What was the time? How many hours of light had there been? It was impossible to tell. Suppose, after all, it was not very early – it might be six, seven. . . . He realized how much he had counted on this child. She was the only person who could help him without endangering herself. Unless he got over the mountains in the next few days he was trapped – he might as well hand himself over to the police, because how could he live through the rains with nobody daring to give him food or shelter? It would have been better, quicker, if he had been recognized in the police station a week ago: so much less trouble. Then he heard a sound; it was like hope coming tentatively back: a scratching and a whining. This was what one meant by dawn – the noise of life. He waited for it – hungrily – in the doorway.
And it came: a mongrel bitch dragging herself across the yard, an ugly creature with bent ears, trailing a wounded or a broken leg, whimpering. There was something wrong with her back. She came very slowly. He could see her ribs like an exhibit in a natural history museum. It was obvious that she hadn’t had food for days: she had been abandoned.
Unlike him, she retained a kind of hope. Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill. An animal never knows despair. Watching her wounded progress he had a sense that this had happened daily – perhaps for weeks; he was watching one of the well-rehearsed effects of the new day, like bird-song in happier regions. She dragged herself up to the veranda door and began to scratch with one paw, lying oddly spreadeagled. Her nose was down to a crack: she seemed to be breathing in the unused air of empty rooms; then she whined impatiently, and once her tail beat as if she heard something move inside. At last she began to howl.
The priest could bear it no longer. He knew now what it meant: he might as well let his eyes see. He came out into the yard and the animal turned awkwardly – the parody of a watchdog – and began to bark at him. It wasn’t anybody she wanted: she wanted what she was used to: she wanted the old world back.
He looked in through the window – perhaps this was the child’s room. Everything had been removed from it except the useless or the broken. There was a cardboard box full of torn paper and a small chair which had lost a leg. There was a large nail in the whitewashed wall where a mirror perhaps had been hung or a picture. There was a broken shoe-horn.
The bitch was dragging itself along the veranda growling: instinct is like a sense of duty – one can confuse it with loyalty very easily. He avoided the animal simply by stepping out into the sun; it couldn’t turn quickly enough to follow him. He pushed at the door and it opened – nobody had bothered to lock up. An ancient alligator’s skin which had been badly cut and inefficiently dried hung on the wall. There was a snuffle behind him and he turned; the bitch had two paws over the threshold, but now that he was established in the house, she didn’t mind him. He was there, in possession, the master, and there were all kinds of smells to occupy her mind. She pushed herself across the floor, making a wet noise.
The priest opened a door on the left – perhaps it had been the bedroom. In a corner lay a pile of old medicine bottles. There were medicines for headaches, stomach-aches, medicines to be taken after meals and before meals. Somebody must have been very ill to need so many? There was a hair-slide, broken, and a ball of hair-combings – very fair hair turning dusty white. He thought with relief: It was her mother, only her mother.
He tried another room which faced, through the mosquito wire, the slow and empty river. This had been the living-room, for they had left behind the table, a folding card-table of plywood bought for a few shillings which hadn’t been worth taking with them wherever they’d gone. Had the mother been dying, he wondered? They had cleared the crop perhaps, and gone to the capital where there was a hospital. He left that room and entered another: this was the one he had seen from the outside – the child’s. He turned over the contents of the wastepaper box with sad curiosity. He felt as if he were clearing up after a death, deciding what would be too painful to keep.
He read, ‘The immediate cause of the American War of Independence was what is called the Boston Tea Party.’ It seemed to be part of an essay written in large firm letters, carefully. ‘But the real issue’ (the word was spelt wrongly, crossed out and re-written) ‘was whether it was right to tax people who were not represented in Parliament.’ It must have been a rough copy – there were so many corrections. He picked out another scrap at random – it was about people called Whigs and Tories – the words were incomprehensible to him. Something like a duster flopped down off the roof into the yard: it was a vulture. He read on, ‘If five men took three days to mow a meadow of four acres five roods, how much would two men mow in one day?’ There was a neat line ruled under the question, and then the calculations began – a hopeless muddle of figures which didn’t work out. There was a hint of heat and irritation in the crumpled paper tossed aside. He could see her very clearly, dispensing with that question decisively: the neat accurately moulded face with the two pinched pigtails. He remembered her readiness to swear eternal enmity against anyone who hurt him, and he remembered his own child enticing him by the rubbish-dump.
He shut the door carefully behind him as if he were preventing an escape. He could hear the bitch – somewhere – growling, and followed her into what had once been the kitchen. She lay in a deathly attitude over a bone with her old teeth bared. An Indian’s face hung outside the mosquito wire like something hooked up to dry – dark, withered, and unappetizing. He had his eyes on the bone as if he coveted it. He looked up as the priest came across the kitchen and immediately was gone as if he had never been there, leaving the house just as abandoned. The priest, too, looked at the bone.
