Monsignor Quixote (13 page)

‘There are many holy words written which are not in the Bible or the Fathers. Those words of Marx demand in a way to be intoned . . . “Heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour . . . chivalrous enthusiasm.”'

‘Franco is dead, father, but all the same do please show a bit of prudence. That man over there is listening to every word you say.'

‘Of course, like all the prophets, Marx does make mistakes. Even St Paul was liable to error.'

‘I don't like the man's brief-case. It's an official sort of brief-case. I can smell the secret police from thirty metres away.'

‘Let me read you what I think is his biggest mistake. The origin of all the other mistakes to come.'

‘For God's sake, father, if you must read, read in a low voice.'

To please the Mayor, Father Quixote almost whispered the words. Sancho had to lean close to him in order to hear, and they must have had the air of two conspirators. ‘“The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industrial labour has stripped him of every trace of national character.” Perhaps that seemed true when he wrote, Sancho, but surely the world has taken a very different route. Listen to this too: “The modern labourer, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper.” You know, once some years ago I took a holiday with a friend – a priest – his name was – oh dear, how one forgets names after a glass or two of wine. He had a parish on the Costa Brava (it was when Rocinante was very young) and I saw the English paupers – so Marx calls them – lying in the sun on the beaches there. As for not having a national character, they had forced the local people to open what they called fish-and-chip shops: otherwise they would have taken their custom elsewhere, perhaps to France or Portugal.'

‘Oh, the English,' Sancho said, ‘forget the English – they never conform to any rules, not even of economics. The Russian proletariat are no longer paupers either. The world has learnt from Marx and Russia. The Russian proletariat have their holidays paid for them in the Crimea. It's just as good as the Costa Brava.'

‘The proletariat I saw on the Costa Brava were paying for their own holidays. You have to look at the Third World, Sancho, to find any paupers now. But that's not because of the triumph of Communism. Don't you think all this would have happened without Communism? Why, it was already beginning to happen when Marx wrote, but he didn't notice. So that's why Communism had to be spread by force – force not only against the bourgeoisie, force against the proletariat too. It was humanism, not Communism, which turned the pauper into the bourgeois and behind humanism there's always the shadow of religion – the religion of Christ as well as the religion of Marx. We are all bourgeois today. Don't tell me that Brezhnev is not just as much a bourgeois as you and me. If the whole world becomes bourgeois, will it be so bad – except for dreamers like Marx and my ancestor?'

‘You make the world of the future sound like Utopia, father.'

‘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 brief-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.'