Silence

  The guards stood up among the bushes and urged on their captives. The priest went to stand up with the others, but the old man twisting his face up like a monkey and for the first time revealing hatred and rancour in his flashing eyes shouted out. ‘You,’ he cried, drawing up his tiny figure to its full stature and putting one hand on his sword, ‘stay here.’

  With a faint smile, the priest sat down again among the bushes. The little old fellow straightened up and, bent back like a rooster, he strutted along, obviously showing the prisoners his determination not to be beaten by a foreigner. A monkey, the priest reflected. He needn’t stand there with his hand on his sword. I’m not going to run away.

  He watched the group as, all manacled, they climbed the height and disappeared from sight into the distant plateau. ‘Hoc passionis tempore piis adauge gratiam.’ The prayer rose up to his dry lips bitterly. ‘Lord,’ he murmured, ‘do not increase their suffering. Already it is too heavy for them. Until today they have been able to bear it. Can you give even more trials to people already crushed with the burdens of taxation, officialdom and cruelty?’

  The old man put a cup to his lips and wet his throat much as a chicken would sip water. ‘I have met quite a number of fathers,’ he said. ‘I have cross-examined them sometimes. … ’ He moistened his lips and spoke now with a servile voice which was in striking contrast with his previous attitude. ‘You understand Japanese?’

  A few wisps of cloud hung in the sky. The hollow began to darken a little. In the shrubs round about the stifling humming of insects began to make itself heard for the first time.

  ‘Peasants are fools,’ he said. ‘It all depends on you whether or not they are to be set free.’

  The priest did not quite understand what he was getting at; but the expression on the other’s face made it clear that the cunning old rascal was setting some trap for him.

  ‘Peasants cannot think for themselves. Even if they talk the thing over they will come to no conclusion. But if you say a single word. … ’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’ asked the priest.

  ‘Apostatize! Apostatize!’ The old man laughed and waved his fan as he spoke.

  ‘And supposing I refuse?’ The priest replied quietly, laughing all the time. ‘Then you’ll kill me, I suppose.’

  ‘No, no,’ said the old man. ‘We won’t do that. If we did that the peasants would become even more stubborn. We made that mistake in Omura and Nagasaki. The Christians there are a stubborn crowd.’

  The old man heaved a deep sigh as he spoke, but it was immediately clear to the priest that the whole thing was a comedy. He even began to feel a secret joy in teasing this old fellow who looked like a monkey.

  ‘Now if you are really a father at heart, you ought to feel pity for the Christians. Isn’t that so?’

  Unconsciously the priest felt his mouth drop. What a simpleton this old fellow was. Did he think to win something with this childish logic? What he had forgotten, however, was that if this official was as simple as a child, he was equally simple in flaring up in anger when defeated in argument.

  ‘What about it?’, said the old man.

  ‘Punish me alone,’ said the priest, shrugging his shoulders and laughing.

  An angry color rose up to the forehead of the old man. From the far distant clouds a faint dull roar of thunder rumbled.

  ‘It is because of you that they must suffer,’ concluded the old man.

  They pushed him into the little hut. Through those brushwood walls standing on the naked soil the white rays of sunlight penetrated like pieces of thread. Outside he could hear the muffled voices of the chattering guards. Where had they brought the Christians? They had simply vanished from sight and that was all. Sitting on the ground and clasping his knees he thought about Monica and her one-eyed companion. Then he thought about the village of Tomogi, about Omatsu and Ichizo and Mokichi. And his heart grew heavy. If only, if only he had a moment for reflection he might at least have given those poor Christians a brief blessing. But he hadn’t even thought of it. This was proof that he hadn’t had a moment’s respite. At least he should have asked them what date it was, what day of the month it was. But he had forgotten that too.

  Since coming to this country he seemed to have lost all sense of time—of months and days; so that now he could no longer reckon how many days had passed since Easter or what saint’s feast was celebrated today.

