The Last Supper: And Other Stories

by Howard Fast

“Not at all. The fact of the matter is that I live and work here. But because you have been emotionally moved by the sight of an Indian peon on a donkey and the fact that his little girl is beautiful—not an unusual thing with the Mexicans, you will admit—you have raised the issue of this child’s sickness as if I could save her but will not.”

  “And can you?” I insisted.

  “I can not. First of all, she is suffering from a very bad kidney ailment. One of her kidneys must be removed, and even then it is anyone’s guess whether the other could heal to an extent to take over the burden.”

  “But there is a chance. You have just said so.”

  “I have said nothing of the sort. Do not turn your thoughts into my words, please. How are her parents to pay for an operation—they have not even money to pay for their calls here? My fee from you is fifty pesos; if they can pay me one, it is a lot, and an operation must cost two thousand pesos, that is, without the cost of a trip to Mexico City, and living there and extras like hospital and anesthesia and drugs and heaven knows what. That is, considering that they would consent to an operation, and a very dangerous operation, you must know.”

  “How could they not consent to something that might save the child’s life? Surely it’s plain that they love her. The father told me that she is their only child.”

  “Surely it is not plain. Everything that might be plain to normal people,” Serente said bitterly, “is turned on its head for a Gringo. Please, I’m not being insulting and only angry at myself and the world I live in. I like you and admire you, but you share the worst characteristics of your countrymen, not the least of which is to endow the entire world with your mental processes. For fifty years, your people have been educated to the fact that operations are beneficial, even when they are not necessary. But to plain, poor people who have never seen a hospital, an operation is a terrible and frightening thing. And if the patient dies in spite of the operation, they conclude that it is murder. Anyway, it is out of the question. There is no money.”

  “I can spare the money—”

  “Can you? Name of God, will you spare the money to operate on a hundred patients of mine who need operation just so urgently? Will you declare yourself God to decide who shall live and who shall perish? Or perhaps this will become a new game for the North Americans—an amusing lottery to see which Mexican deserves life—”

  “Really, Serente, that’s not called for.”

  “No, I suppose not. I’m sorry. But don’t you think I have any feelings? Don’t you suppose I saw the mother and the father and the child? Now why did I choose you for this scene? I don’t know. This is every day for me, day in and day out, every day for every Mexican doctor. But why should I torture you, when you are already tortured enough?”

  “You are not torturing me at all. I understand.”

  “How can you understand? I have been here fifteen years, and I still do not understand, and still I do the wrong thing because I have never been a peasant who in all his life never knew what it is not to be hungry, not to be cold, not to be sick. Yesterday morning a peon came in, with his wife and his son and daughter. Both children had been having bloody stools for months, but what a decision it was for them to pack up their household and journey thirty miles to the frightening city! Finally, they are here. They tell me and I examine the children, and to do anything for them I must know what organism it is. So I give the father two cardboard cartons with the children’s names on them and tell him to have the children defecate in the boxes and then bring the stools back to me. He looks at me like a hurt animal, but after fifteen years I do not understand. I am too busy. I have too many other patients and I am insensitive. But of course he never returns. Why? Because to him, I am like a God, and when I tell him to bring me boxes of stools, it is some dreadful joke I am making on him, or an insult, or just horror. Does he know there are organisms that cause disease? Has he ever seen a microscope? So now, probably, the two children are dead, and it is my fault because I have forgotten the terrors and suffering of plain people. Well, enough. Come to dinner, and when I am your host, I will have to talk gently.”

  “Talk the way you want to talk,” I said. “We will be there.”

  As I walked home from his office, I remembered that I had to stop by at the carpentry shop. It had long been a dream of my wife to use this vacation to do some sculpture, and a few days ago I had stopped at a little carpentry shop and had asked them to make an armature for me. I had wanted a very simple thing, a block of wood with a wooden upright about which the clay could be moulded. The carpenter understood immediately, and said he would have it in a day or two.

