‘At your service, father.’
The church stood in the darkness like a block of ice: it was melting away in the heat. The roof had fallen in at one place, a coign above the doorway had crumbled. The priest took a quick sideways look at Pedro, holding his breath in case it smelt of brandy, but he could see only the outlines of the face. He said – with a feeling of cunning as though he were cheating a greedy prompter inside his own heart – ‘Tell the people, Pedro, that I only want one peso for the baptisms . . .’ There would still be enough for the brandy then, even if he arrived at Las Casas like a beggar. There was silence for as long as two seconds and then the wily village voice began to answer him, ‘We are poor, father. One peso is a lot of money. I – for example – I have three children. Say seventy-five centavos, father.’
Miss Lehr stretched out her feet in their easy slippers and the beetles came up over the veranda from the dark outside. She said, ‘In Pittsburgh once . . .’ Her brother was asleep with an ancient newspaper across his knee: the mail had come in. The priest gave a little sympathetic giggle as in the old days; it was a try-out which didn’t come off. Miss Lehr stopped and sniffed. ‘Funny. I thought I smelt – spirits.’
The priest held his breath, leaning back in the rocking-chair. He thought, how quiet it is, how safe. He remembered townspeople who couldn’t sleep in country places because of the silence: silence can be like noise, dinning against the eardrums.
‘What was I saying father?’
‘In Pittsburgh once . . .’
‘Of course. In Pittsburgh . . . I was waiting for the train. You see I had nothing to read. Books are so expensive. So I thought I’d buy a paper – any paper, the news is just the same. But when I opened it – it was called something like Police News. I never knew such dreadful things were printed. Of course, I didn’t read more than a few lines. I think it was the most dreadful thing that’s ever happened to me. It . . . well, it opened my eyes.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve never told Mr Lehr. He wouldn’t think the same of me, I do believe, if he knew.’
‘But there was nothing wrong . . .’
‘It’s knowing, isn’t it . . . ?’
Somewhere a long way off a bird of some kind called; the lamp on the table began to smoke, and Miss Lehr leant over and turned down the wick: it was as if the only light for miles around had been lowered. The brandy returned on his palate like the smell of ether that reminds a man of a recent operation before he’s used to life: it tied him to another state of being. He didn’t yet belong to this deep tranquillity. He told himself. In time it will be all right, I shall pull up, I only ordered three bottles this time. They will be the last I’ll ever drink, I won’t need drink there – he knew he lied. Mr Lehr woke suddenly and said, ‘As I was saying . . .’
‘You were saying nothing, dear. You were asleep.’
‘Oh no, we were talking about that scoundrel Hoover.’
‘I don’t think so, dear. Not for a long while.’
‘Well,’ Mr Lehr said, ‘it’s been a long day. The father will be tired too . . . after all that confessing,’ he added with slight distaste.
There had been a continuous stream of penitents from eight to ten – two hours of the worst evil a small place like this could produce after three years. It hadn’t amounted to very much – a city would have made a better show – or would it? There isn’t much a man can do. Drunkenness, adultery, uncleanness: he sat there tasting the brandy all the while, sitting on a rocking-chair in a horse-box, not looking at the face of the one who knelt at his side. The others had waited, kneeling in an empty stall – Mr Lehr’s stable had been depopulated these last few years. He had only one old horse left, which blew windily in the dark as the sins came whimpering out.
‘How many times?’
‘Twelve, father. Perhaps more,’ and the horse blew.
It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin – only the hard and careful man and the saint are free of it. These people went out of the stable clean; he was the only one left who hadn’t repented, confessed, and been absolved. He wanted to say to this man, ‘Love is not wrong, but love should be happy and open – it is only wrong when it is secret, unhappy . . . It can be more unhappy than anything but the loss of God. It is the loss of God. You don’t need a penance, my child, you have suffered quite enough,’ and to this other, ‘Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.’ But the habit of the confessional reasserted itself: it was as if he were back in the little stuffy wooden boxlike coffin in which men bury their uncleanness with their priest. He said, ‘Mortal sin . . . danger . . . self-control,’ as if those words meant anything at all. He said, ‘Say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys.’
