The Honorary Consul

by Graham Greene

  "And God the Father, Léon? He doesn't seem to provide much. I asked last night if you still believed in Hun. To me He has always seemed a bit of a swine. I would rather believe in Apollo. At least he was beautiful."

  "The trouble is we have lost the power to believe in Apollo," Father Rivas said. "We have Jehovah in our blood. We can't help it. After all these centuries Jehovah lives in our darkness like a worm in the intestines."

  "You should never have been a priest, Léon."

  "Perhaps you are right, but it's too late to change now. What time is it? How tired to death I am of this radio, but we have to listen to the news—it is still possible they may give in."

  "My watch has stopped. I forgot to wind it."

  "Then we had better keep the radio on, however dangerous, as long as there is a chance..." He turned the sound as low as he could, but all the same they ceased to be alone. Someone was playing a harp almost inaudibly, someone sang in a whisper. They might have been sitting in a vast hall where they couldn't even see or hear the performers.

  There was nothing to do but talk, talk about anything under the sun except about Sunday midnight.

  "I've often noticed," Doctor Plarr said, "when a man leaves a woman he begins to hate her. Or is it that he hates his own failure? Perhaps we want to destroy the only witness who knows exactly what we are like when we drop the comedy. I suppose I shall hate Clara when I leave her."

  "Clara?"

  "Fortnum's wife."

  "It 'is' true what they say?"

  "There's not much point in lying about anything, Léon, in the position we are in now. Dying is a wonderfully effective truth drug, better than pentothal. You priests have always known that. When the priest arrives I always leave a dying man so that he's free to talk. They most of them want to talk, if they have the strength."

  "Are you planning to desert this woman?"

  "I'm planning nothing. But it will happen. If I live. I am certain of that. Nothing is for keeps in this world, Léon. When you entered the Church, weren't you sure in your heart that one day even your priesthood would come to an end?"

  "No. I never believed that. Not for a moment. I thought the Church and I wanted the same thing. You see I had been very happy in my seminary. You might say that was the period of my honeymoon. Only there were occasions... I suppose it happens the same way in all honeymoons... there was a hint that something might be wrong... I remember one old priest... he was the professor in the moral theology course. I've never known a man so cut and dried and sure of the truth. Of course moral theology is the bugbear in every seminary. You learn the rules and find they don't apply to any human case... Oh well, I used to think, a little difference of opinion, what does it matter? In the end a man and wife grow together. The Church will grow nearer to me as I grow nearer to her."

  "But when you left the Church you began to hate it, didn't you?"

  "I have told you—I never left the Church. Mine is only a separation, Eduardo, a separation by mutual consent, not a divorce. I shall never belong wholly to anyone else. Not even to Marta."

  "Even a separation brings hate often enough," Doctor Plarr said. "I have seen it happen many times among my patients in this damned country where no one is allowed a divorce."

  "It will never happen in my case. Even if I cannot love, I see no reason to hate. I can never forget that long honeymoon in the seminary when I was so happy. Now, if I feel any emotion for the Church, it is regret, not hate. I think she could have used me easily for a good purpose if she had understood a little better. I mean about the world as it is."

  The radio murmured on, and they listened with ears alert for the time signal. In the room of mud, which might well have been some primitive aboveground tomb prepared for a whole family, Doctor Plarr no longer felt the least desire to torment Léon Rivas. If there was anyone he wanted to torment, it was himself. He thought: whatever we may pretend to each other, we have both given up hope. That is why we can talk like the friends we used to be. I have reached a premature old age when I can no longer mock a man for his beliefs, however absurd. I can only envy them.

  Curiosity after a while drove him to speak. He remembered how at his first Communion in Asunción, dressed like a diminutive monk with a rope round his waist, he had believed—something, though now he could not remember what.

  "It's a long time," he told Léon, "since I listened to a priest. I thought you taught that the Church was infallible like Christ."

  "Christ was a man," Father Rivas said, "even if some of us believe that he was God as well. It was not the God the Romans killed, but a man. A carpenter from Nazareth. Some of the rules He laid down were only the rules of a good man. A man who lived in his own province, in his own particular day. He had no idea of the kind of world we would be living in now. Render unto Caesar, but when 'our' Caesar uses napalm and fragmentation bombs... The Church lives in time too. Only sometimes, for a short while, for some people—I am not one of them—I am not a man of vision—I think perhaps—but how can I explain to you when I believe so little myself?—I think sometimes the memory of that man, that carpenter, can lift a few people out of the temporary Church of these terrible years, when the Archbishop sits down to dinner with the General, into the great Church beyond our time and place, and then... those lucky ones... they have no words to describe the beauty of that Church."

  "I don't understand a word you say, Léon. You used to explain things more clearly. Even the Trinity."

  "Forgive me. It is such a very long time since I read the right sort of books."

  "You haven't the right audience either. I feel no more interested in the Church now than I feel in Marxism. The Bible is as unreadable to me as Das Kapital. Only sometimes, like a bad habit, I find myself using that crude word God. Last night..."