  Since he had no rosary he began to recite the Paters and Aves on the five fingers of his hand; but just as the water dribbles back down from the mouth of the man whose lips are locked by sickness, the prayer remained empty and hollow on his lips. Rather was he drawn by the voices of the guards outside the hut. What was so funny that they should keep raising their voices and laughing heartily? His thoughts turned to the fire-lit garden and the servants; the figures of those men holding black flaming torches and utterly indifferent to the fate of one man. These guards, too, were men; they were indifferent to the fate of others. This was the feeling that their laughing and talking stirred up in his heart. Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind. And then for the first time a real prayer rose up in his heart.

  Suddenly a ray of bright light broke upon his closed eyelids. Someone was opening the door of the hut, quietly and stealthily, so as to make no noise. Next, tiny and menacing eyes were peering in at him. When the priest looked up the intruder quickly tried to withdraw.

  ‘He’s quiet, isn’t he?’ Someone else was now speaking to the guard who had looked in; and now the door opened. A flood of light rushed into the room and there appeared the figure of a man, not the old samurai but another, without a sword.

  ‘Señor, gracia,’ he said.

  So he was speaking Portuguese. The pronunciation was strange and halting, but it was certainly Portuguese.

  ‘Señor.’

  ‘Palazera â Dios nuestro Señor.’

  The sudden inrush of blinding light had made the priest somewhat dizzy. He listened to the words—yes, there were mistakes here and there; but there was no doubt about the meaning.

  ‘Don’t be surprised,’ went on the other in Portuguese. ‘In Nagasaki and Hirado there are a number of interpreters like myself. But I see that you, father, have quite a grasp of our language. Could you guess where I learnt my Portuguese?’

  Without waiting for an answer, the man went on talking; and as he spoke he kept moving his fan just like the old samurai had done. ‘Thanks to you Portuguese fathers seminaries were built in Arima and Amakusa and Omura. But this doesn’t mean that I’m an apostate. I was baptized all right; but from the beginning I had no wish to be a Christian nor a brother. I’m only the son of a court samurai; nothing but learning could make me great in the world.’

  The fellow was earnestly stressing the fact that he was not a Christian. The priest sat in the dark with expressionless face, listening to him as he prattled on.

  ‘Why don’t you say something?’ exclaimed the man, getting angry now. ‘The fathers always ridiculed us. I knew Father Cabral—he had nothing but contempt for everything Japanese. He despised our houses; he despised our language; he despised our food and our customs—and yet he lived in Japan. Even those of us who graduated from the seminary he did not allow to become priests.’

  As he talked, recalling incidents from the past, his voice became increasingly shrill and violent. Yet the priest, sitting there with his hands clasping his knees, knew that the fellow’s anger was not altogether unjustified. He had heard something about Cabral from Valignano in Macao; he remembered how Valignano had spoken sadly of the Christians and priests who had left the Church because of this man’s attitude towards Japan.

  ‘I’m not like Cabral,’ he said finally.

  ‘Really?’ The fellow spoke with a laugh. ‘I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Why?’

  In the d
arkness the priest could not make out what kind of expression the fellow wore. But he somehow guessed that this low laughing voice issued from a face filled with hatred and resentment. Accustomed as he was to hearing the Christians’ confessions with closed eyes, he could make such conjectures confidently. But, he thought as he looked toward the other, what this fellow is fighting against is not Father Cabral but the fact that he once received baptism.

  ‘Won’t you come outside, father? I don’t think we need now fear that you will run away.’

  ‘You never know,’ said the priest with the shadow of a smile, ‘I’m not a saint. I’m scared of death.’

  ‘Father, sometimes courage only causes trouble for other people. We call that blind courage. And many of the priests, fanatically filled with this blind courage, forget that they are only causing trouble to the Japanese.’

  ‘Is that all the missionaries have done? Have they only caused trouble?’

  ‘If you force on people things that they don’t want, they are inclined to say: “Thanks for nothing!” And Christian doctrine is something like that here. We have our own religion; we don’t want a new, foreign one. I myself learned Christian doctrine in the seminary, but I tell you I don’t think it ought to be introduced into this country.’

