‘Why bad news?’
‘The rains coming so early. You see they are on a hunt.’
‘The gringo . . . ?’
‘He doesn’t really matter, but the Governor’s found there’s still a priest, and you know what he feels about that. If it was me, I’d let the poor devil alone. He’d starve or die of fever or give up. He can’t be doing any good – or any harm. Why, nobody even noticed he was about till a few months ago.’
‘You’ll have to hurry.’
‘Oh, he hasn’t any real chance. Unless he gets over the border. We’ve got a man who knows him. Spoke to him, spent a night with him. Let’s talk of something else. Who wants to be a policeman?’
‘Where do you think he is?’
‘You’d be surprised.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s here – in this town, I mean. That’s deduction. You see since we started taking hostages from the villages, there’s really nowhere else . . . They turn him away, they won’t have him. So we’ve set this man I told you about loose like a dog – he’ll run into him one day or another – and then . . .’
The man in drill said, ‘Have you had to shoot many hostages?’
‘Not yet. Three or four perhaps. Well, here goes the last of the beer. Salud!’ He put the glass regretfully down. ‘Perhaps now I could have just a drop of your – sidral, shall we say?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘Have I met you before? Your face somehow . . .’
‘I don’t think I’ve had the honour.’
‘That’s another mystery,’ the jefe said, stretching out a long fat limb and gently pushing the beggar towards the bed-knobs, ‘how you think you’ve seen people – and places – before. Was it in a dream or in a past life? I once heard a doctor say it was something to do with the focusing of the eyes. But he was a Yankee. A materialist.’
‘I remember once . . .’ the Governor’s cousin said. The lightning shot down over the harbour and the thunder beat on the roof; this was the atmosphere of a whole state – the storm outside and the talk just going on – words like ‘mystery’ and ‘soul’ and ‘the source of life’ came in over and over again, as they sat on the bed talking, with nothing to do and nothing to believe and nowhere better to go.
The man in drill said, ‘I think perhaps I had better be moving on.’
‘Where to?’
‘Oh . . . friends,’ he said vaguely, sketching widely with his hands a whole world of fictitious friendships.
‘You’d better take your drink with you,’ the Governor’s cousin said. He admitted, ‘After all you paid for it.’
‘Thank you, Excellency.’ He picked up the brandy bottle. Perhaps there were three fingers left. The bottle of wine, of course, was quite empty.
‘Hide it, man, hide it,’ the Governor’s cousin said sharply.
‘Oh, of course, Excellency, I will be careful.’
‘You don’t have to call him Excellency,’ the jefe said. He gave a bellow of laughter and thrust the beggar right off the bed on to the floor.
‘No, no, that is . . .’ He sidled cautiously out, with a smudge of tears under his red sore eyes and from the hall heard the conversation begin again – ‘mystery’, ‘soul’ – going interminably on to no end.
The beetles had disappeared; the rain had apparently washed them away: it came perpendicularly down, with a sort of measured intensity, as if it were driving nails into a coffin lid. But the air was no clearer: sweat and rain hung together on the clothes. The priest stood for a few seconds in the doorway of the hotel, the dynamo thudding behind him, then he darted a few yards into another doorway and hesitated, staring over past the bust of the general to the tethered sailing boats and one old barge with a tin funnel. He had nowhere to go. Rain hadn’t entered into his calculations: he had believed that it would be possible just to hang on somehow, sleeping on benches or by the river.
A couple of soldiers arguing furiously came down the street towards the quay – they just let the rain fall on them, as if it didn’t matter, as if things were so bad anyway you couldn’t notice. . . . The priest pushed the wooden door against which he stood, a cantina door coming down only to the knees, and went in out of the rain: stacks of gaseosa bottles and a single billiard table with the score strung on rings, three or four men – somebody had laid his holster on the bar. The priest moved too quickly and jolted the elbow of a man who was making a shot. He turned furiously: ‘Mother of God!’ He was a Red Shirt. Was there no safety anywhere, even for a moment?
