The power and the glory (3 page)

"He will be one day soon, when the Holy Father pleases."
"And are they all like that?"
"Who?"
"The martyrs."
"Yes. All."
"Even Padre José?"
"Don't mention him," the mother said. "How dare you? That despicable man. A traitor to God."
"He told me he was more of a martyr than the rest."
"I've told you many times not to speak to him. My dear child, oh, my dear child..."
"And the other one-the one who came to see us?"
"No, he is not-exactly-like Juan."
"Is he despicable?"
"No, no. Not despicable."
The smallest girl said suddenly: "He smelt funny."
The mother went on reading: "'Did any premonition touch young Juan that night that he, too, in a few short years, would be numbered among the martyrs? We cannot say, but Father Miguel Cerra tells how that evening Juan spent longer than usual upon his knees, and when his class-mates teased him a little, as boys will..."
The voice went on and on, mild and deliberate, inflexibly gentle: the small girls listened intently, framing in their minds little pious sentences with which to surprise their parents, and the boy yawned against the whitewash. Everything has an end.
Presently the mother went in to her husband. She said: "I am so worried about the boy."
"Why not about the girls? There is worry everywhere."
"They are two little saints already. But the boy-he asks such questions-about that whisky priest. I wish we had never had him in the house."
"They would have caught him if we hadn't, and then he would have been one of your martyrs. They would write a book about him and you would read it to the children."
"That man-never."
"Well, after all," her husband said, "he carries on. I don't believe all that they write in these books. We are all human." "You know what I heard today? About a poor woman who took him her son to be baptized. She wanted him called Pedro-but he was so drunk that he took no notice at all and baptized the boy Carlota. Carlota."
"Well, it's a good saint's name."
"There are times," the mother said, "when I lose all patience with you. And now the boy has been talking to Padre José."
"This is a small town," her husband said. "And there is no use pretending. We have been abandoned here. We must get along as best we can. As for the Church-the Church is Padre José and the whisky priest-I don't know of any other. If we don't like the Church, well, we must leave it."
He watched her with patience. He had more education than his wife: he could use a typewriter and knew the elements of book-keeping: once he had been to Mexico City: he could read a map. He knew the extent of their abandonment--the ten hours down-river to the port, the forty-two hours in the Gulf of Vera Cruz-that was one way out. To the north the swamps and rivers petering out against the mountains which divided them from the next state. And on the other side no roads-only mule-tracks and an occasional unreliable plane: Indian villages and the huts of herds: two hundred miles away the Pacific.
She said: "I would rather die."
"Oh," he said, "of course. That goes without saying. But we have to go on living."
The old man sat on a packing-case in the little dry patio. He was very fat and short of breath: he panted a little as if after great exertion in the heat. Once he had been something of an astronomer and now he tried to pick out the constellations, staring up into the night sky. He wore only a shirt and trousers: his feet were bare, but there remained something unmistakably clerical in his manner. Forty years of the priesthood had branded him. There was complete silence over the town: everybody was asleep.
The glittering worlds lay there in space like a promise-the world was not the universe. Somewhere Christ might not have died. He could not believe that to a watcher there this world could shine with such brilliance: it would roll heavily in space under its fog like a burning and abandoned ship. The whole globe was blanketed with his own sin.
A woman called from the only room he possessed: "José, José." He crouched like a galley-slave at the sound: his eyes left the sky, and the constellations fled upwards: the beetles crawled over the patio. "José, José." He thought with envy of the men who had died: it was over so soon. They were taken up there to the cemetery and shot against the wall: in two minutes life was extinct. And they called that martyrdom. Here life went on and on: he was only sixty-two. He might live to ninety. Twenty-eight years-that immeasurable period between his birth and his first parish: all childhood and youth and the seminary lay there.
"José. Come to bed." He shivered: he knew that he was a buffoon. An old man who married was grotesque enough, but an old priest... He stood outside himself and wondered whether he was even fit for hell. He was just a fat old impotent man mocked and taunted between the sheets. But then he remembered the gift he had been given which nobody could take away. That was what made him worthy of damnation-the power he still had of turning the wafer into the flesh and blood of God. He was a sacrilege. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he defiled God. Some mad renegade Catholic, puffed up with the Governors politics, had once broken into a church (in the days when there were still churches) and seized the Host. He had spat on it, trampled it, and then the people had got him and hanged him as they did the stuffed Judas on Holy Thursday from the belfry. He wasn't so bad a man, Padre José thought-he would be forgiven, he was just a politician, but he himself, he was worse than that-he was like an obscene picture hung here every day to corrupt children with.
