The power and the glory (5 page)

"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 there at all the whole of life was adult. In one of Henry Beckley's early reading-books there had been a picture of a doll's tea-party: it was incomprehensible, like a ceremony she hadn't learned: she couldn't see the point of pretending. Four hundred and fifty-six. Four hundred and fifty-seven. The sweat poured down the peons' bodies steadily like a shower-bath. An awful pain took her suddenly in the stomach-she missed a load and tried to catch up in her calculations: the sense of responsibility for the first time felt 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: childhood was something she had never really been conscious of.
"Is that the last?" she said.
"Yes, Señorita."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, Señorita."
But she had to see for herself. Never before had it occurred to her to do a job unwillingly-if she didn't do a thing, nobody would-but today she wanted to lie down, to sleep: if all the bananas didn't get away it was her father's fault. She wondered whether she had fever: her feet felt so cold on the hot ground. Oh, well, she thought, and went patiently into the barn, found the torch, and switched it on. Yes, the place seemed empty enough, but she never left a job half done. She advanced towards the back wall, holding the torch in front of her. An empty bottle, rolled away-she dropped the light on it: Cerveza Moctezuma. Then the torch lit the back wall: low down near the ground somebody had scrawled in chalk-she came closer-a lot of little crosses lay in the circle of light. He must have lain down among the bananas and tried-mechanically-to relieve his fear by writing something, and this was all he could think of. The child stood in pain and looked at them: a horrible novelty enclosed her whole morning: it was as if today everything was memorable.
The Chief of Police was in the cantina playing billiards when the lieutenant found him. The jefe 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 when 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.
"Why? They are-fun."
"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 said 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 factitious 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?"
"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 who think..." 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 semi-circle 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 said. He drew 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 blood. 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 No. 5."
"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 the priest's head round 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 II
Chapter One

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 makes 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 the 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 in, 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 out of 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-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 house-keeper: 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 Brigida?" 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: 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 and appalling love. He said: "I'm very tired. The police were about near Zapata..."
"Why didn't you make for Montecristo?"
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 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 émigré 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 Pueblita?"
"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 said. "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."
"Conception?" One of his lids began to twitch, up and down, up and down: in such trivial ways the body expresses anxiety, horror, or despair. He said: "Who?" They looked at him stupidly. He said furiously: "Whom 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 José in the capital... you have heard of him...?"
They said unconvincingly: "Of course not, father."
He said: "What am I saying now? It's not what you want or what I want." He said 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 bottle to his mouth.
He said shyly: "And Brigida... 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: "Brigida, Brigida," 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 shamefaced 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 balked 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 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.