  "Any word one uses from habit means nothing at all."

  "All the same, when you shoot Fortnum in the back of the head, are you sure you won't have a moment's fear of old Jehovah and His anger? 'Thou shalt not commit murder.' "

  "If I kill him it will be God's fault as much as mine."

  "God's fault?"

  "He made me what I am now. He will have loaded the gun and steadied my hand."

  "I thought the Church teaches that He's love?"

  "Was it love which sent six million Jews to the gas ovens? You are a doctor, you must often have seen intolerable pain—a child dying of meningitis. Is that love? It was not love which cut off Aquino's fingers. The police stations where such things happen... He created them."

  "I have never heard a priest blame God for things like that before."

  "I don't blame Him. I pity Him," Father Rivas said, and the time signal struck faintly in the dark.

  "Pity God?"

  The priest put his fingers on the dial. For a moment he hesitated to turn it. Yes, Doctor Plarr thought, there is always something to be said for remaining ignorant of the worst. I have never told a cancer patient yet that' there is no hope any longer.

  A voice said as indifferently as if it were reading out a list of prices on the stock exchange, "The following communique has been issued from police headquarters. 'At seventeen hours yesterday a man who refused to give his name was arrested while attempting to board the ferry to the Chaco shore. He attempted to escape by plunging into the river, but he was shot by police officers. His body was recovered. It proved to be that of a lorry driver employed at the Bergman orange-canning factory. He had been absent from work since last Monday, the day before the kidnapping of the British Consul. His name was Diego Corredo and his age was thirty-five. Unmarried. His identification is believed to be an important step toward tracing the other members of the gang. It is thought that the kidnappers have not left the province, and an intensive search is now in progress. The commander of the 9th Infantry Brigade has put a parachute company at the disposal of the police.'"

  Doctor Plarr said, "Lucky for you he was not interrogated. I doubt if Perez would have many scruples at this stage."

  It wa
s Pablo who answered. "They will discover soon enough who his friends were. I was employed at the same factory until a year ago. Everyone knew we were good friends." The man on the radio was talking again about the Argentinian football team. There had been a riot with twenty injured when they played in Barcelona.

  ***

  Father Rivas woke Miguel and sent him out to relieve Aquino, and when Aquino returned, the old arguments, broke out anew. Marta had cooked the anonymous stew which she had served for two days now. Doctor Plarr wondered whether Father Rivas had endured the same meal every day of his married life, but probably it was no worse than he had been accustomed to eat in the poor 'barrio' of Asunción.

  Aquino waved his spoon and demanded the instant death ol Charley Fortnum. "They have killed Diego."

  To gel awa> from them awhile Doctor Plarr carried a plate of stew into the other room. Charley Fortnum looked at it with distaste. "I could do with a nice grilled chop, he said, "but I suppose they are afraid I would use a knife to escape."

  "We are all eating the same thing," Doctor Plarr said. "I only wish Humphries was here. It might give him an even greater appetite for the goulash at the Italian Club."

  " 'Whatever the crime, the same meal's served to all.'"

  "A quotation?"

  "One of that fellow Aquino's poems. Is there any news?"

  "The man called Diego tried to escape to the Chaco, but the police shot him."

  "Ten little nigger boys and then there were nine. Will I be the next to go?"

  "I don't think so. You are the only card they have left to gambit with. Even if the police discover this hideout they'll be afraid to attack it while you are alive."

  "I doubt if they would bother much about me."

  "Colonel Perez will bother about his career."

  "Are you as scared as I am, Ted?"

  "I don't know. Perhaps I have a bit more hope. Or perhaps I have less to lose."

  "Yes. That's true. You're lucky. You haven't Clara and the baby to worry about."

  "No."

  "You know about these things, Ted. Will there be much pain?"

  "They say when the wound's serious people feel very little."

  "And my wound will be the most serious of all."

  "Yes."

  "Clara will feel the pain longer than me. I wish it could be the other way round."

  ***

  They were still arguing in the outer room when Doctor Plarr returned. Aquino was saying, "But what does he know of the situation? He is safe in Córdoba or..." He checked himself and looked up at Doctor Plarr.

  "Don't worry," Doctor Plarr said, "I am not likely to survive you. Unless you give up this insane idea. You still have time to escape."

  "And £. dmit failure," Aquino said, "to all the world."

  "You used to be a poet. Were you afraid to admit it when a poem failed?"

  "My poems were never published," Aquino said. "No one knew when I failed. My poems were never read out on the radio. There were 110 questions asked about them in the British Parliament."

  "It's your damn 'machismo' again, isn't it? Who invented 'machismo'? A gang of ruffians like Pizarro and Cortes. Can't any of you for a moment escape your bloody history? You haven't learned a thing, have you, from Cervantes? He had his fill of 'machismo' at Lepanto."

  Father Rivas said, "Aquino is right. We cannot afford to fail. Once before our people released a man rather than kill him—he was a Paraguayan Consul, the General cared no more about his life than Fortnum's, and when it came to the point we were not prepared to kill. If we are weak again like that, no threat of death will be of any use on this continent. Until more ruthless men than we are begin to kill a great many more. I do not want to be responsible for the deaths which will follow our failure."

