The power and the glory (14 page)

"And there's a Red Shirt," the priest said.
"A Red Shirt?"
"He really caught me."
"Mother of God," the mestizo said, "and they'll all have the ear of the Governor." He looked beseechingly up. He said: "You're an educated man. Advise me."
The priest said: "It would be murder, 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 said. He stood in the doorway, in the sunlight, looking in.
The priest said slowly: "He wanted me to clean 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 excusado 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 disappear-as if for ever-through the archway to where her sister waited with the fine: they were both tied up in black shawls like something bought in the market, something 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 scrumpled newspaper cutting and thought with relief: 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 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 said, "has he cleaned up the cells?" He didn't take his eyes from his papers. He said: "Tell the sergeant I want two dozen men with properly cleaned rifles-within two minutes." He looked abstractedly 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 said: "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 Four

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 flag-staff: he had an idea that all Englishmen lowered their flags at sunset and sang "God Save the King." He came carefully round the comer 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 was none here, none at all. He must have arrived on a day when the crop had gone downriver. 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 impossible to tell: time was elastic: it stretched to snapping-point. 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 was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew 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 spread-eagled: 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 a window-perhaps this was the child's room. Everything has 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 inefficiently 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: small fingers of crudely coloured liquid lay in some of them. There were medicines for headaches, stomach-aches, medicine 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 is 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 waste-paper 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 wrong, crossed out, and rewritten) "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 buzzard. He read on: "If five men took three days to mow a meadow of four acres five rods, 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 scrumpled 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 muzzle, 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?-that had been left deliberately for this mongrel; he could imagine the child remembering that, 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 muzzle. 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 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 of the 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: she would eat the bone itself. He dropped it under her muzzle and left the kitchen.
He made one more progress through the empty rooms. A broken shoe-horn: medicine bottles: an essay on the American War of Independence-there was nothing to tell him why they had gone away. He came out onto 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 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 griffin and an 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 buzzard 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 buzzard 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 the oddest 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.