Monsignor Quixote

by Graham Greene

  ‘Oh no, humanism and religion have not done away with either nationalism or imperialism. It’s those two that cause the wars. Wars are not merely for economic reasons – they come from the emotions of men, like love does, from the colour of a skin or the accent of a voice. From unhappy memories too. That’s why I’m glad to have the short memory of a priest.’

  ‘I never thought you occupied yourself with politics.’

  ‘Not “occupied”. But you’ve been my friend a long time, Sancho, and I want to understand you. Das Kapital has always defeated me. This little book is different. It’s the work of a good man. A man as good as you are – and just as mistaken.’

  ‘Time will show.’

  ‘Time can never show. Our lives are far too short.’

  The man with the brief-case had put down his knife and fork and was signalling for his bill. When it came he paid rapidly without paying attention to the details.

  ‘Well,’ Father Quixote said, ‘you can breathe easily now, Sancho, the man has gone.’

  ‘Let us hope he doesn’t come back with the police behind him. He looked very closely at your bib as he left.’

  Father Quixote felt that at last he could raise his voice and speak more freely. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘perhaps because I read so much in St Francis de Sales and St John of the Cross I find poor Marx’s occasional admiration for the bourgeois a little far-fetched.’

  ‘Admiration for the bourgeois? What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘Of course an economist is bound to see things in very material terms, and I admit that perhaps I dwell too much on the spiritual.’

  ‘But he hated the bourgeois.’

  ‘Oh, hatred we know is often the other side of love. Perhaps, poor man, he had been rejected by what he loved. Listen to this, Sancho. “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal production forces than have all the preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground . . .” It makes one almost proud to be a bourgeois, doesn’t it? What a magnificent colonial governor Marx would have made. If only Spain had produced a man like that, perhaps we would never have lost our empire. Poor man, he had to put up with an overcrowded lodging in a poor part of London, and borrow from his friends.’

  ‘You look at Marx from a strange angle, father.’

  ‘I was prejudiced against him – even though he did defend the monasteries – but I had never read this little book. A first reading is something special, like first love. I wish I could come on St Paul now by accident and read him for the first time. If only you would try the experiment, Sancho, with one of what you call my books of chivalry.’

  ‘I would find your taste as absurd as Cervantes found your ancestor’s.’

  It was a friendly meal in spite of their dispute and after a second bottle of wine they agreed to take the road towards León and leave it to a later decision – perhaps even a cast of the dice – whether they made for the east towards the Basque territory or for the west towards Galicia. They left the Valencia arm in arm, but as they made towards the spot where they had parked Rocinante, Father Quixote could feel a pressure on his arm.

  ‘What is it, Sancho?’

  ‘The secret policeman. He is following us now. Don’t say anything. Take the first turning we come to.’

  ‘But Rocinante is up the street.’

  ‘He wants to get the number of our car.’

  ‘How can you possibly know that he’s a secret policeman?’

  ‘By his brief-case,’ Sancho said, and it was true that, after they had turned the first corner and Father Quixote took a look behind, the man was still there, carrying the dreadful insignia of his profession.

  ‘Don’t turn round again,’ Sancho said. ‘We must let him think that we don’t know he is there.’

  ‘How are we going to escape him?’

  ‘We’ll find a bar and order a drink. He’ll linger outside. We’ll go out through the back and get a start on him. Then cut around to Rocinante.’

  ‘Suppose there isn’t a back door?’

  ‘We’ll have to go on to another bar.’

  There was no back door. Sancho drank a brandy and Father Quixote prudently took a coffee. When they left the man was still there twenty yards down the street, looking in a shop window.

  ‘He seems to be rather obvious for a secret policeman,’ Father Quixote said as they moved up the street towards another bar.

  ‘One of their tricks,’ Sancho said. ‘He wants to make us nervous.’ He guided Father Quixote into a second bar and ordered a second brandy.

