The power and the glory (6 page)

"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 chicle 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 a 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 nonexistent?
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 said: "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 and malicious gesture and was gone-perhaps for ever as far as he was concerned. To those you love you do not always say good-bye 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 if a whole world had ended.
It was dark outside: no sign 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 awakened 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 never came. 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 immense 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 stumblingly 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 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. That 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. "O 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-Comelii, Cypriani, Laurentii, Chrysologi-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 enfim 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 round 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 packing-case 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 on 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 stirring, 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. Onto 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. Oh, 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 said: "Where's my case?"
"Never mind your case. Get onto 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 was to start?
Out of all the huts the villagers were reluctantly emerging-the children first: they were curious and not frightened. 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 was the most important thing there.