He whispered wearily, ‘Drink is only the beginning . . .’ He found he had no lesson he could draw against even that common vice unless it was himself smelling of brandy in the stable. He gave out the penance, quickly, harshly, mechanically. The man would go away, saying, ‘A bad priest,’ feeling no encouragement, no interest . . .
He said, ‘Those laws were made for man. The Church doesn’t expect . . . if you can’t fast, you must eat, that’s all.’ The old woman prattled on and on, while the penitents stirred restlessly in the next stall and the horse whinnied, prattled of abstinence days broken, of evening prayers curtailed. Suddenly, without warning, with an odd sense of homesickness, he thought of the hostages in the prison yard, waiting at the water-tap, not looking at him – the suffering and the endurance which went on everywhere the other side of the mountains. He interrupted the woman savagely, ‘Why don’t you confess properly to me? I’m not interested in your fish supply or in how sleepy you are at night . . . remember your real sins.’
‘But I’m a good woman, father,’ she squeaked at him with astonishment.
‘Then what are you doing here, keeping away the bad people?’ He said, ‘Have you any love for anyone but yourself?’
‘I love God, father,’ she said haughtily. He took a quick look at her in the light of the candle burning on the floor – the hard old raisin eyes under the black shawl – another of the pious – like himself.
‘How do you know? Loving God isn’t any different from loving a man – or a child. It’s wanting to be with Him, to be near Him.’ He made a hopeless gesture with his hands. ‘It’s wanting to protect Him from yourself.’
When the last penitent had gone away he walked back across the yard to the bungalow; he could see the lamp burning, and Miss Lehr knitting, and he could smell the grass in the paddock, wet with the first rains. It ought to be possible for a man to be happy here, if he were not so tied to fear and suffering – unhappiness too can become a habit like piety. Perhaps it was his duty to break it, his duty to discover peace. He felt an immense envy of all those people who had confessed to him and been absolved. In six days, he told himself, in Las Casas, I too. . . . But he couldn’t believe that anyone anywhere would rid him of his heavy heart. Even when he drank he felt bound to his sin by love. It was easier to get rid of hate.
Miss Lehr said, ‘Sit down, father. You must be tired. I’ve never held, of course, with confession. Nor has Mr Lehr.’
‘No?’
‘I don’t know how you can stand sitting there, listening to all the horrible things . . . I remember in Pittsburgh once . . .’
The two mules had been brought in overnight, so that he could start early immediately after Mass – the second that he had said in Mr Lehr’s barn. His guide was sleeping somewhere, probably with the mules, a thin nervous creature, who had never been to Las Casas; he simply knew the route by hearsay. Miss Lehr had insisted the night before that she must call him, although he woke of his own accord before it was light. He lay in bed and heard the alarm go off in another room – dinning like a telephone – and presently he heard the slop, slop of Miss Lehr’s bedroom-slippers in the passage outside and a knock-knoc
k on the door. Mr Lehr slept on undisturbed upon his back with the thin rectitude of a bishop upon a tomb.
The priest had lain down in his clothes and he opened the door before Miss Lehr had time to get away; she gave a small squeal of dismay, a bunchy figure in a hair-net.
‘Excuse me.’
‘Oh, it’s quite all right. How long will Mass take, father?’
‘There will be a great many communicants. Perhaps three-quarters of an hour.’
‘I will have some coffee ready for you – and sandwiches.’
‘You must not bother.’
‘Oh, we can’t send you away hungry.’
She followed him to the door, standing a little behind him, so as not to be seen by anything or anybody in the wide empty early world. The grey light uncurled across the pastures; at the gate the tulipán tree bloomed for yet another day; very far off, beyond the little stream where he had bathed, the people were walking up from the village on the way to Mr Lehr’s barn – they were too small at that distance to be human. He had a sense of expectant happiness all round him, waiting for him to take part, like an audience of children at a cinema or a rodeo; he was aware of how happy he might have been if he had left nothing behind him across the range except a few bad memories. A man should always prefer peace to violence, and he was going towards peace.