  ‘If I have any more coffee,’ Father Quixote said, ‘I shan’t sleep tonight.’

  ‘Have a tonic water.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A sort of mineral water with a bit of quinine in it.’

  ‘No alcohol?’

  ‘No, no.’ The brandy was making Sancho bellicose. ‘I’ve a good mind to beat the fellow up, but he’s probably armed.’

  ‘This tonic water is really delicious,’ Father Quixote said. ‘Why have I never had it before? I could almost give up wine. Do you think I can buy it in El Toboso?’

  ‘I don’t know. I doubt it. If he keeps his gun in his brief-case I might be able to knock him out before he draws it.’

  ‘Do you know – I think I’ll have another bottle.’

  ‘I’m going to look for a back door,’ Sancho said, and Father Quixote found himself quite alone in the bar. It was the hour of siesta and one revolving fan in the ceiling hardly made the place any cooler – at regular intervals there came a whiff of cold and then a spell of even greater heat by contrast. Father Quixote drained his tonic and ordered a third quickly so as to drink it before Sancho returned.

  A voice behind him whispered, ‘Monsignor.’ He turned. It was the man with the brief-case, a small lean man in a black suit and a black tie which matched the case he carried. He had dark penetrating eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses and thin lips tightly closed and he might well have been, Father Quixote thought, the harbinger of an evil destiny, perhaps the Grand Inquisitor himself. If only Sancho would return . . . ‘What do you want?’ Father Quixote demanded in what he hoped would sound a strong, defiant voice, but the bubbles of the tonic water betrayed him and he hiccupped.

  ‘I want to speak to you alone.’

  ‘I am alone.’

  The man nodded at the back of the barman. He said, ‘This is serious. Impossible to speak to you here. Please go through that door at the back.’

  But there were two doors: he wished he knew through which one Sancho had gone. ‘On the right,’ the man directed. Father Quixote obeyed: there was a short passage and two other doors. ‘Through there. The first one.’

  Father Quixote found that he was in a lavatory. In the mirror by the washbasin he could see that his captor was fumbling at the latch of his brief-case. To take out a gun? Was he to be shot in the back of the neck? Hastily, too hastily, he began an Act of Contrition under his breath: ‘Oh God, I am sorry and beg pardon for all my fish . . .’

  ‘Monsignor.’

  ‘Yes, friend,’ Father Quixote replied to the image which he watched in the glass. If he was to be shot he preferred the back of the neck to the face, for the face in its way is the mirror image of God.

  ‘I want you to hear my confession.’

  Father Quixote hiccupped. The door opened and Sancho peered in. ‘Father Quixote,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Go away,’ Father Quixote said. ‘I am hearing a confession.’

  He turned to the stranger and tried to regain the dignity of the cloth. ‘This is hardly a suitable place. Why have you chosen me and not your own priest?’

  ‘I have just been burying him,’ the man said. ‘I am an undertaker.’ He opened his b
rief-case and took out a large brass handle.

  Father Quixote said, ‘I am not in my diocese. I have no faculty here.’

  ‘A monsignor is free from such rules. When I saw you in the restaurant I thought “Here is my chance”.’

  Father Quixote said, ‘I’m a very new monsignor. Are you sure about the rules?’

  ‘Anyway, in an emergency any priest . . . This is an emergency.’

  ‘But there are many priests in Valladolid. Go to any church . . .’

  ‘I could see from your eyes that you were a priest who would understand.’

  ‘Understand what?’ The man began quickly to mumble the Act of Contrition, but at least he got the words right. Father Quixote felt himself at a loss. Never before had he heard a confession in such surroundings. He had always been seated in that box like a coffin . . . It was almost automatically that he took refuge in the only box available and sat down on a closed lavatory seat. The stranger would have got down on his knees, but Father Quixote stopped him, for the floor was not at all clean. ‘Don’t kneel,’ he said. ‘Just stand as you are.’ The man held out the large brass handle. He said, ‘I have sinned and I ask the forgiveness of God through you, father. I mean monsignor.’

