists" and came out between a warehouse and the
customs on to the river bank.

The river went heavily by towards the sea between the banana plantations;
the General Obregon was tied up to the bank, and beer was being unloaded --
a hundred cases were already stacked upon the quay. Mr Tench stood in the
shade of the customs house and thought: what am I here for? Memory
drained out of him in the heat. He gathered his bile together and spat
forlornly into the sun. Then he sat down on a case and waited. Nothing to do.
Nobody would come to see him before five.

The General Obregon was about thirty yards long. A few feet of damaged
rail, one lifeboat, a bell hanging on a rotten cord, an oil-lamp in the bow, she
looked as if she might weather two or three more Atlantic years, if she didn't
strike a Norther in the gulf. That, of course, would be the end of her. It didn't
really matter: everybody was insured when he bought a ticket, automatically.
Half a dozen passengers leant on the rail, among the hobbled turkeys, and
stared at the port, the warehouse, the empty baked street with the dentists and
the barbers.

Mr Tench heard a revolver holster creak just behind him and turned his
head. A customs officer was watching him angrily. He said something which
Mr Tench did not catch. "Pardon me," Mr Tench said.

"My teeth," the customs man said indistinctly.

"Oh," Mr Tench said, "yes, your teeth." The man had none: that was why he
couldn't talk clearly. Mr Tench had removed them all. He was shaken with
nausea--something was wrong--worms, dysentery . . . He said, "The set is
nearly finished. Tonight," he promised wildly. It was, of course, quite
impossible; but that was how one lived, putting off everything. The man was
satisfied: he might forget, and in any case what could he do? He had paid in
advance. That was the whole world to Mr Tench: the heat and the forgetting,
the putting off till tomorrow, if possible cash down--for what? He stared out
over the slow river: the fin of a shark moved like a periscope at the river's
mouth. In the course of years several ships had stranded and they now helped
to prop up the bank, the smoke-stacks leaning over like guns pointing at some
distant objective across the banana trees and the swamps.

Mr Tench thought: ether cylinder: I nearly forgot. His mouth fell open and
he began moodily to count the bottles of Cerveza Moctezuma. A hundred and
forty cases. Twelve times a hundred and forty: the heavy phlegm gathered in
his mouth: twelve fours are forty-eight. He said aloud in English, "My God, a
pretty one": twelve hundred, sixteen hundred and eighty: he spat, staring with
vague interest at a girl in the bows of the General Obregon--a fine thin
figure, they were generally so thick, brown eyes, of course, and the inevitable
gleam of the gold tooth, but something fresh and young. . . . Sixteen hundred
and eighty bottles at a peso a bottle.

Somebody whispered in English, "What did you say?"

Mr Tench swivelled round. "You English?" he asked in astonishment, but
at the sight of the round and hollow face charred with a three-days" beard, he
altered his question: "You speak English?"

Yes, the man said, he spoke a little English. He stood stiffly in the shade,
a small man dressed in a shabby dark city suit, carrying a small attache case.
He had a novel under his arm: bits of an amorous scene stuck out, crudely
coloured. He said, "Excuse me. I thought just now you were talking to me."
He had protuberant eyes; he gave an impression of unstable hilarity, as if
perhaps he had been celebrating a birthday, alone.

Mr Tench cleared his mouth of phlegm. "What did I say?" He couldn't
remember a thing.

"You said my God a pretty one."

"Now what could I have meant by that?" He stared up at the merciless sky.
A vulture hung there, an observer. "What? Oh just the girl I suppose. You
don't often see a pretty piece round here. Just one or two a year worth
looking at."

"She is very young."

"Oh, I don't have intentions," Mr Tench said wearily. "A man may look.
I've lived alone for fifteen years."

"Here?"

"Hereabouts."

They fell silent and time passed, the shadow of the customs house shifted a
few inches farther towards the river: the vulture moved a little, like the black
hand of a clock.

"You came in her?" Mr Tench asked.

"No."

"Going in her?"

The little man seemed to evade the question, but then as if some explanation
were required: "I was just looking," he said. "I suppose she'll be sailing quite
soon?"

"To Vera Cruz," Mr Tench said. "In a few hours."

"Without calling anywhere?"

"Where could she call?" He asked, "How did you get here?"

The stranger said vaguely, "A canoe."

"Got a plantation, eh?"

"No."

"It's good hearing English spoken," Mr Tench said. "Now you learnt yours
in the States?"

The man agreed. He wasn't very garrulous.

"Ah, what wouldn't I give," Mr Tench said, "to be there now." He said in a low
anxious voice, "You don't happen, do you, to have a drink in that case of
yours? Some of you people back there--I've known one or two--a little for
medical purposes."

"Only medicine," the man said.

"You a doctor?"

The bloodshot eyes looked slyly out of their corners at Mr Tench. "You
would call me perhaps a--quack?"

"Patent medicines? Live and let live," Mr Tench said.

"Are you sailing?"

"No, I came down here for--. . . oh well, it doesn't matter anyway." He put
his hand on his stomach and said, "You haven't got any medicine, have you,
for--oh hell. I don't know what. It's just this bloody land. You can't cure me
of that. No one can."

"You want to go home?"

"Home," Mr Tench said, "my home"s here. Did you see what the peso
stands at in Mexico City? Four to the dollar. Four. O God. Ora pro nobis."

"Are you a Catholic?"

"No, no. Just an expression. I don't believe in anything like that." He said
irrelevantly, "It's too hot anyway."

"I think I must find somewhere to sit."

"Come up to my place," Mr Tench said. "I've got a spare hammock. The
boat won't leave for hours--if you want to watch it go."

The stranger said, "I was expecting to see someone. The name was Lopez."

"Oh, they shot him weeks ago," Mr Tench said.

"Dead?"

"You know how it is round here. Friend of yours?"

"No, no," the man protested hurriedly. "Just a friend of a friend."

"Well, That's how it is," Mr Tench said. He brought up his bile again and
spat it out into the hard sunlight. "They say he used to help . . . oh,
undesirables . . . well, to get out. His girl"s living with the Chief of Police
now."

"His girl? Do you mean his daughter?"

"He wasn't married. I mean the girl he lived with." Mr Tench was momentarily
surprised by an expression on the stranger's face. He said again,

"You know how it is." He looked across at the General Obregon. "SHe's a
pretty bit. Of course, in two years she'll be like all the rest. Fat and stupid.
O God, I'd like a drink. Ora pro nobis."

"I have a little brandy," the stranger said.

Mr Tench regarded him sharply. "Where?"

The hollow man put his hand to his hip--he might have been indicating the
source of his odd nervous hilarity. Mr Tench seized his wrist. "Careful," he
said. "Not here." He looked down the carpet of shadow: a sentry sat on an
empty crate asleep beside his rifle. "Come to my place," Mr Tench said.
"I meant," the little man said reluctantly, "just to see her go."

"Oh, it will be hours yet," Mr Tench assured him again.

"Hours? Are you certain? It's very hot in the sun."

"You'd better come home."

Home: it was a phrase one used to mean four walls behind which one slept.
There had never been a home. They moved across the little burnt plaza where
the dead General grew green in the damp and the gaseosa stalls stood under
the palms. Home lay like a picture postcard on a pile of other postcards:
shuffle the pack and you had Nottingham, a Metroland birthplace, an
interlude in Southend. Mr Tench's father had been a dentist too--his first
memory was finding a discarded cast in a wastepaper basket--the rough
toothless gaping mouth of clay, like something dug up in Dorset --
Neanderthal or Pithecanthropus. It had been his favourite toy: they tried to
tempt him with Meccano, but fate had struck. There is always one moment in
childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. The hot wet river-port
and the vultures lay in the wastepaper basket, and he picked them out. We
should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around
our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

There was no paving; during the rains the village (it was really no more)
slipped into the mud. Now the ground was hard under the feet like stone. The
two men walked in silence past barbers" shops and dentists"; the vultures on
the roofs looked contented, like domestic fowls: they searched under wide
dusty wings for parasites. Mr Tench said, "Excuse me," stopping at a little
wooden hut, one storey high, with a veranda where a hammock swung. The
hut was a little larger than the others in the narrow street which petered out
two hundred yards away in swamp. He said, nervously, "Would you like to
take a look around? I don't want to boast, but I'm the best dentist here. It's
not a bad place. As places go." Pride wavered in his voice like a plant with
shallow roots.

He led the way inside, locking the door behind him, through a dining-room
where two rocking-chairs stood on either side of a bare table: an oil-lamp,
some copies of old American papers, a cupboard. He said, "I'll get the glasses
out, but first I'd like to show you--you're an educated man . . ." The dentist"s
operating-room looked out on a yard where a few turkeys moved with shabby
nervous pomp: a drill which worked with a pedal, a dentist"s chair gaudy in
bright red plush, a glass cupboard in which instruments were dustily jumbled.
A forceps stood in a cup, a broken spirit-lamp was pushed into a corner, and
gags of cotton-wool lay on all the shelves.

"Very fine," the stranger commented.

"It's not so bad, is it," Mr Tench said, "for this town. You can't imagine the
difficulties. That drill," he continued bitterly, "is made in Japan. I've only had
it a month and It's wearing out already. But I can't afford American drills."

"The window," the stranger said, "is very beautiful."

One pane of stained glass had been let in: a Madonna gazed out through
the mosquito wire at the turkeys in the yard. "I got it," Mr Tench said, "when
they sacked the church. It didn't feel right--a dentist"s room without some
stained glass. Not civilized. At home--I mean in England--it was generally
the Laughing Cavalier--I don't know why--or else a Tudor rose. But one
can't pick and choose."

He opened another door and said, "My workroom." The first thing one saw
was a bed under a mosquito tent. Mr Tench said, "You understand--I'm
pressed for room." A ewer and basin stood at one end of a carpenter's bench,
and a soap-dish: at the other a blow-pipe, a tray of sand, pliers, a little
furnace. "I cast in sand," Mr Tench said. "What else can I do in this place?"
He picked up the case of a lower jaw. "You can't always get them accurate,"
he said. "Of course, they complain." He laid it down, and nodded at another
object on the bench--something stringy and intestinal in appearance, with
two little bladders of rubber. "Congenital fissure," he said. "It's the first time
I've tried. The Kingsley cast. I doubt if I can do it. But a man must try to
keep abreast of things." His mouth fell open: the look of vacancy returned:
the heat in the small room was overpowering. He stood there like a man lost
in a cavern among the fossils and instruments of an age of which he knows
very little. The stranger said, "If we could sit down . . ."

Mr Tench stared at him blankly.

"We could open the brandy."

"Oh yes, the brandy."

Mr Tench got two glasses out of a cupboard under the bench, and wiped
off traces of sand. Then they went and sat in rocking-chairs in the front room.
Mr Tench poured out.

"Water?" the stranger asked.

"You can't trust the water," Mr Tench said. "It's got me here." He put his
hand on his stomach and took a long draught. "You don't look too well
yourself," he said. He took a longer look. "Your teeth." One canine had gone,
and the front teeth were yellow with tartar and carious. He said, "You want to
pay attention to them."

"What is the good?" the stranger said. He held a small spot of brandy in his
glass warily--as if it was an animal to which he gave shelter, but not trust.
He had the air, in his hollowness and neglect, of somebody of no account
who had been beaten up incidentally, by ill-health or restlessness. He sat on
the very edge of the rocking-chair, with his small attache case balanced on
his knee and the brandy staved off with guilty affection.

"Drink up," Mr Tench encouraged him (it wasn't his brandy). "It will do
you good." The man's dark suit and sloping shoulders reminded him
uncomfortably of a coffin, and death was in his carious mouth already. Mr
Tench poured himself out another glass. He said, "It gets lonely here. It's
good to talk English, even to a foreigner. I wonder if You'd like to see a
picture of my kids." He drew a yellow snapshot out of his note-case and
handed it over. Two small children struggled over the handle of a wateringcan
in a back garden. "Of course," he said, "that was sixteen years ago."

"They are young men now."

"One died."

"Oh, well," the other replied gently, "in a Christian country." He took a gulp
of his brandy and smiled at Mr Tench rather foolishly.

"Yes, I suppose so," Mr Tench said with surprise. He got rid of his phlegm
and said, "It doesn't seem to me, of course, to matter much." He fell silent, his
thoughts ambling away; his mouth fell open, he looked grey and vacant, until
he was recalled by a pain in the stomach and helped himself to some more
brandy. "Let me see. What was it we were talking about? The kids . . . oh yes,
the kids. It's funny what a man remembers. You know, I can remember that
watering-can better than I can remember the kids. It cost three and
elevenpence three farthings, green; I could lead you to the shop where I
bought it. But as for the kids," he brooded over his glass into the past, "I
can't remember much else but them crying."

"Do you get news?"

"Oh, I gave up writing before I came here. What was the use? I couldn't
send any money. It wouldn't surprise me if the wife had married again. Her
mother would like it--the old sour bitch: she never cared for me."

The stranger said in a low voice, "It is awful."

Mr Tench examined his companion again with surprise. He sat there like a
black question mark, ready to go, ready to stay, poised on his chair. He
looked disreputable in his grey three-days" beard, and weak: somebody you
could command to do anything. He said, "I mean the world. The way things
happen."

"Drink up your brandy."

He sipped at it. It was like an indulgence. He said, "You remember this
place before--before the Red Shirts came?"

"I suppose I do."

"How happy it was then."

"Was it? I didn't notice."

"They had at any rate--God."

"There's no difference in the teeth," Mr Tench said. He gave himself some
more of the stranger's brandy. "It was always an awful place. Lonely. My
God. People at home would have said romance. I thought: five years here,
and then I'll go. There was plenty of work. Gold teeth. But then the peso
dropped. And now I can't get out. One day I will." He said, "I'll retire. Go
home. Live as a gentleman ought to live. This"--he gestured at the bare base
room--"I'll forget all this. Oh, it won't be long now. I'm an optimist," Mr
Tench said.

The stranger asked suddenly, "How long will she take to Vera Cruz?"

"Who?"

"The boat."

Mr Tench said gloomily, "Forty hours from now and We'd be there. The
Diligencia. A good hotel. Dance places too. A gay town."

"It makes it seem close," the stranger said. "And a ticket, how much would
that be?"

"You'd have to ask Lopez," Mr Tench said. "He's the agent."

"But Lopez . . ." "Oh yes, I forgot. They shot him."

Somebody knocked on the door. The stranger slipped the attache case
under his chair, and Mr Tench went cautiously up towards the window.

"can't be too careful," he said. "Any dentist Who's worth the name has
enemies."

A faint voice implored them, "A friend," and Mr Tench opened up.
Immediately the sun came in like a white-hot bar.

A child stood in the doorway asking for a doctor. He wore a big hat and
had stupid brown eyes. Behind him two mules stamped and whistled on the
hot beaten road. Mr Tench said he was not a doctor: he was a dentist.
Looking round he saw the stranger crouched in the rocking-chair, gazing with
an effect of prayer, entreaty. . . . The child said there was a new doctor in
town: the old one had fever and wouldn't stir. His mother was sick.
A vague memory stirred in Mr Tench's brain. He said with an air of
discovery, "Why, you're a doctor, aren't you?"

"No, no. I've got to catch that boat."

"I thought you said . . ."

"I've changed my mind."

"Oh well, it won't leave for hours yet," Mr Tench said. "they're never on
time." He asked the child how far. The child said it was six leagues away.

"Too far," Mr Tench said. "Go away. Find someone else." He said to the
stranger, "How things get around. Everyone must know you are in town."

"I could do no good," the stranger said anxiously: he seemed to be asking
for Mr Tench's opinion, humbly.

"Go away," Mr Tench commanded. The child did not stir. He stood in the
hard sunlight looking in with infinite patience. He said his mother was dying.
The brown eyes expressed no emotion: it was a fact. You were born, your
parents died, you grew old, you died yourself.

"If sHe's dying," Mr Tench said, "There's no point in a doctor seeing her."
But the stranger got up as though unwillingly he had been summoned to an
occasion he couldn't pass by. He said sadly, "It always seems to happen. Like
this."

"You'll have a job not to miss the boat."

"I shall miss it," he said. "I am meant to miss it." He was shaken by a tiny
rage. "Give me my brandy." He took a long pull at it, with his eyes on the
impassive child, the baked street, the vultures moving in the sky like indige-
stion spots.

"But if sHe's dying . . ." Mr Tench said.

"I know these people. She will be no more dying than I am."

"You can do no good."

The child watched them as if he didn't care. The argument in a foreign
language going on in there was something abstract: he wasn't concerned. He
would just wait here till the doctor came.

"You know nothing," the stranger said fiercely. "That is what everyone says
all the time--you do no good." The brandy had affected him. He said with
monstrous bitterness, "I can hear them saying it all over the world."

"Anyway," Mr Tench said, "There'll be another boat. In a fortnight. Or three
weeks. You are lucky. You can get out. You haven't got your capital here."
He thought of his capital: the Japanese drill, the dentist"s chair, the spiritlamp
and the pliers and the little oven for the gold fillings: a stake in the country.

"Vamos," the man said to the child. He turned back to Mr Tench and told
him that he was grateful for the rest out of the sun. He had the kind of
dwarfed dignity Mr Tench was accustomed to--the dignity of people afraid
of a little pain and yet sitting down with some firmness in his chair. Perhaps
he didn't care for mule travel. He said with an effect of old-fashioned ways,
"I will pray for you."

"You were welcome," Mr Tench said. The man got up on to the mule, and
the child led the way, very slowly under the bright glare, towards the swamp,
the interior. It was from there the man had emerged this morning to take a
look at the General Obregon: now he was going back. He swayed very
slightly in his saddle from the effect of the brandy. He became a minute
disappointed figure at the end of the street.

It had been good to talk to a stranger, Mr Tench thought, going back into
his room, locking the door behind him (one never knew). Loneliness faced
him there, vacancy. But he was as accustomed to both as to his own face in
the glass. He sat down in the rocking-chair and moved up and down, creating
a faint breeze in the heavy air. A narrow column of ants moved across the
room to the little patch on the floor where the stranger had spilt some brandy:
they milled in it, then moved on in an orderly line to the opposite wall and
disappeared. Down in the river the General Obregon whistled twice, he
didn't know why.

The stranger had left his book behind. It lay under his rocking-chair: a
woman in Edwardian dress crouched sobbing upon a rug embracing a man's
brown polished pointed shoes. He stood above her disdainfully with a little
waxed moustache. The book was called La Eterna Martir. After a time Mr
Tench picked it up. When he opened it he was taken aback--what was
printed inside didn't seem to belong; it was Latin. Mr Tench grew thoughtful:
he shut the book up and carried it into his workroom. You couldn't burn a
book, but it might be as well to hide it if you were not sure--sure, that is, of
what it was all about. He put it inside the little oven for gold alloy. Then he
stood by the carpenter's bench, his mouth hanging open: he had remembered
what had taken him to the quay--the ether cylinder which should have come
down-river in the General Obregon. Again the whistle blew from the river,
and Mr Tench ran without his hat into the sun. He had said the boat would
not go before morning, but you could never trust these people not to keep to
time-table, and sure enough, when he came out on to the bank between the
customs and the warehouse, the General Obregon was already ten feet off in
the sluggish river, making for the sea. He bellowed after it, but it wasn't any
good: there was no sign of a cylinder anywhere on the quay. He shouted once
again, and then didn't trouble any more. It didn't matter so much after all: a
little additional pain was hardly noticeable in the huge abandonment.

On the General Obregon a faint breeze became evident: banana plantations
on either side, a few wireless aerials on a point, the port slipped behind.
When you looked back you could not have told that it had ever existed at all.
The wide Atlantic opened up; the great grey cylindrical waves lifted the
bows, and the hobbled turkeys shifted on the deck. The captain stood in the
tiny deck-house with a toothpick in his hair. The land went backward at a low
even roll, and the dark came quite suddenly, with a sky of low and brilliant
stars. One oil-lamp was lit in the bows, and the girl whom Mr Tench had
spotted from the bank began to sing gently--a melancholy, sentimental, and
contented song about a rose which had been stained with true love"s blood.
There was an enormous sense of freedom and air upon the gulf with the low
tropical shoreline buried in darkness as deeply as any mummy in a tomb. I
am happy, the young girl said to herself without considering why, I am
happy.

Far back inside the darkness the mules plodded on. The effect of the
brandy had long ago worn off, and the man bore in his brain along the
marshy tract, which, when the rains came, would be quite impassable, the
sound of the General Obregon"s siren. He knew what it meant: the ship had
kept to timetable: he was abandoned. He felt an unwilling hatred of the child
ahead of him and the sick woman--he was unworthy of what he carried. A
smell of damp came up all round him; it was as if this part of the world had
never been dried in the flame when the world spun off into space: it had
absorbed only the mist and cloud of those awful regions. He began to pray,
bouncing up and down to the lurching slithering mule"s stride, with his
brandied tongue: "Let me be caught soon. . . . Let me be caught." He had tried
to escape, but he was like the King of a West African tribe, the slave of his
people, who may not even lie down in case the winds should fail.



CHAPTER 2: The Capital



The squad of police made their way back to the station. They walked
raggedly with rifles slung anyhow: ends of cotton where buttons should have
been: a puttee slipping down over the ankle: small men with black secret
Indian eyes. The little plaza on the hill-top was lighted with globes strung
together in threes and joined by trailing overhead wires. The Treasury, the
Presidencia, a dentist"s, the prison--a low white colonnaded building which
dated back three hundred years--and then the steep street down past the
back wall of a ruined church: whichever way you went you came ultimately
to water and to river. Pink classical facades peeled off and showed the mud
beneath, and the mud slowly reverted to mud. Round the plaza the evening
parade went on--women in one direction, men in the other; young men in red
shirts milled boisterously round the gaseosa stalls.

The lieutenant walked in front of his men with an air of bitter distaste. He
might have been chained to them unwillingly--perhaps the scar on his jaw
was the relic of an escape. His gaiters were polished, and his pistol-holster:
his buttons were all sewn on. He had a sharp crooked nose jutting out of a
lean dancer's face; his neatness gave an effect of inordinate ambition in the
shabby city. A sour smell came up to the plaza from the river and the vultures
were bedded on the roofs, under the tent of their rough black wings. Some-
times, a little moron head peered out and down and a claw shifted. At nine-
thirty exactly all the lights in the plaza went out.

A policeman clumsily presented arms and the squad marched into
barracks; they waited for no order, hanging up their rifles by the officers"
room, lurching on into the courtyard, to their hammocks or the excusados.
Some of them kicked off their boots and lay down. Plaster was peeling off
the mud walls; a generation of policemen had scrawled messages on the
whitewash. A few peasants waited on a bench, hands between their knees.
Nobody paid them any attention. Two men were fighting in the lavatory.

"Where is the jefe?" the lieutenant asked. No one knew for certain: they
thought he was playing billiards somewhere in the town. The lieutenant sat
down with dapper irritation at the chief"s table; behind his head two hearts
were entwined in pencil on the whitewash. "All right," he said, "what are
you waiting for? Bring in the prisoners." They came in bowing, hat in hand,
one behind the other. "So-and-so drunk and disorderly." "Fined five pesos."
"But I can't pay, your excellency." "Let him clean out the lavatory and the cells
then." "So-and-so. Defaced an election poster." "Fined five pesos." "So-and-
so found wearing a holy medal under his shirt." "Fined five pesos." The duty
drew to a close: there was nothing of importance. Through the open door the
mosquitoes came whirring in.

Outside the sentry could be heard presenting arms. The Chief of Police
came breezily in, a stout man with a pink fat face, dressed in white flannels
with a wide-awake hat and a cartridge-belt and a big pistol clapping his thigh.
He held a handkerchief to his mouth: he was in distress. "Toothache again,"
he said, "toothache."

"Nothing to report," the lieutenant said with contempt.

"The Governor was at me again today," the chief complained.

"Liquor?"

"No, a priest."

"The last was shot weeks ago."

"He doesn't think so."

"The devil of it is," the lieutenant said, "we haven't photographs." He
glanced along the wall to the picture of James Calver, wanted in the United
States for bank robbery and homicide: a tough uneven face taken at two
angles: description circulated to every station in Central America: the low
forehead and the fanatic bent-on-one-thing eyes. He looked at it with regret:
there was so little chance that he would ever get south; he would be picked up
in some dive at the border--in Juarez or Piedras Negras or Nogales.

"He says we have," the chief complained. "My tooth, oh, my tooth." He
tried to find something in his hip-pocket, but the holster got in the way. The
lieutenant tapped his polished boot impatiently. "There," the chief said. A
large number of people sat round a table: young girls in white muslin: older
women with untidy hair and harassed expressions: a few men peered shyly
and solicitously out of the background. All the faces were made up of small
dots. It was a newspaper photograph of a first communion party taken years
ago; a youngish man in a Roman collar sat among the women. You could
imagine him petted with small delicacies, preserved for their use in the
stifling atmosphere of intimacy and respect. He sat there, plump, with
protuberant eyes, bubbling with harmless feminine jokes. "It was taken
years ago."

"He looks like all the rest," the lieutenant said. It was obscure, but you
could read into the smudgy photograph a well-shaved, well-powdered jowl
much too developed for his age. The good things of life had come to him too
early--the respect of his contemporaries, a safe livelihood. The trite religious
word upon the tongue, the joke to ease the way, the ready acceptance of other
people"s homage . . . a happy man. A natural hatred as between dog and dog
stirred in the lieutenant's bowels. "We've shot him half a dozen times," he
said.

"The Governor has had a report . . . he tried to get away last week to Vera
Cruz."

"What are the Red Shirts doing that he comes to us?"

"Oh, they missed him, of course. It was just luck that he didn't catch the
boat."

"What happened to him?"

"They found his mule. The Governor says he must have him this month.
Before the rains come."

"Where was his parish?"

"Concepcion and the villages around. But he left there years ago."

"Is anything known?"

"He can pass as a gringo. He spent six years at some American seminary. I
don't know what else. He was born in Carmen--the son of a storekeeper. Not
that that helps."

"They all look alike to me," the lieutenant said. Something you could
almost have called horror moved him when he looked at the white muslin
dresses--he remembered the smell of incense in the churches of his boyhood,
the candles and the laciness and the self-esteem, the immense demands made
from the altar steps by men who didn't know the meaning of sacrifice. The
old peasants knelt there before the holy images with their arms held out in the
attitude of the cross: tired by the long day"s labour in the plantations they
squeezed out a further mortification. And the priest came round with the
collecting-bag taking their centavos, abusing them for their small comforting
sins, and sacrificing nothing at all in return--except a little sexual
indulgence. And that was easy, the lieutenant thought, easy. Himself he felt
no need of women. He said, "We will catch him. It is only a question of
time."

"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 ex-
perienced 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 Jose?"

"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 Jose."

"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 Jose 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 oc-
casional unreliable plane: Indian villages and the huts of herds: two hun-
dred 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, "Jose, Jose." 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. "Jose, Jose."
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.

"Jose. 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 Jose 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. "Jose. 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. "Jose." 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. "Jose." "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 slaughterroom.
A high child's voice said, "Jose." 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. "Jose," somebody squeaked again. "Jose." 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, "Jose, Jose. Come to bed, Jose." 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
food 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.

He thought: after all, a man likes to be welcomed.

He walked up to his bungalow; it was distinguished from the others which
lay along the bank by a tiled roof, a flag-post without a flag, a plate on the
door with the title "Central American Banana Company". Two hammocks
were strung up on the veranda, but there was nobody about. Captain Fellows
knew where to find his wife. He burst boisterously through a door and shout-
ed, "Daddy"s home." A scared thin face peeked at him through a mosquito-
net; his boots ground peace into the floor; Mrs Fellows flinched away into
the white muslin tent. He said, "Pleased to see me, Trix?" and she drew
rapidly on her face the outline of her frightened welcome. It was like a
trick you do with a blackboard. Draw a dog in one line without lifting the
chalk--and the answer, of course, is a sausage.

"I'm glad to be home," Captain Fellows said, and he believed it. It was his
one firm conviction--that he really felt the correct emotions of love and joy
and grief and hate. He had always been a good man at zero hour.

"All well at the office?"

"Fine," Fellows said, "fine."

"I had a bit of fever yesterday."

"Ah, you need looking after. You'll be all right now," he said vaguely, "that
I'm home." He shied merrily away from the subject of fever--clapping his
hands, a big laugh, while she trembled in her tent. "Where"s Coral?"

"SHe's with the policeman," Mrs Fellows said.

"I hoped sHe'd meet me," he said, roaming aimlessly about the little interior
room, full of boot-trees, while his brain caught up with her. "Policeman?
What policeman?"

"He came last night and Coral let him sleep on the veranda. He's looking
for somebody, she says."

"What an extraordinary thing. Here?"

"He's not an ordinary policeman. He's an officer. He left his men in the
village--Coral says."

"I do think you ought to be up," he said. "I mean--these fellows, you can't
trust them." He felt no conviction when he added, "SHe's just a kid."

"I tell you I had fever," Mrs Fellows wailed, "I felt so terribly ill."

"You'll be all right. Just a touch of the sun. You'll see--now I'm home."

"I had such a headache. I couldn't read or sew. And then this man . . .

Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort
of not turning round. She dressed up her fear, so that she could look at it--
in the form of fever, rats, unemployment. The real thing was taboo--death
coming nearer every year in the strange place: everybody packing up and
leaving, while she stayed in a cemetery no one visited, in a big above-ground
tomb.

He said, "I suppose I ought to go and see the man." He sat down on the bed
and put his hand upon her arm. They had something in common--a kind of
diffidence. He said absent-mindedly, "That dago secretary of the boss has
gone."

"Where?"

"West." He could feel her arm go stiff: she strained away from him towards
the wall. He had touched the taboo--the bond was broken, he couldn't tell
why. "Headache, darling?"

"hadn't you better see the man?"

"Oh yes, yes. I'll be off." But he didn't stir: it was the child who came to
him.

She stood in the doorway watching them with a look of immense
responsibility. Before her serious gaze they became a boy you couldn't trust
and a ghost you could almost puff away, a piece of frightened air. She was
very young--about thirteen--and at that age you are not afraid of many
things, age and death, all the things which may turn up, snake-bite and fever
and rats and a bad smell. Life hadn't got at her yet; she had a false air of
impregnability. But she had been reduced already, as it were, to the smallest
terms--everything was there but on the thinnest lines. That was what the sun
did to a child, reduced it to a framework. The gold bangle on the bony wrist
was like a padlock on a canvas door which a fist could break. She said, "I told
the policeman you were home."

"Oh yes, yes," Captain Fellows said. "Got a kiss for your old dad?"

She came solemnly across the room and kissed him formally upon the
forehead--he could feel the lack of meaning. She had other things to think
about. She said, "I told cook that Mother would not be getting up for dinner."

"I think you ought to make the effort, dear," Captain Fellows said.

"Why?" Coral asked.

"Oh, well . . ."

Coral said, "I want to talk to you alone." Mrs Fellows shifted inside her
tent. Common sense was a horrifying quality she had never possessed: it was
common sense which said, "The dead can't hear" or "She can't know now"
or "Tin flowers are more practical".

"I don't understand," Captain Fellows said uneasily, "why your mother
shouldn't hear."

"She wouldn't want to. It would only scare her."

Coral--he was accustomed to it by now--had an answer to everything. She
never spoke without deliberation; she was prepared--but sometimes the
answers she had prepared seemed to him of a wildness . . . They were based
on the only life she could remember, the swamp and vultures and no children
anywhere, except a few in the village with bellies swollen by worms who ate
dirt from the bank, inhumanly. A child is said to draw parents together, and
certainly he felt an immense unwillingness to entrust himself to this child.
Her answers might carry him anywhere. He felt through the net for his wife's
hand, secretively: they were adults together. This was the stranger in their
house. He said boisterously, "you're frightening us."

"I don't think," the child said, with care, "that You'll be frightened."

He said weakly, pressing his wife's hand, "Well, my dear, our daughter
seems to have decided . . ."

"First you must see the policeman. I want him to go. I don't like him."

"Then he must go, of course," Captain Fellows said, with a hollow
unconfident laugh.

"I told him that. I said we couldn't refuse him a hammock for the night
when he arrived so late. But now he must go."

"And he disobeyed you?"

"He said he wanted to speak to you."

"He little knew," Captain Fellows said, "he little knew." Irony was his only
defence, but it was not understood; nothing was understood which was not
clear--like an alphabet or a simple sum or a date in history. He relinquished
his wife's hand and allowed himself to be led unwillingly into the afternoon
sun. The police officer stood in front of the veranda, a motionless olive
figure; he wouldn't stir a foot to meet Captain Fellows.

"Well, lieutenant?" Captain Fellows said breezily. It occurred to him that
Coral had more in common with the policeman than with himself.

"I am looking for a man," the lieutenant said. "He has been reported in this
district."

"He can't be here."

"Your daughter tells me the same."

"She knows."

"He is wanted on a very serious charge."

"Murder?"

"No. Treason."

"Oh, treason," Captain Fellows said, all his interest dropping; there was so
much treason everywhere--it was like petty larceny in a barracks.

"He is a priest. I trust you will report at once if he is seen." The lieutenant
paused. "You are a foreigner living under the protection of our laws. We
expect you to make a proper return for our hospitality. You are not a
Catholic?"

"No."

"Then I can trust you to report?" the lieutenant said.

"I suppose so."

The lieutenant stood there like a little dark menacing question-mark in the
sun: his attitude seemed to indicate that he wouldn't even accept the benefit
of shade from a foreigner. But he had used a hammock; that, Captain Fellows
supposed, he must have regarded as a requisition. "Have a glass of gaseosa?"

"No. No, thank you."

"Well," Captain Fellows said, "I can't offer you anything else, can I? It's
treason to drink spirits."

The lieutenant suddenly turned on his heel as if he could no longer bear the
sight of them and strode away along the path which led to the village: his
gaiters and his pistol-holster winked in the sunlight. When he had gone some
way they could see him pause and spit; he had not been discourteous, he had
waited till he supposed that they no longer watched him before he got rid of
his hatred and contempt for a different way of life, for ease, safety, toleration,
and complacency.

"I wouldn't want to be up against him," Captain Fellows said.

"Of course he doesn't trust us."

"They don't trust anyone."

"I think," Coral said, "he smelt a rat."

"They smell them everywhere."

"You see, I wouldn't let him search the place."

"Why ever not?" Captain Fellows asked, and then his vague mind went off
at a tangent. "How did you stop him?"

"I said I'd loose the dogs on him--and complain to the Minister. He hadn't
any right . . ."

"Oh, right," Captain Fellows said. "They carry their right on their hips. It
wouldn't have done any harm to let him look."

"I gave him my word." She was as inflexible as the lieutenant: small and
black and out of place among the banana groves. Her candour made allow-
ances for nobody: the future, full of compromises, anxieties, and shame,
lay outside. But at any moment now a word, a gesture, the most trivial act
might be her sesame--to what? Captain Fellows was touched with fear; he
was aware of an inordinate love which robbed him of authority. You cannot
control what you love--you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken
bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead. He closed his
eyes--he was a happy man--and hummed a tune.

Coral said, "I shouldn't have liked a man like that to catch me out--lying, I
mean."

"Lying? Good God," Captain Fellows said, "you don't mean He's here."

"Of course He's here," Coral said.

"Where?"

"In the big barn," she explained gently. "We couldn't let them catch him."

"Does your mother know about this?"

She said with devastating honesty, "Oh no. I couldn't trust her." She was
independent of both of them: they belonged together in the past. In forty
years" time they would be dead as last year's dog. He said, "You'd better
show me."

He walked slowly; happiness drained out of him more quickly and com-
pletely than out of an unhappy man: an unhappy man is always prepared.
As she walked in front of him, her two meagre tails of hair bleaching in the
sunlight, it occurred to him for the first time that she was of an age when
Mexican girls were ready for their first man. What was to happen? He
flinched away from problems which he had never dared to confront. As they
passed the window of his bedroom he caught sight of a thin shape lying
bunched and bony and alone in a mosquito-net. He remembered with self-
pity and nostalgia his happiness on the river, doing a man's job without
thinking of other people. If I had never married. . . . He wailed like a child at
the merciless immature back, "We've no business interfering with politics."

"This isn't politics," she said gently. "I know about politics. Mother and I
are doing the Reform Bill." She took a key out of her pocket and unlocked the
big barn in which they stored bananas before sending them down the river to
the port. It was very dark inside after the glare. There was a scuffle in a
corner. Captain Fellows picked up an electric torch and shone it on somebody
in a torn dark suit--a small man who blinked and needed a shave.

"Quien es usted?" Captain Fellows said. "I speak English." He clutched a
small attache case to his side, as if he were waiting to catch a train he
must on no account miss.

"you've no business here."

"No," the man said, "no."

"It's nothing to do with us," Captain Fellows said. "We are foreigners."
The man said, "Of course. I will go." He stood with his head a little bent
like a man in an orderly-room listening to an officer's decision. Captain
Fellows relented a little. He said, "You'd better wait till dark. You don't want
to be caught."

"No."

"Hungry?"

"A little. It does not matter." He said with a rather repulsive humility, "If
you would do me a favour . . ."

"What?"

"A little brandy."

"I'm breaking the law enough for you as it is," Captain Fellows said. He
strode out of the barn, feeling twice the size, leaving the small bowed figure
in the darkness among the bananas. Coral locked the door and followed him.
"What a religion," Captain Fellows said. "Begging for brandy. Shameless."

"But you drink it sometimes."

"My dear," Captain Fellows said, "when you are older You'll understand the
difference between drinking a little brandy after dinner and--well, needing
it."

"Can I take him some beer?"

"You won't take him anything."

"The servants wouldn't be safe."

He was powerless and furious. He said, "You see what a hole you've put us
in." He stumped back into the house and into his bedroom, roaming aimlessly
among the boot-trees. Mrs Fellows slept uneasily, dreaming of weddings.
Once she said aloud, "My train. Be careful of my train."

"What's that?" he asked petulantly. "What's that?"

Dark fell like a curtain: one moment the sun was there, the next it had
gone. Mrs Fellows woke to another night. "Did you speak, dear?"

"It was you who spoke," he said. "Something about trains."

"I must have been dreaming."

"It will be a long time before they have trains here," he said, with gloomy
satisfaction. He came and sat on the bed, keeping away from the window; out
of sight, out of mind. The crickets were beginning to chatter and beyond the
mosquito wire fireflies moved like globes. He put his heavy, cheery, needing to-
be-reassured hand on the shape under the sheet and said, "It's not such a
bad life, Trixy. Is it now? Not a bad life?" But he could feel her stiffen: the
word "life" was taboo: it reminded you of death. She turned her face away
from him towards the wall and then hopelessly back again--the phrase "turn
to the wall" was taboo too. She lay panic-stricken, while the boundaries of her
fear widened to include every relationship and the whole world of inanimate
things: it was like an infection. You could look at nothing for long without
becoming aware that it, too, carried the germ . . . the word "sheet" even. She
threw the sheet off her and said, "It's so hot, It's so hot." The usually happy
and the always unhappy one watched the night thicken from the bed with
distrust. They were companions cut off from all the world: there was no
meaning anywhere outside their own hearts: they were carried like children in
a coach through the huge spaces without any knowledge of their destination.
He began to hum with desperate cheerfulness a song of the war years; he
wouldn't listen to the footfall in the yard outside, going in the direction of the
barn.

Coral put down the chicken legs and tortillas on the ground and unlocked the
door. She carried a bottle of Cerveza Moctezuma under her arm. There was
the same scuffle in the dark: the noise of a frightened man. She said, "It's
me," to quieten him, but she didn't turn on the torch. She said, "There's a
bottle of beer here, and some food."

"Thank you. Thank you."

"The police have gone from the village--south. You had better go north."
He said nothing.

She asked, with the cold curiosity of a child, "What would they do to you if
they found you?"

"Shoot me."

"You must be very frightened," she said with interest.

He felt his way across the barn towards the door and the pale starlight. He
said, "I am frightened," and stumbled on a bunch of bananas.