  When I came into his carpentry shop now, the armature was ready. The carpentry shop itself brought me back to my earlier mood, for it was a place that reached back to the oldest memories of man’s work with tools, bent-bow rawhide drills, the same drills one sees painted on Egyptian tombs, hand-made planes and hand-made saws, yes, even the adz unchanged from the Spanish adz that the Conquistidors had brought to the land four centuries ago, and even the nails they used were four-sided and hand-hammered. Sleepy, with its white front, the shop lay in the afternoon sunlight like a painted picture of some long, long ago, the two carpenters, in their leather aprons, with their work-hardened hands and their fine brown faces, in the picture and of the picture, yet possessed of that particular and peculiar quality which the carpenter, of all workers, has—a singular relationship to tools and wood and people, a gentleness of visage, a certain contemplation of life, a particular warmth and oneness with the world around him and its people. This is not my imagination; I have worked with carpenters and seen them in many places and situations, in Europe and Asia, in Maine and Vermont and California, in my home, on a job, and as prisoners working in prison, and always the quality is there.

  “Here is your armature, Senor,” the older of the two carpenters said to me, holding it out to me, a marvel of beauty and workmanship which made me gasp with astonishment, a base of polished mahogany, the upright jointed into it, the whole finished and polished like a piece of precious furniture. “It must cost four pesos,” which is thirty-two cents in American money. And then, seeing my face, he asked whether that was too much money. I answered, no, that it was very little money, too little money for the work he had done and the beautiful wood he had used. No, I said, my astonishment was due to the fact that he had taken such pains to make it beautiful.

  “And why should it not be beautiful, Senor?”

  The question posed itself with no answer, for behind the meaning of beauty to this man lay a thousand years of culture and experience of which I knew all too little, and could comprehend even less. It brought to mind the unending stream of peasants and workers who travel far in Mexico to look at the paintings that bedeck their walls and buildings as no other buildings in all the world are bedecked. I took the armature from him, paid him, and went home.…

  I saw the priest the next day. It came about quite by accident, for my wife and I and the children had wandered into the great cathedral with no other thought than to see what the, old rock and mountain of a place contained, but soon the cold gloom of the church drove the children back into the sunlight and my wife went after them, leaving me to contemplate alone the mass of jewel-laden images, the ancient murals, the gold and silver candle-sticks, the silks and tapestries and precious stones—all of it gathered here in the wet twilight, shut off by wall and darkness from the bright Mexican sunlight and the heart-breaking Mexican poverty. I must have been entirely lost in contemplation when the priest addressed me, for I was entirely unconscious of his approach and rather startled when he said,

  “You like our cathedral, senor?”

  “I don’t know that I have thought about liking or disliking it. I am impressed by it.”

  “Then senor is not a Catholic,” which was more a statement of fact than a question. His English was excellent, and I remarked upon that. “Yes, I studied English in Spain.”

  “But you are not Spanish, yo
u are Mexican.” He was obviously Mexican, a heavy-set, fleshy man of about fifty, with the round, healthy look that some priests have.

  “I was in Spain between 1935 and 1940—a time when the Mexican Government did not see eye to eye with our mother, the Church. It was better to be in Spain then.” But he said nothing of what had occurred in Spain during those years, and I wondered why. Perhaps because I was wondering, I told him briefly the story of the man on the donkey who looked like Jesus Christ and of his daughter and her sickness. Was there nothing he could do, I wanted to know?

  “And why do you ask a priest?” he said.

  “I think because there is no one else to turn to.”

  “But this man—he is a Mexican, and he will turn to God.”

  “Perhaps, but that will not cure his daughter.”

  “Are you so sure, senor? If it is God’s will that his daughter should live, she will live, and if it is God’s will that she shall die, then she will die. Such things are ordained and not for you or me to decide.”

  “But isn’t such an attitude old-fashioned, to say the least?” I asked carefully, considering each phrase before I spoke it. “There is a science of medicine and there are hospitals and surgeons and anti-biotics, and surely you would not deny that people are helped by these things?”