There was a lot of meat on it still. A small cloud of flies hung above it a few inches from the bitch’s mouth, and the bitch kept her eye fixed, now that the Indian was gone, on the priest. They were all in competition. The priest advanced a step or two and stamped twice. ‘Go,’ he said, ‘go,’ flapping his hands, but the mongrel wouldn’t move, flattened above the bone, with all the resistance left in the broken body concentrated in the yellow eyes, burring between her teeth. It was like hate on a deathbed. The priest came cautiously forward; he wasn’t yet used to the idea that the animal couldn’t spring. One associates a dog with action, but this creature, like any crippled human being, could only think. You could see the thoughts – hunger and hope and hatred – stuck on the eyeball.
The priest put out his hand towards the bone and the flies buzzed upwards. The animal became silent, watching. ‘There, there,’ the priest said cajolingly; he made little enticing movements in the air and the animal stared back. Then the priest turned and moved away as if he were abandoning the bone; he droned gently to himself a phrase from the Mass, elaborately paying no attention. Then he switched quickly round again. It hadn’t worked. The bitch watched him, screwing round her neck to follow his ingenious movements.
For a moment he became furious – that a mongrel bitch with a broken back should steal the only food. He swore at it – popular expressions picked up beside bandstands: he would have been surprised in other circumstances that they came so readily to his tongue. Then suddenly he laughed: this was human dignity disputing with a bitch over a bone. When he laughed the animal’s ears went back, twitching at the tips, apprehensive. But he felt no pity – her life had no importance beside that of a human being. He looked round for something to throw, but the room had been cleared of nearly everything except the bone. Perhaps, who knows? it might have been left deliberately for this mongrel; he could imagine the child remembering, before she left with the sick mother and the stupid father: he had the impression that it was always she who had to think. He could find for his purpose nothing better than a broken wire rack which had been used for vegetables.
He advanced again towards the bitch and struck her lightly on the head. She snapped at the wire with her old broken teeth and wouldn’t move. He beat at her again more fiercely and she caught the wire – he had to rasp it away. He struck again and agai
n before he realized that she couldn’t, except with great exertion, move at all: she was unable to escape his blows or leave the bone. She just had to endure, her eyes yellow and scared and malevolent shining back at him between the blows.
So then he changed his method; he used the vegetable rack as a kind of muzzle, holding back the teeth with it, while he bent and captured the bone. One paw tugged at it and gave way; he lowered the wire and jumped back – the animal tried without success to follow him, then lapsed upon the floor. The priest had won: he had his bone. The bitch no longer tried to growl.
The priest tore off some raw meat with his teeth and began to chew: no food had ever tasted so good, and now that for the moment he was happy he began to feel a little pity. He thought: I will eat just so much and she can have the rest. He marked mentally a point upon the bone and tore off another piece. The nausea he had felt for hours now began to die away and leave an honest hunger; he ate on and the bitch watched him. Now that the fight was over she seemed to bear no malice; her tail began to beat the floor, hopefully, questioningly. The priest reached the point he had marked, but now it seemed to him that his previous hunger had been imaginary: this was hunger, what he felt now. A man’s need was greater than a dog’s: he would leave that knuckle of meat at the joint. But when the moment came he ate that too – after all, the dog had teeth: it would eat the bone itself. He dropped it and left the kitchen.
He made one more progress through the empty rooms. A broken shoe-horn: medicine bottles: an essay on the American War of Independence – there was nothing to tell him why they had gone away. He came out on to the veranda and saw through a gap in the planks that a book had fallen to the ground and lay between the rough pillars of brick which raised the house out of the track of ants. It was months since he had seen a book. It was almost like a promise, mildewing there under the piles, of better things to come – life going on in private houses with wireless sets and bookshelves and beds made ready for the night and a cloth laid for food. He knelt down on the ground and reached for it. He suddenly realized that when once the long struggle was over and he had crossed the mountains and the state line, life might, after all, be enjoyed again.
It was an English book, but from his years in an American seminary he retained enough English to read it, with a little difficulty. Even if he had been unable to understand a word, it would still have been a book. It was called Jewels Five Words Long: A Treasury of English Verse, and on the fly-leaf was pasted a printed certificate – Awarded to . . . and then the name of Coral Fellows filled up in ink . . . for proficiency in English Composition, Third Grade. There was an obscure coat of arms, which seemed to include a griffon and oak leaf, a Latin motto, ‘Virtus Laudata Crescit,’ and a signature from a rubber stamp, Henry Beckley, B.A., Principal of Private Tutorials, Ltd.
The priest sat down on the veranda steps. There was silence everywhere – no life around the abandoned banana station except the vulture which hadn’t yet given up hope. The Indian might never have existed at all. After a meal, the priest thought with sad amusement, a little reading, and opened the book at random. Coral – so that was the child’s name. He thought of the shops in Vera Cruz full of it – the hard brittle jewellery which was thought for some reason so suitable for young girls after their first communion.
‘I come,’ he read, ‘from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.’
It was a very obscure poem, full of words which were like Esperanto. He thought: So this is English poetry: how odd. The little poetry he knew dealt mainly with agony, remorse, and hope. These verses ended on a philosophical note – ‘For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever.’ The triteness and untruth of ‘for ever’ shocked him a little: a poem like this ought not to be in a child’s hands. The vulture came picking its way across the yard, a dusty and desolate figure; every now and then it lifted sluggishly from the earth and flapped down twenty yards on. The priest read:
‘“Come back! Come back!” he cried in grief
Across the stormy water:
“And I’ll forgive your Highland chief –
My daughter, O my daughter.”’
