He turned. It was the mestizo, padding behind him, dripping water: he must have swum the river. His two teeth stuck out over his lower lip, and he grinned ingratiatingly. ‘What do you want?’ the priest asked sharply.
‘You didn’t tell me you were going to Carmen.’
‘Why should I?’
‘You see, I want to go to Carmen, too. It’s better to travel in company.’ He was wearing a shirt, a pair of white trousers, and gym shoes through which one big toe showed – plump and yellow like something which lives underground. He scratched himself under the armpits and came chummily up to the priest’s stirrup. He said, ‘You are not offended, señor?’
‘Why do you call me señor?’
‘Anyone can tell you’re a man of education.’
‘The forest is free to all,’ the priest said.
‘Do you know Carmen well?’ the man asked.
‘Not well. I have a few friends.’
‘You’re going on business, I suppose?’
The priest said nothing. He could feel the man’s hand on his foot, a light and deprecating touch. The man said, ‘There’s a finca off the road two leagues from here. It would be as well to stay the night.’
‘I am in a hurry,’ the priest said.
‘But what good would it be reaching Carmen at one, two in the morning? We could sleep at the finca and be there before the sun was high.’
‘I do what suits me.’
‘Of course, señor, of course.’ The man was silent for a little while, and then said, ‘It isn’t wise travelling at night if the señor hasn’t got a gun. It’s different for a man like me . . .’
‘I am a poor man,’ the priest said. ‘You can see for yourself. I am not worth robbing.’
‘And then there’s the gringo – they say he’s a wild kind of a man, a real pistolero. He comes up to you and says in his own language – Stop: what is the way to – well, some place, and you do not understand what he is saying and perhaps you make a movement and he shoots you dead. But perhaps you know Americano, señor?’
‘Of course I don’t. How should I? I am a poor man. But I don’t listen to every fairy-tale.’
‘Do you come from far?’
The priest thought a moment: ‘Concepción.’ He could do no more harm there.
The man for the time being seemed satisfied. He walked along by the mule, a hand on the stirrup. Every now and then he spat. When the priest looked down he could see the big toe moving like a grub along the ground – he was probably harmless. It was the general condition of life that made for suspicion. The dusk fell and then almost at once the dark. The mule moved yet more slowly. Noise broke out all round them; it was like a theatre when the curtain falls and behind in the wings and passages hubbub begins. Things you couldn’t put a name to – jaguars perhaps – cried in the undergrowth, monkeys moved in the upper boughs, and the mosquitoes hummed all round like sewing machines. ‘It’s thirsty walking,’ the man said. ‘Have you by any chance, señor, got a little drink . . . ?’
‘No.’
‘If you want to reach Carmen before three, you will have to beat the mule. Shall I take the stick . . . ?’
‘No, no, let the brute take its time. It doesn’t matter to me . . .’ he said drowsily.
‘You talk like a priest.’
He came quickly awake, but under the tall dark trees he could see nothing. He said, ‘What nonsense you talk.’
‘I am a very good Christian,’ the man said, stroking the priest’s foot.
‘I dare say. I wish I were.’
‘Ah, you ought to be able to tell which people you can trust.’ He spat in a comradely way.
‘I have nothing to trust anyone with,’ the priest said. ‘Except these trousers – they are very torn. And this mule – it isn’t a good mule; you can see for yourself.’
There was silence for a while, and then, as if he had been considering the last statement, the half-caste went on, ‘It wouldn’t be a bad mule if you treated it right. Nobody can teach me anything about mules. I can see for myself it’s tired out.’
The priest looked down at the grey swinging stupid head. ‘Do you think so?’
‘How far did you travel yesterday?’
‘Perhaps twelve leagues.’
‘Even a mule needs rest.’
The priest took his bare feet from out of the deep leather stirrups and scrambled to the ground. The mule for less than a minute took a longer stride and then dropped to a yet slower pace. The twigs and roots of the forest path cut the priest’s feet – after five minutes he was bleeding. He tried in vain not to limp. The half-caste exclaimed, ‘How delicate your feet are. You should wear shoes.’