The priest apologized humbly, edging back towards the door but, again he was too quick – his pocket caught against the wall and the brandy bottle chinked. Three of four faces looked at him with malicious amusement: he was a stranger and they were going to have fun. ‘What’s that you’ve got in your pocket?’ the Red Shirt asked. He was a youth not out of his teens, with gold teeth and a jesting conceited mouth.
‘Lemonade,’ the priest said.
‘What do you want to carry lemonade with you for?’
‘I take it at night – with my quinine.’
The Red Shirt swaggered up and poked the pocket with the butt of his cue. ‘Lemonade, eh?’
‘Yes, lemonade.’
‘Let’s have a look at the lemonade.’ He turned proudly to the others and said, ‘I can scent a smuggler at ten paces.’ He thrust his hand into the priest’s pocket and hauled at the brandy bottle. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Didn’t I tell you –’ The priest flung himself against the swing door and burst out into the rain. A voice shouted, ‘Catch him.’ They were having the time of their lives.
He was off up the street towards the plaza, turned left and right again – it was lucky the streets were dark and the moon obscured. As long as he kept away from lighted windows he was almost invisible – he could hear them calling to each other. They were not giving up: it was better than billiards: somewhere a whistle blew – the police were joining in.
This was the town to which it had been his ambition to be promoted, leaving the right kind of debts behind at Concepción: he thought of the cathedral and Montez and a Monsignor he once knew, as he doubled this way and that. Something buried very deep, the will to escape, cast a momentary and appalling humour over the whole situation – he giggled and panted and giggled again. He could hear them hallooing and whistling in the dark, and the rain came down; it drove and jumped upon the cement floor of the useless frontón which had once been the cathedral (it was too hot to play pelota and a few iron swings stood like gallows at its edge). He worked his way downhill again: he had an idea.
The shouts came nearer, and then up from the river a new lot of men approached; these were pursuing the hunt methodically – he could tell it by their slow pace, the police, the official hunters. He was between the two – the amateurs and the professionals. But he knew the door – he pushed it open, came quickly through into the patio and closed it behind him.
He stood in the dark and panted, hearing the steps come nearer up the street, while the rain drove down. Then he realized that somebody was watching him from the window, a small dark withered face, like one of the preserved heads tourists buy. He came up to the grille and said, ‘Padre José?’
‘Over there.’ A second face appeared behind the other’s shoulder, lit uncertainly by a candle-flame, then a third face: faces sprouted like vegetables. He could feel them watching him as he splashed back across the patio and banged on a door.
He didn’t for a second or two recognize Padre José in the absurd billowing nightshirt, holding a lamp. The last time he had seen him was at the conference, sitting in the back row, biting his nails, afraid to be noticed. It hadn’t been necessary: none of the busy cathedral clergy even knew what he was called. It was odd to think that now he had won a kind of fame superior to theirs. He said ‘José’ gently, winking up at him from the splashing dark.
‘Who are you?’
‘Don’t you remember me? Of course, it’s years now . . . don’t you remember the conference
at the cathedral . . . ?’
‘O God,’ Padre José said.
‘They are looking for me. I thought perhaps just for tonight you could perhaps . . .’
‘Go away,’ Padre José said, ‘go away.’
‘They don’t know who I am. They think I’m a smuggler – but up at the police station they’ll know.’
‘Don’t talk so loud. My wife . . .’
‘Just show me some corner,’ he whispered. He was beginning to feel fear again. Perhaps the effect of the brandy was wearing off (it was impossible in this hot damp climate to stay drunk for long: alcohol came out again under the armpits: it dripped from the forehead), or perhaps it was only that the desire of life which moves in cycles was returning – any sort of life.
In the lamplight Padre José’s face wore an expression of hatred. He said, ‘Why come to me? Why should you think . . . ? I’ll call the police if you don’t go. You know what sort of a man I am.’
He pleaded gently. ‘You’re a good man, José. I’ve always known that.’
‘I’ll shout if you don’t go.’
He tried to remember some cause of hatred. There were voices in the street – arguments, a knocking – were they searching the houses? He said, ‘If I ever offended you, José, forgive me. I was conceited, proud, overbearing – a bad priest. I always knew in my heart you were the better man.’