"can't you escape from here?"

"I tried. A month ago. The boat was leaving and then I was summoned."

"Somebody needed you?"

"She didn't need me," he said bitterly. She could just see his face now, as
the world swung among the stars: what her father would call an untrustwor-
thy face. He said, "You see how unworthy I am. Talking like this."

"Unworthy of what?"

He clasped his little attache case closely and said, "Could you tell me what
month it is. Is it still February?"

"No. It's the seventh of March."

"I don't often meet people who know. That means another month--six
weeks--before the rains." He went on, "When the rains come I am nearly
safe. You see, the police can't get about."

"The rains are best for you?" she asked: she had a keen desire to learn. The
Reform Bill and Senlac and a little French lay like treasure-trove in her brain.
She expected answers to every question, and she absorbed them hungrily.

"Oh no, no. They mean another six months living like this." He tore at a
chicken leg. She could smell his breath: it was disagreeable, like something
which has lain about too long in the heat. He said, "I'd rather be caught."
"But can't you," she said logically, "just give yourself up?"

He had answers as plain and understandable as her questions. He said,
"There's the pain. To choose pain like that--It's not possible. And It's my
duty not to be caught. You see, my bishop is no longer here." Curious
pedantries moved him. "This is my parish." He found a tortilla and began to
eat ravenously.

She said solemnly, "It's a problem." She could hear a gurgle as he drank
out of the bottle. He said, "I try to remember how happy I was once." A
firefly lit his face like a torch and then went out--a tramp"s face: what could
ever have made it happy? He said, "In Mexico City now they are saying
Benediction. The Bishop"s there. . . . Do you imagine he ever thinks . . . ?
They don't even know I'm alive."

She said, "Of course you could--renounce."

"I don't understand."

"Renounce your faith," she explained, using the words of her European
History.

He said, "It's impossible. There's no way. I'm a priest. It's out of my
power."

The child listened intently. She said, "Like a birthmark." She could hear him
sucking desperately at the bottle. She said, "I think I could find my father's
brandy."

"Oh no, you mustn't steal." He drained the beer: a long glassy whistle in
the darkness: the last drop must have gone. He said, "I must leave. At once."

"You can always come back here."

"Your father would not like it."

"He needn't know," she said. "I could look after you. My room is just
opposite this door. You would just tap at my window. Perhaps," she went
seriously on, "it would be better to have a code. You see, somebody else
might tap."

He said in a horrified voice, "Not a man?"

"Yes. You never know. Another fugitive from justice."

"Surely," he asked in bewilderment, "that is not likely?"

She said airily, "These things do happen."

"Before today?"

"No, but I expect they will again. I want to be prepared. You must tap three
times. Two long taps and a short one."

He giggled suddenly like a child. "How do you tap a long tap?"

"Like this."

"Oh, you mean a loud one?"

"I call them long taps--because of Morse." He was hopelessly out of his
depth. He said, "You are very good. Will you pray for me?"

"Oh," she said, "I don't believe in that."

"Not in praying?"

"You see, I don't believe in God. I lost my faith when I was ten."

"Well, well," he said. "Then I will pray for you."

"You can," she said patronizingly, "if you like. If you come again I shall
teach you the Morse code. It would be useful to you."

"How?"

"If you were hiding in the plantation I could flash to you with my mirror
news of the enemy"s movements."

He listened seriously. "But wouldn't they see you?"

"Oh," she said, "I would invent an explanation." She moved logically
forward a step at a time, eliminating all objections.

"Good-bye, my child," he said.

He lingered by the door. "Perhaps--you do not care for prayers. Perhaps you
would like . . . I know a good conjuring trick."

"I like tricks."

"You do it with cards. Have you any cards?"

"No."

He sighed, "Then That's no good," and giggled--she could smell the beer
on his breath--"I shall just have to pray for you."

She said, "You don't sound afraid."

"A little drink," he said, "will work wonders in a cowardly man. With a
little brandy, why, I'd defy--the devil." He stumbled in the doorway.
"Good-bye," she said. "I hope You'll escape." A faint sigh came out of the
darkness. She said gently, "If they kill you I shan't forgive them--ever." She
was ready to accept any responsibility, even that of vengeance, without a
second thought. It was her life.

Half a dozen huts of mud and wattle stood in a clearing; two were in ruins. A
few pigs rooted round, and an old woman carried a burning ember from hut
to hut, lighting a little fire on the centre of each floor to fill the hut with
smoke and keep mosquitoes away. Women lived in two of the huts, the pigs
in another; in the last unruined hut where maize was stored, an old man and a
boy and a tribe of rats. The old man stood in the clearing watching the fire
being carried round; it flickered through the darkness like a ritual repeated at
the same hour for a lifetime. White hair, a white stubbly beard, and hands
brown and fragile as last year's leaves, he gave an effect of immense
permanence. Living on the edge of subsistence nothing much could ever
change him. He had been old for years.

The stranger came into the clearing. He wore what used to be town shoes,
black and pointed; only the uppers were left, so that he walked to all intents
barefoot. The shoes were symbolic, like the cobwebbed flags in churches. He
wore a shirt and a pair of black torn trousers and he carried his attache case,
as if he were a season-ticket holder. He had nearly reached the state of
permanency too, but he carried about with him the scars of time--the
damaged shoes implied a different past, the lines of his face suggested hopes
and fears of the future. The old woman with the ember stopped between two
huts and watched him. He came on into the clearing with his eyes on the
ground and his shoulders hunched, as if he felt exposed. The old man
advanced to meet him; he took the stranger's hand and kissed it. "Can you
let me have a hammock for the night?"

"Ah, father, for a hammock you must go to a town. Here you must take
only the luck of the road."

"Never mind. Anywhere to lie down. Can you give me--a little spirit?"

"Coffee, father. We have nothing else."

"Some food."

"We have no food."

"Never mind."

The boy came out of the hut and watched them: everybody watched. It was
like a bull-fight. The animal was tired and they waited for the next move.
They were not hard-hearted; they were watching the rare spectacle of
something worse off than themselves. He limped on towards the hut. Inside it
was dark from the knees upwards; there was no flame on the floor, just a
slow burning away. The place was half filled by a stack of maize, and rats
rustled among the dry outer leaves. There was a bed made of earth with a
straw mat on it, and two packing-cases made a table. The stranger lay down,
and the old man closed the door on them both.

"Is it safe?"

"The boy will watch. He knows."

"Were you expecting me?"

"No, father. But it is five years since we have seen a priest . . . it was bound
to happen one day."

He fell uneasily asleep, and the old man crouched on the floor, fanning the
fire with his breath. Somebody tapped on the door and the priest jerked
upright. "It is all right," the old man said. "Just your coffee, father." He
brought it to him--grey maize coffee smoking in a tin mug, but the priest was
too tired to drink. He lay on his side perfectly still: a rat watched him from
the maize.

"The soldiers were here yesterday," the old man said. He blew on the fire.
The smoke poured up and filled the hut. The priest began to cough, and the
rat moved quickly like the shadow of a hand into the stack.

"The boy, father, has not been baptized. The last priest who was here
wanted two pesos. I had only one peso. Now I have only fifty centavos."

"Tomorrow," the priest said wearily.

"Will you say Mass, father, in the morning?"

"Yes, yes." "And confession, father, will you hear our confessions?"

"Yes, but let me sleep first." He turned on his back and closed his eyes to
keep out the smoke.

"We have no money, father, to give you. The other priest, Padre Jose . . ."

"Give me some clothes instead," he said impatiently.

"But we have only what we wear."

"Take mine in exchange."

The old man hummed dubiously to himself, glancing sideways at what the
fire showed of the black torn cloth. "If I must, father," he said. He blew
quietly at the fire for a few minutes. The priest's eyes closed again.
"After five years there is so much to confess."

The priest sat up quickly. "What was that?" he said.

"You were dreaming, father. The boy will warn us if the soldiers come. I
was only saying --"

"can't you let me sleep for five minutes?" He lay down again. Somewhere,
in one of the women's huts, someone was singing--"I went down to my field
and there I found a rose."

The old man said softly, "It would be a pity if the soldiers came before we
had time . . . such a burden on poor souls, father . . ." The priest shouldered
himself upright against the wall and said furiously, "Very well. Begin. I will
hear your confession." The rats scuffled in the maize. "Go on then," he said.
"don't waste time. Hurry. When did you last . . . ?" The old man knelt beside
the fire, and across the clearing the woman sang: "I went down to my field
and the rose was withered."

"Five years ago." He paused and blew at the fire. "It's hard to remember,
father."

"Have you sinned against purity?"

The priest leant against the wall with his legs drawn up beneath him, and
the rats accustomed to the voices moved again in the maize. The old man
picked out his sins with difficulty, blowing at the fire. "Make a good act of
contrition," the priest said, "and say--say--have you a rosary?--then say the
Joyful Mysteries." His eyes closed, his lips and tongue stumbled over the
absolution, failed to finish . . . he sprang awake again.

"Can I bring the women?" the old man was saying. "It is five years . . ."

"Oh, let them come. Let them all come," the priest cried angrily. "I am your
servant." He put his hand over his eyes and began to weep. The old man o-
pened the door: it was not completely dark outside under the enormous arc
of starry ill-lit sky. He went across to the women's huts and knocked.

"Come," he said. "You must say your confessions. It is only polite to the
father." They wailed at him that they were tired . . . the morning would do.
"Would you insult him?" he said. "What do you think he has come here for?
He is a very holy father. There he is in my hut now weeping for our sins." He
hustled them out; one by one they picked their way across the clearing
towards the hut, and the old man set off down the path towards the river to
take the place of the boy who watched the ford for soldiers.




CHAPTER 4: The Bystanders




It was years since Mr Tench had written a letter. He sat before the work-table
sucking at a steel nib; an odd impulse had come to him to project this stray
letter towards the last address he had--in Southend. Who knew who was
alive still? He tried to begin. It was like breaking the ice at a party where you
knew nobody. He started to write the envelope--Mrs Henry Tench, care of
Mrs Marsdyke, 3 The Avenue, Westcliff. It was her mother's house: the
dominating interfering creature who had induced him to set up his place in
Southend for a fatal while. "Please forward," he wrote. She wouldn't do it if
she knew, but she had probably forgotten his handwriting by this time.
He sucked the inky nib--how to go on? It would have been easier if there
had been some purpose behind it other than the vague desire to put on record
to somebody that he was still alive. It might prove awkward if she had
married again, but in that case she wouldn't hesitate to tear the letter up. He
wrote: Dear Sylvia, in a big clear immature script, listening to the furnace
purring on the bench. He was making a gold alloy--there were no depots
here where he could buy his material ready-made. Besides, the depots didn't
favour 14-carat gold for dental work, and he couldn't afford finer material.
The trouble was--nothing ever happened here. His life was as sober,
respectable, regular as even Mrs Marsdyke could require.

He took a look at the crucible. The gold was on the point of fusion with the
alloy, so he flung in a spoonful of vegetable charcoal to protect the mixture
from the air, took up his pen again and sat mooning over the paper. He
couldn't remember his wife clearly--only the hats she wore. How surprised
she would be at hearing from him after this long while; there had been one
letter written by each of them since the little boy died. The years really meant
nothing to him--they drifted fairly rapidly by without changing a habit. He
had meant to leave six years ago, but the peso dropped with a revolution, and
so he had come south. Now he had more money saved, but a month ago the
peso dropped again--another revolution somewhere. There was nothing to do
but wait . . . the nib went back between his teeth and memory melted in the
little hot room. Why write at all? He couldn't remember now what had given
him the odd idea. Somebody knocked at the outer door and he left the letter
on the bench--Dear Sylvia, staring up, big and bold and hopeless. A boat"s
bell rang by the riverside: it was the General Obregon back from Vera Cruz.
A memory stirred. It was as if something alive and in pain moved in the little
front room among the rocking-chairs--"an interesting afternoon: what
happened to him, I wonder, when"--then died, or got away. Mr Tench was
used to pain: it was his profession. He waited cautiously till a hand beat on
the door again and a voice said, "Con amistad"--there was no trust anywhere
--before he drew the bolts and opened up, to admit a patient.


Padre Jose went in, under the big classical gateway marked in black letters
"Silencio" to what people used to call the Garden of God. It was like a
building estate where nobody had paid attention to the architecture of the
next house. The big stone tombs of above-ground burial were any height and
any shape; sometimes an angel stood on the roof with lichenous wings:
sometimes through a glass window you could see some rusting metal flowers
upon a shelf--it was like looking into the kitchen of a house whose owners
have moved on, forgetting to clean the vases out. There was a sense of
intimacy--you could go anywhere and see anything. Life here had withdrawn
altogether.

He walked very slowly because of his bulk among the tombs; he could be
alone here, there were no children about, and he could waken a faint sense of
homesickness which was better than no feeling at all. He had buried some of
these people. His small inflamed eyes turned here and there. Coming round
the huge grey bulk of the Lopez tomb--a merchant family which fifty years
ago had owned the only hotel in the capital--he found he was not alone. A
grave was being dug at the edge of the cemetery next the wall: two men were
rapidly at work: a woman stood by and an old man. A child's coffin lay at
their feet--it took no time at all in the spongy soil to get down far enough. A
little water collected. That was why those who could afford it lay above
ground.

They all paused a moment and looked at Padre Jose, and he sidled back
towards the Lopez tomb as if he were an intruder. There was no sign of grief
anywhere in the bright hot day: a vulture sat on a roof outside the cemetery.
Somebody said, "Father."

Padre Jose put up his hand deprecatingly as if he were trying to indicate
that he was not there, that he was gone, away, out of sight.

The old man said, "Padre Jose." They all watched him hungrily; they had
been quite resigned until he had appeared, but now they were anxious,
eager. . . . He ducked and dodged away from them. "Padre Jose," the old
man repeated. "A prayer?" They smiled at him, waiting. They were quite
accustomed to people dying, but an unforeseen hope of happiness had bobbed
up among the tombs: they could boast after this that one at least of their
family had gone into the ground with an official prayer.

"It's impossible," Padre Jose said.

"Yesterday was her saint"s day," the woman said, as if that made a differ-
ence. "She was five." She was one of those garrulous women who show
to strangers the photographs of their children, but all she had to show was a
coffin.

"I am sorry."

The old man pushed the coffin aside with his foot the better to approach
Padre Jose; it was small and light and might have contained nothing but
bones. "Not a whole service, you understand--just a prayer. She was --
innocent," he said. The word in the little stony town sounded odd and archaic
and local, outdated like the Lopez tomb, belonging only here.

"It is against the law."

"Her name," the woman went on, "was Anita. I was sick when I had her,"
she explained, as if to excuse the child's delicacy which had led to all this
inconvenience.

"The law . . ."

The old man put his finger to his nose. "You can trust us. It is just the case
of a short prayer. I am her grandfather. This is her mother, her father, her
uncle. You can trust us."

But that was the trouble--he could trust no one. As soon as they got back
home one or other of them would certainly begin to boast. He walked
backwards all the time, weaving his plump fingers, shaking his head, nearly
bumping into the Lopez tomb. He was scared, and yet a curious pride
bubbled in his throat because he was being treated as a priest again, with
respect. "If I could," he said, "my children . . ."

Suddenly and unexpectedly there was agony in the cemetery. They had been
used to losing children, but they hadn't been used to what the rest of the
world knows best of all--the hope which peters out. The woman began to
cry, dryly, without tears, the trapped noise of something wanting to be
released; the old man fell on his knees with his hands held out. "Padre Jose,"
he said, "there is no one else . . ." He looked as if he were asking for a
miracle. An enormous temptation came to Padre Jose to take the risk and say
a prayer over the grave. He felt the wild attraction of doing one"s duty and
stretched a sign of the cross in the air; then fear came back, like a drug.
Contempt and safety waited for him down by the quay: he wanted to get
away. He sank hopelessly down on his knees and entreated them: "Leave me
alone." He said, "I am unworthy. can't you see?--I am a coward." The two
old men faced each other on their knees among the tombs, the small coffin
shoved aside like a pretext--an absurd spectacle. He knew it was absurd: a
lifetime of self-analysis enabled him to see himself as he was, fat and ugly
and old and humiliated. It was as if a whole seducing choir of angels had
silently withdrawn and left the voices of the children in the patio--"Come to
bed, Jose, come to bed," sharp and shrill and worse than they had ever been.
He knew he was in the grip of the unforgivable sin, despair.


"At last the blessed day arrived," the mother read aloud, "when the days of
Juan's novitiate were over. Oh, what a joyful day was that for his mother and
sisters. And a little sad too, for the flesh cannot always be strong, and how
could they help mourning a while in their hearts for the loss of a small son
and an elder brother? Ah, if they had known that they were gaining that day a
saint in heaven to pray for them."

The younger girl on the bed said, "Have we got a saint?"

"Of course."

"Why did they want another saint?"

The mother went on reading: "Next day the whole family received commu-
nion from the hands of a son and brother. Then they said a fond goodbye
--they little knew that it was the last--to the new soldier of Christ and
returned to their homes in Morelos. Already clouds were darkening the
heavens, and President Calles was discussing the anti-Catholic laws in the
Palace at Chapultepec. The devil was ready to assail poor Mexico."
"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 readingbooks
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, senorita."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, senorita."

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, Concepcion, 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 fighting.
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.

He came cautiously out of the belt of trees into a marshy clearing. The
whole state was like that, river and swamp and forest. He knelt down in the
late sunlight and bathed his face in a brown pool which reflected back at him
like a piece of glazed pottery the round, stubbly and hollow features. They
were so unexpected that he grinned at them--with the shy evasive
untrustworthy smile of a man caught out. In the old days he often practised a
gesture a long while in front of a glass so that he had come to know his own
face as well as an actor does. It was a form of humility--his own natural face
hadn't seemed the right one. It was a buffoon's face, good enough for mild
jokes to women, but unsuitable at the altar-rail. He had tried to change it --
and indeed, he thought, indeed I have succeeded, they'll never recognize me
now, and the cause of his happiness came back to him like the taste of
brandy, promising temporary relief from fear, loneliness, a lot of things. He
was being driven by the presence of soldiers to the very place where he most
wanted to be. He had avoided it for six years, but now it wasn't his fault--it
was his duty to go there--it couldn't count as sin. He went back to his mule
and kicked it gently, "Up, mule, up," a small gaunt man in torn peasant"s
clothes going for the first time in many years, like any ordinary man, to his
home.

In any case, even if he could have gone south and avoided the village, it
was only one more surrender. The years behind him were littered with similar
surrenders--feast days and fast days and days of abstinence had been the first
to go: then he had ceased to trouble more than occasionally about his breviary
--and finally he had left it behind altogether at the port in one of his periodic
attempts at escape. Then the altar stone went--too dangerous to carry with
him. He had no business to say Mass without it; he was probably liable to
suspension, but penalties of the ecclesiastical kind began to seem unreal in a
state where the only penalty was the civil one of death. The routine of his life
like a dam was cracked and forgetfulness came dribbling through, wiping out
this and that. Five years ago he had given way to despair--the unforgivable
sin--and he was going back now to the scene of his despair with a curious
lightening of the heart. For he had got over despair too. He was a bad priest,
he knew it. They had a word for his kind--a whisky priest, but every failure
dropped out of sight and mind: somewhere they accumulated in secret--the
rubble of his failures. One day they would choke up, he supposed, altogether
the source of grace. Until then he carried on, with spells of fear, weariness,
with a shamefaced lightness of heart.

The mule splashed across the clearing and they entered the forest again.
Now that he no longer despaired it didn't mean, of course, that he wasn't
damned--it was simply that after a time the mystery became too great, a
damned man putting God into the mouths of men: an odd sort of servant, that,
for the devil. His mind was full of a simplified mythology: Michael dressed
in armour slew a dragon, and the angels fell through space like comets with
beautiful streaming hair because they were jealous, so one of the Fathers had
said, of what God intended for men--the enormous privilege of life--this
life.

There were signs of cultivation; stumps of trees and the ashes of fires
where the ground was being cleared for a crop. He stopped beating the mule
on; he felt a curious shyness . . . A woman came out of a hut and watched
him lagging up the path on the tired mule. The tiny village, not more than two
dozen huts round a dusty plaza, was made to pattern, but it was a pattern
which lay close to his heart. He felt secure--he was confident of a welcome,
confident that in this place there would be at least one person he could trust
not to betray him to the police. When he was quite close the mule sat down
again--this time he had to roll on the ground to escape. He picked himself up
and the woman watched him as if he were an enemy. "Ah, Maria," he said,
"and how are you?"

"Well," she exclaimed, "it is you, father?"

He didn't look directly at her: his eyes were sly and cautious. He said, "You
didn't recognize me?"

"you've changed." She looked him up and down with a kind of contempt.
She said, "When did you get those clothes, father?"

"A week ago."

"What did you do with yours?"

"I gave them in exchange."

"Why? They were good clothes."

"They were very ragged--and conspicuous."

"I'd have mended them and hidden them away. It's a waste. You look like
a common man."

He smiled, looking at the ground, while she chided him like a housekeeper:
it was just as in the old days when there was a presbytery and meetings of the
Children of Mary and all the guilds and gossip of a parish, except of course
that . . . He said gently, not looking at her, with the same embarrassed smile,
"How"s Brigitta?" His heart jumped at the name: a sin may have enormous
consequences: it was six years since he had been--home.

"SHe's as well as the rest of us. What did you expect?"

He had his satisfaction, but it was connected with his crime; he had no
business to feel pleasure at anything attached to that past. He said
mechanically, "That's good," while his heart beat with its secret love. He
said, "I'm very tired. The police were about near Zapata . . ."

"Why didn't you make for Monte Cristo?"

He looked quickly up with anxiety. It wasn't the welcome that he had
expected; a small knot of people had gathered between the huts and watched
him from a safe distance--there was a little decaying bandstand and a single
stall for gaseosas--people had brought their chairs out for the evening.
Nobody came forward to kiss his hand and ask his blessing. It was as if he
had descended by means of his sin into the human struggle to learn other
things besides despair and love, that a man can be unwelcome even in his
own home. He said, "The Red Shirts were there."

"Well, father," the woman said, "we can't turn you away. You'd better
come along." He followed her meekly, tripping once in the long peon's
trousers, with the happiness wiped off his face and the smile somehow left
behind like the survivor of a wreck. There were seven or eight men, two
women, half a dozen children: he came among them like a beggar. He
couldn't help remembering the last time . . . the excitement, the gourds of
spirit brought out of holes in the ground . . . his guilt had still been fresh, yet
how he had been welcomed. It was as if he had returned to them in their
vicious prison as one of themselves--an emigre who comes back to his
native place enriched.

"This is the father," the woman said. Perhaps it was only that they hadn't
recognized him, he thought, and waited for their greetings. They came
forward one by one and kissed his hand and then stood back and watched
him. He said, "I am glad to see you . . ." he was going to say "my children",
but then it seemed to him that only the childless man has the right to call
strangers his children. The real children were coming up now to kiss his
hand, one by one, under the pressure of their parents. They were too young to
remember the old days when the priests dressed in black and wore Roman
collars and had soft superior patronizing hands; he could see they were
mystified at the show of respect to a peasant like their parents. He didn't look
at them directly, but he was watching them closely all the same. Two were
girls--a thin washed-out child--of five, six, seven? he couldn't tell, and one
who had been sharpened by hunger into an appearance of devilry and malice
beyond her age. A young woman stared out of the child's eyes. He watched
them disperse again, saying nothing: they were strangers.

One of the men said, "Will you be here long, father?"

He said, "I thought, perhaps . . . I could rest . . . a few days."

One of the other men said, "couldn't you go a bit farther north, father, to
Pueblito?"

"We've been travelling for twelve hours, the mule and I."

The woman suddenly spoke for him, angrily, "Of course he'll stay here
tonight. It's the least we can do."

He said, "I'll say Mass for you in the morning," as if he were offering them
a bribe, but it might almost have been stolen money from their expressions of
shyness and unwillingness.

Somebody said, "If you don't mind, father, very early . . . in the night
perhaps."

"What is the matter with you all?" he asked. "Why should you be afraid?"

"Haven't you heard . . . ?"

"Heard?"

"They are taking hostages now--from all the villages where they think
you've been. And if people don't tell . . . somebody is shot . . . and then
they take another hostage. It happened in Concepcion."

"Concepcion?" One of his lids began to twitch up and down, up and down.
He said, "Who?" They looked at him stupidly. He said furiously, "Who did
they murder?"

"Pedro Montez."

He gave a little yapping cry like a dog"s--the absurd shorthand of grief.
The old-young child laughed. He said, "Why don't they catch me? The fools.
Why don't they catch me?" The little girl laughed again; he stared at her
sightlessly, as if he could hear the sound but couldn't see the face. Happiness
was dead again before it had had time to breathe; he was like a woman with a
stillborn child--bury it quickly and forget and begin again. Perhaps the next
would live.

"You see, father," one of the men said, "why . . ."

He felt as a guilty man does before his judges. He said "Would you rather
that I was like . . . like Padre Jose in the capital . . . you have heard of
him . . . ?"

They said unconvincingly, "Of course not that, father."

He said, "What am I saying now? It's not what you want or what I want."
He continued sharply, with authority, "I will sleep now . . . You can wake me
an hour before dawn . . . half an hour to hear your confessions . . . then Mass,
and I will be gone."

But where? There wouldn't be a village in the state to which he wouldn't
be an unwelcome danger now.

The woman said, "This way, father."

He followed her into a small room where all the furniture had been made
out of packing-cases--a chair, a bed of boards tacked together and covered
with a straw mat, a crate on which a cloth had been laid and on the cloth an
oil-lamp. He said, "I don't want to turn anybody out of here."

"It's mine."

He looked at her doubtfully. "Where will you sleep?" He was afraid of
claims. He watched her covertly: was this all there was in marriage, this
evasion and suspicion and lack of ease? When people confessed to him in
terms of passion, was this all they meant--the hard bed and the busy woman
and the not talking about the past?

"When you are gone."

The light flattened out behind the forest and the long shadows of the trees
pointed towards the door. He lay down upon the bed, and the woman busied
herself somewhere out of sight: he could hear her scratching at the earth
floor. He couldn't sleep. Had it become his duty then to run away? He had
tried to escape several times, but he had always been prevented . . . now they
wanted him to go. Nobody would stop him, saying a woman was ill or a man
dying. He was a sickness now.

"Maria," he said. "Maria, what are you doing?"

"I have saved a little brandy for you."

He thought: if I go, I shall meet other priests: I shall go to confession: I
shall feel contrition and be forgiven: eternal life will begin for me all over
again. The Church taught that it was every man's first duty to save his own
soul. The simple ideas of hell and heaven moved in his brain; life without
books, without contact with educated men, had peeled away from his
memory everything but the simplest outline of the mystery.

"There," the woman said. She carried a small medicine bottle filled with
spirit.

If he left them, they would be safe, and they would be free from his
example. He was the only priest the children could remember: it was from
him they would take their ideas of the faith. But it was from him too they
took God--in their mouths. When he was gone it would be as if God in all
this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. wasn't it his
duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his
sake? even if they were corrupted by his example? He was shaken with the
enormity of the problem. He lay with his hands over his eyes: nowhere, in all
the wide flat marshy land, was there a single person he could consult. He
raised the brandy to his mouth.

He said shyly, "And Brigitta . . . is she . . . well?"

"You saw her just now."

"No." He couldn't believe that he hadn't recognized her. It was making
light of his mortal sin: you couldn't do a thing like that and then not even
recognize . . .

"Yes, she was there." Maria went to the door and called, "Brigitta, Brigitta,"
and the priest turned on his side and watched her come in out of the outside
landscape of terror and lust--that small malicious child who had laughed at
him.

"Go and speak to the father," Maria said. "Go on." He made an attempt to
hide the brandy bottle, but there was nowhere . . .he tried to minimize it in
his hands, watching her, feeling the shock of human love.

"She knows her catechism," Maria said, "but she won't say it . . ."

The child stood there, watching him with acuteness and contempt. They
had spent no love in her conception: just fear and despair and half a bottle of
brandy and the sense of loneliness had driven him to an act which horrified
him--and this scared shame-faced overpowering love was the result. He said,
"Why not? Why won't you say it?" taking quick secret glances, never meeting
her gaze, feeling his heart pound in his breast unevenly, like an old donkey
engine, with the baulked desire to save her from--everything.

"Why should I?"

"God wishes it."

"How do you know?"

He was aware of an immense load of responsibility: it was indistinguishable
from love. This, he thought, must be what all parents feel: ordinary men go
through life like this crossing their fingers, praying against pain, afraid. . . .
This is what we escape at no cost at all, sacrificing an unimportant motion
of the body. For years, of course, he had been responsible for souls, but that
was different . . . a lighter thing. You could trust God to make allowances, but
you couldn't trust smallpox, starvation, men . . . He said, "My dear," tightening
his grip upon the brandy bottle . . . He had baptized her at his last visit: she
had been like a rag doll with a wrinkled aged face--it had seemed unlikely that
she would live long . . . He had felt nothing but a regret; it was difficult even
to feel shame where no one blamed him. He was the only priest most of them
had ever known--they took their standard of the priesthood from him. Even the
women.

"Are you the gringo?"

"What gringo?"

The woman said, "The silly little creature. It's because the police have been
looking for a man." It seemed odd to hear of any other man they wanted but
himself.

"What has he done?"

"He's a Yankee. He murdered some people in the north."

"Why should he be here?"

"They think He's making for Quintana Roo--the chiceli plantations." It was where
many criminals in Mexico ended up: you could work on a plantation and earn good
money and nobody interfered.

"Are you the gringo?" the child repeated.

"Do I look like a murderer?"

"I don't know."

If he left the state, he would be leaving her too, abandoned. He said
humbly to the woman, "couldn't I stay a few days here?"

"It's too dangerous, father."

He caught the look in the child's eyes which frightened him--it was again
as if a grown woman was there before her time, making her plans, aware of
far too much. It was like seeing his own mortal sin look back at him, without
contrition. He tried to find some contact with the child and not the woman; he
said, "My dear, tell me what games you play . . ." The child sniggered. He
turned his face quickly away and stared up at the roof, where a spider moved.
He remembered a proverb--it came out of the recesses of his own childhood:
his father had used it--"The best smell is bread, the best savour salt, the best
love that of children." It had been a happy childhood, except that he had been
afraid of too many things, and had hated poverty like a crime; he had
believed that when he was a priest he would be rich and proud--that was
called having a vocation. He thought of the immeasurable distance a man
travels--from the first whipping-top to this bed, on which he lay clasping the
brandy. And to God it was only a moment. The child's snigger and the first
mortal sin lay together more closely than two blinks of the eye. He put out his
hand as if he could drag her back by force from--something; but he was
powerless. The man or the woman waiting to complete her corruption might
not yet have been born. How could he guard her against the non-existent?
She started out of his reach and put her tongue out at him. The woman
said, "You little devil you," and raised her hand.

"No," the priest said. "No." He scrambled into a sitting position. "don't you
dare . . ."

"I'm her mother."

"We haven't any right." He said to the child, "If only I had some cards I
could show you a trick or two. You could teach your friends . . ." He had
never known how to talk to children except from the pulpit. She stared back
at him with insolence. He asked, "Do you know how to send messages with
taps--long, short, long . . . ?"

"What on earth, father!" the woman exclaimed.

"It's a game children play. I know." He said to the child, "Have you any
friends?"

The child suddenly laughed again knowingly. The seven-year-old body
was like a dwarf"s: it disguised an ugly maturity.

"Get out of here," the woman said. "Get out before I teach you . . ."

She made a last impudent malicious gesture and was gone--perhaps for
ever as far as he was concerned. You do not always say good-bye to those
you love beside a deathbed, in an atmosphere of leisure and incense. He said,
"I wonder what we can teach . . ." He thought of his own death and her life
going on; it might be his hell to watch her rejoining him gradually through
the debasing years, sharing his weakness like tuberculosis. . . . He lay back on
the bed and turned his head away from the draining light; he appeared to be
sleeping, but he was wide awake. The woman busied herself with small jobs,
and as the sun went down the mosquitoes came out, flashing through the air
to their mark unerringly, like sailors" knives.

"Shall I put up a net, father?"

"No. It doesn't matter." He had had more fevers in the last ten years than he
could count: he had ceased to bother: they came and went and made no
difference--they were part of his environment.

Presently she left the hut and he could hear her voice gossiping outside. He
was astonished and a bit relieved by her resilience. Once for five minutes
seven years ago they had been lovers--if you could give that name to a
relationship in which she had never used his baptismal name: to her it was
just an incident, a scratch which heals completely in the healthy flesh: she
was even proud of having been the priest's woman. He alone carried a
wound, as though a whole world had died.


It was dark: no sign as yet of the dawn. Perhaps two dozen people sat on
the earth floor of the largest hut while he preached to them. He couldn't see
them with any distinctness. The candles on the packing-case smoked steadily
upwards--the door was shut and there was no current of air. He was talking
about heaven, standing between them and the candles in the ragged peon
trousers and the torn shirt. They grunted and moved restlessly. He knew they
were longing for the Mass to be over: they had woken him very early,
because there were rumours of police . . .

He said, "One of the Fathers has told us that joy always depends on pain.
Pain is part of joy. We are hungry and then think how we enjoy our food at
last. We are thirsty . . ." He stopped suddenly, with his eyes glancing away
into the shadows, expecting the cruel laugh that did not come. He said, "We
deny ourselves so that we can enjoy. You have heard of rich men in the north
who eat salted foods, so that they can be thirsty--for what they call the
cocktail. Before the marriage, too, there is the long betrothal . . ." Again he
stopped. He felt his own unworthiness like a weight at the back of the tongue.
There was a smell of hot wax from where a candle drooped in the nocturnal
heat; people shifted on the hard floor in the shadows. The smell of unwashed
human beings warred with the wax. He cried out stubbornly in a voice of
authority, "That is why I tell you that heaven is here: this is a part of heaven
just as pain is a part of pleasure." He said, "Pray that you will suffer more and
more and more. Never get tired of suffering. The police watching you, the
soldiers gathering taxes, the beating you always get from the jefe because you
are too poor to pay, smallpox and fever, hunger . . . that is all part of heaven --
the preparation. Perhaps without them, who can tell, you wouldn't enjoy
heaven so much. Heaven would not be complete. And heaven. What is
heaven?" Literary phrases from what seemed now to be another life
altogether--the strict quiet life of the seminary--became confused on his
tongue: the names of precious stones: Jerusalem the Golden. But these people
had never seen gold.

He went rather stumbling on, "Heaven is where there is no jefe, no unjust
laws, no taxes, no soldiers and no hunger. Your children do not die in
heaven." The door of the hut opened and a man slipped in. There was
whispering out of the range of the candlelight. "You will never be afraid there
--or unsafe. There are no Red Shirts. Nobody grows old. The crops never fail.
Oh, it is easy to say all the things that there will not be in heaven: what is
there is God. That is more difficult. Our words are made to describe what we
know with our senses. We say “light”, but we are thinking only of the sun,
“love” . . ." It was not easy to concentrate: the police were not far away. The
man had probably brought news. "That means perhaps a child . . ." The door
opened again: he could see another day drawn across like a grey slate outside.
A voice whispered urgently to him, "Father."

"Yes?"

"The police are on the way. They are only a mile off, coming through the
forest."

This was what he was used to: the words not striking home, the hurried
close, the expectation of pain coming between him and his faith. He said
stubbornly, "Above all remember this--heaven is here." Were they on
horseback or on foot? If they were on foot, he had twenty minutes left to
finish Mass and hide. "Here now, at this minute, your fear and my fear are
part of heaven, where there will be no fear any more for ever." He turned his
back on them and began very quickly to recite the Credo. There was a time
when he had approached the Canon of the Mass with actual physical dread --
the first time he had consumed the body and blood of God in a state of mortal
sin. But then life bred its excuses--it hadn't after a while seemed to matter
very much, whether he was damned or not, so long as these others . . .

He kissed the top of the packing-case and turned to bless. In the inadequate
light he could just see two men kneeling with their arms stretched out in the
shape of a cross--they would keep that position until the consecration was
over, one more mortification squeezed out of their harsh and painful lives. He
felt humbled by the pain ordinary men bore voluntarily; his pain was forced
on him. "Oh Lord, I have loved the beauty of thy house . . ." The candles
smoked and the people shifted on their knees--an absurd happiness bobbed
up in him again before anxiety returned: it was as if he had been permitted to
look in from the outside at the population of heaven. Heaven must contain
just such scared and dutiful and hunger-lined faces. For a matter of seconds
he felt an immense satisfaction that he could talk of suffering to them now
without hypocrisy--it is hard for the sleek and well-fed priest to praise
poverty. He began the prayer for the living: the long list of the Apostles and
Martyrs fell like footsteps--Cornelii, Cypriani, Laurentii, Chrysogoni--soon
the police would reach the clearing where his mule had sat down under him
and he had washed in the pool. The Latin words ran into each other on his
hasty tongue: he could feel impatience all round him. He began the
Consecration of the Host (he had finished the wafers long ago--it was a piece
of bread from Maria"s oven); impatience abruptly died away: everything in
time became a routine but this--"Who the day before he suffered took Bread
into his holy and venerable hands . . ." Whoever moved outside on the forest
path, there was no movement here--"Hoc est enim Corpus Meum." He could
hear the sigh of breaths released: God was here in the body for the first time
in six years. When he raised the Host he could imagine the faces lifted like
famished dogs. He began the Consecration of the Wine--in a chipped cup.
That was one more surrender--for two years he had carried a chalice around
with him; once it would have cost him his life, if the police officer who
opened his case had not been a Catholic. It may very well have cost the
officer his life, if anybody had discovered the evasion--he didn't know; you
went round making God knew what martyrs--in Concepcion or elsewhere --
when you yourself were without grace enough to die.

The Consecration was in silence: no bell rang. He knelt by the packingcase
exhausted, without a prayer. Somebody opened the door: a voice whispered
urgently, "they're here." They couldn't have come on foot then, he thought
vaguely. Somewhere in the absolute stillness of the dawn--it couldn't have
been more than a quarter of a mile away--a horse whinnied.

He got to his feet--Maria stood at his elbow. She said, "The cloth, father,
give me the cloth." He put the Host hurriedly into his mouth and drank the
wine: one had to avoid profanation: the cloth was whipped away from the
packing-case. She nipped the candles, so that the wick should not leave a
smell . . . The room was already cleared, only the owner hung by the entrance
waiting to kiss his hand. Through the door the world was faintly visible, and
a cock in the village crowed.

Maria said, "Come to the hut quickly."

"I'd better go." He was without a plan. "Not be found here."

"They are all round the village."

Was this the end at last, he wondered? Somewhere fear waited to spring at
him, he knew, but he wasn't afraid yet. He followed the woman, scurrying
across the village to her hut, repeating an act of contrition mechanically as he
went. He wondered when the fear would start. He had been afraid when the
policeman opened his case--but that was years ago. He had been afraid
hiding in the shed among the bananas, hearing the child argue with the police
officer--that was only a few weeks away. Fear would undoubtedly begin
again soon. There was no sign of the police--only the grey morning, and the
chickens and turkeys astir, flopping down from the trees in which they had
roosted during the night. Again the cock crew. If they were so careful, they
must know beyond the shadow of doubt that he was here. It was the end.

Maria plucked at him. "Get in. Quick. On to the bed." Presumably she had
an idea--women were appallingly practical: they built new plans at once out
of the ruins of the old. But what was the good? She said, "Let me smell your
breath. O God, anyone can tell . . . wine . . . what would we be doing with
wine?" She was gone again, inside, making a lot of bother in the peace and
quiet of the dawn. Suddenly, out of the forest, a hundred yards away, an
officer rode. In the absolute stillness you could hear the creaking of his
revolver-holster as he turned and waved.