Stubbornly he reasserted, ‘I am a poor man.’
‘You will never get to Carmen at this rate. Be sensible, man. If you don’t want to go as far off the road as the finca, I know a little hut less than half a league from here. We can sleep a few hours and still reach Carmen at daybreak.’ There was a rustle in the grass beside the path – the priest thought of snakes and his unprotected feet. The mosquitoes jabbed at his wrists; they were like little surgical syringes filled with poison and aimed at the bloodstream. Sometimes a firefly held its lighted globe close to the half-caste’s face, turning it on and off like a torch. He said accusingly, ‘You don’t trust me. Just because I am a man who likes to do a good turn to strangers, because I try to be a Christian, you don’t trust me.’ He seemed to be working himself into a little artificial rage. He said, ‘If I wanted to rob you, couldn’t I have done it already? You’re an old man.’
‘Not so very old,’ the priest said mildly. His conscience began automatically to work: it was like a slot machine into which any coin could be fitted, even a cheater’s blank disc. The words proud, lustful, envious, cowardly, ungrateful – they all worked the right springs – he was all these things. The half-caste said, ‘Here I have spent many hours guiding you to Carmen – I don’t want any reward because I am a good Christian. I have probably lost money by it at home – never mind that . . .’
‘I thought you said you had business in Carmen?’ the priest said gently.
‘When did I say that?’ It was true – he couldn’t remember . . . perhaps he was unjust too . . . ‘Why should I say a thing which isn’t true? No, I give up a whole day to helping you, and you pay no attention when your guide is tired . . .’
‘I didn’t need a guide,’ he protested mildly.
‘You say that when the road is plain, but if it wasn’t for me, you’d have taken the wrong path a long time ago. You said yourself you didn’t know Carmen well. That was why I came.’
‘But of course,’ the priest said, ‘if you are tired, we will rest.’ He felt guilty at his own lack of trust, but all the same, it remained like a growth only a knife could rid him of.
After half an hour they came to the hut. Made of mud and twigs, it had been set up in a minute clearing by a small farmer whom the forest must have driven out, edging in on him, an unstayable natural force which he couldn’t defeat with his machete and his small fires. There were still signs in the blackened ground of an attempt to clear the brushwood for some meagre and inadequate crop. The man said, ‘I will see to the mule. You go in and lie down and rest.’
‘But it is you who are tired.’
‘Me tired?’ the half-caste said. ‘What makes you say that? I am never tired.’
With a heavy heart the priest took off his saddlebag, pushed at the door and went in to complete darkness. He struck a light – there was no furniture; only a raised dais of hard earth and a straw mat too torn to have been worth removing. He lit a candle and stuck it in its own wax on the dais: then sat down and waited: the man was a long time. In one fist he still carried the ball of paper salvaged from his case – a man must retain some sentimental relics if he is to live at all. The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety. He wondered whether the mestizo had stolen his mule, and reproached himself for the necessary suspicion. The
n the door opened and the man came in – the two yellow canine teeth, the finger-nails scratching in the armpit. He sat down on the earth, with his back against the door, and said, ‘Go to sleep. You are tired. I’ll wake you when we need to start.’
‘I’m not very sleepy.’
‘Blow out the candle. You’ll sleep better.’
‘I don’t like darkness,’ the priest said. He was afraid.
‘Won’t you say a prayer, father, before we sleep?’
‘Why do you call me that?’ he asked sharply, peering across the shadowy floor to where the half-caste sat against the door.
‘Oh, I guessed, of course. But you needn’t be afraid of me. I’m a good Christian.’
‘You’re wrong.’
‘I could easily find out, couldn’t I?’ the half-caste said. ‘I’d just have to say – father, hear my confession. You couldn’t refuse a man in mortal sin.’