  ‘Your and my way of thinking are different,’ said the priest quietly dropping his voice. ‘If they were the same I would not have crossed the sea from far away to come to this country.’

  This was his first controversy with a Japanese. Since the time of Xavier had many fathers engaged in such an exchange with the Buddhists? Valignano had warned him not to underrate the intelligence of the Japanese. They were well-versed in the art of controversy, he had said.

  ‘Well, then, let me ask a question.’ Opening and closing his fan as he spoke, he came to the attack. ‘The Christians say that their Deus is the source of love and mercy, the source of goodness and virtue, whereas the buddhas are all men and cannot possess these qualities. Is this your stand also, father?’

  ‘A buddha cannot escape death any more than we can. He is something different from the Creator.’

  ‘Only a father who is ignorant of Buddhist teaching could say such a thing. In fact, you cannot say that the buddhas are no more than men. There are three kinds of buddhas—bossin, goshin and oka. The oka buddha shows eight aspects for delivering human beings and giving them benefits; but the bossin has neither beginning nor end, and he is unchangeable. It is written in the sutras that the buddha is everlasting and never changes. It is only a Christian who could regard the buddhas as mere human beings. We don’t think that way at all.’

  The fellow kept pouring out his answers as though he had learnt them all by rote. Undoubtedly he had examined many missionaries in the past and had kept reflecting on the best way of beating them down. Obviously he had ended up by using big words that he himself did not understand.

  ‘But you hold that everything exists naturally, that the world has neither beginning nor end,’ said the priest, seizing on the other’s weak point and taking the offensive.

  ‘Yes, that is our position.’

  ‘But an object without life must either be moved from outside by something else, or from within. How were the buddhas born? Moreover, I understand that these buddhas have merciful hearts—but antecedent to all this, how was the world made? Our Deus is the source of his own existence; he created man; he gave existence to all things.’

  ‘Then the Christian God created evil men. Is that what you are saying? Is evil also the work of your Deus?’ The interpreter laughed softly as he spoke, enjoying his victory.

  ‘No, no,’ cried the priest shaking his head. ‘God created everything for good. And for this good he bestowed on man the power of thought; but we men sometimes use this power of discrimination in the wrong way. This is evil.’

  The interpreter clicked his tongue in contempt. But the priest had scarcely expected him to be convinced by his explanation. This kind of dialogue soon ceased to be dialogue, becoming a play of words in which one tried vigorously to down one’s opponent.

  ‘Stop this sophistry,’ shouted the interpreter. ‘You may satisfy peasants with their wives and children in this way; but you can’t beguile me. But now let me put you one more question. If it is true that God is really loving and merciful, how do you explain the fact that he gives so many trials and sufferings of all kinds to man on his way to Heaven?’

  ‘Sufferings of every kind? I think you are missing the point. If only man faithfully observes the commandments of our Deus he should be able to live in peace. If we have the desire to eat something, we can satisfy it. God does not order us to die of hunger. All we are asked to do is to honor God our Creator, and that is enough. Or again, when we cannot cast away the desires of the flesh, God does not order us to avoid all contact with women; rather does he tell us to have one wife and do his divine will.’

  As he finished speaking, he felt that his answer had been well framed. In the darkness of the hut he could clearly feel that the interpreter was lost for words and reduced to silence.

  ‘Enough! We can’t go on for ever with this useless banter,’ said the other angrily, now passing into Japanese. ‘I didn’t come here for this nonsense.’

  Far in the distance a cock was crowing. From the slightly open door a single ray of light penetrated the darkness of the room, and in it a myriad of dust particles were dancing. The priest looked at them intently.

  The interpreter breathed a deep sigh. ‘If you don’t apostatize,’ he said, ‘the peasants will be suspended in the pit.’

  The priest could not quite understand the meaning of what he was saying.

  ‘Yes, five peasants will be suspended upside down in the pit for several days.’

  ‘Suspended in the pit?’

  ‘Yes, father, unless you apostatize.’

  The priest was silent. Were these words serious? or were they a threat? He peered into the darkness, his eyes gleaming.