‘You have been very good to me, Miss Lehr.’
How odd it had seemed at first to be treated as a guest, not as a criminal or a bad priest. These were heretics – it never occurred to them that he was not a good man: they hadn’t the prying insight of fellow Catholics.
‘We’ve enjoyed having you, father. But you’ll be glad to be away. Las Casas is a fine city. A very moral place, as Mr Lehr always says. If you meet Father Quintana you must remember us to him – he was here three years ago.’
A bell began to ring. They had brought the church bell down from the tower and hung it outside Mr Lehr’s barn; it was like any Sunday anywhere.
‘I’ve sometimes wished,’ Miss Lehr said, ‘that I could go to church.’
‘Why not?’
‘Mr Lehr wouldn’t like it. He’s very strict. But it happens so seldom nowadays – I don’t suppose there’ll be another service now for another three years.’
‘I will come back before then.’
‘Oh no,’ Miss Lehr said. ‘You won’t do that. It’s a hard journey and Las Casas is a fine city. They have electric light in the streets: there are two hotels. Father Quintana promised to come back – but there are Christians everywhere, aren’t there? Why should he come back here? It isn’t even as if we were really badly off.’
A little group of Indians passed the gate, gnarled tiny creatures of the Stone Age. The men in short smocks walked with long poles, and the women with black plaits and knocked-about faces carried their babies on their backs. ‘The Indians have heard you are here,’ Miss Lehr said. ‘They’ve walked fifty miles – I shouldn’t be surprised.’ They stopped at the gate and watched him; when he looked at them they went down on their knees and crossed themselves – the strange elaborate mosaic touching the nose and ears and chin. ‘My brother gets so angry,’ Miss Lehr said, ‘if he sees somebody go on his knees to a priest, but I don’t see that it does any harm.’
Round the corner of the house the mules were stamping – the guide must have brought them out to give them their maize. They were slow feeders, you had to give them a long start. It was time to begin Mass and be gone. He could smell the early morning. The world was still fresh and green, and in the village below the pastures a few dogs barked. The alarm clock tick-tocked in Miss Lehr’s hand. He said, ‘I must be going now.’ He felt an odd reluctance to leave Miss Lehr and the house and the brother sleeping in the inside room. He was aware of a mixture of tenderness and dependence. When a man wakes after a dangerous operation he puts a special value upon the first face he sees as the anaesthetic wears away.
He had no vestments, but the Masses in this village were nearer to the old parish days than any he had known in the last eight years – there was no fear of interruption, no hurried taking of the sacraments as the police approached. There was even an altar stone brought from the locked church. But because it was so peaceful he was all the more aware of his own sin as he prepared to take the Elements – ‘Let not the participation of thy Body, O Lord Jesus Christ, which I, though unworthy, presume to receive, turn to my judgement and condemnation.’ A virtuous man can almost cease to believe in Hell, but he carried Hell about with him. Sometimes at night he dreamed of it. Domine, non sum dignus . . . domine, non sum dignus. . . . Evil ran like malaria in his veins. He remembered a dream he had had of a big grassy arena lined with the statues of the saints – but the saints were alive, they turned their eyes this way and that, waiting for something. He waited, too, with an awful expectancy. Bearded Peters and Pauls, with Bibles pressed to their breasts, watched some entrance behind his back he couldn’t see – it had the menace of a beast. Then a marimba began to play, tinkly and repetitive, a firework exploded, and Christ danced into the arena – danced and postured with a bleeding painted face, up and down, up and down, grimacing like a prostitute, smiling and suggestive. He woke with the sense of complete despair that a man might feel finding the only money he possessed was counterfeit.
‘. . . and we saw his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.’ Mass was over.