The priest said nothing, waiting for the demand to come: the hand which held the papers twitched. ‘Oh, you needn’t fear me,’ the mestizo went carefully on. ‘I wouldn’t betray you. I’m a Christian. I just thought a prayer . . . would be good . . .’
‘You don’t need to be a priest to know a prayer.’ He began, ‘Pater noster qui es in coelis . . .’ while the mosquitoes came droning towards the candle-flame. He was determined not to sleep – the man had some plan. His conscience ceased to accuse him of uncharity. He knew. He was in the presence of Judas.
He leant his head back against the wall and half closed his eyes – he remembered Holy Week in the old days when a stuffed Judas was hanged from the belfry and boys made a clatter with tins and rattles as he swung out over the door. Old staid members of the congregation had sometimes raised objections: it was blasphemous, they said, to make this guy out of Our Lord’s betrayer; but he had said nothing and let the practice continue – it seemed to him a good thing that the world’s traitor should be made a figure of fun. It was too easy otherwise to idealize him as a man who fought with God – a Prometheus, a noble victim in a hopeless war.
‘Are you awake?’ a voice whispered from the door. The priest suddenly giggled, as if this man, too, were absurd with stuffed straw legs and a painted face and an old straw hat who would presently be burnt in the plaza while people made political speeches and the fireworks went off.
‘Can’t you sleep?’
‘I was dreaming,’ the priest whispered. He opened his eyes and saw the man by the door was shivering – the two sharp teeth jumped up and down on the lower lip. ‘Are you ill?’
‘A little fever,’ the man said. ‘Have you any medicine?’
‘No.’
The door creaked as the man’s back shook. He said, ‘It was getting wet in the river . . .’ He slid farther down upon the floor and closed his eyes – mosquitoes with singed wings crawled over the earth bed. The priest thought: I mustn’t sleep, it’s dangerous, I must watch him. He opened his fist and smoothed out the paper. There were faint pencil lines visible – single words, the beginnings and ends of sentences, figures. Now that his case was gone, it was the only evidence left that life had ever been different: he carried it with him as a charm, because if life had been like that once, it might be so again. The candle-flame in the hot marshy lowland air burned to a smoky point vibrating. . . . The priest held the paper close to it and read the words Altar Society, Guild of the Blessed Sacrament, Children of Mary, and then looked up again and across the dark hut saw the yellow malarial eyes of the mestizo watching him. Christ would not have found Judas sleeping in the garden: Judas could watch more than one hour.
‘What’s that paper . . . father?’ he said enticingly, shivering against the door.
‘Don’t call me father. It is a list of seeds I have to buy in Carmen.’
‘Can you write?’
‘I can read.’
He looked at the paper again and a little mild impious joke stared up at him in faded pencil – something about ‘of one substance’. He had been referring to his corpulency and the good dinner he had just eaten: the parishioners had not much relished his humour.
It had been a dinner given at Concepción in honour of the tenth anniversary of his ordination. He sat in the middle of the table with – who was it on his right hand? There were twelve dishes – he had said something about the Apostles, too, which was not thought to be in the best of taste. He was quite young and he had been moved by a gentle devilry, surrounded by all the pious and middle-aged and respectable people of Concepción, wearing their guild ribbons and badges. He had drunk just a little too much; in those days he wasn’t used to liquor. It came back to him now suddenly who was on his right hand – it was Montez, the father of the man they had shot.
Montez had talked at some length. He had reported the progress of the Altar Society in the last year – they had a balance in hand of twenty-two pesos. He had noted it down for comment – there it was, A.S. 22. Montez had been very anxious to start a branch of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, and some woman had complained that bad books were being sold in Concepción, fetched in from the capital by mule: her child had got hold of one called A Husband for a Night. In his speech he said he would write to the Governor on the subject.
The moment he had said that the local photographer had set off his flare, and so he could remember himself at that instant, just as if he had been a stranger looking in from the outside – attracted by the noise – on some happy and festal and strange occasion: noticing with envy, and perhaps a little amusement, the fat youngish priest who stood with one plump hand splayed authoritatively out while the tongue played pleasantly with the word ‘Governor’. Mouths were open all round fishily, and the faces glowed magnesium-white, with the lines and individuality wiped out.