That sounded to him more impressive – though hardly perhaps, any more than the other, stuff for children. He felt in the foreign words the ring of genuine passion and repeated to himself on his hot and lonely perch the last line – ‘My daughter, O my daughter.’ The words seemed to contain all that he felt himself of repentance, longing and unhappy love.
It was an odd thing that ever since that hot and crowded night in the cell he had passed into a region of abandonment – almost as if he had died there with the old man’s head on his shoulder and now wandered in a kind of limbo, because he wasn’t good or bad enough. . . . Life didn’t exist any more: it wasn’t merely a matter of the banana station. Now as the storm broke and he scurried for shelter he knew quite well what he would find – nothing.
The huts leapt up in the lightning and stood there shaking, then disappeared again in the rumbling darkness. The rain hadn’t come yet: it was sweeping up from Campeche Bay in great sheets, covering the whole state in its methodical advance. Between the thunder-breaks he could imagine that he heard it – a gigantic rustle moving across towards the mountains which were now so close to him – a matter of twenty miles.
He reached the first hut; the door was open, and as the lightning quivered he saw as he expected nobody at all. Just a pile of maize and the indistinct grey movement of – perhaps – a rat. He dashed for the next hut, but it was the same as ever (the maize and nothing else), just as if all human life were receding before him, as if Somebody had determined that from now on he was to be left alone – altogether alone. As he stood there the rain reached the clearing; it came out of the forest like thick white smoke and moved on. It was as if an enemy were laying a gas-cloud across a whole territory, carefully, to see that nobody escaped. The rain spread and stayed just long enough, as though the enemy had his stopwatch out and knew to a second the limit of the lungs’ endurance. The roof held the rain out for a while and then let it through – the twigs bent under the weight of water and shot apart; it came through in half a dozen places, pouring down in black funnels; then the downpour stopped and the roof dripped and the rain moved on, with the lightning quivering on its flanks like a protective barrage. In a few minutes it would reach the mountains: a few more storms like this and they would be impassable.
He had been walking all day and he was very tired; he found a dry spot and sat down. When the lightning struck he could see the clearing. All around was the gentle noise of the dripping water. It was nearly like peace, but not quite. For peace you needed human company – his aloneness was like a threat of things to come. Suddenly he remembered – for no apparent reason – a day of rain at the American seminary, the glass windows of the library steamed over with the central heating, the tall shelves of sedate books, and a young man – a stranger from Tucson – drawing his initials on the pane with his finger – that was peace. He looked at it from the outside: he couldn’t believe that he would ever again get in. He had made his own world, and this was it – the empty broken huts, the storm going by, and fear again – fear because he was not alone after all.
Somebody was moving outside, cautiously. The footsteps would come a little way and then stop. He waited apathetically, and the roof dripped behind him. He thought of the mestizo padding around the city, seeking a really cast-iron occasion for his betrayal. A face peered round the hut door at him and quickly withdrew – an old woman’s face, but you could never tell with Indians – she mightn’t have been more than twenty. He got up and went outside. She scampered back from before him in her heavy sack-like skirt, her black plaits swinging heavily. Apparently his loneliness was only to be broken by these evasive faces, creatures who looked as if they had come out of the Stone Age, who withdrew again quickly.
He was stirred by
a sort of sullen anger – this one should not withdraw. He pursued her across the clearing, splashing in the pools, but she had a start and no sense of shame and she got into the forest before him. It was useless looking for her there, and he returned towards the nearest hut. It wasn’t the hut which he had been sheltering in before, but it was just as empty. What had happened to these people? He knew well enough that these more or less savage encampments were temporary only; the Indians would cultivate a small patch of ground and when they had exhausted the soil for the time being, they would simply move away. They knew nothing about the rotation of crops, but when they moved they would take their maize with them. This was more like flight, from force or disease. He had heard of such flights in the case of sickness, and the horrible thing, of course, was that they carried the sickness with them wherever they moved; sometimes they became panicky like flies against a pane, but discreetly, letting nobody know, muting their hubbub. He turned moodily again to stare out at the clearing, and there was the Indian woman creeping back towards the hut where she had sheltered. He called out to her sharply and again she fled, shambling, towards the forest. Her clumsy progress reminded him of a bird feigning a broken wing. . . . He made no movement to follow her, and before she reached the trees she stopped and watched him; he began to move slowly back towards the other hut. Once he turned: she was following him at a distance, keeping her eyes on him. Again he was reminded of something animal or bird-like, full of anxiety. He walked on, aiming directly at the hut. Far away beyond it the lightning stabbed down, but you could hardly hear the thunder; the sky was clearing overhead and the moon came out. Suddenly he heard an odd artificial cry, and turning he saw the woman making back towards the forest; then she stumbled, flung up her arms and fell to the ground, like the bird offering herself.