The power and the glory (16 page)

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 quiet 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 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: when the rain came it was at first a kind of relief. 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 the 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 all the way because he wanted to kill the mother as well as the child: he was sentimental that way. 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 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 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 somebody, 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 still 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 motorcars. 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 scrumpled 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: Father So-and-so, 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 onto a long slope of grass. There were lights and huts, below, and up here 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 III
Chapter One

THE middle-aged woman sat on the veranda darning socks: she wore pince-nez and she had kicked off her shoes for 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 idealistic face. You needed to be shrewd in this country if you were going to retain any ideals at all: 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 to ask questions or to look ahead.
"Soon I can go on," the priest said.
"You don't have to hurry," Miss Lehr said, 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 Huey Long-they ought to control him. It doesn't do any good insulting other countries."
"Haven't they tried to take your land away?"
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. Villas 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 said: he stood by the earthenware jar, glass in hand, trying to collect his thoughts, staring out over the long and peaceful grassy 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 conciliatingly. 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 way 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 the little cold stream while the sun flattened.... 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 monastic, 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 fly-leaf 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, xii.
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 xiv.
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 Bible." He was on the defensive all the time about his faith, as if he was perpetually conscious of some friction, like that of an ill-fitting shoe.
The priest said: "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 grass-grown 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 said: "Father, will you hear our confessions?"
He said: "Yes. Yes. In Señor 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 said 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. He 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 Señor 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 went 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. Señor Lehr will give me food for six 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 case 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 water, beer, spirits.... The priest came in out of the dusty street to the heat of the lamp. He said: "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..."
He 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 said: "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 case, 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.