That moment of authority had jerked him back to seriousness – he had ceased to unbend and everybody was happier. He said, ‘The balance of twenty-two pesos in the accounts of the Altar Society – though quite revolutionary for Concepción – is not the only cause for congratulation in the last year. The Children of Mary have increased their membership by nine – and the Guild of the Blessed Sacrament last autumn made our annual retreat more than usually successful. But we mustn’t rest on our laurels, and I confess I have got plans you may find a little startling. You already think me a man, I know, of inordinate ambitions – well, I want Concepción to have a better school – and that means a better presbytery too, of course. We are a big parish and the priest has a position to keep up. I’m not thinking of myself but of the Church. And we shall not stop there – though it will take a good many years, I’m afraid, even in a place the size of Concepción, to raise the money for that.’ As he talked a whole serene life lay ahead – he had ambition: he saw no reason why one day he might not find himself in the state capital, attached to the cathedral, leaving another man to pay off the debts in Concepción. An energetic priest was always known by his debts. He went on, waving a plump and eloquent hand, ‘Of course, many dangers here in Mexico threaten our dear Church. In this state we are unusually lucky – men have lost their lives in the north and we must be prepared’ – he refreshed his dry mouth with a draught of wine – ‘for the worst. Watch and pray,’ he went vaguely on, ‘watch and pray. The devil like a raging lion –’ The Children of Mary stared up at him with their mouths a little open, the pale blue ribbons slanting across their dark best blouses.
He talked for a long while, enjoying the sound of his own voice: he had discouraged Montez on the subject of the St Vincent de Paul Society, because you had to be careful not to encourage a layman too far, and he had told a charming story about a child’s deathbed – she was dying of consumption very firm in her faith at the age of eleven. She asked who it was standing at the end of her bed, and they had said, ‘That’s Father So-and-so,’ and she had said, ‘No, no. I know Father So-and-so. I mean the one with the golden crown.’ One of the Guild of the Blessed Sacrament had wept. Everybody was very happy. It was a true story too, though he couldn’t quite remember where he
had heard it. Perhaps he had read it in a book once. Somebody refilled his glass. He took a long breath and said, ‘My children . . .’
. . . and as the mestizo stirred and grunted by the door he opened his eyes and the old life peeled away like a label: he was lying in torn peon trousers in a dark unventilated hut with a price upon his head. The whole world had changed – no church anywhere: no brother priest, except Padre José, the outcast, in the capital. He lay listening to the heavy breathing of the half-caste and wondered why he had not gone the same road as Padre José and conformed to the laws. I was too ambitious, he thought, that was it. Perhaps Padre José was the better man – he was so humble that he was ready to accept any amount of mockery; at the best of times he had never considered himself worthy of the priesthood. There had been a conference once of the parochial clergy in the capital, in the happy days of the old governor, and he could remember Padre José slinking in at the tail of every meeting, curled up half out of sight in a back row, never opening his mouth. It was not, like some more intellectual priests, that he was over-scrupulous: he had been simply filled with an overwhelming sense of God. At the Elevation of the Host you could see his hands trembling – he was not like St Thomas who needed to put his hands into the wounds in order to believe: the wounds bled anew for him over every altar. Once Padre José had said to him in a burst of confidence, ‘Every time . . . I have such fear.’ His father had been a peon.
But it was different in his case – he had ambition. He was no more an intellectual than Padre José, but his father was a storekeeper, and he knew the value of a balance of twenty-two pesos and how to manage mortgages. He wasn’t content to remain all his life the priest of a not very large parish. His ambitions came back to him now as something faintly comic, and he gave a little gulp of astonished laughter in the candlelight. The half-caste opened his eyes and said, ‘Are you still not asleep?’
The Power and the Glory Page 10