  ‘I’m not a monsignor in this box,’ Father Quixote said. ‘There are no ranks in the confessional. What have you done?’

  ‘I have stolen this handle and another handle like it.’

  ‘Then you must give them back.’

  ‘The owner is dead. I buried him this morning.’

  Father Quixote shielded, as the custom is, his eyes with a hand for the sake of secrecy, but a vision of the dark vulpine face remained clearly in his mind. He was a priest who liked to hear a quick confession in the simple abstract words that penitents usually employed. They seldom entailed more than one simple question – how many times . . .? I have committed adultery, I have neglected my Easter duties, I have sinned against purity . . . He was not used to a sin in the form of a brass handle. Surely a handle like that could have little value.

  ‘You should return the handle to the heirs.’

  ‘Father González left no heirs.’

  ‘But what are these handles? When did you steal them?’

  ‘I charged for them in my bill and then I took them off the coffin so that I could use them again.’

  ‘Do you often do that?’ Father Quixote could not restrain the fatal curiosity which was his recurring fault in the confessional.

  ‘Oh, it’s a common practice. All my competitors do it.’

  Father Quixote wondered what Father Heribert Jone would have written about this case. He would certainly list it among sins against justice, the category to which adultery also belongs, but Father Quixote seemed to remember that in the case of theft the gravity of the sin had to be judged by the value of the object stolen – if it was equivalent to one seventh of the owner’s monthly wage it must be treated seriously. If the owner were a millionaire there would be no sin at all – at least not against justice. What would Father González have earned monthly and indeed was he the true owner if he had only come into possession of the handles after death? A coffin surely belonged to the earth in which it was laid.

  He asked – more to allow himself time to think than for any other reason – ‘Have you confessed to the other occasions?’

  ‘No. I told you, monsignor, it is a recognized practice in my profession. We charge extra for brass handles, that’s true, but it’s only a kind of rent. Till the interment is over.’

  ‘Then why are you confessing to me now?’

  ‘Perhaps I am a too scrupulous man, monsignor, but it seemed somehow different when I buried Father González. He would have been so proud of the brass handles. You see, it showed how esteemed he was in the parish, because, naturally, it was the parish which paid.’

  ‘And you contributed?’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course. I was very fond of Father González.’

  ‘So in a way you are stealing from yourself?’

  ‘Not stealing, monsignor.’

  ‘I’ve told you not to call me monsignor. You say that you have not stolen, that it is the practice of your colleagues to remove these handles . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then what is troubling your conscience?’

  The man gave a gesture which could have been one of bewilderment. Father Quixote thought: How many times I have felt guilty as he does without knowing why. Sometimes he envied the certitude of those who were able to lay down clear rules – Father Heribert Jone, his bishop, even the Pope. Himself he lived in a mist, unable to see a path, stumbling . . . He said, ‘Don’t worry about such little things. Go home and have a good sleep. Perhaps you have stolen . . . Do you think God cares so much about a small thing like that? He has created a universe – we don’t know how many stars and planets and worlds. You have stolen two brass handles – don’t feel so important. Say you are sorry for your pride and go home.’

  The man said, ‘But please – my absolution.’

  Father Quixote unwillingly muttered the unnecessary formula. The man put the handle back in the briefcase, closed it, and made a kind of duck in the direction of Father Quixote before he went out. Father Quixote sat on the lavatory seat with a sense of exhaustion and inadequacy. He thought: I didn’t say the right words. Why do I never find the right words? The man needed help and I recited a formula. God forgive me. Will someone only give me a formula too when I come to die?

  After a while he went back into the bar. Sancho was there waiting for him and drinking another brandy.

  ‘What on earth have you been up to?’

  ‘Practising my profession,’ Father Quixote replied.

  ‘In a lavatory?’