All round the little clearing the police appeared--they must have marched
very quickly, for only the officer had a horse. Rifles at the trail, they
approached the small group of huts--an exaggerated and rather absurd show
of force. One man had a puttee trailing behind him--it had probably caught
on something in the forest. He tripped on it and fell with a great clatter of
cartridge-belt on gunstock: the lieutenant on the horse looked round and then
turned his bitter and angry face upon the silent huts.

The woman was pulling at him from inside the hut. She said, "Bite this.
Quick. There's no time . . ." He turned his back on the advancing police and
came into the dusk of the room. She had a small raw onion in her hand. "Bite
it," she said. He bit it and began to weep. "Is that better?" she said. He could
hear the pad, pad of the cautious horse hoofs advancing between the huts.

"It's horrible," he said with a giggle.

"Give it to me." She made it disappear somewhere into her clothes: it was a
trick all women seemed to know. He asked, "Where"s my case?"

"Never mind your case. Get on to the bed."

But before he could move a horse blocked the doorway. They could see a
leg in riding-boots piped with scarlet: brass fittings gleamed: a hand in a
glove rested on the high pommel. Maria put a hand upon his arm--it was as
near as she had ever come to a movement of affection: affection was taboo
between them. A voice cried, "Come on out, all of you." The horse stamped
and a little pillar of dust went up. "Come on out, I said." Somewhere a shot
was fired. The priest left the hut.

The dawn had really broken: light feathers of colour were blown up the
sky: a man still held his gun pointed upwards: a little balloon of grey smoke
hung at the muzzle. Was this how the agony would start?

Out of all the huts the villagers were reluctantly emerging--the children
first: they were inquisitive and unfrightened. The men and women had the air
already of people condemned by authority--authority was never wrong.
None of them looked at the priest. They stared at the ground and waited.
Only the children watched the horse as if it were the most important thing
there. The lieutenant said, "Search the huts." Time passed very slowly; even the
smoke of the shot seemed to remain in the air for an unnatural period. Some
pigs came grunting out of a hut, and a turkey-cock paced with evil dignity
into the centre of the circle, puffing out its dusty feathers and tossing the long
pink membrane from its beak. A soldier came up to the lieutenant and saluted
sketchily. He said, "they're all here."

"you've found nothing suspicious?"

"No."

"Then look again."

Once more time stopped like a broken clock. The lieutenant drew out a
cigarette-case, hesitated and put it back again. Again the policeman
approached and reported, "Nothing."

The lieutenant barked out, "Attention. All of you. Listen to me." The outer
ring of police closed in, pushing the villagers together into a small group in
front of the lieutenant: only the children were left free. The priest saw his
own child standing close to the lieutenant's horse; she could just reach above
his boot: she put up her hand and touched the leather. The lieutenant said, "I
am looking for two men--one is a gringo, a yankee, a murderer. I can see
very well he is not here. There is a reward of five hundred pesos for his
capture. Keep your eyes open." He paused and ran his eye over them. The
priest felt his gaze come to rest; he looked down like the others at the ground.

"The other," the lieutenant said, "is a priest." He raised his voice: "You
know what that means--a traitor to the republic. Anyone who shelters him is
a traitor too." Their immobility seemed to anger him. He said, "you're fools if
you still believe what the priests tell you. All they want is your money. What
has God ever done for you? Have you got enough to eat? Have your children
got enough to eat? Instead of food they talk to you about heaven. Oh,
everything will be fine after you are dead, they say. I tell you--everything
will be fine when they are dead, and you must help." The child had her hand
on his boot. He looked down at her with dark affection. He said with
conviction, "This child is worth more than the Pope in Rome." The police
leant on their guns; one of them yawned; the turkey-cock went hissing back
towards the hut. The lieutenant said, "If you've seen this priest speak up.
There's a reward of seven hundred pesos . . ."

Nobody spoke.

The lieutenant yanked his horse"s head round towards them. He said, "We
know He's in this district. Perhaps you don't know what happened to a man
in Concepcion." One of the women began to weep. He said, "Come up--one
after the other--and let me have your names. No, not the women, the men."

They filed sullenly up and he questioned them, "What's your name? What
do you do? Married? Which is your wife? Have you heard of this priest?"
Only one man now stood between the priest and the horse"s head. He recited
an act of contrition silently with only half a mind--". . . my sins, because they
have crucified my loving Saviour . . . but above all because they have offend-
ed . . ." He was alone in front of the lieutenant--"I hereby resolve never
more to offend Thee . . ." It was a formal act, because a man had to be
prepared: it was like making your will and might be as valueless.

"Your name?"

The name of the man in Concepcion came back to him. He said, "Montez."

"Have you ever seen the priest?"

"No."

"What do you do?"

"I have a little land."

"Are you married?"

"Yes."

"Which is your wife?"

Maria suddenly broke out, "I'm his wife. Why do you want to ask so many
questions? Do you think he looks like a priest?"

The lieutenant was examining something on the pommel of his saddle: it
seemed to be an old photograph. "Let me see your hands," he said.
The priest held them up: they were as hard as a labourer's. Suddenly the
lieutenant leant down from the saddle and sniffed at his breath. There was
complete silence among the villagers--a dangerous silence, because it
seemed to convey to the lieutenant a fear . . . He stared back at the hollow
stubbled face, looked back at the photograph. "All right," he said, "next," and
then as the priest stepped aside, "Wait." He put his hand down to Brigitta"s
head and gently tugged at her black stiff hair. He said, "Look up. You know
everyone in this village, don't you?"

"Yes," she said.

"Who's that man, then? What's his name?"

"I don't know," the child said. The lieutenant caught his breath. "You don't
know his name?" he said. "Is he a stranger?"

Maria cried, "Why, the child doesn't know her own name. Ask her who her father
is."

"Who's your father?"

The child stared up at the lieutenant and then turned her knowing eyes
upon the priest . . . "Sorry and beg pardon for all my sins," he was repeating
to himself with his fingers crossed for luck. The child said, "That's him.
There."

"All right," the lieutenant said. "Next." The interrogations went on: name?
work? married? while the sun came up above the forest. The priest stood with
his hands clasped in front of him: again death had been postponed. He felt an
enormous temptation to throw himself in front of the lieutenant and declare
himself--"I am the one you want." Would they shoot him out of hand? A
delusive promise of peace tempted him. Far up in the sky a vulture watched;
they must appear from that height as two groups of carnivorous animals who
might at any time break into conflict, and it waited there, a tiny black spot,
for carrion. Death was not the end of pain--to believe in peace was a kind of
heresy.

The last man gave his evidence.

The lieutenant said, "Is no one willing to help?"

They stood silent beside the decayed bandstand. He said, "You heard what
happened at Concepcion. I took a hostage there . . . and when I found that this
priest had been in the neighbourhood I put the man against the nearest tree. I
found out because There's always someone who changes his mind--perhaps
because somebody in Concepcion loved the man's wife and wanted him out
of the way. It's not my business to look into reasons. I only know we found
wine later in Concepcion . . . Perhaps There's somebody in this village who
wants your piece of land--or your cow. It's much safer to speak now.
Because I'm going to take a hostage from here too." He paused. Then he said,
"There's no need even to speak, if He's here among you. Just look at him. No
one will know then that it was you who gave him away. He won't know
himself if you're afraid of his curses. Now . . . This is your last chance."

The priest looked at the ground--he wasn't going to make it difficult for
the man who gave him away.

"Right," the lieutenant said, "then I shall choose my man. you've brought it
on yourselves."

He sat on his horse watching them--one of the policemen had leant his
gun against the bandstand and was doing up a puttee. The villagers still stared
at the ground; everyone was afraid to catch his eye. He broke out suddenly,
"Why won't you trust me? I don't want any of you to die. In my eyes--can't
you understand--you are worth far more than he is. I want to give you"--he
made a gesture with his hands which was valueless, because no one saw him
--"everything." He said in a dull voice, "You. You there. I'll take you."

A woman screamed. "That's my boy. That's Miguel. You can't take my
boy."

He said dully, "Every man here is somebody"s husband or somebody"s son.
I know that."

The priest stood silently with his hands clasped; his knuckles whitened as
he gripped . . . He could feel all round him the beginning of hate. Because he
was no one"s husband or son. He said, "Lieutenant . . ."

"What do you want?"

"I'm getting too old to be much good in the fields. Take me."

A rout of pigs came rushing round the corner of a hut, taking no notice of
anybody. The soldier finished his puttee and stood up. The sunlight coming
up above the forest winked on the bottles of the gaseosa stall.

The lieutenant said, "I'm choosing a hostage, not offering free board and
lodging to the lazy. If you are no good in the fields, you are no good as a
hostage." He gave an order. "Tie the man's hands and bring him along."

It took no time at all for the police to be gone--they took with them two or
three chickens, a turkey and the man called Miguel. The priest said aloud, "I
did my best." He went on, "It's your job--to give me up. What do you expect
me to do? It's my job not to be caught."

One of the men said, "That's all right, father. Only will you be careful . . .
to see that you don't leave any wine behind . . . like you did at Concepcion?"

Another said, "It's no good staying, father. they'll get you in the end. They
won't forget your face again. Better go north, to the mountains. Over the
border."

"It's a fine state over the border," a woman said. "they've still got churches
there. Nobody can go in them, of course--but they are there. Why, I've heard
that there are priests too in the towns. A cousin of mine went over the
mountains to Las Casas once and heard Mass--in a house, with a proper
altar, and the priest all dressed up like in the old days. You'd be happy there,
father."

The priest followed Maria to the hut. The bottle of brandy lay on the table;
he touched it with his fingers--there wasn't much left. He said, "My case,
Maria? Where"s my case?"

"It's too dangerous to carry that around any more," Maria said.

"How else can I take the wine?"

"There isn't any wine."

"What do you mean?"

She said, "I'm not going to bring trouble on you and everyone else. I've
broken the bottle. Even if it brings a curse . . ."

He said gently and sadly, "You mustn't be superstitious. That was simply --
wine. There's nothing sacred in wine. Only It's hard to get hold of here.
That's why I kept a store of it in Concepcion. But they've found that."

"Now perhaps You'll go--go away altogether. you're no good any more to
anyone," she said fiercely. "don't you understand, father? We don't want you
any more."

"Oh yes," he said. "I understand. But It's not what you want--or I want . . ."

She said savagely, "I know about things. I went to school. I'm not like
these others--ignorant. I know you're a bad priest. That time we were
together--that wasn't all you've done. I've heard things, I can tell you. Do
you think God wants you to stay and die--a whisky priest like you?" He
stood patiently in front of her, as he had stood in front of the lieutenant,
listening. He hadn't known she was capable of all this thought. She said,
"Suppose you die. You'll be a martyr, won't you? What kind of a martyr do
you think You'll be? It's enough to make people mock."

That had never occurred to him--that anybody would consider him a
martyr. He said, "It's difficult. Very difficult. I'll think about it. I wouldn't
want the Church to be mocked . . ."

"Think about it over the border then . . ."

"Well . . ."

She said, "When you-know-what happened, I was proud. I thought the
good days would come back. It's not everyone Who's a priest's woman. And
the child . . . I thought you could do a lot for her. But you might as well be a
thief for all the good . . ."

He said vaguely, "There"ve been a lot of good thieves."

"For God's sake take this brandy and go."

"There was one thing," he said. "In my case . . . there was something . . ."

"Go and find it yourself on the rubbish-tip then. I won't touch it again."

"And the child," he said, "you're a good woman, Maria. I mean--You'll try
and bring her up well . . . as a Christian."

"She'll never be good for anything, you can see that."

"She can't be very bad--at her age," he implored her.

"She'll go on the way sHe's begun."

He said, "The next Mass I say will be for her."

She wasn't even listening. She said, "SHe's bad through and through." He
was aware of faith dying out between the bed and the door--the Mass would
soon mean no more to anyone than a black cat crossing the path. He was
risking all their lives for the sake of spilt salt or a crossed finger. He began,
"My mule . . ."

"They are giving it maize now."

She added, "You'd better go north. There's no chance to the south any
more."

"I thought perhaps Carmen . . ."

"they'll be watching there."

"Oh, well . . ." He said sadly, "Perhaps one day . . . when things are
better . . ." He sketched a cross and blessed her, but she stood impatiently
before him, willing him to be gone for ever.

"Well, good-bye, Maria."

"Good-bye."

He walked across the plaza with his shoulders hunched; he felt that there
wasn't a soul in the place who wasn't watching him with satisfaction--the
trouble-maker who for obscure and superstitious reasons they preferred not
to betray to the police. He felt envious of the unknown gringo whom they
wouldn't hesitate to trap--he at any rate had no burden of gratitude to carry
round with him.

Down a slope churned up with the hoofs of mules and ragged with treeroots
there was the river--not more than two feet deep, littered with empty
cans and broken bottles. A notice, which hung on a tree, read, "It is forbidden
to deposit rubbish . . ." Underneath all the refuse of the village was collected
and slid gradually down into the river. When the rains came it would be
washed away. He put his foot among the old tins and the rotting vegetables
and reached for his case. He sighed: it had been quite a good case: one more
relic of the quiet past . . . Soon it would be difficult to remember that life had
ever been any different. The lock had been torn off: he felt inside the silk lining . . .

The papers were there; reluctantly he let the case fall--a whole important
and respected youth dropped among the cans--he had been given it by his
parishioners in Concepcion on the fifth anniversary of his ordination . . .
Somebody moved behind a tree. He lifted his feet out of the rubbish--flies
burred round his ankles. With the papers hidden in his fist he came round the
trunk to see who was spying. . . . The child sat on a root, kicking her heels
against the bark. Her eyes were shut tight fast. He said, "My dear, what is the
matter with you . . . ?" They came open quickly then--red-rimmed and angry,
with an expression of absurd pride.

She said, "You . . . you . . ."

"Me?"

"You are the matter."

He moved towards her with infinite caution, as if she were an animal who
distrusted him. He felt weak with longing. He said, "My dear, why me . . . ?"

She said furiously, "They laugh at me."

"Because of me?"

She said, "Everyone else has a father . . . who works."

"I work too."

"you're a priest, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Pedro says you aren't a man. You aren't any good for women." She said,
"I don't know what he means."

"I don't suppose he knows himself."

"Oh, yes he does," she said. "He's ten. And I want to know. you're going
away, aren't you?"

"Yes."

He was appalled again by her maturity, as she whipped up a smile from a
large and varied stock. She said, "Tell me --" enticingly. She sat there on the
trunk of the tree by the rubbish-tip with an effect of abandonment. The world
was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit. She was
without protection--she had no grace, no charm to plead for her; his heart
was shaken by the conviction of loss. He said, "My dear, be careful . . ."

"What of? Why are you going away?"

He came a little nearer; he thought--a man may kiss his own daughter, but
she started away from him. "don't you touch me," she screeched at him in
her ancient voice and giggled. Every child was born with some kind of
knowledge of love, he thought; they took it with the milk at the breast: but on
parents and friends depended the kind of love they knew--the saving or the
damning kind. Lust too was a kind of love. He saw her fixed in her life like a
fly in amber--Maria"s hand raised to strike: Pedro talking prematurely in the
dusk: and the police beating the forest--violence everywhere. He prayed
silently, "O God, give me any kind of death--without contrition, in a state of
sin--only save this child."

He was a man who was supposed to save souls. It had seemed quite simple
once, preaching at Benediction, organizing the guilds, having coffee with
elderly ladies behind barred windows, blessing new houses with a little
incense, wearing black gloves . . . It was as easy as saving money: now it
was a mystery. He was aware of his own desperate inadequacy.

He went down on his knees and pulled her to him, while she giggled and
struggled to be free: "I love you. I am your father and I love you. Try to
understand that." He held her tightly by the wrist and suddenly she stayed
still, looking up at him. He said, "I would give my life, That's nothing, my
soul . . . my dear, my dear, try to understand that you are--so important."
That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs,
the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the
republic: this child was more important than a whole continent. He said, "You
must take care of yourself because you are so--necessary. The president up
in the capital goes guarded by men with guns--but my child, you have all the
angels of heaven --" She stared back at him out of dark and unconscious eyes;
he had a sense that he had come too late. He said, "Good-bye, my dear," and
clumsily kissed her--a silly infatuated ageing man, who as soon as he
released her and started padding back to the plaza could feel behind his
hunched shoulders the whole vile world coming round the child to ruin her.
His mule was there, saddled, by the gaseosa stall. A man said, "Better go
north, father," and stood waving his hand. One mustn't have human
affections--or rather one must love every soul as if it were one"s own child.
The passion to protect must extend itself over a world--but he felt it tethered
and aching like a hobbled animal to the tree trunk. He turned his mule south.


He was travelling in the actual track of the police. So long as he went slowly
and didn't overtake any stragglers it seemed a fairly safe route. What he want-
ed now was wine. Without it he was useless; he might as well escape north
into the mountains and the safe state beyond, where the worst that could
happen to him was a fine and a few days in prison because he couldn't
pay. But he wasn't ready yet for the final surrender--every small surrender
had to be paid for in a further endurance, and now he felt the need of
somehow ransoming his child. He would stay another month, another
year . . . Jogging up and down on the mule he tried to bribe God with
promises of firmness. . . . The mule suddenly dug in its hoofs and stopped
dead: a tiny green snake raised itself on the path and then hissed away into
the grass like a match-flame. The mule went on.

When he came near a village he would stop the mule and advance as close
as he could on foot--the police might have stopped there. Then he would ride
quickly through, speaking to nobody beyond a "Buenos dias", and again on
the forest path he would pick up the track of the lieutenant's horse. He had no
clear idea now about anything; he only wanted to put as great a distance as
possible between him and the village where he had spent the night. In one
hand he still carried the crumpled ball of paper. Somebody had tied a bunch
of about fifty bananas to his saddle, beside the machete and the small bag
which contained his store of candles, and every now and then he ate one --
ripe, brown, and sodden, tasting of soap. It left a smear like a moustache over
his mouth.

After six hours" travelling he came to La Candelaria, which lay, a long
mean tin-roofed village, beside one of the tributaries of the Grijalva River. He
came cautiously out into the dusty street--it was early afternoon. The
vultures sat on the roofs with their small heads hidden from the sun, and a
few men lay in hammocks in the narrow shade the houses cast. The mule
plodded forward very slowly through the heavy day. The priest leant forward
on his pommel.

The mule came to a stop of its own accord beside a hammock. A man lay
in it, bunched diagonally, with one leg trailing to keep the hammock moving,
up and down, up and down, making a tiny current of air. The priest said,
"Buenas tardes." The man opened his eyes and watched him.

"How far is it to Carmen?"

"Three leagues."

"Can I get a canoe across the river?"

"Yes." "Where?"

The man waved a languid hand--as much as to say anywhere but here. He
had only two teeth left, canines which stuck yellowly out at either end of his
mouth like the teeth you find enclosed in clay which have belonged to long-
extinct animals.

"What were the police doing here?" the priest asked, and a cloud of flies
came down, settling on the mule"s neck; he poked at them with a stick and
they rose heavily, leaving a small trickle of blood, and dropped again on the
tough grey skin. The mule seemed to feel nothing, standing in the sun with
his head drooping.

"Looking for someone," the man said.

"I've heard," the priest said, "that There's a reward out--for a gringo."
The man swung his hammock back and forth. He said, "It's better to be
alive and poor than rich and dead."

"Can I overtake them if I go towards Carmen?"

"They aren't going to Carmen."

"No?"

"They are making for the city."

The priest rode on. Twenty yards farther he stopped again beside a gaseosa
stall and asked the boy in charge, "Can I get a boat across the river?"

"There isn't a boat."

"No boat?"

"Somebody stole it."

"Give me a sidral." He drank down the yellow bubbly chemical liquid: it
left him thirstier than before. He said, "How do I get across?"

"Why do you want to get across?"

"I'm making for Carmen. How did the police get over?"

"They swam."

"Mula, Mula," the priest said, urging the mule on, past the inevitable
bandstand and a statue in florid taste of a woman in a toga waving a wreath.
Part of the pedestal had been broken off and lay in the middle of the road --
the mule went round it. The priest looked back; far down the street the
mestizo was sitting upright in the hammock watching him. The mule turned
off down a steep path to the river, and again the priest looked back--the half-
caste was still in the hammock, but he had both feet upon the ground. An
habitual uneasiness made the priest beat at the mule--"Mula, Mula," but the
mule took its time, sliding down the bank towards the river.

By the riverside it refused to enter the water. The priest split the end of his
stick with his teeth and jabbed a sharp point into the mule"s flank. It waded
reluctantly in, and the water rose to the stirrups and then to the knees; the
mule began to swim, splayed out flat with only the eyes and nostrils visible,
like an alligator. Somebody shouted from the bank.

The priest looked round. At the river's edge the mestizo stood and called,
not very loudly: his voice didn't carry. It was as if he had a secret purpose
which nobody but the priest must hear. He waved his arm, summoning the
priest back, but the mule lurched out of the water and up the bank beyond and
the priest paid no attention--uneasiness was lodged in his brain. He urged the
mule forward through the green half-light of a banana grove, not looking
behind. All these years there had been two places to which he could always
return and rest safely in hiding--one had been Concepcion, his old parish,
and that was closed to him now: the other was Carmen, where he had been
born and where his parents were buried. He had imagined there might be a
third, but he would never go back now. . . . He turned the mule"s head
towards Carmen, and the forest took them again. At this rate they would
arrive in the dark, which was what he wanted. The mule unbeaten went with
extreme langour, head drooping, smelling a little of blood. The priest, leaning
forward on the high pommel, fell asleep. He dreamed that a small girl in stiff
white muslin was reciting her Catechism--somewhere in the background,
there was a bishop and a group of Children of Mary, elderly women with
grey hard pious faces wearing pale blue ribbons. The bishop said, "Excellent
. . . Excellent," and clapped his hands, plop, plop. A man in a morning coat
said, "There's a deficit of five hundred pesos on the new organ. We pro-
pose to hold a special musical performance, when it is hoped . . ." He
remembered with appalling suddenness that he oughtn't to be there at all . . .
he was in the wrong parish . . . he should be holding a retreat at Concepcion.
The man Montez appeared behind the child in white muslin, gesticulating,
reminding him . . . Something had happened to Montez, he had a dry wound
on his forehead. He felt with dreadful certainty a threat to the child. He said,
"My dear, my dear," and woke to the slow rolling stride of the mule and the
sound of footsteps.

He turned. It was the mestizo, padding behind him, dripping water: he must
have swum the river. His two teeth stuck out over his lower lip, and he grin-
ned ingratiatingly.

"What do you want?" the priest asked sharply.

"You didn't tell me you were going to Carmen."

"Why should I?"

"You see, I want to go to Carmen, too. It's better to travel in company." He
was wearing a shirt, a pair of white trousers, and gym shoes through which
one big toe showed--plump and yellow like something which lives
underground. He scratched himself under the armpits and came chummily up
to the priest's stirrup. He said, "You are not offended, senor?"

"Why do you call me senor?"

"Anyone can tell you're a man of education."

"The forest is free to all," the priest said.

"Do you know Carmen well?" the man asked.

"Not well. I have a few friends."

"you're going on business, I suppose?"

The priest said nothing. He could feel the man's hand on his foot, a light
and deprecating touch. The man said, "There's a finca off the road two
leagues from here. It would be as well to stay the night."

"I am in a hurry," the priest said.

"But what good would it be reaching Carmen at one, two in the morning?
We could sleep at the finca and be there before the sun was high."

"I do what suits me."

"Of course, senor, of course." The man was silent for a little while, and
then said, "It isn't wise travelling at night if the senor hasn't got a gun. It's
different for a man like me . . ."

"I am a poor man," the priest said. "You can see for yourself. I am not
worth robbing."

"And then There's the gringo--they say He's a wild kind of a man, a real
pistolero. He comes up to you and says in his own language--Stop: what is
the way to--well, some place, and you do not understand what he is saying
and perhaps you make a movement and he shoots you dead. But perhaps you
know Americano, senor?"

"Of course I don't. How should I? I am a poor man. But I don't listen to
every fairy-tale."

"Do you come from far?"

The priest thought a moment: "Concepcion." He could do no more harm
there. The man for the time being seemed satisfied. He walked along by the
mule, a hand on the stirrup. Every now and then he spat. When the priest
looked down he could see the big toe moving like a grub along the ground --
he was probably harmless. It was the general condition of life that made for
suspicion. The dusk fell and then almost at once the dark. The mule moved
yet more slowly. Noise broke out all round them; it was like a theatre when
the curtain falls and behind in the wings and passages hubbub begins. Things
you couldn't put a name to--jaguars perhaps--cried in the undergrowth,
monkeys moved in the upper boughs, and the mosquitoes hummed all round
like sewing machines. "It's thirsty walking," the man said. "Have you by any
chance, senor, got a little drink . . . ?"

"No."

"If you want to reach Carmen before three, you will have to beat the mule.
Shall I take the stick . . . ?"

"No, no, let the brute take its time. It doesn't matter to me . . ." he said
drowsily.

"You talk like a priest."

He came quickly awake, but under the tall dark trees he could see nothing.
He said, "What nonsense you talk."

"I am a very good Christian," the man said, stroking the priest's foot.

"I dare say. I wish I were."

"Ah, you ought to be able to tell which people you can trust." He spat in a
comradely way.

"I have nothing to trust anyone with," the priest said. "Except these trousers
--they are very torn. And this mule--it isn't a good mule; you can see for
yourself."

There was silence for a while, and then, as if he had been considering the
last statement, the half-caste went on, "It wouldn't be a bad mule if you
treated it right. Nobody can teach me anything about mules. I can see for
myself It's tired out."

The priest looked down at the grey swinging stupid head. "Do you think
so?"

"How far did you travel yesterday?"

"Perhaps twelve leagues."

"Even a mule needs rest."

The priest took his bare feet from out of the deep leather stirrups and scram-
bled to the ground. The mule for less than a minute took a longer stride and
then dropped to a yet slower pace. The twigs and roots of the forest path
cut the priest's feet--after five minutes he was bleeding. He tried in vain not
to limp. The half-caste exclaimed, "How delicate your feet are. You should
wear shoes."

Stubbornly he reasserted, "I am a poor man."

"You will never get to Carmen at this rate. Be sensible, man. If you don't
want to go as far off the road as the finca, I know a little hut less than half a
league from here. We can sleep a few hours and still reach Carmen at
daybreak." There was a rustle in the grass beside the path--the priest thought
of snakes and his unprotected feet. The mosquitoes jabbed at his wrists; they
were like little surgical syringes filled with poison and aimed at the
bloodstream. Sometimes a firefly held its lighted globe close to the halfcaste"s
face, turning it on and off like a torch. He said accusingly, "You don't
trust me. Just because I am a man who likes to do a good turn to strangers,
because I try to be a Christian, you don't trust me." He seemed to be working
himself into a little artificial rage. He said, "If I wanted to rob you, couldn't I
have done it already? you're an old man."

"Not so very old," the priest said mildly. His conscience began automa-
tically to work: it was like a slot machine into which any coin could
be fitted, even a cheater's blank disc. The words proud, lustful, envious,
cowardly, ungrateful--they all worked the right springs--he was all these
things. The half-caste said, "Here I have spent many hours guiding you to
Carmen--I don't want any reward because I am a good Christian. I have
probably lost money by it at home--never mind that . . ."

"I thought you said you had business in Carmen?" the priest said gently.
"When did I say that?" It was true--he couldn't remember . . . perhaps he
was unjust too . . . "Why should I say a thing which isn't true? No, I give
up a whole day to helping you, and you pay no attention when your guide is
tired . . ."

"I didn't need a guide," he protested mildly.

"You say that when the road is plain, but if it wasn't for me, You'd have
taken the wrong path a long time ago. You said yourself you didn't know
Carmen well. That was why I came."

"But of course," the priest said, "if you are tired, we will rest." He felt guilty
at his own lack of trust, but all the same, it remained like a growth only a knife
could rid him of.

After half an hour they came to the hut. Made of mud and twigs, it had
been set up in a minute clearing by a small farmer whom the forest must have
driven out, edging in on him, an unstayable natural force which he couldn't
defeat with his machete and his small fires. There were still signs in the
blackened ground of an attempt to clear the brushwood for some meagre and
inadequate crop. The man said, "I will see to the mule. You go in and lie
down and rest."

"But it is you who are tired."

"Me tired?" the half-caste said. "What makes you say that? I am never
tired."

With a heavy heart the priest took off his saddlebag, pushed at the door and
went in to complete darkness. He struck a light--there was no furniture; only
a raised dais of hard earth and a straw mat too torn to have been worth
removing. He lit a candle and stuck it in its own wax on the dais: then sat
down and waited: the man was a long time. In one fist he still carried the ball
of paper salvaged from his case--a man must retain some sentimental relics
if he is to live at all. The argument of danger only applies to those who live in
relative safety. He wondered whether the mestizo had stolen his mule, and
reproached himself for the necessary suspicion. Then the door opened and the
man came in--the two yellow canine teeth, the finger-nails scratching in the
armpit. He sat down on the earth, with his back against the door, and said,
"Go to sleep. You are tired. I'll wake you when we need to start."

"I'm not very sleepy."

"Blow out the candle. You'll sleep better."

"I don't like darkness," the priest said. He was afraid.

"won't you say a prayer, father, before we sleep?"

"Why do you call me that?" he asked sharply, peering across the shadowy
floor to where the half-caste sat against the door.

"Oh, I guessed, of course. But you needn't be afraid of me. I'm a good
Christian."

"you're wrong."

"I could easily find out, couldn't I?" the half-caste said. "I'd just have to
say--father, hear my confession. You couldn't refuse a man in mortal sin."
The priest said nothing, waiting for the demand to come: the hand which
held the papers twitched. "Oh, you needn't fear me," the mestizo went
carefully on. "I wouldn't betray you. I'm a Christian. I just thought a
prayer . . . would be good . . ."

"You don't need to be a priest to know a prayer." He began, "Pater noster
qui es in coelis . . ." while the mosquitoes came droning towards the candle-
flame. He was determined not to sleep--the man had some plan. His con-
science ceased to accuse him of uncharity. He knew. He was in the
presence of Judas.

He leant his head back against the wall and half closed his eyes--he
remembered Holy Week in the old days when a stuffed Judas was hanged
from the belfry and boys made a clatter with tins and rattles as he swung out
over the door. Old staid members of the congregation had sometimes raised
objections: it was blasphemous, they said, to make this guy out of Our Lord's
betrayer; but he had said nothing and let the practice continue--it seemed to
him a good thing that the world's traitor should be made a figure of fun. It
was too easy otherwise to idealize him as a man who fought with God--a
Prometheus, a noble victim in a hopeless war.

"Are you awake?" a voice whispered from the door. The priest suddenly
giggled, as if this man, too, were absurd with stuffed straw legs and a painted
face and an old straw hat who would presently be burnt in the plaza while
people made political speeches and the fireworks went off.

"can't you sleep?"

"I was dreaming," the priest whispered. He opened his eyes and saw the
man by the door was shivering--the two sharp teeth jumped up and down on
the lower lip. "Are you ill?"

"A little fever," the man said. "Have you any medicine?"

"No."

The door creaked as the man's back shook. He said, "It was getting wet in
the river . . ." He slid farther down upon the floor and closed his eyes --
mosquitoes with singed wings crawled over the earth bed. The priest thought:
I mustn't sleep, It's dangerous, I must watch him. He opened his fist and
smoothed out the paper. There were faint pencil lines visible--single words,
the beginnings and ends of sentences, figures. Now that his case was gone, it
was the only evidence left that life had ever been different: he carried it with
him as a charm, because if life had been like that once, it might be so again.
The candle-flame in the hot marshy lowland air burned to a smoky point
vibrating. . . . The priest held the paper close to it and read the words Altar
Society, Guild of the Blessed Sacrament, Children of Mary, and then looked
up again and across the dark hut saw the yellow malarial eyes of the mestizo
watching him. Christ would not have found Judas sleeping in the garden:
Judas could watch more than one hour.

"What's that paper . . . father?" he said enticingly, shivering against the
door.

"don't call me father. It is a list of seeds I have to buy in Carmen."

"Can you write?"

"I can read."

He looked at the paper again and a little mild impious joke stared up at him
in faded pencil--something about "of one substance". He had been referring
to his corpulency and the good dinner he had just eaten: the parishioners had
not much relished his humour.

It had been a dinner given at Concepcion in honour of the tenth anniversary
of his ordination. He sat in the middle of the table with--who was it on his
right hand? There were twelve dishes--he had said something about the
Apostles, too, which was not thought to be in the best of taste. He was quite
young and he had been moved by a gentle devilry, surrounded by all the
pious and middle-aged and respectable people of Concepcion, wearing their
guild ribbons and badges. He had drunk just a little too much; in those days
he wasn't used to liquor. It came back to him now suddenly who was on his
right hand--it was Montez, the father of the man they had shot.
Montez had talked at some length. He had reported the progress of the
Altar Society in the last year--they had a balance in hand of twenty-two
pesos. He had noted it down for comment--there it was, A.S. 22. Montez had
been very anxious to start a branch of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, and
some woman had complained that bad books were being sold in Concepcion,
fetched in from the capital by mule: her child had got hold of one called A
Husband for a Night. In his speech he said he would write to the Governor on
the subject.

The moment he had said that the local photographer had set off his flare,
and so he could remember himself at that instant, just as if he had been a
stranger looking in from the outside--attracted by the noise--on some happy
and festal and strange occasion: noticing with envy, and perhaps a little
amusement, the fat youngish priest who stood with one plump hand splayed
authoritatively out while the tongue played pleasantly with the word
"Governor". Mouths were open all round fishily, and the faces glowed
magnesium-white, with the lines and individuality wiped out.

That moment of authority had jerked him back to seriousness--he had
ceased to unbend and everybody was happier. He said, "The balance of
twenty-two pesos in the accounts of the Altar Society--though quite
revolutionary for Concepcion--is not the only cause for congratulation in the
last year. The Children of Mary have increased their membership by nine --
and the Guild of the Blessed Sacrament last autumn made our annual retreat
more than usually successful. But we mustn't rest on our laurels, and I
confess I have got plans you may find a little startling. You already think me
a man, I know, of inordinate ambitions--well, I want Concepcion to have a
better school--and that means a better presbytery too, of course. We are a big
parish and the priest has a position to keep up. I'm not thinking of myself but
of the Church. And we shall not stop there--though it will take a good many
years, I'm afraid, even in a place the size of Concepcion, to raise the money
for that." As he talked a whole serene life lay ahead--he had ambition: he
saw no reason why one day he might not find himself in the state capital,
attached to the cathedral, leaving another man to pay off the debts in
Concepcion. An energetic priest was always known by his debts. He went on,
waving a plump and eloquent hand, "Of course, many dangers here in Mexico
threaten our dear Church. In this state we are unusually lucky--men have lost
their lives in the north and we must be prepared"--he refreshed his dry mouth
with a draught of wine--"for the worst. Watch and pray," he went vaguely
on, "watch and pray. The devil like a raging lion --" The Children of Mary
stared up at him with their mouths a little open, the pale blue ribbons slanting
across their dark best blouses.

He talked for a long while, enjoying the sound of his own voice: he had
discouraged Montez on the subject of the St Vincent de Paul Society, because
you had to be careful not to encourage a layman too far, and he had told a
charming story about a child's deathbed--she was dying of consumption
very firm in her faith at the age of eleven. She asked who it was standing at
the end of her bed, and they had said, "That's Father So-and-so," and she had
said, "No, no. I know Father So-and-so. I mean the one with the golden
crown." One of the Guild of the Blessed Sacrament had wept. Everybody was
very happy. It was a true story too, though he couldn't quite remember where
he had heard it. Perhaps he had read it in a book once. Somebody refilled his
glass. He took a long breath and said, "My children . . ."


. . . and as the mestizo stirred and grunted by the door he opened his eyes and
the old life peeled away like a label: he was lying in torn peon trousers in a
dark unventilated hut with a price upon his head. The whole world had
changed--no church anywhere: no brother priest, except Padre Jose, the
outcast, in the capital. He lay listening to the heavy breathing of the half-caste
and wondered why he had not gone the same road as Padre Jose and
conformed to the laws. I was too ambitious, he thought, that was it. Perhaps
Padre Jose was the better man--he was so humble that he was ready to
accept any amount of mockery; at the best of times he had never considered
himself worthy of the priesthood. There had been a conference once of the
parochial clergy in the capital, in the happy days of the old governor, and he
could remember Padre Jose slinking in at the tail of every meeting, curled up
half out of sight in a back row, never opening his mouth. It was not, like
some more intellectual priests, that he was over-scrupulous: he had been
simply filled with an overwhelming sense of God. At the Elevation of the
Host you could see his hands trembling--he was not like St Thomas who
needed to put his hands into the wounds in order to believe: the wounds bled
anew for him over every altar. Once Padre Jose had said to him in a burst of
confidence, "Every time . . . I have such fear." His father had been a peon.
But it was different in his case--he had ambition. He was no more an
intellectual than Padre Jose, but his father was a storekeeper, and he knew the
value of a balance of twenty-two pesos and how to manage mortgages. He
wasn't content to remain all his life the priest of a not very large parish. His
ambitions came back to him now as something faintly comic, and he gave a
little gulp of astonished laughter in the candlelight. The half-caste opened his
eyes and said, "Are you still not asleep?"

"Sleep yourself," the priest said, wiping a little sweat off his face with his
sleeve.

"I am so cold."

"Just a fever. Would you like this shirt? It isn't much, but it might help."

"No, no. I don't want anything of yours. You don't trust me."

No, if he had been humble like Padre Jose, he might be living in the capital
now with Maria on a pension. This was pride, devilish pride, lying here offer-
ing his shirt to the man who wanted to betray him. Even his attempts at
escape had been half-hearted because of his pride--the sin by which the
angels fell. When he was the only priest left in the state his pride had been all
the greater; he thought himself the devil of a fellow carrying God around at
the risk of his life; one day there would be a reward. . . . He prayed in the
half-light: "O God, forgive me--I am a proud, lustful, greedy man. I have
loved authority too much. These people are martyrs--protecting me with
their own lives. They deserve a martyr to care for them--not a man like me,
who loves all the wrong things. Perhaps I had better escape--if I tell people
how it is over here, perhaps they will send a good man with a fire of love . . ."
As usual his self-confession dwindled away into the practical problem--what
am I to do?

Over by the door the mestizo was uneasily asleep.

How little his pride had to feed on--he had celebrated only four Masses
this year, and he had heard perhaps a hundred confessions. It seemed to him
that the dunce of any seminary could have done as well . . . or better. He
raised himself very carefully and began to move on his naked toes across the
floor. He must get to Carmen and away again quickly before this man . . . the
mouth was open, showing the pale hard toothless gums. In his sleep he was
grunting and struggling; then he collapsed upon the floor and lay still.
There was a sense of abandonment, as if he had given up every struggle
from now on and lay there a victim of some power. . . . The priest had only to
step over his legs and push the door--it opened outwards.

He put one leg over the body and a hand gripped his ankle. The mestizo
stared up at him. "Where are you going?"

"I want to relieve myself," the priest said.

The hand still held his ankle. "Why can't you do it here?" the man whined
at him. "What's preventing you, father? You are a father, aren't you?"

"I have a child," the priest said, "if That's what you mean."

"You know what I mean. You understand about God, don't you?" The hot
hand clung. "Perhaps you've got him there--in a pocket. You carry him
around, don't you, in case There's anybody sick. . . . Well, I'm sick. Why
don't you give him to me? or do you think he wouldn't have anything to do
with me . . . if he knew?"

"you're feverish."

But the man wouldn't stop. The priest was reminded of an oil-gusher which
some prospectors had once struck near Concepcion--it wasn't a good
enough field apparently to justify further operations, but there it had stood for
forty-eight hours against the sky, a black fountain spouting out of the marshy
useless soil and flowing away to waste--fifty thousand gallons an hour. It
was like the religious sense in man, cracking suddenly upwards, a black pillar
of fumes and impurity, running to waste. "Shall I tell you what I've done? --
It's your business to listen. I've taken money from women to do you know
what, and I've given money to boys . . ."

"I don't want to hear."

