Monsignor Quixote (11 page)

‘Give me another bit of cheese,' Father Quixote said. ‘Listen. Here comes the jeep.'

The jeep drove slowly past them. The fat Guardia was at the wheel and the thin one looked penetratingly towards them as though he were a naturalist observing two rare insects which he must remember to describe with accuracy. Father Quixote felt glad that he was again wearing his clerical collar. He even pushed out a foot to show the purple socks which he hated.

‘We have conquered the windmills,' the Mayor said.

‘What windmills?'

‘The Guardia revolve with every wind. They were there with the Generalissimo. They are there now. If my party came to power they would still be there, turning with the wind from the East.'

‘Shall we take the road again now they are gone?'

‘Not yet. I want to see if they come back.'

‘If you don't want them to follow us to Avila, what way shall we take?'

‘I'm sorry to deprive you of St Teresa's ring finger, but I think Segovia would be better. Tomorrow we will visit in Salamanca a holier shrine than the one you prayed at today.'

The first chill of the evening had touched them. The Mayor moved restlessly to the road and back again: no sign of the Guardia. He said, ‘Were you never in love with a woman, father?'

‘Never. Not in the way you mean.'

‘Were you never tempted . . .?'

‘Never.'

‘Strange and inhuman.'

‘It's not so strange or inhuman,' Father Quixote replied. ‘I have been protected like many others. It is a little like the taboo of incest. Not many are tempted to break that.'

‘No, but there are always so many alternatives to incest. Like a friend's sister.'

‘I had my alternative too.'

‘Who was she?'

‘A girl called Martin.'

‘She was your Dulcinea?'

‘Yes, if you like, but she lived a very long way from El Toboso. All the same her letters reached me there. They were a great comfort to me when things were difficult with the bishop. There was one thing she wrote – I think of it nearly every day: “Before we die by the sword, let us die by pin stabs.”'

‘Your ancestor would have preferred the sword.'

‘All the same, perhaps, in the end it was by pin stabs that he died.'

‘Martin – from the way you pronounce it she was not a Spanish girl?'

‘No, she was a Norman. You mustn't misunderstand me. She was dead many years before I knew her and grew to love her. You have heard of her perhaps under another name. She lived at Lisieux. The Carmelites there had a special vocation – to pray for priests. I hope – I think – she prays for me.'

‘Oh, you are talking about that St Thérèse – the name Martin confused me.'

‘I'm glad there's a Communist who has heard of her.'

‘You know I was not always a Communist.'

‘Well, anyway, perhaps a true Communist is a sort of priest, and in that case she prays undoubtedly for you.'

‘It's cold waiting around here. Let's be off.'

They drove for a while in silence back along the road they had come. There was no sign of the jeep. They passed the turning to Avila and followed the sign towards Segovia. The Mayor said at last, ‘So that is your love story, father. Mine is rather different, except that the woman is dead too, like yours.'

‘God rest her soul,' Father Quixote said. It was an automatic reflex when he spoke, but in the silence that descended on both of them he prayed to the souls in Purgatory: ‘You are nearer God than I am. Pray for us both.'

The great Roman aqueduct of Segovia loomed ahead of them, casting a long shadow in the evening light.

They found a lodging in a small
albergue
not far from the Church of St Martin – that name again – the name by which he always thought of her. She seemed closer to him then than in her trappings as a saint or under her sentimental nickname of the Little Flower. He would even sometimes address her in his prayers as Señorita Martin as though the family name might catch her ear through all the thousands of incantations addressed to her in all tongues by the light of candles before the plaster image.

They had drunk enough by the roadside and neither was in the mood to seek a restaurant. It was as though two dead women had been travelling with them during those last kilometres. Father Quixote was glad to have a room to himself, minute though it was. It seemed to him that his journey had already extended across the whole breadth of Spain, though he knew he was not much more than two hundred kilometres from La Mancha. The slowness of Rocinante made a nonsense of distance. Well, the furthest that his ancestor had gone from La Mancha in all his journeys had been the city of Barcelona and yet anyone who had read the true history would have thought that Don Quixote had covered the whole immense area of Spain. There was a virtue in slowness which we had lost. Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.

Before he went to sleep Father Quixote read a little because he was still haunted by his dream. He opened as was his custom St Francis de Sales at random. Even before the birth of Christ men had taken the
sortes Virgilianae
as a kind of horoscope and he had more faith in St Francis than in Virgil – that rather derivative poet. What he found in
The Love of God
astonished him a little, but all the same it encouraged him. ‘Among the reflections and resolutions it is good to make use of colloquies, and speak sometimes to our Lord, sometimes to the Angels, to the Saints and to oneself, to one's own heart, to sinners, and even to inanimate creatures . . .' He said to Rocinante, ‘Forgive me. I have driven you too hard,' and fell into a dreamless sleep.

VI

HOW MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE AND

SANCHO VISIT ANOTHER HOLY SITE

‘I am glad,' the Mayor said as they took the road to Salamanca, ‘that you have at last consented to put on that bib – what do you call it?'

‘A
pechera
.'

‘I was afraid that we might find ourselves in prison if those Guardia checked too quickly in Avila.'

‘Why? For what?'

‘The reason is unimportant, it's only the fact which counts. I had some experience of prison during the Civil War. There was always a certain tension in prison, you know. One's friends went away and never came back.'

‘But now – there's no war now. Things are better.'