  “We talk at cross purposes, senor,” the, priest smiled, a smile without warmth or welcome. “Do you believe in God?”

  “That’s somewhat of a personal question, isn’t it?”

  “And do you talk less personally, senor? You see a man, who to you, he looks like our Savior. Would that occur to a Christian? You do not think twice before you pronounce your thought to me, blasphemous though it may be. And then when I ask you whether you believe in God, you feel I am asking a personal question. No, it is not anti-biotics the Mexican needs, but faith.”

  “In other words,” I said, no longer attempting to conceal my annoyance, “you remain unmoved by this story and have no intentions of doing anything about it.”

  “Quite the contrary; I am deeply moved, and I shall do something about it, more than you, I believe.”

  “May I ask what?”

  “I shall pray,” the priest said, and then he folded his hands, turned his back on me, and walked away.…

  Dinner at Dr. Serente’s was always a special treat. Not only was his lovely Spanish wife a charming and thoughtful hostess, not only were the people one met there always interesting and very often amusing, but the food was good, and when Mexican food is good, it is better than any in this hemisphere.

  The Serente house was an old one, in the old Mexican style. The living quarters lay in one row, presenting a flat, characterless front to the street, the few windows barred, and the entrance through an arched carriage-way. But once inside, inside the walled quadrangle that contained house and garden, a veritable fairyland opened to one’s view. A long veranda stretched the full length of the living-quarters, each room opening onto it, a veranda upon which the Serentes lived, entertained and ate, all the while facing the, lovely garden. Like most of the best Mexican gardens, it was not very large, and owed its beauty to the intensity of its tropical green and to the variety of its trees and shrubs and the surprising velvet quality of its grass. In the twilight, as now, it became a place of utter enchantment, connected with our world only through the play-cries of the doctor’s son—who was about ten years old—and his friends.

  When my wife and I arrived, the labor leader was already present, a man of about thirty, heavy-set, broad-shouldered with a broad and warm Indian face. A few minutes later, the exile and his wife arrived, his wife a thin, weary woman with fine dark eyes and an air of incredible loneliness. A Chilean, a member of the Chilean Senate and representative of the Chilean working class to a trade union congress in Mexico City, completed the party. After we were all introduced, we sat around and drank the very excellent drinks the doctor served and talked, the conversation half in Spanish, half in English, flowing from one language into the other, the stiffness of the English soothed and modulated by the melodious lilt of the Spanish. The Chilean had been in Spain during the Civil War, and he and Serente’s wife—whom he had known as a nurse then—recalled old memories, most of them tortured by time, defeat and resignation. The Mexican labor leader, whose name was Diego Gomez, was too young to recall those times, and Serente, to whom talk of Spain always brought sorrow, changed the subject by telling the story of how I had seen Christ riding down Dwight W. Morrow Street. He told it mockingly, watching my reaction, and then the exile pointed out what a charming title for a story it made, Christ on Dwight W. Morrow Street. What in the whole world could be as incongruous?

  Just Dwight W. Morrow Street,” Mrs. Serente said. “Each time I hear it, I find it as unbelievable.”

  “Christ in Cuernavaca,” Gomez said in Spanish. “There is the best title. Only I am dubious. Of all the places on earth, I feel that Cuernavaca will be the last for Christ to visit if He returns.”