In three days, he told himself, I shall be in Las Casas: I shall have confessed and been absolved, and the thought of the child on the rubbish-heap came automatically back to him with painful love. What was the good of confession when you loved the result of your crime?
The people knelt as he made his way down the barn. He saw the little group of Indians: women whose children he had baptized: Pedro: the man from the cantina was there too, kneeling with his face buried in his plump hands, a chain of beads falling between the fingers. He looked a good man: perhaps he was a good man. Perhaps, the priest thought, I have lost the faculty of judging – that woman in prison may have been the best person there. A horse cried in the early day, tethered to a tree, and all the freshness of the morning came in through the open door.
Two men waited beside the mules; the guide was adjusting a stirrup, and beside him, scratching under the arm-pit, awaiting his coming with a doubtful and defensive smile, stood the half-caste. He was like the small pain that reminds a man of his sickness, or perhaps like the unexpected memory which proves that love after all isn’t dead. ‘Well,’ the priest said, ‘I didn’t expect you here.’
‘No, father, of course not.’ He scratched and smiled.
‘Have you brought the soldiers with you?’
‘What things you do say, father,’ he protested with a callow giggle. Behind him, across the yard and through an open door, the priest could see Miss Lehr putting up his sandwiches. She had dressed, but she still wore her hair-net. She was wrapping the sandwiches carefully in grease-proof paper, and her sedate movements had a curious effect of unreality. It was the half-caste who was real. He said, ‘What trick are you playing now?’ Had he perhaps bribed his guide to lead him back across the border? He could believe almost anything of that man.
‘You shouldn’t say things like that, father.’
Miss Lehr passed out of sight, with the soundlessness of a dream.
‘No?’
‘I’m here, father,’ the man seemed to take a long breath for his surprising stilted statement, ‘on an errand of mercy.’
The guide finished with one mule and began on the next, shortening the already short Mexican stirrup; the priest giggled nervously. ‘An errand of mercy?’
‘Well, father, you’re the only priest this side of Las Casas, and the man’s dying . . .’
‘What man?’
‘The Yankee.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The one the police wanted. He robbed a bank. You know the one I mean.’
‘He wouldn’t need me,’ the prie
st said impatiently, remembering the photograph on the peeling wall watching the first communion party.
‘Oh, he’s a good Catholic, father.’ Scratching under his arm-pit, he didn’t look at the priest. ‘He’s dying, and you and I wouldn’t like to have on our conscience what that man . . .’
‘We shall be lucky if we haven’t worse.’
‘What do you mean, father?’
The priest said, ‘He only killed and robbed. He hasn’t betrayed his friends.’
‘Holy Mother of God, I’ve never . . .’
‘We both have,’ the priest said. He turned to the guide. ‘Are the mules ready?’
‘Yes, father.’
‘We’ll start then.’ He had forgotten Miss Lehr completely; the other world had stretched a hand across the border, and he was again in the atmosphere of flight.
‘Where are you going?’ the half-caste said.
‘To Las Casas.’ He climbed stiffly on to his mule. The half-caste held on to his stirrup-leather, and he was reminded of their first meeting: there was the same mixture of complaint, appeal, abuse. ‘You’re a fine priest,’ he wailed up to him. ‘Your bishop ought to hear of this. A man’s dying, wants to confess, and just because you want to get to the city . . .’
‘Why do you think me such a fool?’ the priest said. ‘I know why you’ve come. You’re the only one they’ve got who can recognize me, and they can’t follow me into this state. Now if I ask you where this American is, you’ll tell me – I know – you don’t have to speak – that he’s just the other side.’
‘Oh no, father, you’re wrong there. He’s just this side.’
‘A mile or two makes no difference.’
‘It’s an awful thing, father,’ the half-caste said, ‘never to be believed. Just because once – well, I admit it –’
The priest kicked his mule into motion. They passed out of Mr Lehr’s yard and turned south; the half-caste trotted at his stirrup.
The Power and the Glory Page 19