"It's your business."

"you're mistaken."

"Oh no, I'm not. You can't deceive me. Listen. I've given money to boys --
you know what I mean. And I've eaten meat on Fridays." The awful jumble
of the gross, the trivial, and the grotesque shot up between the two yellow
fangs, and the hand on the priest's ankle shook and shook with the fever.
"I've told lies, I haven't fasted in Lent for I don't know how many years.
Once I had two women--I'll tell you what I did . . ." He had an immense self-
importance; he was unable to picture a world of which he was only a typical
part--a world of treachery, violence, and lust in which his shame was
altogether insignificant. How often the priest had heard the same confession --
Man was so limited he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the
animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died; the more
evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It
was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a
civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt. He
said, "Why do you tell me all this?"

The man lay exhausted, saying nothing; he was beginning to sweat, his
hand loosed its hold on the priest's ankle. He pushed the door open and went
outside--the darkness was complete. How to find the mule? He stood
listening--something howled not very far away. He was frightened. Back in
the hut the candle burned--there was an odd bubbling sound: the man was
weeping. Again he was reminded of oil land, the little black pools and the
bubbles blowing slowly up and breaking and beginning again.

The priest struck a match and walked straight forward--one, two, three
paces into a tree. A match in that immense darkness was of no more value
than a firefly. He whispered, "Mula, mula," afraid to call out in case the half-
caste heard him; besides, it was unlikely that the stupid beast would make
any reply. He hated it--the lurching mandarin head, the munching greedy
mouth, the smell of blood and ordure. He struck another match and set off
again, and again after a few paces he met a tree. Inside the hut the gaseous
sound of grief went on. He had got to get to Carmen and away before that
man found a means of communicating with the police. He began again,
quartering the clearing--one, two, three, four--and then a tree. Something
moved under his foot, and he thought of scorpions. One, two, three, and
suddenly the grotesque cry of the mule came out of the dark; it was hungry,
or perhaps it smelt some animal.

It was tethered a few yards behind the hut--the candle-flame swerved out
of sight. His matches were running low, but after two more attempts he found
the mule. The half-caste had stripped it and hidden the saddle. He couldn't
waste time looking any more. He mounted, and only then realized how
impossible it was to make it move without even a piece of rope round the
neck; he tried twisting its ears, but they had no more sensitivity than door-
handles: it stood planted there like an equestrian statue. He struck a match
and held the flame against its side--it struck up suddenly with its back
hooves and he dropped the match; then it was still again, with drooping
sullen head and great antediluvian haunches. A voice said accusingly, "You
are leaving me here to die."

"Nonsense," the priest said. "I am in a hurry. You will be all right in the
morning, but I can't wait."

There was a scuffle in the darkness and then a hand gripped his naked foot.

"don't leave me alone," the voice said. "I appeal to you--as a Christian."

"You won't come to any harm here."

"How do you know with the gringo somewhere about?"

"I don't know anything about the gringo. I've met nobody who has seen
him. Besides, He's only a man--like one of us."

"I won't be left alone. I have an instinct . . ."

"Very well," the priest said wearily, "find the saddle."

When they had saddled the mule they set off again, the mestizo holding the
stirrup. They were silent--sometimes the half-caste stumbled, and the grey
false dawn began; a small coal of cruel satisfaction glowed at the back of the
priest's mind--this was Judas sick and unsteady and scared in the dark. He
had only to beat the mule on to leave him stranded in the forest; once he
dug in the point of his stick and forced it forward at a weary trot, and he could
feel the pull, pull of the half-caste"s arm on the stirrup holding him back.
There was a groan--it sounded like "Mother of God", and he let the mule
slacken its pace. He prayed silently, "God forgive me." Christ had died for
this man too: how could he pretend with his pride and lust and cowardice to
be any more worthy of that death than the half-caste? This man intended to
betray him for money which he needed, and he had betrayed God for what?
Not even for real lust. He said, "Are you sick?" and there was no reply. He
dismounted and said, "Get up. I'll walk for a while."

"I'm all right," the man said in a tone of hatred.

"Better get up."

"You think you're very fine," the man said. "Helping your enemies. That's
Christian, isn't it?"

"Are you my enemy?"

"That's what you think. You think I want seven hundred pesos--That's the
reward. You think a poor man like me can't afford not to tell the police . . ."

"you're feverish."

The man said in a sick voice of cunning, "you're right, of course."

"Better mount." The man nearly fell: he had to shoulder him up. He leant
hopelessly down from the mule with his mouth almost on a level with the
priest's, breathing bad air into the other's face. He said, "A poor man has
no choice, father. Now if I was a rich man--only a little rich--I should be
good."

The priest suddenly--for no reason--thought of the Children of Mary
eating pastries. He giggled and said, "I doubt it." If that were goodness . . .

"What was that you said, father? You don't trust me," he went ambling on,
"because I'm poor, and because you don't trust me --" he collapsed over
the pommel of the saddle, breathing heavily and shivering. The priest held him
on with one hand and they proceeded slowly towards Carmen. It was no
good; he couldn't stay there now. It would be unwise even to enter the
village, for if it became known, somebody would lose his life--they would
take a hostage. Somewhere a long way off a cock crew. The mist came up
knee-high out of a spongy ground, and he thought of the flashlight going off
in the bare church hall among the trestle tables. What hour did the cocks
crow? One of the oddest things about the world these days was that there
were no clocks--you could go a year without hearing one strike. They went
with the churches, and you were left with the grey slow dawns and the
precipitate nights as the only measurements of time.

Slowly, slumped over the pommel, the half-caste became visible, the
yellow canines jutting out of the open mouth; really, the priest thought, he
deserved his reward--seven hundred pesos wasn't so much, but he could
probably live on it--in that dusty hopeless village--for a whole year. He
giggled again; he could never take the complications of destiny quite
seriously, and it was just possible, he thought, that a year without anxiety
might save this man's soul. You only had to turn up the underside of any
situation and out came scuttling these small absurd contradictory situations.
He had given way to despair--and out of that had emerged a human soul and
love--not the best love, but love all the same. The mestizo said suddenly,
"It's fate. I was told once by a fortuneteller . . . a reward . . ."

He held the half-caste firmly in the saddle and walked on. His feet were
bleeding, but they would soon harden. An odd stillness dropped over the
forest, and welled up in the mist from the ground. The night had been noisy,
but now all was quiet. It was like an armistice with the guns silent on either
side: you could imagine the whole world listening to what they had never
heard before--peace.

A voice said "You are the priest, aren't you?"

"Yes." It was as if they had climbed out of their opposing trenches and met
to fraternize among the wires in No Man's Land. He remembered stories of
the European war--how during the last years men had sometimes met on an
impulse between the lines.

"Yes," he said again, and the mule plodded on. Sometimes, instructing
children in the old days, he had been asked by some black lozenge-eyed
Indian child, "What is God like?" and he would answer facilely with
references to the father and the mother, or perhaps more ambitiously he
would include brother and sister and try to give some idea of all loves and
relationships combined in an immense and yet personal passion. . . . But at
the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery--that
we were made in God's image. God was the parent, but He was also the
policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something
resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the
bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex.
He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities
which God's image had thought out, and God's image shook now, up and
down on the mule"s back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower
lip, and God's image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut
among the rats. He said, "Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so
hot?" and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the
shoulders of God's image.

The man didn't answer, as the mule"s backbone slid him first to one side,
then the other.

"It isn't more than two leagues now," the priest said encouragingly--he
had to make up his mind. He carried around with him a clearer picture of
Carmen than any other village or town in the state: the long slope of grass
which led up from the river to the cemetery on a tiny hill where his parents
were buried. The wall of the burial-ground had fallen in: one or two crosses
had been smashed by enthusiasts: an angel had lost one of its stone wings,
and what gravestones were left undamaged leant at an acute angle in the long
marshy grass. One image of the Mother of God had lost ears and arms and
stood like a pagan Venus over the grave of some rich forgotten timber
merchant. It was odd--this fury to deface, because, of course, you could
never deface enough. If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the
globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content
with stone figures--you had to kill yourself among the graves.

He said, "Are you strong enough now to hold on?" He took away his hand.
The path divided--one way led to Carmen, the other west. He pushed the
mule on, down the Carmen path, flogging at its haunches. He said, "You'll be
there in two hours," and stood watching the mule go on towards his home
with the informer humped over the pommel.

The half-caste tried to sit upright. "Where are you going?"

"You'll be my witness," the priest said. "I haven't been in Carmen. But if
you mention me, they'll give you food."

"Why . . . why . . ." The half-caste tried to wrench round the mule"s head,
but he hadn't enough strength: it just went on. The priest called out,
"Remember. I haven't been in Carmen." But where else now could he go?
The conviction came to him that there was only one place in the whole state
where there was no danger of an innocent man being taken as a hostage--but
he couldn't go there in these clothes. . . . The half-caste held hard on to the
pommel and swivelled his yellow eyes beseechingly, "You wouldn't leave me
here--alone." But it was more than the half-caste he was leaving behind on
the forest track: the mule stood sideways like a barrier, nodding a stupid
head, between him and the place where he had been born. He felt like a man
without a passport who is turned away from every harbour.

The half-caste was calling after him, "Call yourself a Christian." He had
somehow managed to get himself upright. He began to shout abuse--a
meaningless series of indecent words which petered out in the forest like the
weak blows of a hammer. He whispered, "If I see you again, you can't blame
me . . ." Of course, he had every reason to be angry: he had lost seven
hundred pesos. He shrieked hopelessly, "I don't forget a face."




CHAPTER 2




The young men and women walked round and round the plaza in the hot
electric night, the men one way, the girls another, never speaking to each
other. In the northern sky the lightning flapped. It was like a religious
ceremony which had lost all meaning, but at which they still wore their best
clothes. Sometimes a group of older women would join in the procession
with a little more excitement and laughter, as if they retained some memory
of how things used to go before all the books were lost. A man with a gun on
his hip watched from the Treasury steps, and a small withered soldier sat by
the prison door with a gun between his knees and the shadows of the palms
pointed at him like a zareba of sabres. Lights were burning in a dentist"s
window, shining on the swivel chair and the red plush cushions and the glass
for rinsing on its little stand and the child's chest-of-drawers full of fittings.
Behind the wire-netted windows of the private houses grandmothers swung
back and forth in rocking-chairs, among the family photographs--nothing to
do, nothing to say, with too many clothes on, sweating a little. This was the
capital city of a state.

The man in the shabby drill suit watched it all from a bench. A squad of
armed police went by to their quarters walking out of step, carrying their
rifles anyhow. The plaza was lit at each corner by clusters of three globes
joined by ugly trailing overhead wires, and a beggar worked his way from
seat to seat without success.

He sat down next to the man in drill and started a long explanation. There
was something confidential, and at the same time threatening, in his manner.
On every side the streets ran down towards the river and the port and the
marshy plain. He said that he had a wife and so many children, and that
during the last few weeks they had eaten so little--he broke off and fingered
the cloth of the other's drill suit. "And how much," he said, "did this cost?"

"You'd be surprised how little."

Suddenly as a clock struck nine-thirty all the lights went out. The beggar
said, "It's enough to make a man desperate." He looked this way and that as
the parade drifted away down hill. The man in drill got up, and the other got
up too, tagging after him towards the edge of the plaza: his flat bare feet went
slap, slap on the pavement. He said, "A few pesos wouldn't make any differ-
ence to you . . ."

"Ah, if you knew what a difference they would make."

The beggar was put out. He said, "A man like me sometimes feels that he
would do anything for a few pesos." Now that the lights were out all over
town, they stood intimately in the shadow. He said, "Can you blame me?"

"No, no. It would be the last thing I would do."

Everything he said seemed to feed the beggar's irritation. "Sometimes," the
beggar said, "I feel as if I could kill . . ."

"That, of course, would be very wrong."

"Would it be wrong if I got a man by the throat . . . ?"

"Well, a starving man has got the right to save himself, certainly."

The beggar watched with rage, while the other talked on as if he were
considering a point of academic interest. "In my case, of course, it would
hardly be worth the risk. I possess exactly fifteen pesos seventy-five centavos
in the world. I haven't eaten myself for forty-eight hours."

"Mother of God," the beggar said, "you're as hard as a stone. Haven't you a
heart?"

The man in the drill suit suddenly giggled. The other said, "you're lying.
Why haven't you eaten--if you've got fifteen pesos?"

"You see, I want to spend them on drink."

"What sort of drink?"

"The kind of drink a stranger doesn't know how to get in a place like this."

"You mean spirits?"

"Yes--and wine."

The beggar came very close. His leg touched the leg of the other man, he
put a hand upon the other's sleeve. They might have been great friends or
even brothers standing intimately together in the dark. Even the lights in the
houses were going out now, and the taxis, which during the day waited half-
way down the hill for fares that never seemed to come, were already dis-
persing--a tail-lamp winked and went out past the police barracks. The
beggar said, "Man, this is your lucky day. How much would you pay me
. . . ?"

"For some drink?"

"For an introduction to someone who could let you have a little brandy --
real fine Vera Cruz brandy."

"With a throat like mine," the man in drill explained, "It's wine I really want."

"Pulque or mescal--He's got everything."

"Wine?"

"Quince wine."

"I'd give everything I've got," the other swore solemnly and exactly, "--
except the centavos, That's to say--for some real genuine grape wine."
Somewhere down the hill by the river a drum was beating, one-two, one-two,
and the sound of marching feet kept a rough time: the soldiers--or the police
--were going home to bed.

"How much?" the beggar repeated impatiently.

"Well, I would give you the fifteen pesos and you would get the wine for
me for what you cared to spend."

"You come with me."

They began to go down the hill. At the corner where one street ran up past
the chemist"s shop towards the barracks and another ran down to the hotel,
the quay, the warehouse of the United Banana Company, the man in drill
stopped. The police were marching up, rifles slung at ease. "Wait a moment."
Among them walked a half-caste with two fang-like teeth jutting out over his
lip. The man in drill standing in the shadow watched him go by: once the
mestizo turned his head and their eyes met. Then the police went by, up into
the plaza. "Let"s go. Quickly."

The beggar said, "They won't interfere with us. they're after bigger game."

"What was that man doing with them, do you think?"

"Who knows? A hostage perhaps."

"If he had been a hostage, they would have tied his hands, wouldn't they?"

"How do I know?" He had the grudging independence you find in countries
where it is the right of a poor man to beg. He said, "Do you want the spirits or
don't you?"

"I want wine."

"I can't say he'll have this or that. You must take what comes."

He led the way down towards the river. He said, "I don't even know if He's
in town." The beetles were flocking out and covering the pavements; they
popped under the feet like puffballs, and a sour green smell came up from the
river. The white bust of a general glimmered in a tiny public garden, all hot
paving and dust, and an electric dynamo throbbed on the ground floor of the
only hotel. Wide wooden stairs crawling with beetles ran up to the first floor.
"I've done my best," the beggar said, "a man can't do more."

On the first floor a man dressed in formal dark trousers and a white skintight
vest came out of a bedroom with a towel over his shoulder. He had a little
grey aristocratic beard and he wore braces as well as a belt. Somewhere
in the distance a pipe gurgled, and the beetles detonated against a bare globe.
The beggar was talking earnestly, and once as he talked the light went off
altogether and then flickered unsatisfactorily on again. The head of the stairs
was littered with wicker rocking-chairs, and on a big slate were chalked the
names of the guests--three only for twenty rooms.

The beggar turned back to his companion. "The gentleman," he said, "is not
in. The manager says so. Shall we wait for him?"

"Time to me is of no account."

They went into a big bare bedroom with a tiled floor. The little black iron
bedstead was like something somebody has left behind by accident when
moving out. They sat down on it side by side and waited, and the beetles
came popping in through the gaps in the mosquito wire. "He is a very im-
portant man," the beggar said. "He is the cousin of the Governor--he can
get anything for you, anything at all. But, of course, you must be introduced
by someone he trusts."

"And he trusts you?"

"I worked for him once." He added frankly, "He has to trust me."

"Does the Governor know?"

"Of course not. The Governor is a hard man."

Every now and then the water-pipes swallowed noisily.

"And why should he trust me?"

"Oh, anyone can tell a drinker. You'll want to come back for more. It's
good stuff he sells. Better give me the fifteen pesos." He counted them
carefully twice. He said, "I'll get you a bottle of the best Vera Cruz brandy.
You see if I don't." The light went off, and they sat in the dark; the bed
creaked as one of them shifted.

"I don't want brandy," a voice said. "At least--not very much."

"What do you want then?"

"I told you--wine."

"Wine"s expensive."

"Never mind that. Wine or nothing."

"Quince wine?"

"No, no. French wine."

"Sometimes he has Californian wine."

"That would do."

"Of course himself--he gets it for nothing. From the Customs."

The dynamo began throbbing again below and the light came dimly on.
The door opened and the manager beckoned the beggar; a long conversation
began. The man in the drill suit leant back on the bed. His chin was cut in
several places where he had been shaving too closely; his face was hollow
and ill--it gave the impression that he had once been plump and round-faced
but had caved in. He had the appearance of a business man who had fallen on
hard times.

The beggar came back. He said, "The gentleman's busy, but he'll be back
soon. The manager sent a boy to look for him."

"Where is he?"

"He can't be interrupted. He's playing billiards with the Chief of Police."
He came back to the bed, squashing two beetles under his naked feet. He
said, "This is a fine hotel. Where do you stay? you're a stranger, aren't you?"

"Oh, I'm just passing through."

"This gentleman is very influential. It would be a good thing to offer him a
drink. After all, you won't want to take it all away with you. You may as well
drink here as anywhere else."

"I should like to keep a little--to take home."

"It's all one. I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass."

"All the same --" Then the light went out again, and on the horizon the
lightning bellied out. The sound of thunder came through the mosquito-net
from very far away like the noise you hear from the other end of a town when
the Sunday bullfight is on.

The beggar said confidentially, "What's your trade?"

"Oh, I pick up what I can--where I can."

They sat in silence together listening to the sound of feet on the wooden
stairs. The door opened, but they could see nothing. A voice swore resignedly
and asked, "Who's there?" Then a match was struck and showed a large blue
jaw and went out. The dynamo churned away and the light went on again.

The stranger said wearily, "Oh, It's you."

"It's me."

He was a small man with a too large pasty face and he was dressed in a tight
grey suit. A revolver bulged under his waistcoat. He said, "I've got nothing
for you. Nothing."

The beggar padded across the room and began to talk earnestly in a very
low voice: once he gently squeezed the other's polished shoe with his bare
toes. The man sighed and blew out his cheeks and watched the bed closely as
if he feared they had designs on it. He said sharply to the one in the drill suit,

"So you want some Vera Cruz brandy, do you? It's against the law."

"Not brandy. I don't want brandy."

"isn't beer good enough for you?"

He came fussily and authoritatively into the middle of the room, his shoes
squeaking on the tiles--the Governor's cousin. "I could have you arrested,"
he threatened.

The man in the drill suit cringed formally. He said, "Of course, your
Excellency . . ."

"Do you think I've got nothing better to do than slake the thirst of every
beggar who chooses . . . ?"

"I would never have troubled you if this man had not . . ."

The Governor's cousin spat on the tiles.

"But if your Excellency would rather I went away . . ."

He said sharply, "I'm not a hard man. I always try to oblige my fellows . . .
when It's in my power and does no harm. I have a position, you understand.
These drinks come to me quite legally."

"Of course."

"And I have to charge what they cost me."

"Of course."

"Otherwise I'd be a ruined man." He walked delicately to the bed as if his
shoes were cramping him and began to unmake it. "Are you a talker?" he
asked over his shoulder.

"I know how to keep a secret."

"I don't mind you telling the right people." There was a large rent in the
mattress; he pulled out a handful of straw and put his fingers in again. The
man in drill gazed out with false indifference at the public gardens, the dark
mud-banks and the masts of sailing ships; the lightning flapped behind them,
and the thunder came nearer.

"There," said the Governor's cousin, "I can spare you that. It's good stuff."

"It wasn't really brandy I wanted."

"You must take what comes."

"Then I think I'd rather have my fifteen pesos back."

The Governor's cousin exclaimed sharply, "Fifteen pesos." The beggar
began rapidly to explain that the gentleman wanted to buy a little wine as
well as brandy: they began to argue fiercely by the bed in low voices about
prices. The Governor's cousin said, "Wine"s very difficult to get. I can let you
have two bottles of brandy."

"One of brandy and one of . . ."

"It's the best Vera Cruz brandy."

"But I am a wine drinker . . . you don't know how I long for wine . . ."

"Wine costs me a great deal of money. How much more can you pay?"

"I have only seventy-five centavos left in the world."

"I could let you have a bottle of tequila."

"No, no."

"Another fifty centavos then. . . . It will be a large bottle." He began to
scrabble in the mattress again, pulling out straw. The beggar winked at the
man in drill and made the motions of drawing a cork and filling a glass.

"There," the Governor's cousin said, "take it or leave it."

"Oh, I will take it."

The Governor's cousin suddenly lost his surliness. He rubbed his hands
and said, "A stuffy night. The rains are going to be early this year, I think."

"Perhaps your Excellency would honour me by taking a glass of brandy to
toast our business."

"Well, well . . . perhaps . . ." The beggar opened the door and called briskly
for glasses.

"It's a long time," the Governor's cousin said, "since I had a glass of wine.
Perhaps it would be more suitable for a toast."

"Of course," the man in drill said, "as your Excellency chooses." He
watched the cork drawn with a look of painful anxiety. He said, "If you will
excuse me, I think I will have brandy," and smiled raggedly, with an effort,
watching the wine level fall.

They toasted each other, all three sitting on the bed--the beggar drank
brandy. The Governor's cousin said, "I'm proud of this wine. It's good wine.
The best Californian." The beggar winked and motioned and the man in drill
said, "One more glass, your Excellency--or can I recommend this brandy?"

"It's good brandy--but I think another glass of wine." They refilled their
glasses. The man in drill said, "I'm going to take some of that wine back--to
my mother. She loves a glass."

"She couldn't do better," the Governor's cousin said emptying his own. He
said, "So you have a mother?"

"Haven't we all?"

"Ah, you're lucky. Mine"s dead. His hand strayed towards the bottle,
grasped it. "Sometimes I miss her. I called her “my little friend”." He tilted
the bottle. "With your permission?"

"Of course, your Excellency," the other said hopelessly, taking a long
draught of brandy. The beggar said, "I too have a mother."

"Who cares?" the Governor's cousin said sharply. He leant back and the
bed creaked. He said, "I have often thought a mother is a better friend than a
father. Her influence is towards peace, goodness, charity. . . . Always on the
anniversary of her death I go to her grave with flowers."

The man in drill caught a hiccup politely. He said, "Ah, if I could too . . ."

"But you said your mother was alive?"

"I thought you were speaking of your grandmother."

"How could I? I can't remember my grandmother."

"Nor can I."

"I can," the beggar said.

The Governor's cousin said, "You talk too much."

"Perhaps I could send him to have this wine wrapped up. . . . For your
Excellency"s sake I mustn't be seen . . ."

"Wait, wait. There's no hurry. You are very welcome here. Anything in
this room is at your disposal. Have a glass of wine."

"I think brandy . . ."

"Then with your permission . . ." He tilted the bottle: a little of it splashed
over on to the sheets. "What were we talking about?"

"Our grandmothers."

"I don't think it can have been that. I can't even remember mine. The
earliest thing I can remember . . ."

The door opened. The manager said, "The Chief of Police is coming up the
stairs."

"Excellent. Show him in."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course. He's a good fellow." He said to the others. "But at billiards
you can't trust him."

A large stout man in a singlet, white trousers and a revolver-holster
appeared in the doorway. The Governor's cousin said, "Come in. Come in.
How is your toothache? We were talking about our grandmothers." He said
sharply to the beggar, "Make room for the jefe."

The jefe stood in the doorway, watching them with dim embarrassment. He
said, "Well, well . . ."

"We're having a little private party. Will you join us? It would be an
honour."

The jefe's face suddenly lit up at the sight of the wine. "Of course--a little
beer never comes amiss."

"That's right. Give the jefe a glass of beer." The beggar filled his own glass
with wine and held it out. The jefe took his place upon the bed and drained
the glass: then he took the bottle himself. He said, "It's good beer. Very good
beer. Is this the only bottle?" The man in drill watched him with frigid anxiety.

"I'm afraid the only bottle."

"Salud!"

"And what," the Governor's cousin said, "were we talking about?"

"About the first thing you could remember," the beggar said.

"The first thing I can remember," the jefe began, with deliberation, "--but
this gentleman is not drinking."

"I will have a little brandy."

"Salud!"

"Salud!"

"The first thing I can remember with any distinctness is my first
communion. Ah, the thrill of the soul, my parents round me . . ."

"How many parents then have you got?"

"Two, of course."

"They could not have been around you--you would have needed at least
four--ha, ha."

"Salud!"

"Salud!"

"No, but as I was saying--life has such irony. It was my painful duty to
watch the priest who gave me that communion shot--an old man. I am not
ashamed to say that I wept. The comfort is that he is probably a saint and
that he prays for us. It is not everyone who earns a saint's prayers."

"An unusual way . . ."

"But then life is mysterious."

"Salud!"

The man in drill said, "A glass of brandy, jefe?"

"There is so little in this bottle that I may as well . . ."

"I was very anxious to take a little back for my mother."

"Oh, a drop like this. It would be an insult to take it. Just the dregs." He
turned it up over his glass and chuckled, "If you can talk of beer having
dregs." Then he stopped with the bottle held over the glass and said with
astonishment, "Why, man, you're crying." All three watched the man in drill
with their mouths a little open. He said, "It always takes me like this --
brandy. Forgive me, gentlemen. I get drunk very easily and then I see . . ."

"See what?"

"Oh, I don't know, all the hope of the world draining away."

"Man, you're a poet."

The beggar said, "A poet is the soul of his country."

Lightning filled the windows like a white sheet, and thunder crashed
suddenly overhead. The one globe flickered and faded up near the ceiling.

"This is bad news for my men," the jefe said, stamping on a beetle which had
crawled too near.

"Why bad news?"

"The rains coming so early. You see they are on a hunt."

"The gringo . . . ?"

"He doesn't really matter, but the Governor's found there's still a priest,
and you know what he feels about that. If it was me, I'd let the poor devil
alone. He'd starve or die of fever or give up. He can't be doing any good--or
any harm. Why, nobody even noticed he was about till a few months ago."

"You'll have to hurry."

"Oh, he hasn't any real chance. Unless he gets over the border. We've got a
man who knows him. Spoke to him, spent a night with him. Let"s talk of
something else. Who wants to be a policeman?"

"Where do you think he is?"

"You'd be surprised."

"Why?"

"He's here--in this town, I mean. That's deduction. You see since we start-
ed taking hostages from the villages, There's really nowhere else . . . They
turn him away, they won't have him. So we've set this man I told you about
loose like a dog--he'll run into him one day or another--and then . . ."

The man in drill said, "Have you had to shoot many hostages?"

"Not yet. Three or four perhaps. Well, here goes the last of the beer.
Salud!" He put the glass regretfully down. "Perhaps now I could have just a
drop of your--sidral, shall we say?"

"Yes. Of course."

"Have I met you before? Your face somehow . . ."

"I don't think I've had the honour."

"That's another mystery," the jefe said, stretching out a long fat limb and
gently pushing the beggar towards the bed-knobs, "how you think you've
seen people--and places--before. Was it in a dream or in a past life? I once
heard a doctor say it was something to do with the focusing of the eyes. But
he was a Yankee. A materialist."

"I remember once . . ." the Governor's cousin said. The lightning shot
down over the harbour and the thunder beat on the roof; this was the
atmosphere of a whole state--the storm outside and the talk just going on --
words like "mystery" and "soul" and "the source of life" came in over and
over again, as they sat on the bed talking, with nothing to do and nothing to
believe and nowhere better to go.

The man in drill said, "I think perhaps I had better be moving on."

"Where to?"

"Oh . . . friends," he said vaguely, sketching widely with his hands a whole
world of fictitious friendships.

"You'd better take your drink with you," the Governor's cousin said. He
admitted, "After all you paid for it."

"Thank you, Excellency." He picked up the brandy bottle. Perhaps there
were three fingers left. The bottle of wine, of course, was quite empty.

"Hide it, man, hide it," the Governor's cousin said sharply.

"Oh, of course, Excellency, I will be careful."

"You don't have to call him Excellency," the jefe said. He gave a bellow of
laughter and thrust the beggar right off the bed on to the floor.

"No, no, that is . . ." He sidled cautiously out, with a smudge of tears under
his red sore eyes and from the hall heard the conversation begin again --
"mystery", "soul"--going interminably on to no end.


The beetles had disappeared; the rain had apparently washed them away: it
came perpendicularly down, with a sort of measured intensity, as if it were
driving nails into a coffin lid. But the air was no clearer: sweat and rain hung
together on the clothes. The priest stood for a few seconds in the doorway of
the hotel, the dynamo thudding behind him, then he darted a few yards into
another doorway and hesitated, staring over past the bust of the general to the
tethered sailing boats and one old barge with a tin funnel. He had nowhere to
go. Rain hadn't entered into his calculations: he had believed that it would be
possible just to hang on somehow, sleeping on benches or by the river.
A couple of soldiers arguing furiously came down the street towards the
quay--they just let the rain fall on them, as if it didn't matter, as if things
were so bad anyway you couldn't notice. . . . The priest pushed the wooden
door against which he stood, a cantina door coming down only to the knees,
and went in out of the rain: stacks of gaseosa bottles and a single billiard
table with the score strung on rings, three or four men--somebody had laid
his holster on the bar. The priest moved too quickly and jolted the elbow of a
man who was making a shot. He turned furiously: "Mother of God!" He was a
Red Shirt. Was there no safety anywhere, even for a moment?

The priest apologized humbly, edging back towards the door but, again he
was too quick--his pocket caught against the wall and the brandy bottle
chinked. Three of four faces looked at him with malicious amusement: he
was a stranger and they were going to have fun. "What's that you've got in
your pocket?" the Red Shirt asked. He was a youth not out of his teens, with
gold teeth and a jesting conceited mouth.

"Lemonade," the priest said.

"What do you want to carry lemonade with you for?"

"I take it at night--with my quinine."

The Red Shirt swaggered up and poked the pocket with the butt of his cue.

"Lemonade, eh?"

"Yes, lemonade."

"Let's have a look at the lemonade." He turned proudly to the others and
said, "I can scent a smuggler at ten paces." He thrust his hand into the priest's
pocket and hauled at the brandy bottle. "There," he said. "Didn't I tell you --'
The priest flung himself against the swing door and burst out into the rain. A
voice shouted, "Catch him." They were having the time of their lives. He
was off up the street towards the plaza, turned left and right again--it
was lucky the streets were dark and the moon obscured. As long as he kept
away from lighted windows he was almost invisible--he could hear them
calling to each other. They were not giving up: it was better than billiards:
somewhere a whistle blew--the police were joining in.

This was the town to which it had been his ambition to be promoted,
leaving the right kind of debts behind at Concepcion: he thought of the
cathedral and Montez and a Monsignor he once knew, as he doubled this way
and that. Something buried very deep, the will to escape, cast a momentary
and appalling humour over the whole situation--he giggled and panted and
giggled again. He could hear them hallooing and whistling in the dark, and
the rain came down; it drove and jumped upon the cement floor of the useless
front on which had once been the cathedral (it was too hot to play pelota and a
few iron swings stood like gallows at its edge). He worked his way downhill
again: he had an idea.

The shouts came nearer, and then up from the river a new lot of men ap-
proached; these were pursuing the hunt methodically--he could tell it by
their slow pace, the police, the official hunters. He was between the two--
the amateurs and the professionals. But he knew the door--he pushed it
open, came quickly through into the patio and closed it behind him.

He stood in the dark and panted, hearing the steps come nearer up the
street, while the rain drove down. Then he realized that somebody was
watching him from the window, a small dark withered face, like one of the
preserved heads tourists buy. He came up to the grille and said, "Padre
Jose?"

"Over there." A second face appeared behind the other's shoulder, lit
uncertainly by a candle-flame, then a third face: faces sprouted like
vegetables. He could feel them watching him as he splashed back across the
patio and banged on a door.

He didn't for a second or two recognize Padre Jose in the absurd billowing
nightshirt, holding a lamp. The last time he had seen him was at the
conference, sitting in the back row, biting his nails, afraid to be noticed. It
hadn't been necessary: none of the busy cathedral clergy even knew what he
was called. It was odd to think that now he had won a kind of fame superior
to theirs. He said "Jose" gently, winking up at him from the splashing dark.

"Who are you?"

"Don't you remember me? Of course, it's years now . . . don't you re-
member the conference at the cathedral . . . ?"

"O God," Padre Jose said.

"They are looking for me. I thought perhaps just for tonight you could
perhaps . . ."

"Go away," Padre Jose said, "go away."

"They don't know who I am. They think I'm a smuggler--but up at the
police station they'll know."

"Don't talk so loud. My wife . . ."

"Just show me some corner," he whispered. He was beginning to feel fear
again. Perhaps the effect of the brandy was wearing off (it was impossible in
this hot damp climate to stay drunk for long: alcohol came out again under
the armpits: it dripped from the forehead), or perhaps it was only that the
desire of life which moves in cycles was returning--any sort of life.

In the lamplight Padre Jose's face wore an expression of hatred. He said,
"Why come to me? Why should you think . . . ? I'll call the police if you
don't go. You know what sort of a man I am."

He pleaded gently. "You're a good man, Jose. I've always known that."

"I'll shout if you don't go."

He tried to remember some cause of hatred. There were voices in the street
--arguments, a knocking--were they searching the houses? He said, "If I ever
offended you, Jose, forgive me. I was conceited, proud, overbearing--a bad
priest. I always knew in my heart you were the better man."

"Go," Jose screeched at him, "go. I don't want martyrs here. I don't belong
any more. Leave me alone. I'm all right as I am." He tried to gather up his
venom into spittle and shot it feebly at the other's face: it didn't even reach,
but fell impotently through the air. He said, "Go and die quickly. That's your
job," and slammed the door to. The door of the patio came suddenly open and
the police were there. He caught a glimpse of Padre Jose peering through a
window and then an enormous shape in a white nightshirt engulfed him and
drew him away--whisked him off, like a guardian spirit, from the disastrous
human struggle. A voice said, "That's him." It was the young Red Shirt. He
let his fist open and dropped by Padre Jose's wall a little ball of paper:
it was like the final surrender of a whole past.

He knew it was the beginning of the end--after all these years. He began to
say silently an act of contrition, while they picked the brandy bottle out of
his pocket, but he couldn't give his mind to it. That was the fallacy of the
deathbed repentance--penitence was the fruit of long training and discipline:
fear wasn't enough. He tried to think of his child with shame, but he could
only think of her with a kind of famished love--what would become of her?
And the sin itself was so old that like an ancient picture the deformity had
faded and left a kind of grace. The Red Shirt smashed the bottle on the stone
paving and the smell of spirit rose all round them--not very strongly: there
hadn't been much left.

Then they took him away. Now that they had caught him they treated him
in a friendly way, poking fun at his attempt to escape, except the Red Shirt
whose shot he had spoiled. He couldn't find any answer to their jokes: self-
preservation lay across his brain like a horrifying obsession. When would
they discover who he really was? When would he meet the half-caste, or the
lieutenant who had interrogated him already? They moved in a bunch slowly
up the hill to the plaza. A rifle-butt grounded outside the station as they
came in. A small lamp fumed against the dirty whitewashed wall; in the court-
yard hammocks swung, bunched around sleeping bodies like the nets in which
poultry are tied. "You can sit down," one of the men said, and pushed him
in a comradely way towards a bench. Everything now seemed irrevocable; the
sentry passed back and forth outside the door, and in the courtyard among
the hammocks the ceaseless murmur of sleep went on.

Somebody had spoken to him: he gaped helplessly up. "What?" There seemed
to be an argument in progress between the police and the Red Shirt as to whe-
ther somebody should be disturbed. "But it's his duty," the Red Shirt kept
on repeating: he had rabbity front teeth. He said, "I'll report it to the
Governor."

A policeman said, "You plead guilty, don't you?"

"Yes," the priest said.

"There. What more do you want? It's a fine of five pesos. Why disturb
anybody?"

"And who gets the five pesos, eh?"

"That's none of your business."

The priest said suddenly, "No one gets them."

"No one?"

"I have only twenty-five centavos in the world."

The door of an inner room opened and the lieutenant came out. He said.

"What in God's name is all the noise . . . ?" The police came raggedly and
unwillingly to attention.

"I've caught a man carrying spirits," the Red Shirt said.

The priest sat with his eyes on the ground . . . "because it has crucified . . .
crucified . . . crucified . . ." contrition stuck hopelessly over the formal
words. He felt no emotion but fear.

"Well," the lieutenant said, "what is it to do with you? We catch dozens."

"Shall we bring him in?" one of the men asked.

The lieutenant took a look at the bowed servile figure on the bench. "Get
up," he said. The priest rose. Now, he thought, now . . . he raised his eyes.
The lieutenant looked away, out of the door where the sentry slouched to and
fro. His dark pinched face looked rattled, harassed. . . .

"He has no money," one of the policemen said.

"Mother of God," the lieutenant said, "can I never teach you . . . ?" He
took two steps towards the sentry and turned, "Search him. If he has no mo-
ney, put him in a cell. Give him some work. . . ." He went outside and sud-
denly raising his open hand he struck the sentry on the ear. He said,
"You're asleep. March as if you have some pride . . . pride," he repeated
again, while the small acetylene lamp fumed up the whitewashed wall and
the smell of urine came up out of the yard and the men lay in their ham-
mocks netted and secured.

"Shall we take his name?" a sergeant asked.

"Yes, of course," the lieutenant said, not looking at him, walking brisk-
ly and nervously back past the lamp into the courtyard; he stood there
unsheltered, looking round while the rain fell on his dapper uniform. He
looked like a man with something on his mind: it was as if he were under the
influence of some secret passion which had broken up the routine of his life.
Back he came. He couldn't keep still.

The sergeant pushed the priest ahead into the inner room. A bright com-
mercial calendar hung on the flaking whitewash--a dark-skinned mestizo
girl in a bathing-dress advertised some gaseous water; somebody had
pencilled in a neat pedagogic hand a facile and over-confident statement
about man having nothing to lose but his chains.

"Name?" the sergeant said. Before he could check himself he had replied,

"Montez."

"Home?"

He named a random village: he was absorbed in his own portrait. There he
sat among the white-starched dresses of the first communicants. Somebody
had put a ring round his face to pick it out. There was another picture on
the wall too--the gringo from San Antonio, Texas, wanted for murder and bank
robbery.

"I suppose," the sergeant said cautiously, "that you bought the drink from
a stranger . . ."

"Yes."

"Whom you can't identify?"

"No."

"That's the way," the sergeant said approvingly: it was obvious he didn't
want to start anything. He took the priest quite confidingly by the arm and led
him out and across the courtyard; he carried a large key like the ones used in
morality plays or fairy stories as a symbol. A few men moved in the
hammocks--a large unshaven jaw hung over the side like something left
unsold on a butcher's counter: a big torn ear: a naked black-haired thigh. He
wondered when the mestizo's face would appear, elated with recognition.

The sergeant unlocked a small grated door and let out with his boot at
something straddled across the entrance. He said, "They are all good fellows,
all good fellows here," kicking his way in. A heavy smell lay on the air and
somebody in the absolute darkness wept.

The priest lingered on the threshold trying to see. He said, "I am so dry.
Could I have water?" the stench poured up his nostrils and he retched.

"In the morning," the sergeant said, "you've drunk enough now," and laying
a large considerate hand upon the priest's back, he pushed him in, then
slammed the door to. He trod on a hand, an arm, and pressing his face against
the grille, protested, "There's no room. I can't see. Who are these people?"
Outside among the hammocks the sergeant began to laugh. "Hombre," he
said, "hombre, have you never been in jail before?"