He belched on his packing-case shaken by wind. "José, what are you doing? You come to bed." There was never anything to do at all-no daily Office, no Masses, no confessions, and it was no good praying any longer at all: a prayer demanded an act and he had no intention of acting. He had lived for two years now in a continuous state of mortal sin with no one to hear his confession: nothing to do at all but sit and eat-eat far too much: she fed him and fattened him and preserved him like a prize boar. "José." He began to hiccup with nerves at the thought of facing for the seven hundred and thirty-eighth time his harsh house-keeper-his wife. There she would be, lying in the big shameless bed that filled up half the room, a bony shadow within the mosquito tent, a lanky jaw and a short grey pigtail and an absurd bonnet. She thought she had a position to keep up: a government pensioner: the wife of the only married priest. She was proud of it. "José." "I'm-hic-coming, my love," he said, and lifted himself from the crate. Somebody somewhere laughed.
He lifted little pink eyes like those of a pig conscious of the slaughter-room. A high child's voice said: "José." He stared in a bewildered way around the patio. At a barred window opposite, three children watched him with deep gravity. He turned his back and took a step or two towards his door, moving very slowly because of his bulk. "José," somebody squeaked again, "José." He looked back over his shoulder and caught the faces out in expressions of wild glee: his little pink eyes showed no anger-he had no right to be angry: he moved his mouth into a ragged and baffled, disintegrated smile, and as if that sign of weakness gave them all the license they needed, they squealed back at him without disguise: "José, José. Come to bed, José." Their little shameless voices filled the patio, and he smiled humbly and sketched small gestures for silence, and there was no respect anywhere left for him in his home, in the town, in the whole abandoned star.

Chapter Three

CAPTAIN FELLOWS sang loudly to himself, while the little motor chugged in the bows of the canoe. His big sunburned face was like the map of a mountain region-patches of varying brown with two small lakes that were his eyes. He composed his songs as he went, and his voice was quite tuneless. "Going home, going home, the food will be good for m-e-e. I don't like the food in the bloody citee." He turned out of the main stream into a tributary: a few alligators lay on the sandy margin. "I don't like your snouts, O trouts. I don't like your snouts, O trouts." He was a happy man.
The banana plantations came down on either bank: his voice boomed under the hard sun: that and the churr of the motor were the only sounds anywhere-he was completely alone. He was borne up on a big tide of boyish joy-doing a mans job, the heart of the wild: he felt no responsibility for anyone. In only one other country had he felt more happy, and that was in war-time France, in the ravaged landscape of trenches. The tributary corkscrewed farther into the marshy overgrown state, and a buzzard lay spread out in the sky. Captain Fellows opened a tin box and ate a sandwich-food never tasted so good as out of doors. A monkey made a sudden chatter at him as he went by, and Captain Fellows felt happily at one with nature-a wide shallow kinship with all the world moved with the bloodstream through the veins: he was at home anywhere. The artful little devil, he thought, the artful little devil. He began to sing again-somebody else's words a little jumbled in his friendly unretentive memory. "Give to me the life I love, bread I dip in the river, under the wide and starry sky, the hunter's home from the sea." The plantations petered out, and far behind the mountains came into view, heavy black lines drawn low-down across the sky. A few bungalows rose out of the mud. He was home. A very slight cloud marred his happiness.
He thought: After all, a man likes to be welcomed.
He walked up to his bungalow: it was distinguished from the others which lay along the bank by a tiled roof, a flagpost without a flag, a plate on the door with the title, "Central American Banana Company." Two hammocks were strung up on the veranda, but there was nobody about. Captain Fellows knew where to find his wife-it was not she he had expected. He burst boisterously through a door and shouted: 'Daddy's home." A scared thin face peeked at him through a mosquito net; his boots ground peace into the floor; Mrs. Fellows flinched away into the white muslin tent. He said: "Pleased to see me, Trix?" and she drew rapidly on her face the outline of her frightened welcome. It was like a trick you do with a blackboard. Draw a dog in one line without lifting the chalk-and the answer, of course, is a sausage.
"I'm glad to be home," Captain Fellows said, and he believed it. It was his one firm conviction-that he really felt the correct emotions of love and joy and grief and hate. He had always been a good man at zero hour.
"All well at the office?"
"Fine," Fellows said, "fine."
"I had a bit of fever yesterday."
"Ah, you need looking after. You'll be all right now," he said vaguely, "that I'm home." He shied merrily away from the subject of fever-clapping his hands, a big laugh, while she trembled in her tent. "Where's Coral?"
"She's with the policeman," Mrs. Fellows said.
"I hoped she'd meet me," he said, roaming aimlessly about the little, inferior room, full of boot-trees, while his brain caught up with her. "Policeman? What policeman?"
"He came last night and Coral let him sleep on the veranda. He's looking for somebody, she says."