‘Yes. Perhaps. Of course in Spain one has always found that the best people have been for a while in prison. It's possible that we would never have heard of your great ancestor if Cervantes had not served his time that way more than once. The prison gives you even more chance to think than a monastery where the poor devils have to wake up at all sorts of ungodly hours to pray. In prison I was never woken up before six o'clock and at night the lights went out usually at nine. Of course interrogations were apt to be painful, but they took place at a reasonable hour. Never during the siesta. The great thing to remember, monsignor, is that unlike an abbot an interrogator wants to sleep at his usual hour.'

In Arévalo there were some old torn posters of a travelling circus on the walls. A man in tights displayed arms and thighs of an exorbitant size. El Tigre he was called – ‘The Great Wrestler of the Pyrenees'.

‘How little Spain changes,' the Mayor said. ‘You would never feel in France that you were in the world of Racine or Molière, nor in London that you were still close to Shakespeare's time. It is only in Spain and Russia that time stands still. We shall have our adventures on the road, father, much as your ancestor did. We have already battled with the windmills and we have only missed by a week or two an adventure with the Tiger. He would probably have proved as tame when challenged as your ancestor found the lion.'

‘But I am not Don Quixote, Sancho. I would be afraid to challenge a man of such a size.'

‘You underrate yourself, father. Your faith is your spear. If the Tiger had dared to say something derogatory of your beloved Dulcinea . . .'

‘But you know I have no Dulcinea, Sancho.'

‘I was referring of course to Señorita Martin.'

Another poster which they passed exhibited a tattooed lady almost as large as the Tiger. ‘Spain has always loved monsters,' Sancho said and he gave his strange yapping laugh. ‘What would you do, father, if you had to be present at the birth of a monster with two heads?'

‘I would baptize it, of course. What an absurd question.'

‘But you would be wrong, monsignor. Remember I have been reading Father Heribert Jone. He teaches that if you doubt whether you are dealing with one monster or two, you must strike an average and baptize one head absolutely and the other conditionally.'

‘Really, Sancho, I am not responsible for Father Jone. You seem to have read him far more closely than I have ever done.'

‘And in the case of a difficult birth, father, when some other part than the head is presented first, you must baptize that, so that in the case of a breech birth . . .'

‘Tonight, Sancho, I promise you that I will take up the study of Marx and Lenin if you will leave Father Jone alone.'

‘Then begin with Marx and
The Communist Manifesto
. The
Manifesto
is short and Marx is a much better writer than Lenin.'

They crossed the River Tormes into the grey old city of Salamanca in the early afternoon. Father Quixote was still unaware of the object of their pilgrimage, but he was happy in his ignorance. This was the university city where he had as a boy dreamt of making his studies. Here he could visit the actual lecture room where the great St John of the Cross attended the classes of the theologian Fray Luis de León, and Fray Luis might well have known his ancestor if the Don's travels had taken him to Salamanca. Looking up at the great carved gateway of the university, with the chiselled Pope surrounded by his cardinals, the heads in medallion of all the Catholic kings, where even Venus and Hercules had been found a place, not to mention a very small frog, he muttered a prayer. The frog had been pointed out by two children who demanded payment in return.

‘What did you say, father?'

‘This is a holy city, Sancho.'

‘You feel at home here, don't you? Here in the library are all your books of chivalry in their first editions, mouldering away in old calf. I doubt if any student draws one out to blow the dust away.'

‘How lucky you were to study here, Sancho.'

‘Lucky? I'm not so sure of that. I feel very much an exile now. Perhaps we should have travelled east towards the home I've never known. To the future, not to the past. Not to the home I left.'

‘You went through this very doorway to your lectures. I'm trying to imagine the young Sancho . . .'

‘They were not lectures by Father Heribert Jone.'

‘Wasn't there at least one professor whom you were prepared to listen to?'

‘Oh yes. In those days I still had a half-belief. A complete believer I could never have listened to for long, but there was one professor with a half-belief and I listened to him for two years. Perhaps I would have lasted longer at Salamanca if he had stayed, but he went into exile – as he had already done years before. He wasn't a Communist, I doubt if he was a Socialist, but he couldn't swallow the Generalissimo. So here we've come to see what's left of him.'

In a very small square, above folds of rumpled green-black stone, an aggressive head with a pointed beard stared upwards at the shutters of a little house. ‘That's where he died,' Sancho said, ‘in a room up there sitting with a friend before a charcoal burner to keep him warm. His friend saw suddenly that one of his slippers was on fire and yet Unamuno had not stirred. You can still see the stigmata of the burnt shoe in the wooden floor.'

‘Unamuno.' Father Quixote repeated the name and looked up with respect at the face of stone, the hooded eyes expressing the fierceness and the arrogance of individual thought.

‘You know how he loved your ancestor and studied his life. If he had lived in those days perhaps he would have followed the Don on the mule called Dapple instead of Sancho. Many priests gave a sigh of relief when they heard of his death. Perhaps even the Pope in Rome felt easier without him. And Franco too, of course, if he was intelligent enough to recognize the strength of his enemy. In a sense he was my enemy too for he kept me in the Church for several years with that half-belief of his which for a while I could share.'

‘And now you have a complete belief, don't you? In the prophet Marx. You don't have to think for yourself any more. Isaiah has spoken. You are in the hands of future history. How happy you must be with your complete belief. There's only one thing you will ever lack – the dignity of despair.' Father Quixote spoke with an unaccustomed anger – or was it, he wondered, envy?

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

‘He wrote that?'

‘Yes.'

They returned to Rocinante.

‘Where do we go from here, Sancho?'

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

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