CHAPTER 3




A voice near his foot said, "Got a cigarette?"

He drew quickly back and trod on an arm. A voice said imperatively,
"Water, quick," as if whoever it was thought he could take a stranger
unawares, and make him fork out.

"Got a cigarette?"

"No." He said weakly, "I have nothing at all," and imagined he could feel
enmity fuming up all round him. He moved again. Somebody said, "Look out
for the bucket." That was where the stench came from. He stood perfectly
still and waited for his sight to return. Outside the rain began to stop: it
dropped haphazardly and the thunder moved away. You could count forty now
between the lightning flash and the roll. Halfway to the sea, or halfway to
the mountains. He felt around with his foot, trying to find enough space to
sit down but there seemed to be no room at all. When the lightning went on
he could see the hammocks at the edge of the courtyard.

"Got something to eat?" a voice asked, and when he didn't answer, "Got
something to eat?"

"No."

"Got any money?" another voice said.

"No."

Suddenly, from about five feet away, there came a tiny scream--a
woman's. A tired voice said, "Can't you be quiet?" Among the furtive
movements came again the muffled painless cries. He realized that pleasure
was going on even in this crowded darkness. Again he put out his foot and
began to edge his way inch by inch away from the grille. Behind the human
voices another noise went permanently on: it was like a small machine, an
electric belt set at a certain tempo. It filled any silences that there
were louder than human breath. It was the mosquitoes.

He had moved perhaps six feet from the grille, and his eyes began to
distinguish heads--perhaps the sky was clearing: they hung around him like
gourds. A voice said, "Who are you?" He made no reply, feeling panic,
edging in. Suddenly he found himself against the back wall: the stone was
wet against his hand--the cell could not have been more than twelve feet
deep. He found he could just sit down if he kept his feet drawn up under
him. An old man lay slumped against his shoulder; he told his age from the
featherweight lightness of the bones, the feeble uneven flutter of the breath.
He was either somebody close to birth or death--and he could hardly be a
child in this place. The old man said suddenly, "Is that you, Catarina?"
and his breath went out in a long patient sigh, as if he had been waiting
a long while and could afford to wait a lot longer.

The priest said, "No. Not Catarina." When he spoke everybody came suddenly
silent, listening, as if what he said had importance: then the voices
and movements began again. But the sound of his own voice, the sense of
communication with a neighbour, calmed him.

"You wouldn't be," the old man said. "I didn't really think you were. She'll
never come."

"Is she your wife?"

"What's that you're saying? I haven't got a wife."

"Catarina?"

"She's my daughter." Everybody was listening except the two invisible
people who were concerned only in their cramped pleasure.

"Perhaps they won't allow her here."

"She'll never try," the old hopeless voice pronounced with absolute con-
viction. The priest's feet began to ache, drawn up under his haunches. He
said, "If she loves you . . ." Somewhere across the huddle of dark shapes
the woman cried again--that finished cry of protest and abandonment and
pleasure.

"It's the priests who've done it," the old man said.

"The priests?"

"The priests."

"Why the priests?"

"The priests."

A low voice near his knees said, "The old man's crazy. What's the use of
asking him questions?"

"Is that you, Catarina?" He added, "I don't really believe it, you know. It's
just a question."

"Now I've got something to complain about," the voice went on. "A man's
got to defend his honour. You'll admit that, won't you?"

"I don't know anything about honour."

"I was in the cantina and the man I'm telling you about came up to me and
said, “Your mother's a whore.” Well, I couldn't do anything about it:
he'd got his gun on him. All I could do was wait. He drank too much beer--
I knew he would--and when he was staggering I followed him out. I had a
bottle and I smashed it against a wall. You see, I hadn't got my gun. His
family's got influence with the jefe or I'd never be here."

"It's a terrible thing to kill a man."

"You talk like a priest."

"It was the priests who did it," the old man said. "You're right there."

"What does he mean?"

"What does it matter what an old man like that means? I'd like to tell you
about something else . . ."

A woman's voice said, "They took the child away from him."

"Why?"

"It was a bastard. They acted quite correctly."

At the word "bastard" his heart moved painfully, as when a man in love
hears a stranger name a flower which is also the name of his woman.

"Bastard!" the word filled him with miserable happiness. It brought his own
child nearer: he could see her under the tree by the rubbish-dump, unguarded.
He repeated "Bastard?" as he might have repeated her name--with tenderness
disguised as indifference.

"They said he was no fit father. But, of course, when the priests fled, she
had to go with him. Where else could she go?" It was like a happy ending
until she said, "Of course she hated him. They'd taught her about things."
He could imagine the small set mouth of an educated woman. What was she
doing here?

"Why is he in prison?"

"He had a crucifix."

The stench from the pail got worse all the time; the night stood round them
like a wall, without ventilation, and he could hear somebody making water,
drumming on the tin sides. He said, "They had no business . . ."

"They were doing what was right, of course. It was a mortal sin."

"No right to make her hate him."

"They knew what's right."

He said, "They were bad priests to do a thing like that. The sin was over. It
was their duty to teach--well, love."

"You don't know what's right. The priests know."

He said after a moment's hesitation, very distinctly, "I am a priest."

It was like the end: there was no need to hope any longer. The ten years'
hunt was over at last. There was silence all round him. This place was very
like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love, it stank to
heaven; but he realized that after all it was possible to find peace there,
when you knew for certain that the time was short.

"A priest?" the woman said at last.

"Yes."

"Do they know?"

"Not yet."

He could feel a hand fumbling at his sleeve. A voice said, "You shouldn't
have told us. Father, there are all sorts here. Murderers . . ."

The voice which had described the crime to him said, "You've no cause to
abuse me. Because I kill a man it doesn't mean . . ." Whispering started
everywhere. The voice said bitterly, "I'm not an informer just because when
a man says “Your mother was a whore . . .”'

The priest said, "There's no need for anyone to inform on me. That would
be a sin. When it's daylight they'll discover for themselves."

"They'll shoot you, father," the woman's voice said.

"Yes."

"Are you afraid?"

"Yes. Of course."

A new voice spoke, in the corner from which the sounds of pleasure had come.
It said roughly and obstinately, "A man isn't afraid of a thing like that."

"No?" the priest asked.

"A bit of pain. What do you expect? It has to come."

"All the same," the priest said, "I am afraid."

"Toothache is worse."

"We can't all be brave men."

The voice said with contempt, "You believers are all the same. Christianity
makes you cowards."

"Yes. Perhaps you are right. You see I am a bad priest and a bad man. To
die in a state of mortal sin'--he gave an uneasy chuckle--"it makes you
think."

"There. It's as I say. Believing in God makes cowards." The voice was
triumphant, as if it had proved something.

"So then?" the priest said.

"Better not to believe--and be a brave man."

"I see--yes. And of course, if one believed the Governor did not exist or
the jefe, if we could pretend that this prison was not a prison at all but
a garden, how brave we could be then."

"That's just foolishness."

"But when we found that the prison was a prison, and the Governor up
there in the square undoubtedly existed, well, it wouldn't much matter if
we'd been brave for an hour or two."

"Nobody could say that this prison was not a prison."

"No? You don't think so? I can see you don't listen to the politicians." His
feet were giving him great pain: he had cramp in the soles, but he could bring
no pressure on the muscles to relieve them. It was not yet midnight; the hours
of darkness stretched ahead interminably.

The woman said suddenly, "Think. We have a martyr here . . ."

The priest giggled: he couldn't stop himself. He said, "I don't think martyrs
are like this." He became suddenly serious, remembering Maria's words--it
wouldn't be a good thing to bring mockery on the Church. He said, "Martyrs
are holy men. It is wrong to think that just because one dies . . . no. I tell
you I am in a state of mortal sin. I have done things I couldn't talk to you
about. I could only whisper them in the confessional." Everybody, when he
spoke, listened attentively to him as if he were addressing them in church. He
wondered where the inevitable Judas was sitting now, but he wasn't aware of
Judas as he had been in the forest hut. He was moved by an irrational
affection for the inhabitants of this prison. A phrase came to him: "God so
loved the world . . ." He said, "My children, you must never think the holy
martyrs are like me. You have a name for me. Oh, I've heard you use it
before now. I am a whisky priest. I am in here now because they found a
bottle of brandy in my pocket." He tried to move his feet from under him: the
cramp had passed: now they were lifeless: all feeling gone. Oh well, let them
stay. He wouldn't have to use them often again.

The old man was muttering and the priest's thoughts went back to Brigitta.
The knowledge of the world lay in her like the dark explicable spot in an Xray
photograph; he longed--with a breathless feeling in the breast--to save
her, but he knew the surgeon's decision--the ill was incurable.

The woman's voice said pleadingly, "A little drink, father . . . it's not
so important." He wondered why she was here--probably for having a holy
picture in her house. She had the tiresome intense note of a pious woman.
They were extraordinarily foolish over pictures. Why not burn them? One
didn't need a picture . . . He said sternly, "Oh, I am not only a drunkard."
He had always been worried by the fate of pious women. As much as politicians,
they fed on illusion. He was frightened for them: they came to death so often
in a state of invincible complacency, full of uncharity. It was one's duty, if
one could, to rob them of their sentimental notions of what was good . . . He
said in hard accents, "I have a child."

What a worthy woman she was! Her voice pleaded in the darkness; he
couldn't catch what she said, but it was something about the Good Thief. He
said, "My child, the thief repented. I haven't repented." He remembered her
coming into the hut, the dark malicious knowing look with the sunlight at her
back. He said, "I don't know how to repent." That was true: he had lost the
faculty. He couldn't say to himself that he wished his sin had never existed,
because the sin seemed to him now so unimportant and he loved the fruit of
it. He needed a confessor to draw his mind slowly down the drab passages
which led to grief and repentance.

The woman was silent now: he wondered whether after all he had been too harsh
with her. If it helped her faith to believe that he was a martyr . . . But he
rejected the idea: one was pledged to truth. He shifted an inch or two on his
hams and said, "What time does it get light?"

"Four . . . five . . ." a man replied. "How can we tell, father? We haven't
clocks."

"Have you been here long?"

"Three weeks."

"Are you kept here all day?"

"Oh no. They let us out to clean the yard."

He thought: that is when I shall be discovered--unless it's earlier, for
surely one of these people will betray me first. A long train of thought began,
which led him to announce after a while, "They are offering a reward for me.
Five hundred, six hundred pesos, I'm not sure." Then he was silent again. He
couldn't urge any man to inform against him--that would be tempting him to
sin--but at the same time if there was an informer here, there was no reason
why the wretched creature should be bilked of his reward. To commit so ugly
a sin--it must count as murder--and to have no compensation in this world
. . . He thought: it wouldn't be fair.

"Nobody here," a voice said, "wants their blood money."

Again he was touched by an extraordinary affection. He was just one
criminal among a herd of criminals . . . He had a sense of companionship
which he had never experienced in the old days when pious people came
kissing his black cotton glove.

The pious woman's voice leapt hysterically out at him, "It is so stupid to
tell them that. You don't know the sort of wretches who are here, father.
Thieves, murderers . . ."

"Well," an angry voice said, "why are you here?"

"I had good books in my house," she announced, with unbearable pride. He
had done nothing to shake her complacency. He said, "They are everywhere.
It's no different here."

"Good books?"

He giggled. "No, no. Thieves, murderers . . . Oh, well, my child, if you had
more experience you would know there are worse things to be." The old man
seemed to be uneasily asleep; his head lay sideways against the priest's
shoulder, and he muttered angrily. God knows, it had never been easy to
move in this place, but the difficulty seemed to increase as the night wore on
and limbs stiffened. He couldn't twitch his shoulder now without waking the
old man to another night of suffering. Well, he thought, it was my kind who
robbed him: it's only fair to be made a little uncomfortable . . . He sat silent
and rigid against the damp wall, with his dead feet under his haunches. The
mosquitoes droned on; it was no good defending yourself by striking at the
air: they pervaded the whole place like an element. Somebody as well as the
old man had fallen asleep and was snoring, a curious note of satisfaction, as
though he had eaten and drunk well at a good dinner and was now taking a
snooze. . . . The priest tried to calculate the hour: how much time had passed
since he had met the beggar in the plaza? It was probably not long after
midnight: there would be hours more of this.

It was, of course, the end, but at the same time you had to be prepared for
everything, even escape. If God intended him to escape He could snatch him
away from in front of a firing-squad. But God was merciful. There was only
one reason, surely, which would make Him refuse His peace--if there was
any peace--that he could still be of use in saving a soul, his own or anoth-
er's. But what good could he do now? They had him on the run; he dared not
enter a village in case somebody else should pay with his life--perhaps a man
who was in mortal sin and unrepentant. It was impossible to say what souls
might not be lost simply because he was obstinate and proud and wouldn't admit
defeat. He couldn't even say Mass any longer--he had no wine. It had gone
down the dry gullet of the Chief of Police. It was appallingly complicated.
He was still afraid of death, he would be more afraid of death yet when the
morning came, but it was beginning to attract him by its simplicity.

The pious woman was whispering to him. She must have somehow edged
her way nearer. She was saying, "Father, will you hear my confession?"

"My dear child, here! It's quite impossible. Where would be the secrecy?"

"It's been so long . . ."

"Say an Act of Contrition for your sins. You must trust God, my dear, to
make allowances . . ."

"I wouldn't mind suffering . . ."

"Well, you are here."

"That's nothing. In the morning my sister will have raised the money for
my fine."

Somewhere against the far wall pleasure began again; it was unmistakable:
the movements, the breathlessness, and then the cry. The pious woman said
aloud with fury, "Why won't they stop it? The brutes, the animals!'

"What's the good of your saying an Act of Contrition now in this state of
mind?"

"But the ugliness . . ."

"Don't believe that. It's dangerous. Because suddenly we discover that our
sins have so much beauty."

"Beauty," she said with disgust. "Here. In this cell. With strangers all
round."

"Such a lot of beauty. Saints talk about the beauty of suffering. Well, we
are not saints, you and I. Suffering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding
and pain. That is beautiful in that corner--to them. It needs a lot of learning
to see things with a saint's eye: a saint gets a subtle taste for beauty and can
look down on poor ignorant palates like theirs. But we can't afford to."

"It's mortal sin."

"We don't know. It may be. But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from
experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell.
Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh no, they were
just as quick and light and . . ."

Again the cry came, an expression of intolerable pleasure. The woman
said, "Stop them. It's a scandal." He felt fingers on his knee, grasping,
digging. He said, "We're all fellow prisoners. I want drink at this moment
more than anything, more than God. That's a sin too."

"Now," the woman said, "I can see you're a bad priest. I wouldn't believe it
before. I do now. You sympathize with these animals. If your bishop heard
you . . ."

"Ah, he's a very long way off." He thought of the old man now in Mexico
City, living in one of those ugly comfortable pious houses, full of images
and holy pictures, saying Mass on Sundays at one of the cathedral altars.
"When I get out of here, I shall write . . ."

He couldn't help laughing: she had no sense of how life had changed. He said,
"If he gets the letter he'll be interested to hear I'm alive." But again he
became serious. It was more difficult to feel pity for her than for the half-
caste who a week ago had tagged him through the forest, but her case might
be worse. The other had so much excuse--poverty and fever and innumerable
humiliations. He said, "Try not to be angry. Pray for me instead."

"The sooner you are dead the better."

He couldn't see her in the darkness, but there were plenty of faces he could
remember from the old days which fitted the voice. When you visualized a
man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity--that was a
quality God's image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners
of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible
to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination. He began to feel an over-
whelming responsibility for this pious woman. "You and Father Jose,' she
said. "It's people like you who make people mock--at real religion." She
had, after all, as many excuses as the half-caste. He saw the kind of salon
in which she spent her days, with the rocking-chair and the photographs,
meeting no one. He said gently, "You are not married, are you?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"And you never had a vocation?"

"They wouldn't believe it," she said bitterly.

He thought: poor woman, she's had nothing, nothing at all. If only one could
find the right word . . . He leant hopelessly back, moving carefully so
as not to waken the old man. But the right words never came to him. He was
more out of touch with her kind than he had ever been; he would have known
what to say to her in the old days, feeling no pity at all, speaking with half
a mind a platitude or two. Now he felt useless. He was a criminal and ought
only to talk to criminals; he had done wrong again, trying to break down her
complacency. He might just as well have let her go on thinking him a martyr.

His eyes closed and immediately he began to dream. He was being pursued;
he stood outside a door banging on it, begging for admission, but nobody
answered--there was a word, a password, which would save him, but he had
forgotten it. He tried desperately at random--cheese and child, Califor-
nia, excellency, milk, Vera Cruz. His feet had gone to sleep and he
knelt outside the door. Then he knew why he wanted to get in: he wasn't
being pursued after all: that was a mistake. His child lay beside him bleeding
to death and this was a doctor's house. He banged on the door and shouted,
"Even if I can't think of the right word, haven't you a heart?" The child was
dying and looked up at him with middle-aged complacent wisdom. She said,
"You animal," and he woke again crying. He couldn't have slept for more
than a few seconds because the woman was still talking about the vocation
the nuns had refused to recognize. He said, "That made you suffer, didn't it?
To suffer like that--perhaps it was better than being a nun and happy," and
immediately after he had spoken he thought: a silly remark, what does it
mean? Why can't I find something to say to her which she could remember?

He didn't sleep again: he was striking yet another bargain with God. This
time, if he escaped from the prison, he would escape altogether. He would go
north, over the border. His escape was so improbable that, if it happened, it
couldn't be anything else but a sign--an indication that he was doing more
harm by his example than good by his occasional confessions. The old man
moved against his shoulder and the night just stayed around them. The
darkness was always the same and there were no clocks--there was nothing
to indicate time passing. The only punctuation of the night was the sound of
urination.

Suddenly, he realized that he could see a face, and then another; he had
begun to forget that it would ever be another day, just as one forgets that one
will ever die. It comes suddenly on one in a screeching brake or a whistle in
the air, the knowledge that time moves and comes to an end. All the voices
slowly became faces--there were no surprises. The confessional teaches you
to recognize the shape of a voice--the loose lip of the weak chin and the false
candour of the too straightforward eyes. He saw the pious woman a few feet
away, uneasily dreaming with her prim mouth open, showing strong teeth
like tombs: the old man: the boaster in the corner, and his woman asleep
untidily across his knees. Now that the day was at last here, he was the only
one awake, except for a small Indian boy who sat cross-legged near the door
with an expression of interested happiness, as if he had never known such
friendly company. Over the courtyard the whitewash became visible upon the
opposite wall. He began formally to pay his farewell to the world: he couldn't
put any heart in it. His corruption was less evident to his senses than his
death. One bullet, he thought, is almost certain to go directly through the
heart--a squad must contain one accurate marksman. Life would go out in a
"fraction of a second" (that was the phrase), but all night he had been
realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no
clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second
of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever. For some
reason he thought of a man he had once shrived who was on the point of
death with cancer--his relatives had had to bandage their faces, the smell of
the rotting interior was so appalling. He wasn't a saint. Nothing in life was
as ugly as death.

A voice in the yard called "Montez." He sat on upon his dead feet; he
thought automatically: This suit isn't good for much more. It was smeared
and fouled by the cell floor and his fellow prisoners. He had obtained it at
great risk in a store down by the river, pretending to be a small farmer with
ideas above his station. Then he remembered he wouldn't need it much
longer--it came with an odd shock, like locking the door of one's house for
the last time. The voice repeated impatiently, "Montez."

He remembered that that, for the moment, was his name. He looked up
from his ruined suit and saw the sergeant unlocking the cell door. "Here,
Montez." He let the old man's head fall gently back against the sweating wall
and tried to stand up, but his feet crumpled like pastry. "Do you want to sleep
all night?" the sergeant complained testily: something had irritated him: he
wasn't as friendly as he had been the night before. He let out a kick at a
sleeping man and beat on the cell door, "Come on. Wake up all of you. Out
into the yard." Only the Indian boy obeyed, sliding unobtrusively out with his
look of alien happiness. The sergeant complained, "The dirty hounds. Do they
want us to wash them? You, Montez." Life began to return painfully to his
feet. He managed to reach the door.

The yard had come sluggishly to life. A queue of men were bathing their
faces at a single tap; a man in a vest and pants sat on the ground hugging a
rifle. "Get out into the yard and wash," the sergeant yelled at them, but when
the priest stepped out he snapped at him, "Not you, Montez."

"Not me?"

"We've got other plans for you," the sergeant said.

The priest stood waiting while his fellow prisoners filed out into the yard.
One by one they went past him; he looked at their feet and not their faces,
standing like a temptation at the door. Nobody said a word: a woman's feet
went draggingly by in black worn low-heeled shoes. He was shaken by the
sense of his own uselessness. He whispered without looking up, "Pray for
me."

"What's that you said, Montez?"

He couldn't think of a lie; he felt as if ten years had exhausted his whole
stock of deceit.

"What's that you said?"

The shoes had stopped moving. The woman's voice said, "He was begging."
She added mercilessly, "He ought to have more sense. I've nothing for
him." Then she went on, flat-footed into the yard.

"Did you sleep well, Montez?" the sergeant badgered him.

"Not very well."

"What do you expect?" the sergeant said. "It'll teach you to like brandy too
well, won't it?"

"Yes." He wondered how much longer all these preliminaries would take.

"Well, if you spend all your money on brandy, you've got to do a bit of
work in return for a night's lodging. Fetch the pails out of the cells and
mind you don't spill them--this place stinks enough as it is."

"Where do I take them to?"

The sergeant pointed to the door of the excusados beyond the tap. "Report
to me when you've finished that," he said, and went bellowing orders back
into the yard.

The priest bent down and took the pail. It was full and very heavy: he went
bowed with the weight across the yard. Sweat got into his eyes. He wiped
them free and saw one behind the other in the washing queue faces he knew --
the hostages. There was Miguel, whom he had seen taken away; he remembered
the mother screaming out and the lieutenant's tired anger and the sun com-
ing up. They saw him at the same time; he put down the heavy pail and look-
ed at them. Not to recognize them would have been like a hint, a claim, a
demand to them to go on suffering and let him escape. Miguel had been beat-
en up: there was a sore under his eye--flies buzzed round it as they buzz
round a mule's raw flank. Then the queue moved on; they looked on the
ground and passed him; strangers took their place. He prayed silently: Oh
God, send them someone more worthwhile to suffer for. It seemed to him a
damnable mockery that they should sacrifice themselves for a whisky priest
with a bastard child. The soldier sat in his pants with the gun between his
knees paring his nails and biting off the loose skin. In an odd way he felt
abandoned because they had shown no sign of recognition.

The excusados was a cesspool with two planks across it on which a man
could stand. He emptied the pail and went back across the yard to the row of
cells. There were six: one by one he took the pails: once he had to stop and
retch: splash, splash, to and fro across the yard. He came to the last cell.
It wasn't empty; a man lay back against the wall; the early sun just reached
his feet. Flies buzzed around a mound of vomit on the floor. The eyes opened
and watched the priest stooping over the pail: two fangs protruded. . . .

The priest moved quickly and splashed the floor. The half-caste said in that
too-familiar nagging tone, "Wait a moment. You can't do that in here." He
explained proudly, "I'm not a prisoner. I'm a guest." The priest made a
motion of apology (he was afraid to speak) and moved again. "Wait a
moment," the half-caste commanded him again. "Come here."

The priest stood stubbornly, half-turned away, near the door.

"Come here," the half-caste said. "you're a prisoner, aren't you?--and I'm
a guest--of the Governor. Do you want me to shout for a policeman? Then
do as you're told: come here."

It seemed as if God were deciding . . . finally. He came, pail in hand, stood
beside the large flat naked foot, and the half-caste looked up at him from the
shadow of the wall, asking him sharply and anxiously, "What are you doing
here?"

"Cleaning up." "You know what I mean."

"I was caught with a bottle of brandy," the priest said, trying to roughen his
voice.

"I know you," the half-caste said. "I couldn't believe my eyes, but when
you speak . . ."

"I don't think . . ."

"That priest's voice," the half-caste said with disgust. He was like a dog of
a different breed: he couldn't help his hackles rising. The big toe moved
plumply and inimically. The priest put down the pail. He argued hopelessly,
"you're drunk."

"Beer, beer," the half-caste said, "nothing but beer. They promised me the
best of everything, but you can't trust them. don't I know the jefe"s got his
own brandy locked away?"

"I must empty the pail."

"If you move, I'll shout. I've got so many things to think about," the half-
caste complained bitterly. The priest waited: there was nothing else to do;
he was at the man's mercy--a silly phrase, for those malarial eyes had never
known what mercy was. He was saved at any rate from the indignity of
pleading.

"You see," the mestizo carefully explained, "I'm comfortable here." His
yellow toes curled luxuriously beside the vomit. "Good food, beer, company,
and this roof doesn't leak. You don't have to tell me what'll happen after --
they'll kick me out like a dog, like a dog." He became shrill and indignant.
"What have they got you here for? That's what I want to know. It looks
crooked to me. It's my job, isn't it, to find you. Who's going to have the
reward if they've got you already? The jefe, I shouldn't wonder, or that
bastard sergeant." He brooded unhappily. "You can't trust a soul these days."

"And there's a Red Shirt," the priest said.

"A Red Shirt?"

"He really caught me."

"Mother of God," the mestizo said, "and they all have the ear of the
Governor." He looked up beseechingly. He said, "you're an educated man.
Advise me."

"It would be murder," the priest said, "a mortal sin."

"I don't mean that. I mean about the reward. You see as long as they don't
know, well, I'm comfortable here. A man deserves a few weeks' holiday. And
you can't escape far, can you? It would be better, wouldn't it, to catch
you out of here. In the town somewhere. I mean nobody else could claim . . ."
He said furiously, "A poor man has so much to think about."

"I dare say," the priest said, "they'd give you something even here."

"Something," the mestizo said, levering himself up against the wall, "why
shouldn't I have it all?"

"What's going on in here?" the sergeant asked. He stood in the doorway, in
the sunlight, looking in.

The priest said slowly, "He wanted me to clear up his vomit. I said you
hadn't told me . . ."

"Oh, he's a guest," the sergeant said. "He's got to be treated right. You do
as he says."

The mestizo smirked. He said, "And another bottle of beer, sergeant?"

"Not yet," the sergeant said. "you've got to look round the town first."
The priest picked up the pail and went back across the yard, leaving them
arguing. He felt as if a gun were levelled at his back. He went into the
excusados and emptied the pail, then came out again into the sun--the gun
was levelled at his breast. The two men stood in the cell door talking. He
walked across the yard: they watched him come. The sergeant said to the
mestizo, "You say you're bilious and can't see properly this morning. You
clean up your own vomit then. If you don't do your job . . ." Behind the
sergeant's back the mestizo gave him a cunning and unreassuring wink. Now
that the immediate fear was over, he felt only regret. God had decided. He
had to go on with life, go on making decisions, acting on his own advice,
making plans . . .

It took him another half-hour to finish cleaning the cells, throwing a bucket
of water over each floor; he watched the pious woman go off through the
archway to where her sister waited with the fine; they were both tied up in
black shawls like things bought in the market, things hard and dry and
second-hand. Then he reported again to the sergeant, who inspected the cells
and criticized his work and ordered him to throw more water down, and then
suddenly got tired of the whole business and told him he could go to the jefe
for permission to leave. So he waited another hour on the bench outside the
jefe's door, watching the sentry move lackadaisically to and fro in the hot
sun.

And when at last a policeman led him in, it wasn't the jefe who sat at the
desk but the lieutenant. The priest stood not far from his own portrait on
the wall and waited. Once he glanced quickly and nervously up at the old
crumpled newspaper cutting and thought, It's not very like me now. What an
unbearable creature he must have been in those days--and yet in those days
he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes
seemed to him that venial sins--impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a
neglected opportunity--cut you off from grace more completely than the worst
sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now
in his corruption he had learnt . . .

"Well," the lieutenant asked, "has he cleaned up the cells?" He didn't take
his eyes from his papers. He went on, "Tell the sergeant I want two dozen
men with properly cleaned rifles--within two minutes." He looked abstract-
edly up at the priest and said, "Well, what are you waiting for?"

"For permission, Excellency, to go away."

"I am not an excellency. Learn to call things by their right names." He said
sharply, "Have you been here before?"

"Never."

"Your name is Montez. I seem to come across too many people of that name
in these days. Relations of yours?" He sat watching him closely, as if
memory were beginning to work.

The priest said hurriedly, "My cousin was shot at Concepcion."

"That was not my fault."

"I only meant--we were much alike. Our fathers were twins. Not half an
hour between them. I thought your Excellency seemed to think . . ."

"As I remember him, he was quite different. A tall thin man . . . narrow
shoulders . . ."

The priest said hurriedly, "Perhaps only to the family eye . . ."

"But then I only saw him once." It was almost as if the lieutenant had
something on his conscience, as he sat with his dark Indian-blooded hands
restless on the pages, brooding. . . . He asked, "Where are you going?"

"God knows."

"You are all alike, you people. You never learn the truth--that God knows
nothing." Some tiny scrap of life like a grain of smut went racing across the
page in front of him; he pressed his finger down on it and said, "You had no
money for your fine?" and watched another smut edge out between the
leaves, scurrying for refuge: in this heat there was no end to life. "No."

"How will you live?"

"Some work perhaps . . ."

"You are getting too old for work." He put his hand suddenly in his pocket
and pulled out a five-peso piece. "There," he said. "Get out of here, and
don't let me see your face again. Mind that."

The priest held the coin in his fist--the price of a Mass. He said with
astonishment, "you're a good man."




CHAPTER 4




It was still very early in the morning when he crossed the river and came
dripping up the other bank. He wouldn't have expected anybody to be about.
The bungalow, the tin-roofed shed, the flagstaff: he had an idea that all
Englishmen lowered their flag at sunset and sang "God Save the King". He
came carefully round the corner of the shed and the door gave to his pressure.
He was inside in the dark where he had been before: how many weeks ago?
He had no idea. He only remembered that then the rains were a long way off:
now they were beginning to break. In another week only an aeroplane would
be able to cross the mountains.

He felt around him with his foot; he was so hungry that even a few bananas
would be better than nothing--he had had no food for two days--but there
were none here, none at all. He must have arrived on a day when the crop had
gone down-river. He stood just inside the door trying to remember what the
child had told him--the Morse code, her window: across the dead-white
dusty yard the mosquito wire caught the sun. He was reminded suddenly of
an empty larder. He began to listen anxiously. There wasn't a sound
anywhere; the day here hadn't yet begun with that first sleepy slap of a shoe
on a cement floor, the claws of a dog scratching as it stretched, the knock-
knock of a hand on a door. There was just nothing, nothing at all.

What was the time? How many hours of light had there been? It was impos-
sible to tell. Suppose, after all, it was not very early--it might be six,
seven. . . . He realized how much he had counted on this child. She was the
only person who could help him without endangering herself. Unless he got
over the mountains in the next few days he was trapped--he might as well
hand himself over to the police, because how could he live through the rains
with nobody daring to give him food or shelter? It would have been better,
quicker, if he had been recognized in the police station a week ago: so much
less trouble. Then he heard a sound; it was like hope coming tentatively back:
a scratching and a whining. This was what one meant by dawn--the noise of
life. He waited for it--hungrily--in the doorway.

And it came: a mongrel bitch dragging herself across the yard, an ugly
creature with bent ears, trailing a wounded or a broken leg, whimpering.
There was something wrong with her back. She came very slowly. He could
see her ribs like an exhibit in a natural history museum. It was obvious
that she hadn't had food for days: she had been abandoned.

Unlike him, she retained a kind of hope. Hope is an instinct only the
reasoning human mind can kill. An animal never knows despair. Watching
her wounded progress he had a sense that this had happened daily--perhaps
for weeks; he was watching one of the well-rehearsed effects of the new day,
like bird-song in happier regions. She dragged herself up to the veranda door
and began to scratch with one paw, lying oddly spreadeagled. Her nose was
down to a crack: she seemed to be breathing in the unused air of empty
rooms; then she whined impatiently, and once her tail beat as if she heard
something move inside. At last she began to howl.

The priest could bear it no longer. He knew now what it meant: he might
as well let his eyes see. He came out into the yard and the animal turned
awkwardly--the parody of a watchdog--and began to bark at him. It wasn't
anybody she wanted: she wanted what she was used to: she wanted the old
world back.

He looked in through the window--perhaps this was the child's room.
Everything had been removed from it except the useless or the broken. There
was a cardboard box full of torn paper and a small chair which had lost a leg.
There was a large nail in the whitewashed wall where a mirror perhaps had
been hung or a picture. There was a broken shoe-horn.

The bitch was dragging itself along the veranda growling: instinct is like a
sense of duty--one can confuse it with loyalty very easily. He avoided the
animal simply by stepping out into the sun; it couldn't turn quickly enough
to follow him. He pushed at the door and it opened--nobody had bothered to
lock up. An ancient alligator's skin which had been badly cut and ineffi-
ciently dried hung on the wall. There was a snuffle behind him and he
turned; the bitch had two paws over the threshold, but now that he was
established in the house, she didn't mind him. He was there, in possession,
the master, and there were all kinds of smells to occupy her mind. She pushed
herself across the floor, making a wet noise.

The priest opened a door on the left--perhaps it had been the bedroom. In
a corner lay a pile of old medicine bottles. There were medicines for
headaches, stomach-aches, medicines to be taken after meals and before
meals. Somebody must have been very ill to need so many? There was a hair-
slide, broken, and a ball of hair-combings--very fair hair turning dusty
white. He thought with relief: It was her mother, only her mother.

He tried another room which faced, through the mosquito wire, the slow
and empty river. This had been the living-room, for they had left behind the
table, a folding card-table of plywood bought for a few shillings which hadn't
been worth taking with them wherever they'd gone. Had the mother been dying,
he wondered? They had cleared the crop perhaps, and gone to the capital
where there was a hospital. He left that room and entered another: this
was the one he had seen from the outside--the child's. He turned over the
contents of the wastepaper box with sad curiosity. He felt as if he were
clearing up after a death, deciding what would be too painful to keep.

He read, "The immediate cause of the American War of Independence was
what is called the Boston Tea Party." It seemed to be part of an essay written
in large firm letters, carefully. "But the real issue" (the word was spelt
wrongly, crossed out and re-written) "was whether it was right to tax people
who were not represented in Parliament." It must have been a rough copy --
there were so many corrections. He picked out another scrap at random--it
was about people called Whigs and Tories--the words were incomprehensible
to him. Something like a duster flopped down off the roof into the yard:
it was a vulture. He read on, "If five men took three days to mow a mea-
dow of four acres five roods, how much would two men mow in one day?"
There was a neat line ruled under the question, and then the calculations
began--a hopeless muddle of figures which didn't work out. There was a
hint of heat and irritation in the crumpled paper tossed aside. He could
see her very clearly, dispensing with that question decisively: the neat
accurately moulded face with the two pinched pigtails. He remembered her
readiness to swear eternal enmity against anyone who hurt him, and he
remembered his own child enticing him by the rubbish-dump.

He shut the door carefully behind him as if he were preventing an escape.
He could hear the bitch--somewhere--growling, and followed her into what
had once been the kitchen. She lay in a deathly attitude over a bone with
her old teeth bared. An Indian's face hung outside the mosquito wire like
something hooked up to dry--dark, withered, and unappetizing. He had his
eyes on the bone as if he coveted it. He looked up as the priest came across
the kitchen and immediately was gone as if he had never been there, leaving
the house just as abandoned. The priest, too, looked at the bone.

There was a lot of meat on it still. A small cloud of flies hung above it a
few inches from the bitch"s mouth, and the bitch kept her eye fixed, now that
the Indian was gone, on the priest. They were all in competition. The priest
advanced a step or two and stamped twice. "Go," he said, "go," flapping his
hands, but the mongrel wouldn't move, flattened above the bone, with all the
resistance left in the broken body concentrated in the yellow eyes, burring
between her teeth. It was like hate on a deathbed. The priest came cautiously
forward; he wasn't yet used to the idea that the animal couldn't spring. One
associates a dog with action, but this creature, like any crippled human being,
could only think. You could see the thoughts--hunger and hope and hatred --
stuck on the eyeball.

The priest put out his hand towards the bone and the flies buzzed upwards.
The animal became silent, watching. "There, there," the priest said cajolingly;
he made little enticing movements in the air and the animal stared back. Then
the priest turned and moved away as if he were abandoning the bone; he
droned gently to himself a phrase from the Mass, elaborately paying no
attention. Then he switched quickly round again. It hadn't worked. The bitch
watched him, screwing round her neck to follow his ingenious movements.

For a moment he became furious--that a mongrel bitch with a broken back
should steal the only food. He swore at it--popular expressions picked up
beside bandstands: he would have been surprised in other circumstances that
they came so readily to his tongue. Then suddenly he laughed: this was
human dignity disputing with a bitch over a bone. When he laughed the
animal's ears went back, twitching at the tips, apprehensive. But he felt no
pity--her life had no importance beside that of a human being. He looked
round for something to throw, but the room had been cleared of nearly
everything except the bone. Perhaps, who knows? it might have been left
deliberately for this mongrel; he could imagine the child remembering, before
she left with the sick mother and the stupid father: he had the impression that
it was always she who had to think. He could find for his purpose nothing
better than a broken wire rack which had been used for vegetables.

He advanced again towards the bitch and struck her lightly on the head.
She snapped at the wire with her old broken teeth and wouldn't move. He
beat at her again more fiercely and she caught the wire--he had to rasp it
away. He struck again and again before he realized that she couldn't, except
with great exertion, move at all: she was unable to escape his blows or
leave the bone. She just had to endure, her eyes yellow and scared and
malevolent shining back at him between the blows.

So then he changed his method; he used the vegetable rack as a kind of
muzzle, holding back the teeth with it, while he bent and captured the bone.
One paw tugged at it and gave way; he lowered the wire and jumped back --
the animal tried without success to follow him, then lapsed upon the floor.
The priest had won: he had his bone. The bitch no longer tried to growl.

The priest tore off some raw meat with his teeth and began to chew: no
food had ever tasted so good, and now that for the moment he was happy he
began to feel a little pity. He thought: I will eat just so much and she can
have the rest. He marked mentally a point upon the bone and tore off another
piece. The nausea he had felt for hours now began to die away and leave an
honest hunger; he ate on and the bitch watched him. Now that the fight was
over she seemed to bear no malice; her tail began to beat the floor, hopefully,
questioningly. The priest reached the point he had marked, but now it seemed
to him that his previous hunger had been imaginary: this was hunger, what he
felt now. A man's need was greater than a dog's: he would leave that knuckle
of meat at the joint. But when the moment came he ate that too--after all, the
dog had teeth: it would eat the bone itself. He dropped it and left the kitchen.

He made one more progress through the empty rooms. A broken shoehorn:
medicine bottles: an essay on the American War of Independence -- there
was nothing to tell him why they had gone away. He came out on to the
veranda and saw through a gap in the planks that a book had fallen to the
ground and lay between the rough pillars of brick which raised the house out
of the track of ants. It was months since he had seen a book. It was almost
like a promise, mildewing there under the piles, of better things to come--life
going on in private houses with wireless sets and bookshelves and beds made
ready for the night and a cloth laid for food. He knelt down on the ground and
reached for it. He suddenly realized that when once the long struggle was
over and he had crossed the mountains and the state line, life might, after
all, be enjoyed again.

It was an English book, but from his years in an American seminary he
retained enough English to read it, with a little difficulty. Even if he had been
unable to understand a word, it would still have been a book. It was called
Jewels Five Words Long: A Treasury of English Verse, and on the fly-leaf
was pasted a printed certificate--Awarded to . . . and then the name of Coral
Fellows filled up in ink . . . for proficiency in English Composition, Third
Grade. There was an obscure coat of arms, which seemed to include a griffon
and oak leaf, a Latin motto, "Virtus Laudata Crescit," and a signature from a
rubber stamp, Henry Beckley, B.A., Principal of Private Tutorials, Ltd.