"What an extraordinary thing! Here?"
"He's not an ordinary policeman. He's an officer. He left his men in the village-Coral says."
"I do think you ought to be up," he said. "I mean-these fellows, you can't trust them." He felt no conviction when he added: "She's just a kid."
"I tell you I had fever," Mrs. Fellows wailed. "I felt so terribly ill."
"You'll be all right. just a touch of the sun. You'll see-now I'm home."
"I had such a headache. I couldn't read or sew. And then this man..."
Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round. She dressed up her fear, so that she could look at it-in the form of fever, rats, unemployment. The real thing was taboo-death coming nearer every year in the strange place: everybody packing up and leaving, while she stayed in a cemetery no one visited, in a big aboveground tomb.
He said: "I suppose I ought to go and see the man."
He sat down on the bed and put his hand upon her arm. They had something in common-a kind of diffidence. He said absent-mindedly: "That dago secretary of the boss has gone."
"Where?"
"West." He could feel her arm go stiff: she strained away from him towards the wall. He had touched the taboo-he shared it, the bond was broken, he couldn't tell why. "Headache, darling?"
"Hadn't you better see the man?"
"Oh, yes, yes. I'll be off." But he didn't stir: it was the child who came to him
She stood in the doorway watching them with a look of immense responsibility. Before her serious gaze they became a boy you couldn't trust and a ghost you could almost puff away: a piece of frightened air. She was very young-about thirteen-and at that age you are not afraid of many things, age and death, all the things which may turn up, snake-bite and fever and rats and a bad smell. Life hadn't got at her yet: she had a false air of impregnability. But she had been reduced already, as it were, to the smallest terms-everything was there but on the thinnest lines. That was what the sun did to a child, reduced it to a framework. The gold bangle on the bony wrist was like a padlock on a canvas door a fist could break. She said: "I told the policeman you were home."
"Oh, yes, yes," Captain Fellows said. "Got a kiss for your old father?"
She came solemnly across the room and kissed him formally upon the forehead-he could feel the lack of meaning. She had other things to think about. She said: "I told cook that mother would not be getting up for dinner."
"I think you ought to make the effort, dear," Captain Fellows said.
"Why?" Coral said.
"Oh well..."
Coral said: "I want to talk to you alone." Mrs. Fellows shifted inside her tent-just so she could be certain Coral would arrange the final evacuation. Common sense was a horrifying quality she had never possessed: it was common sense which said: "The dead can't hear" or "She can't know now" or "Tin flowers are more practical."
"I don't understand," Captain Fellows said uneasily, "why your mother shouldn't hear."
"She wouldn't want to go. It would only scare her."
Coral-he was accustomed to it by now-had an answer to everything. She never spoke without deliberation: she was prepared-but sometimes the answers she had prepared seemed to him of a wildness.... They were based on the only life she could remember-this. The swamp and vultures and no children anywhere, except a few in the village, with bellies swollen by worms, who ate dirt from the bank, inhumanly. A child is said to draw parents together, and certainly he felt an immense unwillingness to entrust himself to this child. Her answers might carry him anywhere. He felt through the net for his wife's hand-secretively: they were adults together. This was the stranger in their house. He said boisterously: "You're frightening us."
"I don't think," the child said, with care, "that you'll be frightened."
He said weakly, pressing his wife's hand: "Well, my dear, our daughter seems to have decided..."
"First you must see the policeman. I want him to go. I don't like him."
"Then he must go, of course," Captain Fellows said, with a hollow unconfident laugh.
"I told him that. I said we couldn't refuse him a hammock for the night, when he arrived so late. But now he must go."
"And he disobeyed you?"
"He said he wanted to speak to you."
"He little knew," Captain Fellows said, "he little knew." Irony was his only defence, but it was not understood: nothing was understood which was not clear-like an alphabet or a simple sum or a date in history. He relinquished his wife's hand and allowed himself to be led unwillingly into the afternoon sun. The police officer stood in front of the veranda: a motionless olive figure: he wouldn't stir a foot to meet Captain Fellows.
"Well, lieutenant?" Captain Fellows said breezily. It occurred to him that Coral had more in common with the policeman than with himself.
"I am looking for a man," the lieutenant said: "He has been reported in this district."
"He can't be here."
"Your daughter tells me the same."
"She knows."
"He is wanted on a very serious charge."
"Murder?"
"No. Treason."
"Oh, treason," Captain Fellows said, all his interest dropping: there was so much treason everywhere-it was like petty larceny in a barracks.
"He is a priest. I trust you will report at once if he is seen." The lieutenant paused. "You are a foreigner living under the protection of our laws. We expect you to make a proper return for our hospitality. You are not a Catholic?"
"No."
