He felt quite certain now that something valuable was in the hut, perhaps hidden among the maize, and he paid her no attention, going in. Now that the lightning had moved on, he couldn’t see – he felt across the floor until he reached the pile of maize. Outside the padding footsteps came nearer. He began to feel all over it – perhaps food was hidden there – and the dry crackle of the leaves was added to the drip of water and the cautious footsteps, like the faint noises of people busy about their private businesses. Then he put his hand on a face.
He couldn’t be frightened any more by a thing like that – it was something human he had his fingers on. They moved down the body; it was a child’s which lay completely quiet under his hand. In the doorway the moonlight showed the woman’s face indistinctly. She was probably convulsed with anxiety, but you couldn’t tell. He thought – I must get this into the open where I can see . . .
It was a male child – perhaps three years old: a withered bullet head with a mop of black hair: unconscious, but not dead: he could feel the faintest movement in the breast. He thought of disease again until he took out his hand and found that the child was wet with blood, not sweat. Horror and disgust touched him – violence everywhere: was there no end to violence? He said to the woman sharply, ‘What happened?’ It was as if man in all this state had been left to man.
The woman knelt two or three feet away, watching his hands. She knew a little Spanish, because she replied, ‘Americano.’ The child wore a kind of brown one-piece smock. He lifted it up to the neck: the child had been shot in three places. Life was going out of him all the time: there was nothing – really – to be done, but one had to try. . . . He said ‘Water’ to the woman, ‘Water,’ but she didn’t seem to understand, squatting there, watching him. It was a mistake one easily made, to think that just because the eyes expressed nothing there was no grief. When he touched the child he could see her move on her haunches – she was ready to attack him with her teeth if the child so much as moaned.
He began to speak slowly and gently (he couldn’t tell how much she understood): ‘We must have water. To wash him. You needn’t be afraid of me. I will do him no harm.’ He took off his shirt and began to tear it into strips – it was hopelessly insanitary, but what else was there to do? except pray, of course, but one didn’t pray for life, this life. He repeated again, ‘Water.’ The woman seemed to understand – she gazed hopelessly round at where the rain stood in pools – that was all there was. Well, he thought, the earth’s as clean as any vessel would have been. He soaked a piece of his shirt and leant over the child; he could hear the woman slide closer along the ground – a menacing approach. He tried to reassure her again, ‘You needn’t be afraid of me. I am a priest.’
The word ‘priest’ she understood; she leant forward and grabbed at the hand which held the wet scrap of shirt and kissed it. At that moment, while her lips were on his hand, the child’s face wrinkled, the eyes opened and glared at them, the tiny body shook with a kind of fury of pain; they watched the eyeballs roll up and suddenly become fixed, like marbles in a solitaire-board, yellow and ugly with death. The woman let go his hand and scrambled to a pool of water, cupping her fingers for it. The priest said, ‘We don’t need that any more,’ standing up with his hands full of wet shirt. The woman opened her fingers and let the water fall. She said ‘Father’ imploringly, and he wearily went down on his knees and began to pray.
He could feel no meaning any longer in prayers like these. The Host was different: to lay that between a dying man’s lips was to lay God. That was a fact – something you could touch, but this was no more than a pious aspiration. Why should anyone listen to his prayers? Sin was a constriction which prevented their escape; he could feel his prayers weigh him down like undigested food.
When he had finished he lifted up the body and carried it back into the hut; it seemed a waste of time to have taken it out, like a chair you carry out into the garden and back again because the grass is wet. The woman followed him meekly; she didn’t seem to want to touch the body, just watched him put it back in the dark upon the maize. He sat down on the ground and said slowly, ‘It will have to be buried.’
She understood that, nodding.
He said, ‘Where is your husband? Will he help you?’
She began to talk rapidly. It might have been Camacho she was speaking: he couldn’t understand more than an occasional Spanish word here and there. The word ‘Americano’ occurred again, and he remembered the wanted man whose portrait had shared the wall with his. He asked her, ‘Did he do this?’ She shook her head. What had happened? he wondered. Had the man taken shelter here and had the soldiers fired into the huts? It was not unlikely. He suddenly had his attention caught. She had said the name of the banana station – but there had been no dying person there: no sign of violence, unless silence and desertion were signs. He had assumed the mother had been taken ill, but it might be something worse – and he imagined that stupid Captain Fellows taking down his gun, presenting himself clumsily armed to a man whose chief talent it was to draw quickly or to shoot directly from the pocket. That poor child . . . what responsibilities she had perhaps been forced to undertake.
