Monsignor Quixote (14 page)

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 enjoyable 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.'

‘Oh, so that's how it's done. I always imagined it to be a great deal more simple and more enjoyable. They seemed to suffer such a lot. From the sounds they made.'

‘They were pretending – this is acting, father – to have unbearable pleasure.'

‘They didn't seem to find it pleasurable – or perhaps they were bad actors. They just went on suffering. And I saw no balloons, Sancho.'

‘I was afraid you might be shocked, father, but it was you who chose the film.'

‘Yes. By the title. But I don't understand what the title had to do with what we saw.'

‘Well, I suppose that a maiden's prayer is to find a handsome young man to love.'

‘That word love again. I don't believe that Señorita Martin prayed for anything like that. But all the same I was impressed by the silence of the audience. They took it so seriously that I was really afraid to laugh.'

‘You wanted to laugh?'

‘Yes. It was difficult not to. But I don't like to offend anyone who takes a thing seriously. Laughter is not an argument. It can be a stupid abuse. Perhaps they saw things differently from me. Perhaps it was beauty that they saw. All the same, sometimes I longed for one of them to laugh – even you, Sancho – so that I could laugh too. But I was afraid to break that total silence. There is something holy in silence. It would hurt me if in church when I raised the Host someone laughed.'

‘Suppose everyone in the church laughed?'

‘Ah, that would be quite different. Then I would think – I might be wrong, of course – that I was hearing the laughter of joy. A solitary laugh is so often a laugh of superiority.'

That night in bed Father Quixote opened his volume of St Francis de Sales. He still found himself worried by those scenes of love-making in the cinema – worried by his failure to be moved by any emotion except amusement. He had always believed that human love was the same kind as the love of God, even though only the faintest and feeblest reflection of that love, but those exercises which had made him want to laugh aloud, those grunts and squeals . . . Am I, he wondered, incapable of feeling human love? For, if I am, then I must also be incapable of feeling love for God. He began to fear that his spirit might be stamped indelibly by that terrible question mark. He desperately wanted comfort and so he turned to what Sancho had called his books of chivalry, but he couldn't help remembering that Don Quixote at the last had renounced them on his deathbed. Perhaps he too when the end arrived . . .

He opened
The Love of God
at random, but the
sortes Virgilianae
gave him no comfort. He tried three times and then he struck a passage which did seem relevant to what he had seen in the cinema. Not that it made him happier, for it made him think that perhaps he had even less capacity to love than a piece of iron. ‘Iron has such a sympathy with Adamant that as soon as it is touched with the virtue thereof it turns towards it, it begins to stir and quiver with a little hopping, testifying in that the complacence it takes, and thereupon it doth advance and bear itself towards the Adamant, striving by all means possible to be united to it.' And then came a question which pierced him to the heart. ‘And do you not see all the parts of a lively love represented in this lifeless stone?' Oh yes, he had seen a great deal of hopping, he thought, but he had not experienced the lively love.

The dreaded question mark was still stamped on his spirit when they set out next day. Rocinante was positively skittish after her stay in the garage and complained not at all when their speed mounted to forty – even forty-five – kilometres an hour, a speed which they only attained because Father Quixote was deep in his unhappy thoughts. ‘What is wrong?' Sancho asked him. ‘Again today you are the Monsignor of the Sorrowful Countenance.'

‘I have sometimes thought, may God forgive me,' Father Quixote said, ‘that I was specially favoured because I have never been troubled with sexual desires.'

‘Not even in dreams?'

‘No, not even in dreams.'

‘You are a very lucky man.'

Am I? he questioned himself. Or am I the most unfortunate? He couldn't say to the friend who sat beside him what he was thinking – the question he was asking himself. How can I pray to resist evil when I am not even tempted? There is no virtue in such a prayer. He felt completely alone in his silence. It was as though the area of the confessional box and the secrets which it held had extended beyond the box itself and beyond the penitent to include the car he sat in, even the wheel under his hand as they drove towards León. He prayed in his silence: O God, make me human, let me feel temptation. Save me from my indifference.

X

HOW MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE

CONFRONTED JUSTICE

1

They stopped on their way to León in a field on a river bank near the village of Mansilla de las Mulas because the Mayor claimed to have a great thirst. A small foot-bridge gave them a shadow in which they could leave the car, but in fact Sancho's thirst was only a subterfuge to break the silence of Father Quixote which was getting badly on his nerves. A drink might unlock Father Quixote's mouth, and he lowered a bottle of their manchegan wine into the river on a string, awakening the interest of some cows on the other bank. He came back to find Father Quixote staring gloomily down at his purple socks, and he could bear the inexplicable silence no longer. He said, ‘For God's sake, if you have taken a vow of silence go into a monastery. There are Carthusians at Burgos and Trappists at Osera. Take your choice, monsignor, which way we go.'

‘I am sorry, Sancho,' Father Quixote said. ‘It's only my thoughts . . .'

‘Oh, I suppose your thoughts are too high and spiritual for a mere Marxist to understand them.'

‘No, no.'

‘Remember, father, what a good governor my ancestor made. Don Quixote with all his chivalry and courage would never have governed so well. What a holy mess – I
mean
a holy mess – he would have made of that island. My ancestor took to governing just as Trotsky took to commanding an army. Trotsky was without experience, and yet he beat the White generals. Oh, we are materialists, I know, peasants and Marxists. But don't despise us for that.'