  “And why?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Gomez said. “The sorrows of Mexico are doubly visited here. My people, who have an affection for pungent phrases, explain all that afflicts them by pointing out that Mexico is too far from God and too close to the United States. But in Cuernavaca, North America sits squarely upon our backs. A double burden, so as to speak. You have peopled our plain Mexican saloons with your rich alcoholics, our dancehalls with your homosexuals, and our lovely plazas and streets with your lean and ravenous and sexless women. You have built your great mansions all over our hills, and you dazzle us with your wealth. My sister-in-law’s cousin, a plain peasant woman, works as a domestic for the Thompsons here, the one who used to be ambassador to the Argentine. She is paid one hundred and fifty pesos a month and she works seven days a week. Last week a Texas oil-man was visiting the Thompsons. He had too much to drink and he was courting Thompson’s wife. As a gesture, he lit her cigarette with a twenty dollar bill. Yes, each time she asked for a cigarette, he lit it with a twenty dollar bill, four times—one thousand pesos—and only last year this woman, the domestic, this woman’s child died because 250 milligrams of terramycin costs two pesos—”

  “I know,” my wife broke in, “that happens. But it isn’t all of us. You don’t judge a hundred and sixty million people by the Thompsons.”

  “Who am I to judge?” Gomez smiled. “We are talking of Christ in Cuernavaca.”

  “You see, the Mexican is always the center of the earth,” the Chilean said gently. “Oh, what a people!”

  “With good reason,” Gomez said.

  “Any Mexican reason is a good reason. Their ego would even include a monopoly of the world’s suffering—a monopoly of all afflictions, including the United States.”

  “You are too kind to us.”

  “The trouble is,” the exile said, “that no North American can even begin to understand Mexico.”

  “With the possible exception of yourself,” Serente put in.

  “Possibly. I think I understand Mexico—in part, at least.”

  “I don’t,” the Chilean said comfortably. “Nor will I ever. I have even decided to stop trying. I have been here only three weeks, but I have decided that it is easier to love Mexico than to try to understand her.”

  “We are very easy to understand,” Gomez said slowly. “We are plain people and very poor and our backs are bent because always upon them there has been either a Spaniard, a priest, or a North American. Why is that so hard to understand? Why does everyone complicate it so?”

  “And when your backs are no longer bent?”

  “You will see Mexico then,” Gomez nodded. “It will be like this garden—all of it.”

  “But we have all forgotten the little girl,” said my wife. “What will happen to her?”

  “She will die,” said Gomez flatly.

  “And we must accept that?”

  “I have never really understood,” observed Serente, “why people come to Mexico to vacation.”

  �
��To see our cathedrals,” said Gomez, and then I observed that we had seen one of them today, and that I had told my story to a priest.

  “In your Spanish?” Serente snorted.

  “He spoke English excellently. He learned it in Spain during the Civil War.”

  “What was he doing in Spain?”

  “Mexico was uncomfortable for him then, so he went to Spain. I did not ask him what he did there. I could guess.”

  “And did he listen attentively to your story?”

  “Very attentively.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said that the life or death of the little girl is up to God, and he resented my interference.”

  The exile smiled bitterly and said, almost in the way of a non sequitur, “When I was in India, many years ago when it was still a British colony, I spent an hour with the Communist Party District Organizer of the State of Bengal, and I asked him about his program. He pointed out that while the program was long and involved, he could condense it into one sentence. All we have to do, he explained, is to teach our people to spit once together, and then there will be such a wave of water as will wash every Englishman into the sea.”

  “Once together,” nodded Gomez appreciatively. “A simple act that often takes many centuries to perfect.”

  “I don’t like your smile,” Serente’s wife commented. “It’s rather nasty.”

  “But homely. Don’t you think we often confuse the two?”

  Then the Chilean asked me, “But what made you think that the man’s face was the face of Christ? How could you know?” He used a Spanish idiom that confused me, and Serente had to translate the question.

  “Well, there is a face. It’s the face that reoccurs in most of the paintings and sculptures.”

  “I wonder,” the Chilean reflected. “There is so much speculation even as to whether Christ ever existed. Rembrandt painted Jewish faces, if there is such a thing. When the Spaniards came to our land, the Christ they brought had Spanish faces, but little by little, our own painters and sculptures made it a Chilean face, the patient, tired face of the Chilean miner or the the Chilean peasant. I don’t understand why you felt so strongly that this was the face and figure of Christ.”