"Then I can trust you to report?" the lieutenant said.
"I suppose so."
The lieutenant stood there like a little dark menacing question mark in the sun: his attitude seemed to indicate that he wouldn't even accept the benefit of shade from a foreigner. But he had used a hammock: that, Captain Fellows supposed, he must have regarded as a requisition. "Have a glass of gaseosa?"
"No. No, thank you."
"Well," Captain Fellows said, "I can't offer you anything else, can I? It's treason to drink spirits."
The lieutenant suddenly turned on his heel as if he could no longer bear the sight of them and strode away along the path which led to the village: his gaiters and his pistol-holster winked in the sunlight. When he had gone some way they could see him pause and spit: he had not been discourteous, he had waited till he supposed that they no longer watched him before he got rid of his hatred and contempt for a different way of life, for ease, safety, toleration, and complacency.
"I wouldn't want to be up against him," Captain Fellows said.
"Of course he doesn't trust us."
"They don't trust anyone."
"I think," Coral said. "he smelt a rat."
"They smell them everywhere."
"You see, I wouldn't let him search the place."
"Why ever not?" Captain Fellows said-and then his vague mind went off at a tangent. "How did you stop him?"
"I said I'd loose the dogs on him-and complain to the Minister. He hadn't any right..."
"Oh, right," Captain Fellows said. "They carry their right on their hips. It wouldn't have done any harm to let him look."
"I gave him my word." She was as inflexible as the lieutenant: small and black and out of place among the banana groves. Her candour made allowances for nobody: the future, full of compromises, anxieties, and shame, lay outside: the gate was dosed which would one day let it in. But at any moment now a word, a gesture, the most trivial act might be her sesame-to what? Captain Fellows was touched with fear: he was aware of an inordinate love: it robbed him of authority. You cannot control what you love-you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead. He dosed his eyes-he was a happy man--and hummed a tune.
Coral said: "I shouldn't have liked a man like that to catch me out-lying, I mean."
"Lying? Good God," Captain Fellows said, "you don't mean he's here?"
"Of course he's here," Coral said.
"Where?"
"In the big barn," she explained gently.
"We couldn't let them catch him."
"Does your mother know about this?"
She said with devastating honesty: "Oh, no. I couldn't trust her." She was independent of both of them: they belonged together in the past. In forty years' time they would be dead as last year's dog. He said: "You'd better show me."
He walked slowly: happiness drained out of him more quickly and completely than out of an unhappy man: an unhappy man is always prepared. As she walked in front of him, her two meagre tails of hair bleaching in the sunlight, it occurred to him for the first time that she was of an age when Mexican girls were ready for their first man. What was to happen? He flinched away from problems which he had never dared to confront. As they passed the window of his bedroom he caught sight of a thin shape lying bunched and bony and alone in a mosquito tent. He remembered with self-pity and nostalgia his happiness on the river, doing a man's job without thinking of other people. If I had never married.... He wailed like a child at the merciless immature back: "We've no business interfering in their politics."
"This isn't politics," she said gently. "I know about politics. Mother and I are doing the Reform Bill." She took a key out of her pocket and unlocked the big barn in which they stored bananas before sending them down the river to the port. It was very dark inside after the glare: there was a scuffle in a corner. Captain Fellows picked up an electric torch and shone it on somebody in a torn, dark suit-a small man who blinked and needed a shave.
"Que es usted?" Captain Fellows said.
"I speak English." He clutched a small attaché case to his side, as if he were waiting to catch a train he must on no account miss.
"You've no business here."
"No," the man said, "no."
"It's nothing to do with us," Captain Fellows said. "We are foreigners."
The man said: "Of course. I will go." He stood with his head a little bent like a man in an orderly-room listening to an officer's decision. Captain Fellows relented a little. He said: "You'd better wait till dark. You don't want to be caught."
"No."
"Hungry?"
"A little. It does not matter." He said with a rather repulsive humility: "If you would do me a favour..."
"What?"
"A little brandy."
"I'm breaking the law enough for you as it is," Captain Fellows said. He strode out of the barn, feeling twice the size, leaving the small bowed figure in the darkness among the bananas. Coral locked the door and followed him. "What a religion!" Captain Fellows said. "Begging for brandy. Shameless."
"But you drink it sometimes."
"My dear," Captain Fellows said, "when you are older you'll understand the difference between drinking a little brandy after dinner and-well, needing it."
"Can I take him some beer?"
"You won't take him anything."
"The servants wouldn't be safe."
He was powerless and furious; he said: "You see what a hole you've put us in." He stumped back into the house and into his bedroom, roaming restlessly among the boot-trees. Mrs. Fellows slept uneasily, dreaming of weddings. Once she said aloud: "My train. Be careful of my train."