  "You have a complicated conscience," Doctor Plarr said. "Will you pity God for those murders too?"

  "You have no idea, have you, what I meant?"

  "No. I was never taught anything about pitying God by the Jesuits in Asunción. Not that I remember."

  "Perhaps you would have more faith now if you had remembered a little more."

  "Mine's a busy life, Léon, trying to cure the sick. I can't leave that to God."

  "Oh, you may be right. I have always had far too much time. Two Masses on a Sunday. A few feast days. Confessions twice a week. It was mostly the old women who came—and of course the children. The children were forced to come. They were beaten if they did not come, and anyway I gave them sweets. Not as a reward. The bad child received just as many sweets as the good one. I only wanted to make them feel happy while they knelt in that stuffy box. And when.1 gave them a penance I tried to make it a game we played together, a reward not a punishment. And they sucked their sweets while they said a Hail Mary. I could be happy too, for as long as I was with them. I was never happy with then- fathers—or their mothers. I don't know why. Perhaps if I had had a child myself..."

  "It's a long journey you've made, Léon, since you left Asunción."

  "It was not. such an innocent life there as you think. Once a child of eight told me he had drowned his baby sister in the Paraná. People thought she had slipped off the cliff. He told me she used to eat too much and there was less for him. Less mandioca!"

  "Did you give him a sweet?"

  "Yes. And three Hail Marys for a penance."

  Pablo went out on guard in his turn, taking Miguel's place. Marta served the Guaraní with stew and cleaned the other plates. She said, "Father, tomorrow is Sunday. Surely you could say a Mass for us on that day?"

  "It is more than three years since I last said a Mass. I doubt if I can even remember the words."

  "I have a missal, Father."

  "Read the Mass to yourself then, Marta. It will serve just as well."

  "You heard what they said on the radio. The soldiers are searching for us now. It may be the last Mass we shall ever hear. And there is Diego—you must say a Mass for him."

  "I have no right to say a Mass. When I married you, Marta, I excommunicated myself."

  "No one knows you married me."

  "'I' know."

  "Father Pedro used to sleep with women. Everyone in Asunción knew that. And he said Mass every Sunday."

  "He did not marry, Marta. He could go to confession and sin again and go to confession. I am not responsible for his conscience."

  "You seem to suffer from an odd lot of scruples, Léon," Doctor Plarr said, "for a man who plans to murder."

  "Yes. Perhaps they are not scruples—only superstitions. You see if I took the Host I would still half believe I was taking His body. Anyway it's a useless argument. There is no wine."

  "Oh but there is, Father," Marta said. "I found an empty medicine bottle in the rubbish dump and when I was in the town I filled it at a cantina."

  "You think of everything," Father Rivas said sadly.

  "Father, you know I have wanted all these years to hear you say Mass again and to see the people praying with you. Of course it will not be the same without the beautiful vestments. If only you had kept them with you."

  "They did not belong to me, Marta. Anyway vestments are not the Mass. Do you think the Apostles wore vestments? How I hated wearing them when the people in front of me were all in rags. I was glad to turn my back on them and forget them and see only the altar and the candles—but the money for the candles would have fed half the people there."

  "You are wrong, Father. We were all glad to see you in those vestments. They were so beautiful, all the scarlet and the gold embroidery."

  "Yes. I suppose they helped you escape from everything for a little while, but to me they were the clothes of a convict."

  "But, Father, you won't listen to the Archbishop's rules? You will say a Mass for us tomorrow?"

  "Suppose what they say is true and I am damning myself?"

  "The good God would never damn a man like you, Father. But poor Diego, Jose's wife... all of us... we need you to speak to God for us."

  Father Rivas said,
"All right. I will say Mass. For your sake, Marta. I have done very little for you in these years. You have given me love and all I have given you has been a great deal of danger and a dirt floor to lie on. I will say Mass as soon as it is light if the soldiers give us enough time. Have we any bread left?"

  "Yes, Father."

  A sense of some obscure grievance moved Doctor Plarr. He said, "You don't believe yourself in all this mumbojumbo, Léon. You are fooling them like you fooled that child who killed his sister. You want to hand them sweets at Communion to comfort them before you murder Charley Fortnum. I've seen with my own eyes things just as bad as any you've listened to in the confessional, but I can't be pacified with sweets. I have seen a child born without hands and feet. I would have killed it if I had been left alone with it, but the parents watched me too closely—they wanted to keep that bloody broken torso alive. The Jesuits used to tell us it was our duty to love God. A duty to love a God who produces that abortion? It's like the duty of a German to love Hitler. Isn't it better not to believe in that horror up there sitting in the clouds of heaven than pretend to love him?"

  "It may be better not to breathe, but all the same I cannot help breathing. Some men, I think, are condemned to belief by a judge just as they are condemned to prison. They have no choice. No escape. They have been put behind the bars for life."