The priest sat down on the veranda steps. There was silence everywhere --
no life around the abandoned banana station except the vulture which hadn't
yet given up hope. The Indian might never have existed at all. After a meal,
the priest thought with sad amusement, a little reading, and opened the book
at random. Coral--so that was the child's name. He thought of the shops in
Vera Cruz full of it--the hard brittle jewellery which was thought for some
reason so suitable for young girls after their first communion. He read:

"I come from haunts of coot and hern,

I make a sudden sally,

And sparkle out among the fern,

To bicker down a valley."

It was a very obscure poem, full of words which were like Esperanto. He
thought: So this is English poetry: how odd. The little poetry he knew dealt
mainly with agony, remorse, and hope. These verses ended on a philosophical
note--"For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever." The triteness
and untruth of "for ever" shocked him a little: a poem like this ought not
to be in a child's hands. The vulture came picking its way across the yard,
a dusty and desolate figure; every now and then it lifted sluggishly from
the earth and flapped down twenty yards on. The priest read:

"“Come back! Come back!” he cried in grief

Across the stormy water:

“And I'll forgive your Highland chief --

My daughter, O my daughter.”"

That sounded to him more impressive--though hardly perhaps, any more
than the other, stuff for children. He felt in the foreign words the ring of
genuine passion and repeated to himself on his hot and lonely perch the last
line--"My daughter, O my daughter." The words seemed to contain all that
he felt himself of repentance, longing and unhappy love.

It was an odd thing that ever since that hot and crowded night in the cell he
had passed into a region of abandonment--almost as if he had died there with
the old man's head on his shoulder and now wandered in a kind of limbo,
because he wasn't good or bad enough. . . . Life didn't exist any more: it
wasn't merely a matter of the banana station. Now as the storm broke and he
scurried for shelter he knew quite well what he would find--nothing.

The huts leapt up in the lightning and stood there shaking, then disap-
peared again in the rumbling darkness. The rain hadn't come yet: it was
sweeping up from Campeche Bay in great sheets, covering the whole state in
its methodical advance. Between the thunder-breaks he could imagine that he
heard it--a gigantic rustle moving across towards the mountains which were
now so close to him--a matter of twenty miles.

He reached the first hut; the door was open, and as the lightning quivered
he saw as he expected nobody at all. Just a pile of maize and the indistinct
grey movement of--perhaps--a rat. He dashed for the next hut, but it was the
same as ever (the maize and nothing else), just as if all human life were
receding before him, as if Somebody had determined that from now on he was
to be left alone--altogether alone. As he stood there the rain reached the
clearing; it came out of the forest like thick white smoke and moved on. It
was as if an enemy were laying a gas-cloud across a whole territory, care-
fully, to see that nobody escaped. The rain spread and stayed just long
enough, as though the enemy had his stopwatch out and knew to a second the
limit of the lungs' endurance. The roof held the rain out for a while and then
let it through--the twigs bent under the weight of water and shot apart; it
came through in half a dozen places, pouring down in black funnels; then the
downpour stopped and the roof dripped and the rain moved on, with the light-
ning quivering on its flanks like a protective barrage. In a few minutes it
would reach the mountains: a few more storms like this and they would be
impassable.

He had been walking all day and he was very tired; he found a dry spot and
sat down. When the lightning struck he could see the clearing. All around
was the gentle noise of the dripping water. It was nearly like peace, but
not quite. For peace you needed human company--his aloneness was like a
threat of things to come. Suddenly he remembered--for no apparent reason --
a day of rain at the American seminary, the glass windows of the library
steamed over with the central heating, the tall shelves of sedate books,
and a young man--a stranger from Tucson--drawing his initials on the pane
with his finger--that was peace. He looked at it from the outside: he couldn't
believe that he would ever again get in. He had made his own world, and this
was it--the empty broken huts, the storm going by, and fear again--fear
because he was not alone after all.

Somebody was moving outside, cautiously. The footsteps would come a
little way and then stop. He waited apathetically, and the roof dripped be-
hind him. He thought of the mestizo padding around the city, seeking a really
cast-iron occasion for his betrayal. A face peered round the hut door at
him and quickly withdrew--an old woman's face, but you could never tell
with Indians--she mightn't have been more than twenty. He got up and went
outside. She scampered back from before him in her heavy sack-like skirt,
her black plaits swinging heavily. Apparently his loneliness was only to be
broken by these evasive faces, creatures who looked as if they had come out
of the Stone Age, who withdrew again quickly.

He was stirred by a sort of sullen anger--this one should not withdraw. He
pursued her across the clearing, splashing in the pools, but she had a start
and no sense of shame and she got into the forest before him. It was useless
looking for her there, and he returned towards the nearest hut. It wasn't the
hut which he had been sheltering in before, but it was just as empty. What
had happened to these people? He knew well enough that these more or less
savage encampments were temporary only; the Indians would cultivate a
small patch of ground and when they had exhausted the soil for the time
being, they would simply move away. They knew nothing about the rotation
of crops, but when they moved they would take their maize with them. This
was more like flight, from force or disease. He had heard of such flights in
the case of sickness, and the horrible thing, of course, was that they car-
ried the sickness with them wherever they moved; sometimes they became pan-
icky like flies against a pane, but discreetly, letting nobody know, muting
their hubbub. He turned moodily again to stare out at the clearing, and
there was the Indian woman creeping back towards the hut where she had
sheltered. He called out to her sharply and again she fled, shambling, to-
wards the forest. Her clumsy progress reminded him of a bird feigning a broken
wing. . . . He made no movement to follow her, and before she reached the
trees she stopped and watched him; he began to move slowly back towards the
other hut. Once he turned: she was following him at a distance, keeping her
eyes on him. Again he was reminded of something animal or bird-like, full
of anxiety. He walked on, aiming directly at the hut. Far away beyond it
the lightning stabbed down, but you could hardly hear the thunder; the sky
was clearing overhead and the moon came out. Suddenly he heard an odd
artificial cry, and turning he saw the woman making back towards the forest;
then she stumbled, flung up her arms and fell to the ground, like the bird
offering herself.

He felt quite certain now that something valuable was in the hut, perhaps
hidden among the maize, and he paid her no attention, going in. Now that the
lightning had moved on, he couldn't see--he felt across the floor until he
reached the pile of maize. Outside the padding footsteps came nearer. He
began to feel all over it--perhaps food was hidden there--and the dry crackle
of the leaves was added to the drip of water and the cautious footsteps, like
the faint noises of people busy about their private businesses. Then he put
his hand on a face.

He couldn't be frightened any more by a thing like that--it was something
human he had his fingers on. They moved down the body; it was a child's
which lay completely quiet under his hand. In the doorway the moonlight
showed the woman's face indistinctly. She was probably convulsed with
anxiety, but you couldn't tell. He thought--I must get this into the open
where I can see . . .

It was a male child--perhaps three years old: a withered bullet head with a
mop of black hair: unconscious, but not dead: he could feel the faintest
movement in the breast. He thought of disease again until he took out his
hand and found that the child was wet with blood, not sweat. Horror and
disgust touched him--violence everywhere: was there no end to violence?
He said to the woman sharply, "What happened?" It was as if man in all this
state had been left to man.

The woman knelt two or three feet away, watching his hands. She knew a
little Spanish, because she replied, "Americano." The child wore a kind of
brown one-piece smock. He lifted it up to the neck: the child had been shot
in three places. Life was going out of him all the time: there was nothing --
really--to be done, but one had to try. . . . He said "Water" to the woman,
"Water," but she didn't seem to understand, squatting there, watching him. It
was a mistake one easily made, to think that just because the eyes expressed
nothing there was no grief. When he touched the child he could see her move
on her haunches--she was ready to attack him with her teeth if the child so
much as moaned.

He began to speak slowly and gently (he couldn't tell how much she
understood): "We must have water. To wash him. You needn't be afraid of
me. I will do him no harm." He took off his shirt and began to tear it into
strips--it was hopelessly insanitary, but what else was there to do? except
pray, of course, but one didn't pray for life, this life. He repeated again,
"Water." The woman seemed to understand--she gazed hopelessly round at
where the rain stood in pools--that was all there was. Well, he thought, the
earth's as clean as any vessel would have been. He soaked a piece of his shirt
and leant over the child; he could hear the woman slide closer along the
ground--a menacing approach. He tried to reassure her again, "You needn't
be afraid of me. I am a priest."

The word "priest" she understood; she leant forward and grabbed at the
hand which held the wet scrap of shirt and kissed it. At that moment, while
her lips were on his hand, the child's face wrinkled, the eyes opened and
glared at them, the tiny body shook with a kind of fury of pain; they watched
the eyeballs roll up and suddenly become fixed, like marbles in a solitaire-
board, yellow and ugly with death. The woman let go his hand and scrambled
to a pool of water, cupping her fingers for it. The priest said, "We don't
need that any more," standing up with his hands full of wet shirt. The woman
opened her fingers and let the water fall. She said "Father" imploringly,
and he wearily went down on his knees and began to pray.

He could feel no meaning any longer in prayers like these. The Host was
different: to lay that between a dying man's lips was to lay God. That was
a fact--something you could touch, but this was no more than a pious
aspiration. Why should anyone listen to his prayers? Sin was a constriction
which prevented their escape; he could feel his prayers weigh him down like
undigested food.

When he had finished he lifted up the body and carried it back into the hut;
it seemed a waste of time to have taken it out, like a chair you carry out into
the garden and back again because the grass is wet. The woman followed him
meekly; she didn't seem to want to touch the body, just watched him put it
back in the dark upon the maize. He sat down on the ground and said slowly,
"It will have to be buried."

She understood that, nodding.

He said, "Where is your husband? Will he help you?" She began to talk
rapidly. It might have been Camacho she was speaking: he couldn't under-
stand more than an occasional Spanish word here and there. The word
"Americano" occurred again, and he remembered the wanted man whose por-
trait had shared the wall with his. He asked her, "Did he do this?"
She shook her head. What had happened? he wondered. Had the man taken
shelter here and had the soldiers fired into the huts? It was not unlikely.
He suddenly had his attention caught. She had said the name of the banana
station--but there had been no dying person there: no sign of violence, unless
silence and desertion were signs. He had assumed the mother had been taken
ill, but it might be something worse--and he imagined that stupid Captain
Fellows taking down his gun, presenting himself clumsily armed to a man
whose chief talent it was to draw quickly or to shoot directly from the pocket.
That poor child . . . what responsibilities she had perhaps been forced to
undertake.

He shook the thought away and said, "Have you a spade?" She didn't
understand that, and he had to go through the motions of digging. Another
roll of thunder came between them. A second storm was coming up, as if the
enemy had discovered that the first barrage after all had left a few survivors --
this would flatten them. Again he could hear the enormous breathing of the
rain miles away. He realized the woman had spoken the one word "church".
Her Spanish consisted of isolated words. He wondered what she meant by
that. Then the rain reached them. It came down like a wall between him and
escape, fell altogether in a heap and built itself up around them. All the light
went out except when the lightning flashed.

The roof couldn't keep out this rain. It came dripping through everywhere:
the dry maize leaves where the dead child lay crackled like burning wood. He
shivered with cold; he was probably on the edge of fever--he must get away
before he was incapable of moving at all. The woman (he couldn't see her
now) said "Iglesia" again imploringly. It occurred to him that she wanted the
child buried near a church or perhaps only taken to an altar, so that he might
be touched by the feet of a Christ. It was a fantastic notion.

He took advantage of a long quivering stroke of blue light to describe with
his hands his sense of the impossibility. "The soldiers," he said, and she
replied immediately, "Americano." That word always came up, like one with
many meanings which depends on the accent whether it is to be taken as an
explanation, a warning or a threat. Perhaps she meant that the soldiers were
all occupied in the chase, but even so, this rain was ruining everything. It
was still twenty miles to the border, and the mountain paths after the storm
were probably impassable--and a church--he hadn't the faintest idea of where
there would be a church. He hadn't so much as seen such a thing for years
now; it was difficult to believe that they still existed only a few days'
journey off. When the lightning went on again he saw the woman watching him
with stony patience.


For the last thirty hours they had only had sugar to eat--large brown lumps
of it the size of a baby"s skull; they had seen no one, and they had exchanged
no words at all. What was the use when almost the only words they had in
common were "Iglesia" and "Americano"? The woman followed at his heels
with the dead child strapped on her back. She never seemed to tire. A day and
a night brought them out of the marshes to the foothills; they slept fifty feet
up above the slow green river, under a projecting piece of rock where the soil
was dry--everywhere else was deep mud. The woman sat with her knees drawn
up, and her head down. She showed no emotion, but she put the child's body
behind her as if it needed protection from marauders like other possessions.
They had travelled by the sun until the black wooded bar of mountain told them
where to go. They might have been the only survivors of a world which was
dying out; they carried the visible marks of the dying with them.

Sometimes he wondered whether he was safe, but when there are no
visible boundaries between one state and another--no passport examination
or customs house--danger just seems to go on, travelling with you, lifting its
heavy feet in the same way as you do. There seemed to be so little progress:
the path would rise steeply, perhaps five hundred feet, and fall again, clogged
with mud. Once it took an enormous hairpin bend, so that after three hours
they had returned to a point opposite their starting-place, less than a hundred
yards away.

At sunset on the second day they came out on to a wide plateau covered
with short grass. A grove of crosses stood up blackly against the sky, leaning
at different angles--some as high as twenty feet, some not much more than
eight. They were like trees that had been left to seed. The priest stopped and
stared at them. They were the first Christian symbols he had seen for more
than five years publicly exposed--if you could call this empty plateau in the
mountains a public place. No priest could have been concerned in the strange
rough group; it was the work of Indians and had nothing in common with the
tidy vestments of the Mass and the elaborately worked out symbols of the
liturgy. It was like a short cut to the dark and magical heart of the faith--to
the night when the graves opened and the dead walked. There was a
movement behind him and he turned.

The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across
the cruel ground towards the group of crosses; the dead baby rocked on her
back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the
face against the wood and afterwards the loins; then she crossed herself, not
as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated pattern which
included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? and if she did, why
should it not be granted her, the priest wondered? Faith, one was told, could
move mountains, and here was faith--faith in the spittle that healed the blind
man and the voice that raised the dead. The evening star was out: it hung low
down over the edge of the plateau--it looked as if it was within reach--and a
small hot wind stirred. The priest found himself watching the child for some
movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity.
The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle began to
eat, and the child lay quietly at the foot of the cross. Why, after all,
should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?

"Vamos," the priest said, but the woman scraped the sugar with her sharp
front teeth, paying no attention. He looked up at the sky and saw the evening
star blotted out by black clouds. "Vamos." There was no shelter anywhere on
this plateau.

The woman never stirred; the broken snub-nosed face between the black
plaits was completely passive: it was as if she had fulfilled her duty and could
now take up her everlasting rest. The priest suddenly shivered; the ache
which had pressed like a stiff hat-rim across his forehead all day dug deeper
in. He thought: I have to get to shelter--a man's first duty is to himself --
even the Church taught that, in a way. The whole sky was blackening. The
crosses stuck up like dry and ugly cacti. He made off to the edge of the
plateau. Once, before the path led down, he looked back--the woman was
still biting at the lump of sugar, and he remembered that it was all the food
they had.

The way was very steep--so steep that he had to turn and go down backwards;
on either side trees grew perpendicularly out of the grey rock, and five
hundred feet below the path climbed up again. He began to sweat and he had
an appalling thirst, and when the rain came it was at first a kind of re-
lief. He stayed where he was, hunched back against a boulder. There was no
shelter before he reached the bottom of the barranca, and it hardly seemed
worth while to make that effort. He was shivering now more or less
continuously, and the ache seemed no longer inside his head--it was
something outside, almost anything, a noise, a thought, a smell. The senses
were jumbled up together. At one moment the ache was like a tiresome voice
explaining to him that he had taken the wrong path. He remembered a map he
had once seen of the two adjoining states. The state from which he was
escaping was peppered with villages--in the hot marshy land people bred as
readily as mosquitoes, but in the next state--in the north-west corner--there
was hardly anything but blank white paper. you're on that blank paper now,
the ache told him. But there's a path, he argued wearily. Oh, a path, the ache
said, a path may take you fifty miles before it reaches anywhere at all: you
know you won't last that distance. There's just white paper all around.

At another time the ache was a face. He became convinced that the
American was watching him--he had a skin all over spots like a newspaper
photograph. Apparently he had followed them because he wanted to kill the
mother as well as the child: he was sentimental in that respect. It was
necessary to do something. The rain was like a curtain behind which almost
anything might happen. He thought: I shouldn't have left her alone like that.
God forgive me. I have no sense of responsibility: what can you expect of a
whisky priest? and he struggled to his feet and began to climb back towards
the plateau. He was tormented by ideas; it wasn't only the woman: he was
responsible for the American as well: the two faces--his own and the
gunman's--were hanging together on the police station wall, as if they were
brothers in a family portrait gallery. You didn't put temptation in a brother's
way.

Shivering and sweating and soaked with rain he came up over the edge of
the plateau. There was nobody there--a dead child was not someone, just a
useless object abandoned at the foot of one of the crosses. The mother had
gone home. She had done what she wanted to do. The surprise lifted him, as
it were, out of his fever before it dropped him back again. A small lump of
sugar--all that was left--lay by the child's mouth--in case a miracle should
happen or for the spirit to eat? The priest bent down with an obscure sense of
shame and took it: the dead child couldn't growl back at him like a broken
dog: but who was he to disbelieve in miracles? He hesitated, while the rain
poured down; then he put the sugar in his mouth. If God chose to give back
life, couldn't He give food as well?

Immediately he began to eat, the fever returned: the sugar stuck in his
throat: he felt an appalling thirst. Crouching down he tried to lick some water
from the uneven ground; he even sucked at his soaked trousers. The child lay
under the streaming rain like a dark heap of cattle dung. The priest moved
away again, back to the edge of the plateau and down the barranca side; it
was loneliness he felt now--even the face had gone, he was moving alone
across that blank white sheet, going deeper every moment into the abandoned
land.

Somewhere, in some direction, there were towns, of course: go far enough
and you reached the coast, the Pacific, the railway track to Guatemala; there
were roads there and motor-cars. He hadn't seen a railway train for ten years.
He could imagine the black line following the coast along the map, and he
could see the fifty, hundred miles of unknown country. That was where he
was: he had escaped too completely from men. Nature would kill him now.
All the same, he went on; there was no point in going back towards the
deserted village, the banana station with its dying mongrel and its shoe-horn.
There was nothing you could do except put one foot forward and then the
other, scrambling down and then scrambling up; from the top of the barranca,
when the rain passed on, there was nothing to see except a huge crumpled
land, forest and mountain, with the grey wet veil moving over. He looked
once and never looked again. It was too like watching despair.

It must have been hours later that he ceased to climb. It was evening and
forest; monkeys crashed invisibly among the trees with an effect of
clumsiness and recklessness, and what were probably snakes hissed away like
match-flames through the grass. He wasn't afraid of them. They were a form
of life, and he could feel life retreating from him all the time. It wasn't only
people who were going, even the animals and the reptiles moved away;
presently he would be left alone with nothing but his own breath. He began to
recite to himself, "O God, I have loved the beauty of Thy house," and the
smell of soaked and rotting leaves and the hot night and the darkness made
him believe that he was in a mine shaft, going down into the earth to bury
himself. Presently he would find his grave.

When a man came towards him carrying a gun he did nothing at all. The
man approached cautiously; you didn't expect to find another person
underground. He said, "Who are you?" with his gun ready.

The priest gave his name to a stranger for the first time in ten years
because he was tired and there seemed no object in going on living.

"A priest?" the man asked, with astonishment. "Where have you come
from?"

The fever lifted again: a little reality seeped back. He said, "It is all
right. I will not bring you any trouble. I am going on." He screwed up all
his remaining energy and walked on. A puzzled face penetrated his fever and
receded: there were going to be no more hostages, he assured himself aloud.
Footsteps followed him, he was like a dangerous man you see safely off an
estate before you go home. He repeated aloud, "It is all right. I am not
staying here. I want nothing."

"Father . . ." the voice said, humbly and anxiously.

"I will go right away." He tried to run and came suddenly out of the forest
on to a long slope of grass. There were lights and huts below, and up there
at the edge of the forest a big whitewashed building --a barracks? were there
soldiers? He said, "If I have been seen I will give myself up. I assure you
no one shall get into trouble because of me."

"Father . . ." He was racked with his headache, he stumbled and put his
hand against the wall for support. He felt immeasurably tired. He asked,
"The barracks?"

"Father," the voice said, puzzled and worried, "it is our church."

"A church?" The priest ran his hands incredulously over the wall like a
blind man trying to recognize a particular house, but he was too tired to feel
anything at all. He heard the man with the gun babbling out of sight, "Such an
honour, father. The bell must be rung . . ." and he sat down suddenly on the
rain-drenched grass, and leaning his head against the white wall, he fell
asleep, with home behind his shoulder-blades.

His dream was full of a jangle of cheerful noise.




PART THREE



CHAPTER 1




The middle-aged woman sat on the veranda darning socks; she wore pincenez
and she had kicked off her shoes for further comfort. Mr Lehr, her
brother, read a New York magazine--it was three weeks old, but that didn't
really matter: the whole scene was like peace.

"Just help yourself to water," Miss Lehr said, "when you want it."

A huge earthenware jar stood in a cool corner with a ladle and a tumbler.
"Don't you have to boil the water?" the priest asked.

"Oh no, our water's fresh and clean," Miss Lehr said primly, as if she
couldn't answer for anybody else's.

"Best water in the state," her brother said. The shiny magazine leaves
crackled as they turned, covered with photographs of big clean-shaven
mastiff jowls--Senators and Congressmen. Pasture stretched away beyond
the garden fence, undulating gently towards the next mountain range, and
a tulipan tree blossomed and faded daily at the gate.

"You certainly are looking better, father," Miss Lehr said. They both spoke
rather guttural English with slight American accents--Mr Lehr had left
Germany when he was a boy to escape military service: he had a shrewd,
lined and idealistic face. You needed to be shrewd in this country if you were
going to retain any ideals at all and he was cunning in the defence of the good
life.

"Oh," Mr Lehr said, "he only needed to rest up a few days." He was quite
incurious about this man whom his foreman had brought in on a mule in a
state of collapse three days before. All he knew the priest had told him.
That was another thing this country taught you--never ask questions or to
look ahead.

"So I can go on," the priest said.

"You don't have to hurry," said Miss Lehr, turning over her brother's sock,
looking for holes.

"It's so quiet here."

"Oh," Mr Lehr said, "We've had our troubles." He turned a page and said,
"That Senator--Hiram Long--they ought to control him. It doesn't do any
good insulting other countries."

"Haven't they tried to take your land?"

The idealistic face turned his way: it wore a look of innocent craft. "Oh, I
gave them as much as they asked for--five hundred acres of barren land. I
saved a lot on taxes. I never could get anything to grow there." He nodded
towards the veranda posts. "That was the last real trouble. See the bullet-
holes. Villa"s men."

The priest got up again and drank more water. He wasn't very thirsty; he
was satisfying a sense of luxury. He asked, "How long will it take me to get
to Las Casas?"

"You could do it in four days," Mr Lehr said.

"Not in his condition," Miss Lehr said. "Six."

"It will seem so strange," the priest said. "A city with churches, a
university . . ."

"Of course," Mr Lehr said, "my sister and I are Lutherans. We don't hold
with your Church, father. Too much luxury, it seems to me, while the people
starve."

Miss Lehr said, "Now, dear, it isn't the father's fault."

"Luxury?" the priest asked. He stood by the earthenware jar, glass in hand,
trying to collect his thoughts, staring out over the long peaceful glassy
slopes. "You mean . . ." Perhaps Mr Lehr was right; he had lived very easily
once and here he was, already settling down to idleness again.

"All the gold leaf in the churches."

"It's often just paint, you know," the priest murmured conciiatingly. He
thought: yes, three days and I've done nothing, nothing, and he looked down
at his feet elegantly shod in a pair of Mr Lehr's shoes, his legs in Mr Lehr's
spare trousers. Mr Lehr said, "He won't mind my speaking my mind. We're
all Christians here."

"Of course. I like to hear . . ."

"It seems to me you people make a lot of fuss about inessentials."

"Yes? You mean . . ."

"Fasting . . . fish on Friday . . ."

Yes, he remembered like something in his childhood that there had been a
time when he had observed these rules. He said, "After all, Mr Lehr, you're a
German. A great military nation."

"I was never a soldier. I disapprove . . ."

"Yes, of course, but still you understand--discipline is necessary. Drills
may be no good in battle, but they form the character. Otherwise you get --
well, people like me." He looked down with sudden hatred at the shoes--they
were like the badge of a deserter. "People like me," he repeated with
fury. There was a good deal of embarrassment; Miss Lehr began to say
something, "Why, father . . .", but Mr Lehr forestalled her, laying down the
magazine and its load of well-shaved politicians. He said in his German-
American voice with its guttural precision, "Well, I guess It's time for a
bath now. Will you be coming, father?" and the priest obediently followed
him into their common bedroom. He took off Mr Lehr's clothes and put on Mr
Lehr's mackintosh and followed Mr Lehr barefoot across the veranda and the
field beyond. The day before he had asked apprehensively, "Are there no
snakes?" and Mr Lehr had grunted contemptuously that if there were any
snakes they'd pretty soon get out of the way. Mr Lehr and his sister had
combined to drive out savagery by simply ignoring anything that conflicted
with an ordinary German-American homestead. It was, in its way, an
admirable mode of life.

At the bottom of the field there was a little shallow stream running over
brown pebbles. Mr Lehr took off his dressing-gown and lay down flat on his
back. There was something upright and idealistic even in the thin elderly legs
with their scrawny muscles. Tiny fishes played over his chest and made little
tugs at his nipples undisturbed. This was the skeleton of the youth who had
disapproved of militarism to the point of flight. Presently he sat up and began
carefully to soap his lean thighs. The priest afterwards took the soap and
followed suit. He felt it was expected of him, though he couldn't help
thinking it was a waste of time. Sweat cleaned you as effectively as water.
But this was the race which had invented the proverb that cleanliness was
next to godliness--cleanliness, not purity.

All the same, one did feel an enormous luxury lying there in a little cold
stream while the sun sank . . . He thought of the prison cell with the old man
and the pious woman, the half-caste lying across the hut door, the dead child,
and the abandoned station. He thought with shame of his daughter left to her
knowledge and her ignorance by the rubbish-dump. He had no right to such
luxury.

Mr Lehr said, "Would you mind--the soap?"

He had heaved over on his face, and now he set to work on his back.
The priest said, "I think perhaps I should tell you--tomorrow I am saying
Mass in the village. Would you prefer me to leave your house? I do not wish
to make trouble for you."

Mr Lehr splashed seriously, cleaning himself. He said, "Oh, they won't
bother me. But you had better be careful. You know, of course, that it's
against the law."

"Yes," the priest said. "I know that."

"A priest I knew was fined four hundred pesos. He couldn't pay and they
sent him to prison for a week. What are you smiling at?"

"Only because it seems so . . . peaceful here. Prison for a week!"

"Well, I've always heard you people get your own back when it comes to
collections. Would you like the soap?"

"No, thank you. I have finished."

"We'd better be drying ourselves then. Miss Lehr likes to have her bath
before sunset."

As they came back to the bungalow in single file they met Miss Lehr, very
bulky under her dressing-gown. She asked mechanically, like a clock with a
very gentle chime, "Is the water nice today?" and her brother answered, as
he must have answered a thousand times, "Pleasantly cool, dear," and she
slopped down across the grass in bedroom slippers, stooping slightly with
short sight.

"If you wouldn't mind," Mr Lehr said, shutting the bedroom door, "staying
in here till Miss Lehr comes back. One can see the stream--you understand --
from the front of the house." He began to dress, tall and bony and a little
stiff. Two brass bedsteads, a single chair and a wardrobe--the room was mon-
astic, except that there was no cross--no "inessentials" as Mr Lehr would have
put it. But there was a Bible. It lay on the floor beside one of the beds in
a black oilskin cover. When the priest had finished dressing he opened it.
On the flyleaf there was a label which stated that the book was furnished
by the Gideons. It went on: "A Bible in every Hotel Guest Room. Winning
Commercial Men for Christ. Good news." There was then a list of texts. The
priest read with some astonishment:

If you are in trouble read Psalm 34.

If trade is poor Psalm 37.

If very prosperous I Corinthians, x, 2.

If overcome and backsliding James I. Hosea xiv, 4--9.

If tired of sin Psalm 51. Luke xviii, 9--14.

If you desire peace, power and plenty John 14.

If you are lonesome and discouraged Psalms 23 and 27.

If you are losing confidence in men I Corinthians, xiii.

If you desire peaceful slumbers Psalm 121.

He couldn't help wondering how it had got here--with its ugly type and
its over-simple explanations--into a hacienda in Southern Mexico. Mr Lehr
turned away from his mirror with a big coarse hairbrush in his hand and
explained carefully, "My sister ran a hotel once. For drummers. She sold it
to join me when my wife died, and she brought one of those from the hotel.
You wouldn't understand that, father. You don't like people to read the Bi-
ble." He was on the defensive all the time about his faith, as if he were
perpetually conscious of some friction, like that of an ill-fitting shoe.
The priest asked, "Is your wife buried here?"

"In the paddock," Mr Lehr said bluntly. He stood listening, brush in hand,
to the gentle footsteps outside. "That's Miss Lehr," he said, "come up from
her bath. We can go out now."

The priest got off Mr Lehr's old horse when he reached the church and threw
the rein over a bush. This was his first visit to the village since the night
he collapsed beside the wall. The village ran down below him in the dusk: tin-
roofed bungalows and mud huts faced each other over a single wide grassgrown
street. A few lamps had been lit and fire was being carried round among the
poorest huts. He walked slowly, conscious of peace and safety.

The first man he saw took off his hat and knelt and kissed the priest's hand.

"What is your name?" the priest asked.

"Pedro, father."

"Good night, Pedro."

"Is there to be Mass in the morning, father?"

"Yes. There is to be Mass."

He passed the rural school. The schoolmaster sat on the step: a plump
young man with dark brown eyes and horn-rimmed glasses. When he saw the
priest coming he looked ostentatiously away. He was the law-abiding
element: he wouldn't recognize criminals. He began to talk pedantically and
priggishly to someone behind him--something about the infant class. A woman
kissed the priest's hand; it was odd to be wanted again, not to feel
himself the carrier of death. She asked, "Father, will you hear our
confessions?"

He said, "Yes. Yes. In Senor Lehr's barn. Before the Mass. I will be there
at five. As soon as it is light."

"There are so many of us, father . . ."

"Well tonight too then . . . At eight."

"And, father, there are many children to be baptized. There has not been a
priest for three years."

"I am going to be here for two more days."

"What will you charge, father?"

"Well--two pesos is the usual charge." He thought: I must hire two mules
and a guide. It will cost me fifty pesos to reach Las Casas. Five pesos for
the Mass--that left forty-five.

"We are very poor here, father," she haggled gently. "I have four children
myself. Eight pesos is a lot of money."

"Four children are a lot of children--if the priest was here only three years
ago."

He could hear authority, the old parish intonation coming back into his
voice, as if the last years had been a dream and he had never really been away
from the Guilds, the Children of Mary, and the daily Mass. He asked sharply,
"How many children are there here--unbaptized?"

"Perhaps a hundred, father."

He made calculations: there was no need to arrive in Las Casas then as a
beggar; he could buy a decent suit of clothes, find a respectable lodging,
settle down . . . He said, "You must pay one peso fifty a head."

"One peso, father. We are very poor."

"One peso fifty." A voice from years back said firmly into his ear: they
don't value what they don't pay for. It was the old priest he had succeeded
at Concepcion who had explained to him: "They will always tell you they are
poor, starving, but they will always have a little store of money buried
somewhere, in a pot." The priest said, "You must bring the money--and the
children--to Senor Lehr's barn tomorrow at two in the afternoon."

She said, "Yes, father." She seemed quite satisfied; she had brought him
down by fifty centavos a head. The priest walked on. Say a hundred children,
he was thinking, that means a hundred and sixty pesos with tomorrow"s Mass.
Perhaps I can get the mules and the guide for forty pesos. Senor Lehr will
give me food for three days. I shall have a hundred and twenty pesos left.
After all these years, it was like wealth. He felt respect all the way up the
street: men took off their hats as he passed: it was as if he had got back to
the days before the persecution. He could feel the old life hardening round him
like a habit, a stony cast which held his head high and dictated the way he
walked, and even formed his words. A voice from the cantina said, "Father."
The man was very fat, with three commercial chins: he wore a waistcoat in
spite of the great heat, and a watch-chain. "Yes?" the priest said. Behind the
man's head stood bottles of mineral waters, beer, spirits . . . The priest came
in out of the dusty street to the heat of the lamp. He asked, "What is it?"
with his new-old manner of authority and impatience.

"I thought, father, you might be in need of a little sacramental wine."

"Perhaps . . . but you will have to give me credit."

"A priest's credit, father, is always good enough for me. I am a religious
man myself. This is a religious place. No doubt you will be holding a
baptism." He leant avidly forward with a respectful and impertinent manner,
as if they were two people with the same ideas, educated men.

"Perhaps . . ."

The man smiled understandingly. Between people like ourselves, he seemed
to indicate, there is no need of anything explicit: we understand each
other's thoughts. He said, "In the old days, when the church was open, I was
treasurer to the Guild of the Blessed Sacrament. Oh, I am a good Catholic,
father. The people, of course, are very ignorant." He asked, "Would you
perhaps honour me by taking a glass of brandy?" He was in his way quite
sincere.

The priest said doubtfully, "It is kind . . ." The two glasses were already
filled. He remembered the last drink he had had, sitting on the bed in the
dark, listening to the Chief of Police, and seeing, as the light went on, the
last wine drain away . . . The memory was like a hand, pulling away the cast,
exposing him. The smell of brandy dried his mouth. He thought: what a play-
actor I am. I have no business here, among good people. He turned the glass
in his hand, and all the other glasses turned too: he remembered the dentist
talking of his children and Maria unearthing the bottle of spirits she had kept
for him--the whisky priest.

He took a reluctant drink. "It's good brandy, father," the man said. "Yes.
Good brandy."

"I could let you have a dozen bottles for sixty pesos."

"Where would I find sixty pesos?" He thought that in some ways it was better
over there, across the border. Fear and death were not the worst things.
It was sometimes a mistake for life to go on.

"I wouldn't make a profit out of you, father. Fifty pesos."

"Fifty, sixty. It's all the same to me."

"Go on. Have another glass, father. It's good brandy." The man leant
engagingly forward across the counter and said, "Why not half a dozen,
father, for twenty-four pesos?" He said slyly, "After all, father--there
are the baptisms."

It was appalling how easily one forgot and went back; he could still hear
his own voice speaking in the street with the Concepcion accent--unchanged
by mortal sin and unrepentance and desertion. The brandy was musty on the
tongue with his own corruption. God might forgive cowardice and passion,
but was it possible to forgive the habit of piety? He remembered the woman
in the prison and how impossible it had been to shake her complacency. It
seemed to him that he was another of the same kind. He drank the brandy
down like damnation: men like the half-caste could be saved, salvation could
strike like lightning at the evil heart, but the habit of piety excluded
everything but the evening prayer and the Guild meeting and the feel of
humble lips on your gloved hand.

"Las Casas is a fine town, father. They say you can hear Mass every day."
This was another pious person. There were a lot of them about in the
world. He was pouring a little more brandy, but going carefully--not too
much. He said, "When you get there, father, look up a compadre of mine in
Guadalupe Street. He has the cantina nearest the church--a good man.
Treasurer of the Guild of the Blessed Sacrament--just like I was in this place
in the good days. he'll see you get what you want cheap. Now, what about
some bottles for the journey?"

The priest drank. There was no point in not drinking. He had the habit now
--like piety and the parish voice. He said, "Three bottles. For eleven pesos.
Keep them for me here." He finished what was left and went back into the
street; the lamps were lit in windows and the wide street stretched like a
prairie in between. He stumbled in a hole and felt a hand upon his sleeve.
"Ah, Pedro. That was the name wasn't it? Thank you, Pedro."

"At your service, father."

The church stood in the darkness like a block of ice: it was melting away in
the heat. The roof had fallen in at one place, a coign above the doorway had
crumbled. The priest took a quick sideways look at Pedro, holding his breath
in case it smelt of brandy, but he could see only the outlines of the face.
He said--with a feeling of cunning as though he were cheating a greedy
prompter inside his own heart--"Tell the people, Pedro, that I only want one
peso for the baptisms . . ." There would still be enough for the brandy then,
even if he arrived at Las Casas like a beggar. There was silence for as long
as two seconds and then the wily village voice began to answer him, "We are
poor, father. One peso is a lot of money. I--for example--I have three
children. Say seventy-five centavos, father."


Miss Lehr stretched out her feet in their easy slippers and the beetles came up
over the veranda from the dark outside. She said, "In Pittsburgh once . . ." Her
brother was asleep with an ancient newspaper across his knee: the mail had
come in. The priest gave a little sympathetic giggle as in the old days; it was
a try-out which didn't come off. Miss Lehr stopped and sniffed. "Funny. I
thought I smelt--spirits."

The priest held his breath, leaning back in the rocking-chair. He thought,
how quiet it is, how safe. He remembered townspeople who couldn't sleep in
country places because of the silence: silence can be like noise, dinning
against the eardrums.

"What was I saying father?"

"In Pittsburgh once . . ."

"Of course. In Pittsburgh . . . I was waiting for the train. You see I had
nothing to read. Books are so expensive. So I thought I'd buy a paper--any
paper, the news is just the same. But when I opened it--it was called
something like Police News. I never knew such dreadful things were printed.
Of course, I didn't read more than a few lines. I think it was the most
dreadful thing that's ever happened to me. It . . . well, it opened my eyes."

"Yes."

"I've never told Mr Lehr. He wouldn't think the same of me, I do believe,
if he knew."

"But there was nothing wrong . . ."

"It's knowing, isn't it . . . ?"

Somewhere a long way off a bird of some kind called; the lamp on the
table began to smoke, and Miss Lehr leant over and turned down the wick: it
was as if the only light for miles around had been lowered. The brandy
returned on his palate like the smell of ether that reminds a man of a recent
operation before he's used to life: it tied him to another state of being. He
didn't yet belong to this deep tranquility. He told himself. In time it will be
all right, I shall pull up, I only ordered three bottles this time. They will be
the last I'll ever drink, I won't need drink there--he knew he lied. Mr Lehr
woke suddenly and said, "As I was saying . . ."

"You were saying nothing, dear. You were asleep."

"Oh no, we were talking about that scoundrel Hoover."

"I don't think so, dear. Not for a long while."

"Well," Mr Lehr said, "It's been a long day. The father will be tired too . . .
after all that confessing," he added with slight distaste.

There had been a continuous stream of penitents from eight to ten--two
hours of the worst evil a small place like this could produce after three
years. It hadn't amounted to very much--a city would have made a better
show--or would it? There isn't much a man can do. Drunkenness, adultery,
uncleanness: he sat there tasting the brandy all the while, sitting on a
rocking-chair in a horse-box, not looking at the face of the one who knelt
at his side. The others had waited, kneeling in an empty stall--Mr Lehr's
stable had been depopulated these last few years. He had only one old horse
left, which blew windily in the dark as the sins came whimpering out.

"How many times?"

"Twelve, father. Perhaps more," and the horse blew.

It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin--only the hard
and careful man and the saint are free of it. These people went out of the
stable clean; he was the only one left who hadn't repented, confessed, and
been absolved. He wanted to say to this man, "Love is not wrong, but love
should be happy and open--it is only wrong when it is secret, unhappy . . . It
can be more unhappy than anything but the loss of God. It is the loss of God.
You don't need a penance, my child, you have suffered quite enough," and to
this other, "Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust
may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then
we are damned indeed." But the habit of the confessional reasserted itself: it
was as if he were back in the little stuffy wooden boxlike coffin in which
men bury their uncleanness with their priest. He said, "Mortal sin . . . danger . . .
self-control," as if those words meant anything at all. He said, "Say three
Our Fathers and three Hail Marys."