  ‘In a lavatory, in a prison, in a church. What’s the difference?’

  ‘You got rid of that man?’

  Father Quixote said, ‘I suppose I did. I’m a bit tired, Sancho. I know it’s extravagant, but could I have just one more bottle of tonic water?’

  IX

  HOW MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE SAW

  A STRANGE SPECTACLE

  Their stay in Valladolid was unexpectedly prolonged by a firm reluctance on the part of Rocinante to take the road again, so she had to be left in a garage for examination.

  ‘Little wonder,’ Father Quixote said. ‘Yesterday the poor thing covered an immense distance.’

  ‘An immense distance! We are less than 120 kilometres from Salamanca.’

  ‘Her usual stint is ten – when I have to fetch wine from the cooperative.’

  ‘It’s just as well then that we decided against Rome or Moscow. If you want my opinion, you have spoilt her. Cars, like women, should never be spoilt.’

  ‘But she’s very old, Sancho. Older than we are probably. After all – without her help . . . Could we have walked all the way from Salamanca?’

  As they had to wait for the verdict on Rocinante until the morning, Sancho suggested that they might visit a cinema. Father Quixote agreed after some hesitation. There had once been a period when stage plays were forbidden to the priesthood, and though the regulation had never applied to the cinema, which had not then existed, there remained in Father Quixote’s mind a sensation of something dangerous about a spectacle.

  ‘I have never been to a cinema before,’ he told Sancho.

  ‘You must know the world if you are to convert the world,’ Sancho said.

  ‘You will not think me a hypocrite,’ Father Quixote asked, ‘if I remove what you call my bib?’

  ‘All colours are the same in the dark,’ Sancho said, ‘but do as you like.’

  Father Quixote on second thoughts left his pechera on. It seemed more honest. He didn’t wish to be accused of hypocrisy.

  They went to a small cinema which advertised a film called A Maiden’s Prayer. The title had attracted Father Quixote just as much as it repelled Sancho, who foresaw an evening of boredom and piety. However, he was mistaken. The film was no masterpiece, but all the same he found it quite e
njoyable though he was a little afraid of how Father Quixote would react, for the film was certainly not maidenly, and he should have noticed that the poster outside was marked with a warning ‘S’.

  In fact the maiden’s prayer turned out to be a very handsome young man whose adventures with a series of young girls ended always, with the monotony of repetition, in bed. The photography at that point became soft and confusing, and it was a little bit difficult to discern whose legs belonged to whom since the private parts, which distinguish a man from a woman, were skilfully avoided by the camera. Was it the man or the girl who was on top? Whose parts were being kissed by whom? On these occasions there was no dialogue to help the viewer: only the sound of hard breathing and sometimes a grunt or a squeal, which could be either masculine or feminine. To make things even more difficult the scenes had obviously been shot for a small screen (perhaps for a home movie) and the images became still more abstract when enlarged for a cinema. Even Sancho’s enjoyment waned: he would have much preferred more overt pornography and it was difficult to identify with the principal actor who had very shiny black hair and side whiskers. Sancho thought that he recognized the model who had appeared frequently on television for a male deodorant.

  The end of the film was certainly an anti-climax. The young man had fallen deeply in love with the one girl who had resisted his advances. There was a church wedding, a chaste kiss at the altar, when the bridegroom slipped the ring on the bride’s finger, and then a quick cut to a tangle of limbs in bed – it occurred to Sancho that for the sake of economy they had simply repeated one of the earlier scenes with the anonymous limbs, or was it perhaps a touch of intelligent irony on the part of the director? The lights went on and Father Quixote said, ‘How very interesting, Sancho. So that’s what they call a film.’

  ‘It wasn’t a very good example.’

  ‘What a lot of exercise they were all taking. The actors must be quite exhausted.’

  ‘They were only simulating, father.’

  ‘How do you mean, simulating? What were they pretending to do?’

  ‘To make love, of course.’