‘Go,’ José screeched at him, ‘go. I don’t want martyrs here. I don’t belong any more. Leave me alone. I’m all right as I am.’ He tried to gather up his venom into spittle and shot it feebly at the other’s face: it didn’t even reach, but fell impotently through the air. He said, ‘Go and die quickly. That’s your job,’ and slammed the door to. The door of the patio came suddenly open and the police were there. He caught a glimpse of Padre José peering through a window and then an enormous shape in a white nightshirt engulfed him and drew him away – whisked him off, like a guardian spirit, from the disastrous human struggle. A voice said, ‘That’s him.’ It was the young Red Shirt. He let his fist open and dropped by Padre José’s wall a little ball of paper: it was like the final surrender of a whole past.
He knew it was the beginning of the end – after all these years. He began to say silently an act of contrition, while they picked the brandy bottle out of his pocket, but he couldn’t give his mind to it. That was the fallacy of the deathbed repentance – penitence was the fruit of long training and discipline: fear wasn’t enough. He tried to think of his child with shame, but he could only think of her with a kind of famished love – what would become of her? And the sin itself was so old that like an ancient picture the deformity had faded and left a kind of grace. The Red Shirt smashed the bottle on the stone paving and the smell of spirit rose all round them – not very strongly: there hadn’t been much left.
Then they took him away. Now that they had caught him they treated him in a friendly way, poking fun at his attempt to escape, except the Red Shirt whose shot he had spoiled. He couldn’t find any answer to their jokes: self-preservation lay across his brain like a horrifying obsession. When would they discover who he really was? When would he meet the half-caste, or the lieutenant who had interrogated him already? They moved in a bunch slowly up the hill to the plaza. A rifle-butt grounded outside the station as they came in. A small lamp fumed against the dirty whitewashed wall; in the courtyard hammocks swung, bunched around sleeping bodies like the nets in which poultry are tied. ‘You can sit down,’ one of the men said, and pushed him in a comradely way towards a bench. Everything now seemed irrevocable; the sentry passed back and forth outside the door, and in the courtyard among the hammocks the ceaseless murmur of sleep went on.
Somebody had spoken to him: he gaped helplessly up. ‘What?’ There seemed to be an argument in progress between the police and the Red Shirt as to whether somebody should be disturbed. ‘But it’s his duty,’ the Red Shirt kept on repeating: he had rabbity front teeth. He said, ‘I’ll report it to the Governor.’
A policeman said, ‘You plead guilty, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ the priest said.
‘There. What more do you want? It’s a fine of five pesos. Why disturb anybody?’
‘And who gets the five pesos, eh?’
‘That’s none of your business.’
The priest said suddenly, ‘No one gets them.’
‘No one?’
‘I have only twenty-five centavos in the world.’
The door of an inner room opened and the lieutenant came out. He said. ‘What in God’s name is all the noise . . . ?’ The police came raggedly and unwillingly to attention.
‘I’ve caught a man carrying spirits,’ the Red Shirt said.
The priest sat with his eyes on the ground . . . ‘because it has crucified . . . crucified . . . crucified . . .’ contrition stuck hopelessly over the formal words. He felt no emotion but fear.
‘Well,’ the lieutenant said, ‘what is it to do with you? We catch dozens.’
‘Shall we bring him in?’ one of the men asked.
The lieutenant took a look at the bowed servile figure on the bench. ‘Get up,’ he said. The priest rose. Now, he thought, now . . . he raised his eyes. The lieutenant looked away, out of the door where the sentry slouched to and fro. His dark pinched face looked rattled, harassed. . . .
‘He has no money,’ one of the policemen said.
‘Mother of God,’ the lieutenant said, ‘can I never teach you . . . ?’ He took two steps towards the sentry and turned, ‘Search him. If he has no money, put him in a cell. Give him some work. . . .’ He went outside and suddenly raising his open hand he struck the sentry on the ear. He said, ‘You’re asleep. March as if you have some pride . . . pride,’ he repeated again, while the small acetylene lamp fumed up the whitewashed wall and the smell of urine came up out of the yard and the men lay in their hammocks netted and secured.