He whispered wearily, "Drink is only the beginning . . ." He found he had
no lesson he could draw against even that common vice unless it was himself
smelling of brandy in the stable. He gave out the penance, quickly, harshly,
mechanically. The man would go away, saying, "A bad priest," feeling no
encouragement, no interest . . .

He said, "Those laws were made for man. The Church doesn't expect . . . if
you can't fast, you must eat, That's all." The old woman prattled on and on,
while the penitents stirred restlessly in the next stall and the horse whinnied,
prattled of abstinence days broken, of evening prayers curtailed. Suddenly,
without warning, with an odd sense of homesickness, he thought of the
hostages in the prison yard, waiting at the water-tap, not looking at him--the
suffering and the endurance which went on everywhere the other side of the
mountains. He interrupted the woman savagely, "Why don't you confess
properly to me? I'm not interested in your fish supply or in how sleepy you
are at night . . . remember your real sins."

"But I'm a good woman, father," she squeaked at him with astonishment.

"Then what are you doing here, keeping away the bad people?" He said,
"Have you any love for anyone but yourself?"

"I love God, father," she said haughtily. He took a quick look at her in the
light of the candle burning on the floor--the hard old raisin eyes under the
black shawl--another of the pious--like himself.

"How do you know? Loving God isn't any different from loving a man --
or a child. It's wanting to be with Him, to be near Him." He made a hope-
less gesture with his hands. "It's wanting to protect Him from yourself."

When the last penitent had gone away he walked back across the yard to
the bungalow; he could see the lamp burning, and Miss Lehr knitting, and he
could smell the grass in the paddock, wet with the first rains. It ought to be
possible for a man to be happy here, if he were not so tied to fear and
suffering--unhappiness too can become a habit like piety. Perhaps it was his
duty to break it, his duty to discover peace. He felt an immense envy of all
those people who had confessed to him and been absolved. In six days, he
told himself, in Las Casas, I too. . . . But he couldn't believe that anyone
anywhere would rid him of his heavy heart. Even when he drank he felt bound
to his sin by love. It was easier to get rid of hate.

Miss Lehr said, "Sit down, father. You must be tired. I've never held, of
course, with confession. Nor has Mr Lehr."

"No?"

"I don't know how you can stand sitting there, listening to all the horrible
things . . . I remember in Pittsburgh once . . ."

The two mules had been brought in overnight, so that he could start early
immediately after Mass--the second that he had said in Mr Lehr's barn. His
guide was sleeping somewhere, probably with the mules, a thin nervous
creature, who had never been to Las Casas; he simply knew the route by
hearsay. Miss Lehr had insisted the night before that she must call him,
although he woke of his own accord before it was light. He lay in bed and
heard the alarm go off in another room--dinning like a telephone--and
presently he heard the slop, slop of Miss Lehr's bedroom-slippers in the
passage outside and a knock-knock on the door. Mr Lehr slept on undisturbed
upon his back with the thin rectitude of a bishop upon a tomb.

The priest had lain down in his clothes and he opened the door before Miss
Lehr had time to get away; she gave a small squeal of dismay, a bunchy
figure in a hair-net.

"Excuse me."

"Oh, It's quite all right. How long will Mass take, father?"

"There will be a great many communicants. Perhaps three-quarters of an
hour."

"I will have some coffee ready for you--and sandwiches."

"You must not bother."

"Oh, we can't send you away hungry."

She followed him to the door, standing a little behind him, so as not to be
seen by anything or anybody in the wide empty early world. The grey light
uncurled across the pastures; at the gate the tulipan tree bloomed for yet
another day; very far off, beyond the little stream where he had bathed, the
people were walking up from the village on the way to Mr Lehr's barn--they
were too small at that distance to be human. He had a sense of expectant
happiness all round him, waiting for him to take part, like an audience of
children at a cinema or a rodeo; he was aware of how happy he might have
been if he had left nothing behind him across the range except a few bad
memories. A man should always prefer peace to violence, and he was going
towards peace.

"You have been very good to me, Miss Lehr."

How odd it had seemed at first to be treated as a guest, not as a criminal
or a bad priest. These were heretics--it never occurred to them that he was
not a good man: they hadn't the prying insight of fellow Catholics.

"We've enjoyed having you, father. But you'll be glad to be away. Las
Casas is a fine city. A very moral place, as Mr Lehr always says. If you
meet Father Quintana you must remember us to him--he was here three years
ago."

A bell began to ring. They had brought the church bell down from the
tower and hung it outside Mr Lehr's barn; it was like any Sunday anywhere.
"I've sometimes wished," Miss Lehr said, "that I could go to church."

"Why not?"

"Mr Lehr wouldn't like it. He's very strict. But it happens so seldom
nowadays--I don't suppose There'll be another service now for another three
years."

"I will come back before then."

"Oh no," Miss Lehr said. "You won't do that. It's a hard journey and Las
Casas is a fine city. They have electric light in the streets: there are two
hotels. Father Quintana promised to come back--but there are Christians
everywhere, aren't there? Why should he come back here? It isn't even as if
we were really badly off."

A little group of Indians passed the gate, gnarled tiny creatures of the
Stone Age. The men in short smocks walked with long poles, and the women
with black plaits and knocked-about faces carried their babies on their backs.
"The Indians have heard you are here," Miss Lehr said. "they've walked fifty
miles--I shouldn't be surprised."

They stopped at the gate and watched him; when he looked at them they
went down on their knees and crossed themselves--the strange elaborate
mosaic touching the nose and ears and chin. "My brother gets so angry,"
Miss Lehr said, "if he sees somebody go on his knees to a priest, but I
don't see that it does any harm."

Round the corner of the house the mules were stamping--the guide must
have brought them out to give them their maize. They were slow feeders, you
had to give them a long start. It was time to begin Mass and be gone. He
could smell the early morning. The world was still fresh and green, and in
the village below the pastures a few dogs barked. The alarm clock tick-tocked
in Miss Lehr's hand. He said, "I must be going now." He felt an odd reluctance
to leave Miss Lehr and the house and the brother sleeping in the inside
room. He was aware of a mixture of tenderness and dependence. When a man
wakes after a dangerous operation he puts a special value upon the first
face he sees as the anaesthetic wears away.

He had no vestments, but the Masses in this village were nearer to the old
parish days than any he had known in the last eight years--there was no fear
of interruption, no hurried taking of the sacraments as the police approached.
There was even an altar stone brought from the locked church. But because it
was so peaceful he was all the more aware of his own sin as he prepared to
take the Elements--"Let not the participation of thy Body, O Lord Jesus
Christ, which I, though unworthy, presume to receive, turn to my judgement
and condemnation." A virtuous man can almost cease to believe in Hell, but
he carried Hell about with him. Sometimes at night he dreamed of it. Domine,
non sum dignus . . . domine, non sum dignus. . . . Evil ran like malaria in
his veins. He remembered a dream he had had of a big grassy arena lined with
the statues of the saints--but the saints were alive, they turned their eyes
this way and that, waiting for something. He waited, too, with an awful
expectancy. Bearded Peters and Pauls, with Bibles pressed to their breasts,
watched some entrance behind his back he couldn't see--it had the menace
of a beast. Then a marimba began to play, tinkly and repetitive, a firework
exploded, and Christ danced into the arena--danced and postured with a
bleeding painted face, up and down, up and down, grimacing like a prostitute,
smiling and suggestive. He woke with the sense of complete despair that a
man might feel finding the only money he possessed was counterfeit.

". . . and we saw his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father,
full of grace and truth." Mass was over.

In three days, he told himself, I shall be in Las Casas: I shall have confess-
ed and been absolved, and the thought of the child on the rubbish-heap
came automatically back to him with painful love. What was the good
of confession when you loved the result of your crime?

The people knelt as he made his way down the barn. He saw the little
group of Indians: women whose children he had baptized: Pedro: the man
from the cantina was there too, kneeling with his face buried in his plump
hands, a chain of beads falling between the fingers. He looked a good man:
perhaps he was a good man. Perhaps, the priest thought, I have lost the
faculty of judging--that woman in prison may have been the best person
there. A horse cried in the early day, tethered to a tree, and all the
freshness of the morning came in through the open door.

Two men waited beside the mules; the guide was adjusting a stirrup, and
beside him, scratching under the arm-pit, awaiting his coming with a doubtful
and defensive smile, stood the half-caste. He was like the small pain that
reminds a man of his sickness, or perhaps like the unexpected memory which
proves that love after all isn't dead. "Well," the priest said, "I didn't
expect you here."

"No, father, of course not." He scratched and smiled.

"Have you brought the soldiers with you?"

"What things you do say, father," he protested with a callow giggle. Behind
him, across the yard and through an open door, the priest could see Miss Lehr
putting up his sandwiches. She had dressed, but she still wore her hair-net.
She was wrapping the sandwiches carefully in grease-proof paper, and her
sedate movements had a curious effect of unreality. It was the half-caste who
was real. He said, "What trick are you playing now?" Had he perhaps bribed
his guide to lead him back across the border? He could believe almost
anything of that man.

"You shouldn't say things like that, father."

Miss Lehr passed out of sight, with the soundlessness of a dream.

"No?"

"I'm here, father," the man seemed to take a long breath for his surprising
stilted statement, "on an errand of mercy."

The guide finished with one mule and began on the next, shortening the
already short Mexican stirrup; the priest giggled nervously. "An errand of
mercy?"

"Well, father, you're the only priest this side of Las Casas, and the man's
dying . . ."

"What man?"

"The Yankee."

"What are you talking about?"

"The one the police wanted. He robbed a bank. You know the one I mean."

"He wouldn't need me," the priest said impatiently, remembering the
photograph on the peeling wall watching the first communion party.

"Oh, He's a good Catholic, father." Scratching under his arm-pit, he didn't
look at the priest. "He's dying, and you and I wouldn't like to have on our
conscience what that man . . ."

"We shall be lucky if we haven't worse."

"What do you mean, father?"

The priest said, "He only killed and robbed. He hasn't betrayed his
friends."

"Holy Mother of God, I've never . . ."

"We both have," the priest said. He turned to the guide. "Are the mules
ready?"

"Yes, father."

"We'll start then." He had forgotten Miss Lehr completely; the other world
had stretched a hand across the border, and he was again in the atmosphere of
flight.

"Where are you going?" the half-caste said.

"To Las Casas." He climbed stiffly on to his mule. The half-caste held on
to his stirrup-leather, and he was reminded of their first meeting: there was
the same mixture of complaint, appeal, abuse. "you're a fine priest," he
wailed up to him. "Your bishop ought to hear of this. A man's dying, wants
to confess, and just because you want to get to the city . . ."

"Why do you think me such a fool?" the priest said. "I know why you've
come. you're the only one they've got who can recognize me, and they can't
follow me into this state. Now if I ask you where this American is, You'll
tell me--I know--you don't have to speak--that He's just the other side."

"Oh no, father, you're wrong there. He's just this side."

"A mile or two makes no difference."

"It's an awful thing, father," the half-caste said, "never to be believed. Just
because once--well, I admit it --"

The priest kicked his mule into motion. They passed out of Mr Lehr's yard
and turned south; the half-caste trotted at his stirrup.

"I remember," the priest said, "that you told me You'd never forget my
face."

"And I haven't," the man put in triumphantly, "or I wouldn't be here, would
I? Listen, father, I'll admit a lot. You don't know how a reward will tempt a
poor man like me. And when you wouldn't trust me, I thought, well, if That's
how he feels--I'll show him. But I'm a good Catholic, father, and when a
dying man wants a priest . . ."

They climbed the long slope of Mr Lehr's pastures which led to the next range
of hills. The air was still fresh, at six in the morning, at three thousand
feet; up there tonight it would be very cold--they had another six thousand
feet to climb. The priest said uneasily, "Why should I put my head in your
noose?" It was too absurd.

"Look, father." The half-caste was holding up a scrap of paper: the familiar
writing caught the priest's attention--the large deliberate handwriting of a
child. The paper had been used to wrap up food; it was smeared and greasy.
He read, "The Prince of Denmark is wondering whether he should kill himself
or not, whether it is better to go on suffering all the doubts about his
father, or by one blow . . ."

"Not that, father, on the other side. That's nothing."

The priest turned the paper and read a single phrase written in English in
blunt pencil: "For Christ"s sake, father . . ." The mule, unbeaten, lapsed into
a slow heavy walk; the priest made no attempt to urge it on: this piece of paper
left no doubt whatever.

He asked, "How did this come to you?"

"It was this way, father. I was with the police when they shot him. It was in
a village the other side. He picked up a child to act as a screen, but, of course,
the soldiers didn't pay any attention. It was only an Indian. They were both
shot, but he escaped."

"Then how . . . ?"

"It was this way, father." He positively prattled. It appeared that he was
afraid of the lieutenant, who resented the fact that the priest had escaped,
and so he planned to slip across the border, out of reach. He got his chance
at night, and on the way--it was probably on this side of the state line, but
who knew where one state began or another ended?--he came on the American.

He had been shot in the stomach . . .

"How could he have escaped then?"

"Oh, father, he is a man of superhuman strength. He was dying, he wanted
a priest . . ."

"How did he tell you that?"

"It only needed two words, father." Then, to prove the story, the man had
found enough strength to write this note, and so . . . the story had as many
holes in it as a sieve. But what remained was this note, like a memorial
stone you couldn't overlook.

The half-caste bridled angrily again. "You don't trust me, father."

"Oh no," the priest said. "I don't trust you."

"You think I'm lying."

"Most of it is lies."

He pulled the mule up and sat thinking, facing south. He was quite certain
that this was a trap--probably the half-caste had suggested it--but it was a
fact that the American was there, dying. He thought of the deserted banana
station where something had happened and the Indian child lay dead on the
maize: there was no question at all that he was needed. A man with all that on
his soul . . . The oddest thing of all was that he felt quite cheerful; he had
never really believed in this peace. He had dreamed of it so often on the other
side that now it meant no more to him than a dream. He began to whistle a
tune--something he had heard somewhere once. "I found a rose in my field":
it was time he woke up. It wouldn't really have been a good dream--that
confession in Las Casas when he would have had to admit, as well as
everything else, that he had denied confession to a dying man.

He asked, "Will the man still be alive?"

"I think so, father," the half-caste caught him eagerly up.

"How far is it?"

"Four--five hours, father."

"You can take it in turns to ride the other mule."

The priest turned his mule back and called out to the guide. The man
dismounted and stood inertly there, while he explained. The only remark he
made was to the half-caste, motioning him into the saddle, "Be careful of
that saddle-bag. The father's brandy's there."

They rode slowly back: Miss Lehr was at her gate. She said, "You forgot
the sandwiches, father."

"Oh yes. Thank you." He stole a quick look round--it didn't mean a thing
to him. He said, "Is Mr Lehr still asleep?"

"Shall I wake him?"

"No, no. But you will thank him for his hospitality?"

"Yes. And perhaps, father, in a few years we shall see you again? As you
said." She looked curiously at the half-caste, and he stared back through his
yellow insulting eyes.

The priest said, "It's possible," glancing away with a sly secretive smile.

"Well, good-bye, father. You'd better be off, hadn't you? The sun's getting
high."

"Good-bye, my dear Miss Lehr." The mestizo slashed impatiently at his
mule and stirred it into action.

"Not that way, my man," Miss Lehr called.

"I have to pay a visit first," the priest explained, and breaking into an
uncomfortable trot he bobbed down behind the mestizo's mule towards the
village. They passed the whitewashed church--that too belonged to a dream.
Life didn't contain churches. The long untidy village street opened ahead
of them. The schoolmaster was at his door and waved an ironic greeting,
malicious and horn-rimmed. "Well, father, off with your spoils?"

The priest stopped his mule. He said to the half-caste, "Really . . . I had
forgotten . . ."

"You did well out of the baptisms," the schoolmaster said. "It pays to wait a
few years, doesn't it?"

"Come on, father," the half-caste urged him. "don't listen to him." He spat.
"He's a bad man."

The priest said, "You know the people here better than anyone. If I leave a
gift, will you spend it on things that do no harm--I mean food, blankets--not
books?"

"They need food more than books."

"I have forty-five pesos here . . ."

The mestizo wailed, "Father, what are you doing . . . ?"

"Conscience money?" the schoolmaster said.

"Yes."

"All the same, of course I thank you. It's good to see a priest with a
conscience. It's a stage in evolution," he said, his glasses flashing in the
sunlight, a plump embittered figure in front of his tin-roofed shack, an exile.

They passed the last houses, the cemetery, and began to climb. "Why, father,
why?" the half-caste protested.

"He's not a bad man, he does his best, and I shan't need money again, shall
I?" the priest asked, and for quite a while they rode without speaking, while
the sun came blindingly out, and the mules' shoulders strained on the steep
rocky paths, and the priest began to whistle again--"I have a rose"--the only
tune he knew. Once the half-caste started a complaint about something, "The
trouble with you, father, is . . ." but it petered out before it was defined
because there wasn't really anything to complain about as they rode steadily
north towards the border.

"Hungry?" the priest asked at last.

The half-caste muttered something that sounded angry or derisive.

"Take a sandwich," the priest said, opening Miss Lehr's packet.




CHAPTER 2




"There," the half-caste said, with a sort of whinny of triumph, as though he
had lain innocently all these seven hours under the suspicion of lying. He
pointed across the barranca to a group of Indian huts on a peninsula of rock
jutting out across the chasm. They were perhaps two hundred yards away, but
it would take another hour at least to reach them, winding down a thousand
feet and up another thousand.

The priest sat on his mule watching intently; he could see no movement
anywhere. Even the look-out, the little platform of twigs built on a mound
above the huts, was empty. He said, "There doesn't seem to be anybody
about." He was back in the atmosphere of desertion.

"Well," the half-caste said, "you didn't expect anybody, did you? Except
him. He's there. You'll soon find that."

"Where are the Indians?"

"There you go again," the man complained. "Suspicion. Always suspicion.
How should I know where the Indians are? I told you he was quite alone,
didn't I?"

The priest dismounted. "What are you doing now?" the half-caste cried
despairingly.

"We shan't need the mules any more. They can be taken back."

"Not need them? How are you going to get away from here?"

"Oh," the priest said, "I won't have to think about that, will I?" He counted
out forty pesos and said to the muleteer, "I hired you for Las Casas. Well, this
is your good luck. Six days' pay."

"You don't want me any more, father?"

"No, I think you'd better get away from here quickly. Leave you-know-what
behind."

The half-caste said excitedly, "We can't walk all that way, father. Why, the
man's dying."

"We can go just as quickly on our own hooves. Now, friend, be off." The
mestizo watched the mules pick their way along the narrow stony path with
a look of wistful greed; they disappeared round a shoulder of rock--crack,
crack, crack, the sound of their hooves contracted into silence. "Now,"
the priest said briskly, "we won't delay any more," and he started
down the path, with a small sack slung over his shoulder. He could hear the
half-caste panting after him: his wind was bad. They had probably let him
have far too much beer in the capital, and the priest thought, with an odd
touch of contemptuous affection, of how much had happened to them both
since that first encounter in a village of which he didn't even know the name
--the half-caste lying there in the hot noonday rocking his hammock with one
naked yellow foot. If he had been asleep at that moment, this wouldn't have
happened. It was really shocking bad luck for the poor devil that he was to be
burdened with a sin of such magnitude. The priest took a quick look back and
saw the big toes protruding like slugs out of the dirty gym shoes; the man
picked his way down, muttering all the time--his perpetual grievance didn't
help his wind. Poor man, the priest thought, he isn't really bad enough . . .
And he wasn't strong enough either for this journey. By the time the priest
had reached the bottom of the barranca he was fifty yards behind. The priest
sat down on a boulder and mopped his forehead, and the half-caste began to
complain long before he was down to his level, "There isn't so much hurry as
all that." It was almost as though the nearer he got to his treachery the
greater the grievance against his victim became.

"Didn't you say he was dying?" the priest asked.

"Oh yes, dying, of course. But that can take a long time."

"The longer the better for all of us," the priest said. "Perhaps you are right.
I'll take a rest here."

But now, like a contrary child, the half-caste wanted to start again. He said,
"You do nothing in moderation. Either you run or you sit."

"Can I do nothing right?" the priest teased him, and then he put in sharply
and shrewdly, "They will let me see him, I suppose?"

"Of course," the half-caste said and immediately checked himself. "They,
they? Who are you talking about now? First you complain that the place is
empty, and then you talk of “they”." He said with tears in his voice, "You
may be a good man, but why won't you talk plainly, so that a man can
understand you? It's enough to make a man a bad Catholic."

The priest said, "You see this sack here. We don't want to carry that any
farther. It's heavy. I think a little drink will do us both good. We both need
courage, don't we?"

"Drink, father?" the half-caste asked with excitement, and watched the priest
unpack a bottle. He never took his eyes away while the priest drank.
His two fangs stuck greedily out, quivering slightly on the lower lip. Then he
too fastened on the mouth. "It's illegal, I suppose," the priest said with a
giggle, "on this side of the border--if we are on this side." He had another
draw himself and handed it back: it was soon exhausted--he took the bottle
and threw it at a rock and it exploded like shrapnel. The half-caste started. He
said, "Be careful. People might think you'd got a gun."

"As for the rest," the priest said, "we won't need that."

"You mean There's more of it?"

"Two more bottles--but we can't drink any more in this heat. We'd better
leave it here."

"Why didn't you say it was heavy, father? I'll carry it for you. you've only
to ask me to do a thing. I'm willing. Only you just won't ask."

They set off again uphill, the bottles clinking gently; the sun shone
vertically down on the pair of them. It took them the best part of an hour to
reach the top of the barranca. Then the watch-tower gaped over their path like
an upper jaw and the tops of the huts appeared over the rocks above them.
Indians do not build their settlements on a mule path; they prefer to stand
aside and see who comes. The priest wondered how soon the police would
appear; they were keeping very carefully hidden.

"This way, father." The half-caste took the lead, scrambling away from the
path up the rocks to the little plateau. He looked anxious, almost as if he had
expected something to happen before this. There were about a dozen huts;
they stood quiet, like tombs against the heavy sky. A storm was coming up.
The priest felt a nervous impatience; he had walked into this trap, the least
they could do was to close it quickly, finish everything off. He wondered
whether they would suddenly shoot him down from one of the huts. He had
come to the very edge of time: soon there would be no tomorrow and no
yesterday, just existence going on for ever. He began to wish he had taken a
little more brandy. His voice broke uncertainly when he said, "Well, we are
here. Where is this Yankee?"

"Oh yes, the Yankee," the half-caste said, jumping a little. It was as if for
a moment he had forgotten the pretext. He stood there, gaping at the huts,
wondering too. He said, "He was over there when I left him."

"Well, he couldn't have moved, could he?"

If it hadn't been for that letter he would have doubted the very existence of
the American--and if he hadn't seen the dead child too, of course. He began
to walk across the little silent clearing towards the hut: would they shoot
him before he got to the entrance? It was like walking a plank blindfold:
you didn't know at what point you would step off into space for ever. He
hiccuped once and knotted his hands behind his back to stop them trembling.
He had been glad in a way to turn from Miss Lehr's gate--he had never real-
ly believed that he would ever get back to parish work and the daily Mass
and the careful appearances of piety, but all the same you needed to be a
little drunk to die. He got to the door--not a sound anywhere; then a voice
said, "Father."

He looked round. The mestizo stood in the clearing with his face contorted:
the two fangs jumped and jumped; he looked frightened.

"Yes, what is it?"

"Nothing, father."

"Why did you call me?"

"I said nothing," he lied.

The priest turned and went in.

The American was there all right. Whether he was alive was another matter.
He lay on a straw mat with his eyes closed and his mouth open and his hands
on his belly, like a child with stomach-ache. Pain alters a face--or else
successful crime has its own falsity like politics or piety. He was hardly
recognizable from the news picture on the police station wall; that was
tougher, arrogant, a man who had made good. This was just a tramp's face.
Pain had exposed the nerves and given the face a kind of spurious
intelligence.

The priest knelt down and put his face near the man's mouth, trying to hear
the breathing. A heavy smell came up to him--a mixture of vomit and cigar
smoke and stale drink; it would take more than a few lilies to hide this
corruption. A very faint voice close to his ear said in English, "Beat it, father."
Outside the door, in the stormy sunlight, the mestizo stood, staring towards
the hut, a little loose about the knees.

"So you're alive, are you?" the priest said briskly. "Better hurry. You
haven't got long."

"Beat it, father."

"You wanted me, didn't you? you're a Catholic?"

"Beat it," the voice whispered again, as if those were the only words it
could remember of a lesson learnt some while ago.

"Come now," the priest said. "How long is it since you went to confession?"
The eyelids rolled up and astonished eyes looked up at him. The man said
in a puzzled voice, "Ten years, I guess. What are you doing here anyway?"

"You asked for a priest. Come now. Ten years is a long time."

"You got to beat it, father," the man said. He was remembering the lesson
now; lying there flat on the mat with his hands folded on his stomach, any
vitality that was left had accumulated in the brain: he was like a reptile
crushed at one end. He said in a strange voice, "That bastard . . ." The priest
said furiously, "What sort of a confession is this? I make a five hours"
journey . . . and all I get out of you are evil words." It seemed to him
horribly unfair that his uselessness should return with his danger--he
couldn't do anything for a man like this. "Listen, father . . ." the man said.

"I am listening."

"You beat it out of here quick. I didn't know . . ."

"I haven't come all this way to talk about myself," the priest said. "The
sooner your confession's done, the sooner I will be gone."

"You don't need to trouble about me. I'm through."

"You mean damned?" the priest said angrily.

"Sure. Damned," the man replied, licking blood away from his lips.

"You listen to me," the priest said, leaning closer to the stale and
nauseating smell, "I have come here to listen to your confession. Do you want
to confess?"

"No."

"Did you when you wrote that note . . . ?"

"Maybe."

"I know what you want to tell me. I know it, do you understand? Let that
be. Remember you are dying. Don't depend too much on God's mercy. He
has given you this chance. He may not give you another. What sort of a life
have you led all these years? Does it seem so grand now? you've killed a lot
of people--That's about all. Anybody can do that for a while, and then he is
killed too. Just as you are killed. Nothing left except pain."

"Father."

"Yes?" The priest gave an impatient sigh, leaning closer. He hoped for a
moment that at last he had got the man started on some meagre train of sorrow.

"You take my gun, father. See what I mean? Under my arm."

"I haven't any use for a gun."

"Oh yes, you have." The man detached one hand from his stomach and began
to move it slowly up his body. So much effort: it was unbearable to watch.
The priest said sharply, "Lie still. It's not there." He could see the holster
empty under the arm-pit: it was the first definite indication that they and
the half-caste were not alone.

"Bastards," the man said, and his hand lay wearily where it had got to, over
his heart; he imitated the prudish attitude of a female statue, one hand over
the breast and one upon the stomach. It was very hot in the hut; the heavy
light of the storm lay over them.

"Listen, father . . ." The priest sat hopelessly at the man's side; nothing
would shift that violent brain towards peace: once, hours ago perhaps, when
he wrote that message--but the chance had come and gone. He was whispering
now something about a knife. There was a legend believed by many criminals
that dead eyes held the picture of what they had last seen--a Christian
could believe that the soul did the same, held absolution and peace at the
final moment, after a lifetime of the most hideous crime: or sometimes
pious men died suddenly in brothels unabsolved and what had seemed a good
life went out with the permanent stamp on it of impurity. He had heard men
talk of the unfairness of a deathbed repentance--as if it was an easy thing to
break the habit of a life whether to do good or evil. One suspected the good
of the life that ended badly--or the viciousness that ended well. He made
another desperate attempt. He said, "You believed once. Try and understand --
this is your chance. At the last moment. Like the thief. You have murdered
men--children perhaps," he added, remembering the little black heap under
the cross. "But that need not be so important. It only belongs to this life,
a few years--It's over already. You can drop it all here, in this hut, and
go on for ever . . ." He felt sadness and longing at the vaguest idea of a
life he couldn't lead himself . . . words like peace, glory, love.

"Father," the voice said urgently, "you let me be. You look after yourself.
You take my knife . . ." The hand began its weary march again--this time
towards the hip. The knees crooked up in an attempt to roll over, and then
the whole body gave up the effort, the ghost, everything.

The priest hurriedly whispered the words of conditional absolution, in
case, for one second before it crossed the border, the spirit had repented,
but it was more likely that it had gone over still seeking its knife, bent on
vicarious violence. He prayed: "O merciful God, after all he was thinking of
me, it was for my sake . . ." but he prayed without conviction. At the best,
it was only one criminal trying to aid the escape of another--whichever way
you looked, there wasn't much merit in either of them.




CHAPTER 3




A voice said, "Well, have you finished now?"

The priest got up and made a small scared gesture of assent. He recognized
the police officer who had given him money at the prison, a dark smart figure
in the doorway with the stormlight glinting on his leggings. He had one hand
on his revolver and he frowned sourly in at the dead gunman. "You didn't
expect to see me," he said.

"Oh, but I did," the priest said. "I must thank you."

"Thank me, what for?"

"For letting me stay alone with him."

"I am not a barbarian," the officer said. "Will you come out now, please?
It's no use at all your trying to escape. You can see that," he added, as
the priest emerged and looked round at the dozen armed men who surrounded
the hut.

"I've had enough of escaping," he said. The half-caste was no longer in
sight; the heavy clouds were piling up the sky: they made the real mountains
look like little bright toys below them. He sighed and giggled nervously.

"What a lot of trouble I had getting across those mountains, and now . . .
here I am . . ."

"I never believed you would return."

"Oh well, lieutenant, you know how it is. Even a coward has a sense of
duty." The cool fresh wind which sometimes blows across before a storm
breaks touched his skin. He said with badly-affected ease, "Are you going
to shoot me now?"

The lieutenant said again sharply, "I am not a barbarian. You will be tried
. . . properly."

"What for?"

"For treason."

"I have to go all the way back there?"

"Yes. Unless you try to escape." He kept his hand on his gun as if he didn't
trust the priest a yard. He said, "I could swear that somewhere . . ."

"Oh yes," the priest said. "You have seen me twice. When you took a hostage
from my village . . . you asked my child: "Who is he?" She said: "My father,"
and you let me go." Suddenly the mountains ceased to exist: it was as if
somebody had dashed a handful of water into their faces.

"Quick," the lieutenant said, "into that hut." He called out to one of the
men. "Bring us some boxes so that we can sit."

The two of them joined the dead man in the hut as the storm came up all
round them. A soldier dripping with rain carried in two packing-cases. "A
candle," the lieutenant said. He sat down on one of the cases and took out his
revolver. He said, "Sit down, there, away from the door, where I can see you."
The soldier lit a candle and stuck it in its own wax on the hard earth floor,
and the priest sat down, close to the American; huddled up in his attempt to
get at his knife he gave an effect of wanting to reach his companion, to have a
word or two in private. They looked two of a kind, dirty and unshaved: the
lieutenant seemed to belong to a different class altogether. He said with
contempt, "So you have a child?"

"Yes," the priest said.

"You--a priest?"

"You mustn't think they are all like me." He watched the candlelight blink
on the bright buttons. He said, "There are good priests and bad priests. It is
just that I am a bad priest."

"Then perhaps we will be doing your Church a service . . ."

"Yes."

The lieutenant looked sharply up as if he thought he was being mocked. He
said, "You told me twice. That I had seen you twice."

"Yes, I was in prison. And you gave me money."

"I remember." He said furiously, "What an appalling mockery. To have had
you and then to let you go. Why, we lost two men looking for you. they'd be
alive today . . ." The candle sizzled as the drops of rain came through the
roof. "This American wasn't worth two lives. He did no real harm."

The rain poured ceaselessly down. They sat in silence. Suddenly the lieu-
tenant said, "Keep your hand away from your pocket."

"I was only feeling for a pack of cards. I thought perhaps it would help to
pass the time . . ."

"I don't play cards," the lieutenant said harshly.

"No, no. Not a game. Just a few tricks I can show you. May I?"

"All right. If you wish to."

Mr Lehr had given him an old pack of cards. The priest said, "Here, you
see, are three cards. The ace, the king, and the jack. Now," he spread them
fanwise out on the floor, "tell me which is the ace."

"This, of course," the lieutenant said grudgingly, showing no interest.

"But you are wrong," the priest said, turning it up. "That is the jack."

The lieutenant said contemptuously, "A game for gamblers--or children."

"There is another trick," the priest said, "called Fly-away Jack. I cut the
pack into three--so. And I take this Jack of Hearts and I put it into the centre
pack--so. Now I tap the three packs." His face lit up as he spoke--it was
such a long time since he had handled cards--he forgot the storm, the dead
man and the stubborn unfriendly face opposite him. "I say Fly-away Jack" --
he cut the left-hand pack in half and disclosed the jack--"and there he is."

"Of course there are two jacks."

"See for yourself." Unwillingly the lieutenant leant forward and inspected
the centre pack. He said, "I suppose you tell the Indians that that is a miracle
of God."

"Oh no," the priest giggled, "I learnt it from an Indian. He was the richest
man in the village. Do you wonder? with such a hand. No, I used to show the
tricks at any entertainments we had in the parish--for the Guilds, you know."

A look of physical disgust crossed the lieutenant's face. He said, "I remem-
ber those Guilds."

"When you were a boy?"

"I was old enough to know . . ."

"Yes?"

"The trickery." He broke out furiously with one hand on his gun, as though
it had crossed his mind that it would be better to eliminate this beast, now,
at this instant, for ever. "What an excuse it all was, what a fake. Sell all
and give to the poor--that was the lesson, wasn't it? and Senora So-and-so,
the druggist"s wife, would say the family wasn't really deserving of charity,
and Senor This, That and the Other would say that if they starved, what else
did they deserve, they were Socialists anyway, and the priest--you--would
notice who had done his Easter duty and paid his Easter offering." His voice
rose--a policeman looked into the hut anxiously and withdrew again through
the lashing rain. "The Church was poor, the priest was poor, therefore
everyone should sell all and give to the Church."

The priest said, "You are so right." He added quickly, "Wrong too, of
course."

"How do you mean?" the lieutenant asked savagely. "Right? won't you
even defend . . . ?"

"I felt at once that you were a good man when you gave me money at the
prison."

The lieutenant said, "I only listen to you because you have no hope. No
hope at all. Nothing you say will make any difference."

"No."

He had no intention of angering the police officer, but he had had very
little practice the last eight years in talking to any but a few peasants
and Indians. Now something in his tone infuriated the lieutenant. He said,
"you're a danger. That's why we kill you. I have nothing against you, you
understand, as a man."

"Of course not. It's God you're against. I'm the sort of man you shut up
every day--and give money to."

"No, I don't fight against a fiction."

"But I'm not worth fighting, am I? you've said so. A liar, a drunkard. That
man's worth a bullet more than I am."

"It's your ideas." The lieutenant sweated a little in the hot steamy air. He
said, "You are so cunning, you people. But tell me this--what have you ever
done in Mexico for us? Have you ever told a landlord he shouldn't beat his
peon--oh yes, I know, in the confessional perhaps, and It's your duty, isn't
it, to forget it at once. You come out and have dinner with him and It's your
duty not to know that he has murdered a peasant. That's all finished. He's
left it behind in your box."

"Go on," the priest said. He sat on the packing-case with his hands on his
knees and his head bent; he couldn't, though he tried, keep his mind on what
the lieutenant was saying. He was thinking--forty-eight hours to the capital.
Today is Sunday. Perhaps on Wednesday I shall be dead. He felt it as a trea-
chery that he was more afraid of the pain of bullets than of what came after.

"Well, we have ideas too," the lieutenant was saying. "No more money for
saying prayers, no more money for building places to say prayers in. We'll
give people food instead, teach them to read, give them books. We'll see they
don't suffer."

"But if they want to suffer . . ."

"A man may want to rape a woman. Are we to allow it because he wants to? Suf-
fering is wrong."

"And you suffer all the time," the priest commented, watching the sour Indian
face behind the candle-flame. He said, "It sounds fine, doesn't it? Does the
jefe feel like that too?"

"Oh, we have our bad men."

"And what happens afterwards? I mean after everybody has got enough to
eat and can read the right books--the books you let them read?"

"Nothing. Death's a fact. We don't try to alter facts."

"We agree about a lot of things," the priest said, idly dealing out his cards.
"We have facts, too, we don't try to alter--that the world's unhappy whether
you are rich or poor--unless you are a saint, and there aren't many of those.
It's not worth bothering too much about a little pain here. There's one belief
we both of us have--that we'll all be dead in a hundred years." He fumbled,
trying to shuffle, and bent the cards: his hands were not steady.

"All the same, you're worried now about a little pain," the lieutenant said
maliciously, watching his fingers.

"But I'm not a saint," the priest said. "I'm not even a brave man." He
looked up apprehensively: light was coming back: the candle was no longer
necessary. It would soon be clear enough to start the long journey back. He
felt a desire to go on talking, to delay even by a few minutes the decision
to start. He said, "That's another difference between us. It's no good your
working for your end unless you're a good man yourself. And there won't
always be good men in your party. Then you'll have all the old starvation,
beating, get-rich-anyhow. But it doesn't matter so much my being a coward --
and all the rest. I can put God into a man's mouth just the same--and I can
give him God's pardon. It wouldn't make any difference to that if every
priest in the Church was like me."

"That's another thing I don't understand," the lieutenant said, "why you --
of all people--should have stayed when the others ran."

"They didn't all run," the priest said.

"But why did you stay?"

"Once," the priest said, "I asked myself that. The fact is, a man isn't
presented suddenly with two courses to follow: one good and one bad. He
gets caught up. The first year--well, I didn't believe there was really any
cause to run. Churches have been burnt before now. You know how often. It
doesn't mean much. I thought I'd stay till next month, say, and see if things
were better. Then--oh, you don't know how time can slip by." It was quite
light again now: the afternoon rain was over: life had to go on. A policeman
passed the entrance of the hut and looked in curiously at the pair of them. "Do
you know I suddenly realized that I was the only priest left for miles around?
The law which made priests marry finished them. They went: they were quite
right to go. There was one priest in particular--he had always disapproved of
me. I have a tongue, you know, and it used to wag. He said--quite rightly --
that I wasn't a firm character. He escaped. It felt--You'll laugh at this--just
as it did at school when a bully I had been afraid of--for years--got too old
for any more teaching and was turned out. You see, I didn't have to think
about anybody's opinion any more. The people--they didn't worry me. They
liked me." He gave a weak smile, sideways, towards the humped Yankee.

"Go on," the lieutenant said moodily.

"You'll know all there is to know about me at this rate," the priest said,
with a nervous giggle, "by the time I get to, well, prison."

"It's just as well. To know an enemy, I mean."

"That other priest was right. It was when he left I began to go to pieces.
One thing went after another. I got careless about my duties. I began to drink.
It would have been much better, I think, if I had gone too. Because pride was
at work all the time. Not love of God." He sat bowed on the packing-case, a
small plump man in Mr Lehr's cast-off clothes. He said, "Pride was what
made the angels fall. Pride's the worst thing of all. I thought I was a fine
fellow to have stayed when the others had gone. And then I thought I was so
grand I could make my own rules. I gave up fasting, daily Mass. I neglected
my prayers--and one day because I was drunk and lonely--well, you know
how it was, I got a child. It was all pride. Just pride because I'd stayed. I
wasn't any use, but I stayed. At least, not much use. I'd got so that I didn't
have a hundred communicants a month. If I'd gone I'd have given God to twelve
times that number. It's a mistake one makes--to think just because a thing
is difficult or dangerous . . ." He made a flapping motion with his hands.

The lieutenant said in a tone of fury, "Well, you're going to be a martyr --
you've got that satisfaction."

"Oh no. Martyrs are not like me. They don't think all the time--if I had
drunk more brandy I shouldn't be so afraid."