  ‘Father, have you ever heard of Inoue? He’s the magistrate. Sometime you will meet him face to face for investigation.’

  ‘I-NO-U-E’—only with these syllables did the interpreter’s Portuguese seem to come to life. They hit into the priest’s ears and his whole body instantly shook and trembled.

  ‘The fathers who apostatized after Inoue’s cross-examination are: Fathers Porro, Pedro, Cassola and Father Ferreira.’

  ‘Father Ferreira?’

  ‘Yes, do you know him?’

  ‘No, I don’t know him,’ cried the priest excitedly shaking his head. ‘He belongs to a different congregation; I’ve never heard his name; I’ve never met him. … Is this father alive now?’

  ‘He’s alive alright. In fact he has taken a Japanese name, and he lives in a mansion in Nagasaki together with his wife. He is in good repute now.’

  Suddenly there arose before the priest’s eyes the streets of a Nagasaki he had never seen. For some reason he could not understand, this city of his imagination was filled with labyrinthine roads, and the golden sun was glittering on the windows of the tiny houses. And there, walking along the street, wearing clothes just like those of this interpreter, was Ferreira. No, this could not be. Such a fancy was ludicrous.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.

  But with a scornful laugh the interpreter went out.

  The door closed again behind him; the white ray of sunlight was suddenly extinguished; once again, just as before, the voices of the guards resounded against the walls of the hut.

  ‘A selfish rascal if ever there was one,’ the interpreter was saying. ‘But anyhow he’ll end up by apostatizing.’

  This was obviously a reference to himself, the priest thought; and clasping his knees he silently ruminated on the four names the interpreter had trotted out as if having learnt them by rote. Fathers Porro and Pedro he did not know. He felt sure that at Macao he had heard the name of Father Cassola. This missionary was Portuguese but, unlike himself, he had come not from Macao but from
the Spanish controlled Manila and he had secretly entered Japan. After his arrival there had been no news of him, and the Society of Jesus had taken it for granted that he had met with a glorious martyrdom. But behind these three figures was the face of Ferreira—Ferreira for whom he had been searching since his arrival in Japan. If the words of the interpreter were not simply a threat, this Ferreira too, as the rumor had said, had betrayed the Church at the hands of the magistrate Inoue.

  If even Ferreira had apostatized, would he have the strength to endure the sufferings now in store for him? A terrible anguish rose up in his breast. Violently he shook his head trying to control the ugly imaginings and the words that rose up to his throat like nausea. But the more he tried to crush this picture the more vividly it came before his eyes, eluding the control of his will. ‘Exaudi nos, Pater omnipotens, et mittere digneris Sanctum qui custodiat, foveat, protegat, visitet, atque defendat omnes habitantes. … ’ Repeating the prayer again and again he tried wildly to distract his attention; but the prayer could not tranquillize his agonized heart. ‘Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent. … ?’

  Evening came. The door opened. One of the guards put some pumpkin in a wooden bowl, placed it in front of him and went out without saying a word. Raising the thing to his lips he was struck by its sweaty smell. It seemed to have been cooked two or three days previously, but in his present mood he would have been glad to eat leather to fill his empty stomach. Before he had finished gulping it down the flies were circling around his hands. I’m just like a dog, he reflected as he licked his fingers. There had been a time when the missionaries had frequently been invited to meals at the houses of feudal lords and samurai. This was the time when the Portuguese ships had come regularly to the harbors of Hirado and Yokoseura and Fukuda, laden with merchandise; and this was a time, too, according to Valignano, when the missionaries were never in want of bread and wine. They had sat at clean tables, said their grace and leisurely eaten their repast. And here he was, forgetting even to pray, and pouncing upon this food for dogs. His prayer was not one of thanksgiving to God; it was a prayer of petition for help; it was even an excuse for voicing his complaint and resentment. It was disgraceful for a priest to feel like this. Well he knew that his life was supposed to be devoted to the praise of God not to the expression of resentment. Yet in this day of trial, when he felt himself like Job in his leprosy, how difficult it was to raise his voice in praise to God!