‘Shall we take his name?’ a sergeant asked.
‘Yes, of course,’ the lieutenant said, not looking at him, walking briskly and nervously back past the lamp into the courtyard; he stood there unsheltered, looking round while the rain fell on his dapper uniform. He looked like a man with something on his mind: it was as if he were under the influence of some secret passion which had broken up the routine of his life. Back he came. He couldn’t keep still.
The sergeant pushed the priest ahead into the inner room. A bright commercial calendar hung on the flaking whitewash – a dark-skinned mestizo girl in a bathing-dress advertised some gaseous water; somebody had pencilled in a neat pedagogic hand a facile and over-confident statement about man having nothing to lose but his chains.
‘Name?’ the sergeant said. Before he could check himself he had replied, ‘Montez.’
‘Home?’
He named a random village: he was absorbed in his own portrait. There he sat among the white-starched dresses of the first communicants. Somebody had put a ring round his face to pick it out. There was another picture on the wall too – the gringo from San Antonio, Texas, wanted for murder and bank robbery.
‘I suppose,’ the sergeant said cautiously, ‘that you bought the drink from a stranger . . .’
‘Yes.’
‘Whom you can’t identify?’
‘No.’
‘That’s the way,’ the sergeant said approvingly: it was obvious he didn’t want to start anything. He took the priest quite confidingly by the arm and led him out and across the courtyard; he carried a large key like the ones used in morality plays or fairy stories as a symbol. A few men moved in the hammocks – a large unshaven jaw hung over the side like something left unsold on a butcher’s counter: a big torn ear: a naked black-haired thigh. He wondered when the mestizo’s face would appear, elated with recognition.
The sergeant unlocked a small grated door and let out with his boot at something straddled across the entrance. He said, ‘They are all good fellows, all good fellows here,’ kicking his way in. A heavy smell lay on the air and somebody in the absolute dark
ness wept.
The priest lingered on the threshold trying to see. He said, ‘I am so dry. Could I have water?’ the stench poured up his nostrils and he retched.
‘In the morning,’ the sergeant said, ‘you’ve drunk enough now,’ and laying a large considerate hand upon the priest’s back, he pushed him in, then slammed the door to. He trod on a hand, an arm, and pressing his face against the grille, protested, ‘There’s no room. I can’t see. Who are these people?’ Outside among the hammocks the sergeant began to laugh. ‘Hombre,’ he said, ‘hombre, have you never been in jail before?’
CHAPTER 3
A voice near his foot said, ‘Got a cigarette?’
He drew quickly back and trod on an arm. A voice said imperatively, ‘Water, quick,’ as if whoever it was thought he could take a stranger unawares, and make him fork out.
‘Got a cigarette?’
‘No.’ He said weakly, ‘I have nothing at all,’ and imagined he could feel enmity fuming up all round him. He moved again. Somebody said, ‘Look out for the bucket.’ That was where the stench came from. He stood perfectly still and waited for his sight to return. Outside the rain began to stop: it dropped haphazardly and the thunder moved away. You could count forty now between the lightning flash and the roll. Halfway to the sea, or halfway to the mountains. He felt around with his foot, trying to find enough space to sit down but there seemed to be no room at all. When the lightning went on he could see the hammocks at the edge of the courtyard.
‘Got something to eat?’ a voice asked, and when he didn’t answer, ‘Got something to eat?’
‘No.’
‘Got any money?’ another voice said.
‘No.’
Suddenly, from about five feet away, there came a tiny scream – a woman’s. A tired voice said, ‘Can’t you be quiet?’ Among the furtive movements came again the muffled painless cries. He realized that pleasure was going on even in this crowded darkness. Again he put out his foot and began to edge his way inch by inch away from the grille. Behind the human voices another noise went permanently on: it was like a small machine, an electric belt set at a certain tempo. It filled any silences that there were louder than human breath. It was the mosquitoes.