The lieutenant said sharply to a man in the entrance, "Well, what is it?
What are you hanging round for?"

"The storm"s over, lieutenant. We wondered when we were to start?"

"We start immediately."

He got up and put back the pistol in his holster. He said, "Get a horse ready
for the prisoner. And have some men dig a grave quickly for the Yankee."

The priest put the cards in his pocket and stood up. He said, "You have
listened very patiently . . ."

"I am not afraid," the lieutenant said, "of other people's ideas."

Outside the ground was steaming after the rain: the mist rose nearly to their
knees: the horses stood ready. The priest mounted, but before they had time
to move a voice made the priest turn--the same sullen whine he had heard so
often. "Father." It was the half-caste.

"Well, well," the priest said. "You again."

"Oh, I know what you're thinking," the half-caste said. "There's not much
charity in you, father. You thought all along I was going to betray you."

"Go," the lieutenant said sharply. "you've done your job." "May I have one
word, lieutenant?" the priest asked. "You're a good man, father," the mestizo
cut quickly in, "but you think the worst of people. I just want your blessing,
That's all."

"What is the good? You can't sell a blessing," the priest said.

"It's just because we won't see each other again. And I didn't want you to
go off there thinking ill things . . ."

"You are so superstitious," the priest said. "You think my blessing will be
like a blinker over God's eyes. I can't stop him knowing all about it. Much
better go home and pray. Then if he gives you grace to feel sorry, give away
the money . . ."

"What money, father?" The half-caste shook his stirrup angrily. "What
money? There you go again . . ."

The priest sighed. He felt empty with the ordeal. Fear can be more tiring
than a long monotonous ride. He said, "I'll pray for you," and beat his horse
into position beside the lieutenant's.

"And I'll pray for you, father," the half-caste announced complacently.
Once the priest looked back as his horse poised for the steep descent between
the rocks. The half-caste stood alone among the huts, his mouth a little open,
showing the two long fangs. He might have been snapped in the act of shouting
some complaint or some claim--that he was a good Catholic perhaps; one hand
scratched under the arm-pit. The priest waved his hand; he bore no grudge be-
cause he expected nothing else of anything human and he had one cause at least
for satisfaction--that yellow and unreliable face would be absent "at the death".


"You're a man of education," the lieutenant said. He lay across the entrance
of the hut with his head on his rolled cape and his revolver by his side. It
was night, but neither man could sleep. The priest, when he shifted, groaned a
little with stiffness and cramp. The lieutenant was in a hurry to get home, and
they had ridden till midnight. They were down off the hills and in the marshy
plain. Soon the whole State would be subdivided by swamp. The rains had really
begun.

"I'm not that. My father was a storekeeper."

"I mean, you've been abroad. You can talk like a Yankee. you've had schooling."

"Yes."

"I've had to think things out for myself. But there are some things which
you don't have to learn in a school. That there are rich and poor." He said
in a low voice, "I've shot three hostages because of you. Poor men. It made
me hate you."

"Yes," the priest admitted, and tried to stand to ease the cramp in his right
thigh. The lieutenant sat up quickly, gun in hand: "What are you doing?"

"Nothing. Just cramp. That's all." He lay down again with a groan.
The lieutenant said, "Those men I shot. They were my own people. I
wanted to give them the whole world."

"Well, who knows? Perhaps That's what you did."

The lieutenant spat suddenly, viciously, as if something unclean had got
upon his tongue. He said, "You always have answers which mean nothing."

"I was never any good at books," the priest said. "I haven't any memory.
But there was one thing always puzzled me about men like yourself. You
hate the rich and love the poor. isn't that right?"

"Yes."

"Well, if I hated you, I wouldn't want to bring up my child to be like you.
It's not sense."

"That's just twisting . . ."

"Perhaps it is. I've never got your ideas straight. We've always said the
poor are blessed and the rich are going to find it hard to get into heaven.
Why should we make it hard for the poor man too? Oh, I know we are told to give
to the poor, to see they are not hungry--hunger can make a man do evil just
as much as money can. But why should we give the poor power? It's better to
let him die in dirt and wake in heaven--so long as we don't push his face in
the dirt."

"I hate your reasons," the lieutenant said. "I don't want reasons. If you
see somebody in pain, people like you reason and reason. You say--pain's a
good thing, perhaps he'll be better for it one day. I want to let my heart
speak."

"At the end of a gun."

"Yes. At the end of a gun."

"Oh well, perhaps when you're my age You'll know the heart's an untrust-
worthy beast. The mind is too, but it doesn't talk about love. Love. And a
girl puts her head under water or a child's strangled, and the heart all
the time says love, love."

They lay quiet for a while in the hut. The priest thought the lieutenant was
asleep until he spoke again. "You never talk straight. You say one thing to me
--but to another man, or a woman, you say, "God is love." But you think that
stuff won't go down with me, so you say different things. Things you think
I'll agree with."

"Oh," the priest said, "That's another thing altogether--God is love. I don't
say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of
love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It
might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us--God's love. It set
fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the
dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if
he felt that love around."

"You don't trust him much, do you? He doesn't seem a grateful kind of
God. If a man served me as well as you've served him, well, I'd recommend
him for promotion, see he got a good pension . . . if he was in pain, with
cancer, I'd put a bullet through his head."

"Listen," the priest said earnestly, leaning forward in the dark, pressing on
a cramped foot, "I'm not as dishonest as you think I am. Why do you think I
tell people out of the pulpit that they're in danger of damnation if death
catches them unawares? I'm not telling them fairy stories I don't believe
myself. I don't know a thing about the mercy of God: I don't know how awful
the human heart looks to Him. But I do know this--that if There's ever
been a single man in this state damned, then I'll be damned too." He said
slowly, "I wouldn't want it to be any different. I just want justice, that's all."


"We'll be in before dark," the lieutenant said. Six men rode in front and six
behind; sometimes, in the belts of forest between the arms of the river, they
had to ride in single file. The lieutenant didn't speak much, and once, when
two of his men struck up a song about a fat shopkeeper and his woman, he
told them savagely to be silent. It wasn't a very triumphal procession. The
priest rode with a weak grin fixed on his face; it was like a mask he had stuck
on, so that he could think quietly without anyone noticing. What he thought
about mostly was pain.

"I suppose," the lieutenant said, scowling ahead, "you're hoping for a
miracle."

"Excuse me. What did you say?"

"I said I suppose you're hoping for a miracle."

"No."

"You believe in them, don't you?"

"Yes. But not for me. I'm no more good to anyone, so why should God
keep me alive?"

"I can't think how a man like you can believe in those things. The Indians,
yes. Why, the first time they see an electric light they think It's a miracle."

"And I dare say the first time you saw a man raised from the dead you
might think so too." He giggled unconvincingly behind the smiling mask.
"Oh, It's funny, isn't it? It isn't a case of miracles not happening--It's just a
case of people calling them something else. Can't you see the doctors round
the dead man? He isn't breathing any more, his pulse has stopped, his heart"s
not beating: He's dead. Then somebody gives him back his life, and they all --
What's the expression?--reserve their opinion. They won't say It's a miracle,
because That's a word they don't like. Then it happens again and again
perhaps--because God's about on earth--and they say: these aren't miracles,
it is simply that we have enlarged our conception of what life is. Now we
know you can be alive without pulse, breath, heart-beats. And they invent a
new word to describe that state of life, and they say science has disproved a
miracle." He giggled again. "You can't get round them."

They were out of the forest track on to a hard-beaten road, and the lieuten-
ant dug in his spur and the whole cavalcade broke into a canter. They
were nearly home now. The lieutenant said grudgingly, "You aren't a bad
fellow. If there's anything I can do for you . . ."

"If you would give permission for me to confess . . ."

The first houses came into sight, little hard-baked houses of earth falling
into ruin, a few classical pillars just plaster over mud, and a dirty child
playing in the rubble.

The lieutenant said, "But There's no priest."

"Padre Jose."

"Oh, Padre Jose," the lieutenant said with contempt, "He's no good for you."

"He's good enough for me. It's not likely I'd find a saint here, is it?"

The lieutenant rode on for a little while in silence; they came to the
cemetery, full of chipped angels, and passed the great portico with its black
letters, "Silencio". He said, "All right. You can have him." He wouldn't look
at the cemetery as they went by--there was the wall where prisoners were
shot. The road went steeply downhill towards the river; on the right, where
the cathedral had been, the iron swings stood empty in the hot afternoon.
There was a sense of desolation everywhere, more of it than in the mountains
because a lot of life had once existed here. The lieutenant thought: No pulse,
no breath, no heart-beat, but It's still life--We've only got to find a name
for it. A small boy watched them pass; he called out to the lieutenant,
"Lieutenant, have you got him?" and the lieutenant dimly remembered the
face--one day in the plaza--a broken bottle, and he tried to smile back, an
odd sour grimace, without triumph or hope. One had to begin again with that.




CHAPTER 4




The lieutenant waited till after dark and then he went himself. It would be
dangerous to send another man because the news would be around the city in
no time that Padre Jose had been permitted to carry out a religious duty in the
prison. It was wiser not to let even the jefe know. One didn't trust one"s
superiors when one was more successful than they were. He knew the jefe
wasn't pleased that he had brought the priest in--an escape would have been
better from his point of view.

In the patio he could feel himself watched by a dozen eyes. The children
clustered there ready to shout at Padre Jose if he appeared. He wished he had
promised the priest nothing, but he was going to keep his word--because it
would be a triumph for that old corrupt God-ridden world if it could show
itself superior on any point--whether of courage, truthfulness, justice . . .
Nobody answered his knock; he stood darkly in the patio like a petitioner.
Then he knocked again, and a voice called, "A moment. A moment."

Padre Jose put his face against the bars of his window and asked, "Who's
there?" He seemed to be fumbling at something near the ground.

"Lieutenant of police."

"Oh," Padre Jose squeaked. "Excuse me. It is my trousers. In the dark." He
seemed to heave at something and there was a sharp crack, as if his belt or
braces had given way. Across the patio the children began to squeak, "Padre
Jose. Padre Jose." When he came to the door he wouldn't look at them,
muttering tenderly, "The little devils."

The lieutenant said, "I want you to come to the police station."

"But I've done nothing. Nothing. I've been so careful."

"Padre Jose," the children squeaked.

He said imploringly, "If it's anything about a burial, you've been misinformed.
I wouldn't even say a prayer."

"Padre Jose. Padre Jose."

The lieutenant turned and strode across the patio. He said furiously to the
faces at the grid, "Be quiet. Go to bed. At once. Do you hear me?" They
dropped out of sight one by one, but immediately the lieutenant's back was
turned, they were there again watching.

Padre Jose said, "Nobody can do anything with those children."

A woman's voice said, "Where are you, Jose?"

"Here, my dear. It is the police."

A huge woman in a white nightdress came billowing out at them. It wasn't
much after seven; perhaps she lived, the lieutenant thought, in that dress --
perhaps she lived in bed. He said, "Your husband," dwelling on the term with
satisfaction, "your husband is wanted at the station."

"Who says so?"

"I do."

"He's done nothing."

"I was just saying, my dear . . ."

"Be quiet. Leave the talking to me."

"You can both stop jabbering," the lieutenant said. "you're wanted at the
station to see a man--a priest. He wants to confess."

"To me?"

"Yes. There's no one else."

"Poor man," Padre Jose said. His little pink eyes swept the patio. "Poor
man." He shifted uneasily, and took a quick furtive look at the sky where the
constellations wheeled.

"You won't go," the woman said.

"It's against the law, isn't it?" Padre Jose asked.

"You needn't trouble about that."

"Oh, we needn't, eh?" the woman said. "I can see through you. You don't
want my husband to be let alone. You want to trick him. I know your work.
You get people to ask him to say prayers--He's a kind man. But I'd have you
remember this--He's a pensioner of the government."

The lieutenant said slowly, "This priest--he has been working for years
secretly--for your Church. We've caught him and, of course, he'll be shot
tomorrow. He's not a bad man, and I told him he could see you. He seems to
think it will do him good."

"I know him," the woman interrupted, "He's a drunkard. That's all he is."

"Poor man," Padre Jose said. "He tried to hide here once."

"I promise you," the lieutenant said, "nobody shall know."

"Nobody know?" the woman cackled. "Why, it will be all over town. Look
at those children there. They never leave Jose alone." She went on, "There'll
be no end of it--everybody will be wanting to confess, and the Governor will
hear of it, and the pension will be stopped."

"Perhaps, my dear," Jose said, "It's my duty . . ."

"You aren't a priest any more," the woman said, "you're my husband." She
used a coarse word. "That's your duty now."

The lieutenant listened to them with acid satisfaction. It was like redis-
covering an old belief. He said, "I can't wait here while you argue. Are
you going to come with me?"

"He can't make you," the woman said.

"My dear, It's only that . . . well . . . I am a priest."

"A priest," the woman cackled, "you a priest." She went off into a peal of
laughter, which was taken up tentatively by the children at the window. Padre
Jose put his fingers up to his pink eyes as if they hurt. He said, "My dear . . ."
and the laughter went on.

"Are you coming?"

Padre Jose made a despairing gesture--as much as to say, what does one
more failure matter in a life like this? He said, "I don't think It's--pos-
sible."

"Very well," the lieutenant said. He turned abruptly--he hadn't any more
time to waste on mercy, and heard Padre Jose's voice speak imploringly,
"Tell him I shall pray." The children had gained confidence; one of them
called out sharply, "Come to bed, Jose," and the lieutenant laughed once--a
poor unconvincing addition to the general laughter which now surrounded
Padre Jose, chiming up all round towards the disciplined constellations he
had once known by name.

The lieutenant opened the cell door. It was very dark inside. He shut the door
carefully behind him and locked it, keeping his hand on his gun. He said, "He
won't come."

A little bunched figure in the darkness was the priest. He crouched on the
floor like a child playing. He said, "You mean--not tonight?"

"I mean he won't come at all."

There was silence for some while, if you could talk of silence where there
was always the drill-drill of mosquitoes and the little crackling explosions of
beetles against the wall. At last the priest said, "He was afraid, I suppose . . ."

"His wife wouldn't let him come."

"Poor man." He tried to giggle, but no sound could have been more miserable
than the half-hearted attempt. His head drooped between his knees; he looked
as if he had abandoned everything and been abandoned.

The lieutenant said, "You had better know everything. you've been tried
and found guilty."

"Couldn't I have been present at my own trial?"

"It wouldn't have made any difference."

"No." He was silent, preparing an attitude. Then he asked with a kind of
false jauntiness, "And when, if I may ask . . . ?"

"Tomorrow." The promptness and brevity of the reply called his bluff. His
head went down again and he seemed, as far as it was possible to see in the
dark, to be biting his nails.

The lieutenant said, "It's bad being alone on a night like this. If you would
like to be transferred to the common cell . . ."

"No, no. I'd rather be alone. I've got plenty to do." His voice failed, as
though he had a heavy cold. He wheezed, "So much to think about."

"I should like to do something for you," the lieutenant said. "I've brought
you some brandy."

"Against the law?"

"Yes."

"It's very good of you." He took the small flask. "You wouldn't need this, I
dare say. But I've always been afraid of pain."

"We have to die some time," the lieutenant said. "It doesn't seem to matter
so much when."

"You're a good man. you've got nothing to be afraid of."

"You have such odd ideas," the lieutenant complained. He said, "Sometimes
I feel you're just trying to talk me round."

"Round to what?"

"Oh, to letting you escape perhaps--or to believing in the Holy Catholic
Church, the communion of saints . . . how does that stuff go?"

"The forgiveness of sins."

"You don't believe much in that, do you?"

"Oh yes, I believe," the little man said obstinately.

"Then what are you worried about?"

"I'm not ignorant, you see. I've always known what I've been doing. And I
can't absolve myself."

"Would Father Jose coming here have made all that difference?"

He had to wait a long while for his answer, and then he didn't understand
it when it came. "Another man . . . it makes it easier . . ."

"Is there nothing more I can do for you?"

"No. Nothing."

The lieutenant reopened the door; mechanically putting his hand again
upon his revolver he felt moody, as though now the last priest was under lock
and key, there was nothing left to think about. The spring of action seemed
to be broken. He looked back on the weeks of hunting as a happy time which
was over now for ever. He felt without a purpose, as if life had drained out
of the world. He said with bitter kindness (he couldn't summon up any hate of
the small hollow man), "Try to sleep."

He was closing the door when a scared voice spoke. "Lieutenant."

"Yes."

"You've seen people shot. People like me."

"Yes."

"Does the pain go on--a long time?"

"No, no. A second," he said roughly, and closed the door, and picked his
way back across the whitewashed yard. He went into the office. The pictures
of the priest and the gunman were still pinned up on the wall: he tore them
down--they would never be wanted again. Then he sat at his desk and put his
head upon his hands and fell asleep with utter weariness. He couldn't remem-
ber afterwards anything of his dreams except laughter, laughter all the time,
and a long passage in which he could find no door.


The priest sat on the floor, holding the brandy-flask. Presently he unscrewed
the cap and put his mouth to it. The spirit didn't do a thing to him--it might
have been water. He put it down again and began some kind of a general
confession, speaking in a whisper. He said, "I have committed fornication."
The formal phrase meant nothing at all: it was like a sentence in a newspaper:
you couldn't feel repentance over a thing like that. He started again, "I have
lain with a woman," and tried to imagine the other priest asking him, "How
many times? Was she married?" "No." Without thinking what he was doing,
he took another drink of brandy.

As the liquid touched his tongue he remembered his child, coming in out
of the glare: the sullen unhappy knowledgeable face. He said, "Oh God, help
her. Damn me, I deserve it, but let her live for ever." This was the love he
should have felt for every soul in the world: all the fear and the wish to save
concentrated unjustly on the one child. He began to weep; it was as if he had
to watch her from the shore drown slowly because he had forgotten how to
swim. He thought: This is what I should feel all the time for everyone, and he
tried to turn his brain away towards the half-caste, the lieutenant, even a
dentist he had once sat with for a few minutes, the child at the banana station,
calling up a long succession of faces, pushing at his attention as if it were
a heavy door which wouldn't budge. For those were all in danger too. He
prayed, "God help them," but in the moment of prayer he switched back to his
child beside the rubbish-dump, and he knew it was for her only that he
prayed. Another failure.

After a while he began again: "I have been drunk--I don't know how many
times; there isn't a duty I haven't neglected; I have been guilty of pride,
lack of charity . . ." The words were becoming formal again, meaning nothing.
He had no confessor to turn his mind away from the formula to the fact.

He took another drink of brandy, and getting up with pain because of his
cramp he moved to the door and looked through the bars at the hot moony
square. He could see the police asleep in their hammocks, and one man who
couldn't sleep lazily rocking up and down, up and down. There was an odd
silence everywhere, even in the other cells; it was as if the whole world had
tactfully turned away to avoid seeing him die. He felt his way back along the
wall to the farthest corner and sat down with the flask between his knees. He
thought: If I hadn't been so useless, useless. . . . The eight hard hopeless
years seemed to him to be only a caricature of service: a few communions, a
few confessions, and an endless bad example. He thought: If I had only one
soul to offer, so that I could say, Look what I've done. . . . People had died
for him, they had deserved a saint, and a tinge of bitterness spread across his
mind for their sake that God hadn't thought fit to send them one. Padre Jose
and me, he thought, Padre Jose and me, and he took a drink again from the
brandy flask. He thought of the cold faces of the saints rejecting him.

The night was slower than the last he had spent in prison because he was
alone. Only the brandy, which he finished about two in the morning, gave
him any sleep at all. He felt sick with fear, his stomach ached, and his mouth
was dry with the drink. He began to talk aloud to himself because he couldn't
stand the silence any more. He complained miserably, "It's all very well . . .
for saints," and later, "How does he know it only lasts a second? How long's a
second?" Then he began to cry, beating his head gently against the wall. They
had given a chance to Padre Jose, but they had never given him a chance at
all. Perhaps they had got it all wrong--just because he had escaped them for
such a time. Perhaps they really thought he would refuse the conditions Padre
Jose had accepted, that he would refuse to marry, that he was proud. Perhaps
if he suggested it himself, he would escape yet. The hope calmed him for a
while, and he fell asleep with his head against the wall.

He had a curious dream. He dreamed he was sitting at a cafe table in front
of the high altar of the cathedral. About six dishes were spread before him,
and he was eating hungrily. There was a smell of incense and an odd sense of
elation. The dishes--like all food in dreams--did not taste of much, but he
had a sense that when he had finished them, he would have the best dish of
all. A priest passed to and fro before the altar saying Mass, but he took no
notice: the service no longer seemed to concern him. At last the six plates
were empty; someone out of sight rang the sanctus bell, and the serving priest
knelt before he raised the Host. But he sat on, just waiting, paying no
attention to the God over the altar, as though that were a God for other people
and not for him. Then the glass by his plate began to fill with wine, and
looking up he saw that the child from the banana station was serving him.

She said, "I got it from my father's room."

"You didn't steal it?"

"Not exactly," she said in her careful and precise voice.

He said, "It is very good of you. I had forgotten the code--what did you
call it?"

"Morse."

"That was it. Morse. Three long taps and one short one," and immediately
the taps began: the priest by the altar tapped, a whole invisible congregation
tapped along the aisles--three long and one short. He asked, "What is it?"

"News," the child said, watching him with a stern, responsible and interested
gaze.

When he woke up it was dawn. He woke with a huge feeling of hope which
suddenly and completely left him at the first sight of the prison yard. It
was the morning of his death. He crouched on the floor with the empty
brandy-flask in his hand trying to remember an Act of Contrition. "O God, I
am sorry and beg pardon for all my sins . . . crucified . . . worthy of thy
dreadful punishments." He was confused, his mind was on other things: it
was not the good death for which one always prayed. He caught sight of his
own shadow on the cell wall; it had a look of surprise and grotesque
unimportance. What a fool he had been to think that he was strong enough to
stay when others fled. What an impossible fellow I am, he thought, and how
useless. I have done nothing for anybody. I might just as well have never
lived. His parents were dead--soon he wouldn't even be a memory--perhaps
after all he was not at the moment afraid of damnation--even the fear of pain
was in the background. He felt only an immense disappointment because he
had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him, at
that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would
only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like
someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He
knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted--to be a
saint.




PART FOUR




CHAPTER 1




Mrs Fellows lay in bed in the hot hotel room, listening to the siren of a boat
on the river. She could see nothing because she had a handkerchief soaked in
eau-de-Cologne over her eyes and forehead. She called sharply out, "My
dear. My dear," but nobody replied. She felt that she had been prematurely
buried in this big brass family tomb, all alone on two pillows, under a canopy.
"Dear," she said again sharply, and waited.

"Yes, Trixy?" It was Captain Fellows. He said, "I was asleep, dreaming . . ."

"Put some more Cologne on this handkerchief, dear. My head's splitting."

"Yes, Trixy."

He took the handkerchief away; he looked old and tired and bored--a man
without a hobby, walking over to the dressing-table.

"Not too much, dear. It will be days before we can get any more."

He didn't answer, and she said sharply, "You heard what I said, dear,
didn't you?"

"Yes."

"You are so silent these days. You don't realize what it is to be ill and
alone."

"Well," Captain Fellows said, "you know how it is."

"But we agreed, dear, didn't we, that it was better just to say nothing at all,
ever. We mustn't be morbid."

"No."

"We've got our own life to lead."

"Yes."

He came across to the bed and laid the handkerchief over his wife's eyes.
Then sitting down on a chair, he slipped his hand under the net and felt for
her hand. They gave an odd effect of being children, lost in a strange town,
without adult care.

"Have you got the tickets?" she asked.

"Yes, dear."

"I must get up later and pack, but my head hurts so. Did you tell them to
collect the boxes?"

"I forgot."

"You really must try to think of things," she said weakly and sullenly,
"There's no one else," and they both sat silent at a phrase they should have
avoided. He said suddenly, "There's a lot of excitement in town."

"Not a revolution?"

"Oh no. They caught a priest and He's being shot this morning, poor devil. I
can't help wondering whether It's the man Coral--I mean the man we sheltered."

"It's not likely."

"No."

"There are so many priests."

He let go of her hand and going to the window looked out. Boats on the
river, a small stony public garden with a bust and vultures everywhere.
Mrs Fellows said, "It will be good to be back home. I sometimes thought I
should die in this place."

"Of course not, dear."

"Well, people do."

"Yes, they do," he said glumly.

"Now, dear," Mrs Fellows said sharply, "your promise." She gave a long
sigh, "My poor head."

"Would you like some aspirin?"

"I don't know where I've put it. Somehow nothing is ever in its place."

"Shall I go out and get you some more?"

"No, dear, I can't bear to be left alone." She went on with dramatic
brightness, "I expect I shall be all right when we get home. I'll have a proper
doctor then. I sometimes think It's more than a headache. Did I tell you that
I'd heard from Norah?"

"No."

"Get me my glasses, dear, and I'll read you--what concerns us."

"They're on your bed."

"So they are." One of the sailing-boats cast off and began to drift down the
wide sluggish stream, going towards the sea. She read with satisfaction,
"'Dear Trix: how you have suffered. That scoundrel . . .'" She broke abruptly
off. "Oh yes, and then she goes on: 'Of course, you and Charles must stay
with us for a while until you have found somewhere to live. If you don't
mind semi-detached . . .'"

Captain Fellows said suddenly and harshly, "I'm not going back."

"The rent is only fifty-six pounds a year, exclusive, and There's a maid's
bathroom."

"I'm staying."

"A 'cookanheat.' What on earth are you saying, dear?"

"I'm not going back."

"We've been over that so often, dear. You know it would kill me to stay."

"You needn't stay."

"But I couldn't go alone," Mrs Fellows said. "What on earth would Norah
think? Besides--oh, It's absurd."

"A man here can do a job of work."

"Picking bananas," Mrs Fellows said. She gave a little cold laugh. "And
you weren't much good at that."

He turned furiously towards the bed. "You don't mind," he said, "do you --
running away and leaving her . . ."

"It wasn't my fault. If you'd been at home . . ." She began to cry hunched
up under the mosquito-net. She said, "I'll never get home alive."

He came wearily over to the bed and took her hand again. It was no good.
They had both been deserted. They had to stick together. "You won't leave
me alone, will you, dear?" she asked. The room reeked of eau-de-Cologne.

"No, dear."

"You do realize how absurd it is?"

"Yes."

They sat in silence for a long while, as the morning sun climbed outside
and the room got stiflingly hot. Mrs Fellows said at last, "A penny, dear."

"What?"

"For your thoughts."

"I was just thinking of that priest. A queer fellow. He drank. I wonder if
It's him."

"If it is, I expect he deserves all he gets."

"But the odd thing is--the way she went on afterwards--as if He'd told her
things."

"Darling," Mrs Fellows repeated, with harsh weakness from the bed, "your
promise."

"Yes, I'm sorry. I was trying, but it seems to come up all the time."

"We've got each other, dear," Mrs Fellows said, and the letter from Norah
rustled as she turned her head, swathed in handkerchief, away from the hard
outdoor light.


Mr Tench bent over the enamel basin washing his hands with pink soap. He
said in his bad Spanish, "You don't need to be afraid. You can tell me directly
it hurts."

The jefe's room had been fixed up as a kind of temporary dentistry--at
considerable expense, for it had entailed transporting not only Mr Tench
himself but Mr Tench's cabinet, chair, and all sorts of mysterious packing-
cases which seemed to contain little but straw and which were unlikely to
return empty.

"I've had it for months," the jefe said. "You can't imagine the pain . . ."

"It was foolish of you not to call me in sooner. Your mouth"s in a very bad
state. You are lucky to have escaped pyorrhoea." He finished washing and
suddenly stood, towel in hand, thinking of something. "What's the matter?"
the jefe asked. Mr Tench woke with a jump, and coming forward to his cabinet,
began to lay out the drill needles in a little metallic row of pain. The
jefe watched with apprehension. He said, "Your hand is very jumpy. Are you
quite sure you are well enough this morning?"

"It's indigestion," Mr Tench said. "Sometimes I have so many spots in front
of my eyes I might be wearing a veil." He fitted a needle into the drill and
bent the arm round. "Now open your mouth very wide." He began to stuff the
jefe's mouth with plugs of cotton. He said, "I've never seen a mouth as bad as
yours--except once."

The jefe struggled to speak. Only a dentist could have interpreted the
muffled and uneasy question.

"He wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people
in this country, don't you, with bullets?"

As he picked and picked at the tooth, he tried to keep up a running fire of
conversation; that was how one did things at Southend. He said, "An odd
thing happened to me just before I came up the river. I got a letter from my
wife. Hadn't so much as heard from her for--oh, twenty years. Then out of
the blue she . . ." he leant closer and levered furiously with his pick: the
jefe beat the air and grunted. "Wash out your mouth," Mr Tench said, and began
grimly to fix his drill. He said, "What was I talking about? Oh, the wife,
wasn't it? Seems she had got religion of some kind. Some sort of a group --
Oxford. What would she be doing in Oxford? Wrote to say that she had forgiven
me and wanted to make things legal. Divorce, I mean. Forgiven me," Mr Tench
said, looking round the little hideous room, lost in thought, with his hand
on the drill. He belched and put his other hand against his stomach, pressing,
pressing, seeking an obscure pain which was nearly always there. The jefe
leant back exhausted with his mouth wide open.

"It comes and goes," Mr Tench said, losing the thread of his thought com-
pletely. "Of course, It's nothing. Just indigestion. But it gets me locked."
He stared moodily into the mouth as though a crystal were concealed between
the carious teeth. Then, as if he were exerting an awful effort of will,
he leant forward, brought the arm of the drill round and began to pedal. Buzz
and grate. Buzz and grate. The jefe stiffened all over and clutched the arms of
the chair, and Mr Tench's foot went up and down, up and down. The jefe
made odd sounds and waved his hands. "Hold hard," Mr Tench said, "hold
hard. There's just one tiny corner. Nearly finished. There she comes. There."
He stopped and said, "Good God, What's that?"

He left the jefe altogether and went to the window. In the yard below a
squad of police had just grounded their arms. With his hand on his stomach
he protested, "Not another revolution?"

The jefe levered himself upright and spat out a gag. "Of course not," he
said. "A man's being shot."

"What for?"

"Treason."

"I thought you generally did it," Mr Tench said, "up by the cemetery?" A
horrid fascination kept him by the window: this was something he had never
seen. He and the vultures looked down together on the little whitewashed
courtyard.

"It was better not to this time. There might have been a demonstration.
People are so ignorant."

A small man came out of a side door: he was held up by two policemen,
but you could tell that he was doing his best--it was only that his legs were
not fully under his control. They paddled him across to the opposite wall; an
officer tied a handkerchief round his eyes. Mr Tench thought: But I know
him. Good God, one ought to do something. This was like seeing a neighbour
shot.

The jefe said, "What are you waiting for? The air gets into this tooth."

Of course there was nothing to do. Everything went very quickly like a
routine. The officer stepped aside, the rifles went up, and the little
man suddenly made jerky movements with his arms. He was trying to say
something: what was the phrase they were always supposed to use? That was
routine too, but perhaps his mouth was too dry, because nothing came out
except a word that sounded like "Excuse". The crash of the rifles shook Mr
Tench: they seemed to vibrate inside his own guts: he felt sick and shut his
eyes. Then there was a single shot, and opening them again he saw the officer
stuffing his gun back into his holster, and the little man was a routine heap
beside the wall--something unimportant which had to be cleared away. Two
knock-kneed men approached quickly. This was an arena, and the bull was
dead, and there was nothing more to wait for any more.

"Oh," the jefe moaned from the chair, "the pain, the pain." He implored Mr
Tench, "Hurry," but Mr Tench was lost in thought beside the window, one
hand automatically seeking in his stomach for the hidden uneasiness. He
remembered the little man rising bitterly and hopelessly from his chair that
blinding afternoon to follow the child out of town; he remembered a green
watering-can, the photo of the children, that cast he was making out of sand
for a split palate.

"The filling," the jefe pleaded, and Mr Tench's eyes went to the gold on the
glass dish. Currency--he would insist on foreign currency: this time he was
going to clear out, clear out for good. In the yard everything had been tidied
away; a man was throwing sand out of a spade, as if he were filling a grave.
But there was no grave: there was nobody there: an appalling sense of
loneliness came over Mr Tench, doubling him with indigestion. The little
fellow had spoken English and knew about his children. He felt deserted.


"And now," the woman's voice swelled triumphantly, and the two little girls
with beady eyes held their breath, "the great testing day had come." Even
the boy showed interest, standing by the window, looking out into the dark
curfew-emptied street--this was the last chapter, and in the last chapter
things always happened violently. Perhaps all life was like that--dull and
then a heroic flurry at the end.

"'When the Chief of Police came to Juan's cell he found him on his knees,
praying. He had not slept at all, but had spent his last night preparing for
martyrdom. He was quite calm and happy, and smiling at the Chief of Police,
he asked him if he had come to lead him to the banquet. Even that evil man,
who had persecuted so many innocent people, was visibly moved."

If only it would get on towards the shooting, the boy thought: the shooting
never failed to excite him, and he always waited anxiously for the coup de
grace.

"They led him out into the prison yard. No need to bind those hands now
busy with his beads. In that short walk to the wall of execution, did young
Juan look back on those few, those happy years he had so bravely spent? Did
he remember days in the seminary, the kindly rebukes of his elders, the
moulding discipline, days, too, of frivolity when he acted Nero before the old
bishop? Nero was here beside him, and this the Roman amphitheatre."

The mother's voice was getting a little hoarse: she fingered the remaining
pages rapidly: it wasn't worth while stopping now, and she raced more and
more rapidly on.

"Reaching the wall, Juan turned and began to pray--not for himself, but
for his enemies, for the squad of poor innocent Indian soldiers who faced him
and even for the Chief of Police himself. He raised the crucifix at the end of
his beads and prayed that God would forgive them, would enlighten their
ignorance, and bring them at last--as Saul the persecutor was brought--into
his eternal kingdom."

"Had they loaded?" the boy asked.

"What do you mean--"had they loaded"?"

"Why didn't they fire and stop him?"

"Because God decided otherwise." She coughed and went on: "The officer
gave the command to present arms. In that moment a smile of complete
adoration and happiness passed over Juan's face. It was as if he could see
the arms of God open to receive him. He had always told his mother and sis-
ters that he had a premonition that he would be in heaven before them. He
would say with a whimsical smile to his mother, the good but over-careful
housewife: "I will have tidied everything up for you." Now the moment had
come, the officer gave the order to fire, and --" She had been reading too fast
because it was past the little girls' bedtime and now she was thwarted by a
fit of hiccups. "Fire," she repeated, "and . . ."

The two little girls sat placidly side by side--they looked nearly asleep --
this was the part of the book they never cared much about; they endured it for
the sake of the amateur theatricals and the first communion, and of the sister
who became a nun and paid a moving farewell to her family in the third chapter.

"Fire," the mother tried again, "and Juan, raising both arms above his head,
called out in a strong brave voice to the soldiers and the levelled rifles, "Hail,
Christ the King." Next moment he fell riddled with a dozen bullets and the
officer, stooping over his body, put his revolver close to Juan's ear and pulled
the trigger."

A long sigh came from the window.

"No need to have fired another shot. The soul of the young hero had
already left its earthly mansion, and the happy smile on the dead face told
even those ignorant men where they would find Juan now. One of the men
there that day was so moved by his bearing that he secretly soaked his
handkerchief in the martyr's blood, and that handkerchief, cut into a hundred
relics, found its way into many pious homes. And now," the mother went
rapidly on, clapping her hands, "to bed."

"And that one," the boy said, "they shot today. Was he a hero too?"

"Yes."

"The one who stayed with us that time?"

"Yes. He was one of the martyrs of the Church."

"He had a funny smell," one of the little girls said.

"You must never say that again," the mother said. "He may be one of the
saints."

"Shall we pray to him then?"

The mother hesitated. "It would do no harm. Of course, before we know he
is a saint, there will have to be miracles . . ."

"Did he call "Viva el Cristo Rey"?" the boy asked.

"Yes. He was one of the heroes of the faith."

"And a handkerchief soaked in blood?" the boy went on. "Did anyone do
that?"

The mother said ponderously, "I have reason to believe . . . Senora Jiminez
told me . . . I think if your father will give me a little money, I shall
be able to get a relic."

"Does it cost money?"

"How else could it be managed? Everybody can't have a piece."

"No."

He squatted beside the window, staring out, and behind his back came the
muffled sound of small girls going to bed. It brought it home to one--to have
had a hero in the house, though it had only been for twenty-four hours. And
he was the last. There were no more priests and no more heroes. He listened
resentfully to the sound of booted feet coming up the pavement. Ordinary life
pressed round him. He got down from the window-seat and picked up his candle
--Zapata, Villa, Madero, and the rest, they were all dead, and it was people
like the man out there who killed them. He felt deceived.

The lieutenant came along the pavement; there was something brisk and stub-
born about his walk, as if he were saying at every step, "I have done what
I have done." He looked in at the boy holding the candle with a look of
indecisive recognition. He said to himself, "I would do much more for him
and them, more more; life is never going to be again for them what it was for
me," but the dynamic love which used to move his trigger-finger felt flat and
dead. Of course, he told himself, it will come back. It was like love of a
woman and went in cycles: he had satisfied himself that morning, that was
all. This was satiety. He smiled painfully at the child through the window and
said, "Buenas noches." The boy was looking at his revolver-holster and he
remembered an incident in the plaza when he had allowed a child to touch his
gun--perhaps this boy. He smiled again and touched it too--to show he
remembered, and the boy crinkled up his face and spat through the window
bars, accurately, so that a little blob of spittle lay on the revolver-butt.

The boy went across the patio to bed. He had a little dark room with an iron
bedstead that he shared with his father. He lay next to the wall and his father
would lie on the outside, so that he could come to bed without waking his
son. He took off his shoes and undressed glumly by candlelight. He could
hear the whispering of prayers in the other room; he felt cheated and
disappointed because he had missed something. Lying on his back in the heat
he stared up at the ceiling, and it seemed to him that there was nothing in the
world but the store, his mother reading, and silly games in the plaza.

But very soon he went to sleep. He dreamed that the priest whom they had
shot that morning was back in the house dressed in the clothes his father had
lent him and laid out stiffly for burial. The boy sat beside the bed and his
mother read out of a very long book all about how the priest had acted in
front of the bishop the part of Julius Caesar: there was a fish basket at her
feet, and the fish were bleeding, wrapped in her handkerchief. He was very
bored and very tired and somebody was hammering nails into a coffin in the
passage. Suddenly the dead priest winked at him--an unmistakable flicker of
the eyelid, just like that.

He woke and there was the crack, crack on the knocker on the outer door.
His father wasn't in bed and there was complete silence in the other room.
Hours must have passed. He lay listening. He was frightened, but after a short
interval the knocking began again, and nobody stirred anywhere in the house.
Reluctantly, he put his feet on the ground--it might be only his father locked
out; he lit the candle and wrapped a blanket round himself and stood listening
again. His mother might hear it and go, but he knew very well that it was his
duty. He was the only man in the house.

Slowly he made his way across the patio towards the outer door. Suppose
it was the lieutenant come back to revenge himself for the spittle . . . He
unlocked the heavy iron door and swung it open. A stranger stood in the
street, a tall pale thin man with a rather sour mouth, who carried a small
suitcase. He named the boy's mother and asked if this were the senora"s
house. Yes, the boy said, but she was asleep. He began to shut the door, but
a pointed shoe got in the way.

The stranger said, "I have only just landed. I came up the river tonight. I
thought perhaps . . . I have an introduction for the senora from a great friend
of hers."

"She is asleep," the boy repeated.

"If you would let me come in," the man said with an odd frightened smile,
and suddenly lowering his voice he said to the boy, "I am a priest."

"You?" the boy exclaimed.

"Yes," he said gently. "My name is Father --" But the boy had already
swung the door open and put his lips to his hand before the other could give
himself a name.