He shook the thought away and said, ‘Have you a spade?’ She didn’t understand that, and he had to go through the motions of digging. Another roll of thunder came between them. A second storm was coming up, as if the enemy had discovered that the first barrage after all had left a few survivors – this would flatten them. Again he could hear the enormous breathing of the rain miles away. He realized the woman had spoken the one word ‘church’. Her Spanish consisted of isolated words. He wondered what she meant by that. Then the rain reached them. It came down like a wall between him and escape, fell altogether in a heap and built itself up around them. All the light went out except when the lightning flashed.
The roof couldn’t keep out this rain. It came dripping through everywhere: the dry maize leaves where the dead child lay crackled like burning wood. He shivered with cold; he was probably on the edge of fever – he must get away before he was incapable of moving at all. The woman (he couldn’t see her now) said ‘Iglesia’ again imploringly. It occurred to him that she wanted the child buried near a church or perhaps only taken to an altar, so that he might be touched by the feet of a Christ. It was a fantastic notion.
He took advantage of a long quivering stroke of blue light to describe with his hands his sense of the impossibility. ‘The soldiers,’ he said, and she replied immediately, ‘Americano.’ That word always came up, like one with many meanings which depends on the accent whether it is to be taken as an explanation, a warning or a threat. Perhaps she meant that the soldiers were all occupied in the chase, but even so, this rain was ruining everything. It was still twenty miles to the border, and the mountain paths after the storm were probably impassable – and a church – he hadn’t the faintest idea of where there would be a church. He hadn’t so much as seen such a thing for years now; it was difficult to believe that they still existed only a few days’ journey off. When the lightning went on again he saw the woman watching him with stony patience.
For the last thirty hours they had only had sugar to eat – large brown lumps of it the size of a baby’s skull; they had seen no one, and they had exchanged no words at all. What was the use when almost the only words they had in common were ‘Iglesia’ and ‘Americano’? The woman followed at his heels with the dead child strapped on her back. She never seemed to tire. A day and a night brought them out of the marshes to the foothills; they slept fifty feet up above the slow green river, under a projecting piece of rock where the soil was dry – everywhere else was deep mud. The woman sat with her knees drawn up, and her head down. She showed no emotion, but she put the child’s body behind her as if it needed protection from marauders like other possessions. They had travelled by the sun until the black wooded bar of mountain told them where to go. They might have been the only survivors of a world which was dying out; they carried the visible mark
s of the dying with them.
Sometimes he wondered whether he was safe, but when there are no visible boundaries between one state and another – no passport examination or customs house – danger just seems to go on, travelling with you, lifting its heavy feet in the same way as you do. There seemed to be so little progress: the path would rise steeply, perhaps five hundred feet, and fall again, clogged with mud. Once it took an enormous hairpin bend, so that after three hours they had returned to a point opposite their starting-place, less than a hundred yards away.
At sunset on the second day they came out on to a wide plateau covered with short grass. A grove of crosses stood up blackly against the sky, leaning at different angles – some as high as twenty feet, some not much more than eight. They were like trees that had been left to seed. The priest stopped and stared at them. They were the first Christian symbols he had seen for more than five years publicly exposed – if you could call this empty plateau in the mountains a public place. No priest could have been concerned in the strange rough group; it was the work of Indians and had nothing in common with the tidy vestments of the Mass and the elaborately worked out symbols of the liturgy. It was like a short cut to the dark and magical heart of the faith – to the night when the graves opened and the dead walked. There was a movement behind him and he turned.
The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses; the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the face against the wood and afterwards the loins; then she crossed herself, not as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated pattern which included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? and if she did, why should it not be granted her, the priest wondered? Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith – faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead. The evening star was out: it hung low down over the edge of the plateau – it looked as if it was within reach – and a small hot wind stirred. The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity. The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle began to eat, and the child lay quietly at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?
‘Vamos,’ the priest said, but the woman scraped the sugar with her sharp front teeth, paying no attention. He looked up at the sky and saw the evening star blotted out by black clouds. ‘Vamos.’ There was no shelter anywhere on this plateau.
The woman never stirred; the broken snub-nosed face between the black plaits was completely passive: it was as if she had fulfilled her duty and could now take up her everlasting rest. The priest suddenly shivered; the ache which had pressed like a stiff hat-rim across his forehead all day dug deeper in. He thought: I have to get to shelter – a man’s first duty is to himself – even the Church taught that, in a way. The whole sky was blackening. The crosses stuck up like dry and ugly cacti. He made off to the edge of the plateau. Once, before the path led down, he looked back – the woman was still biting at the lump of sugar, and he remembered that it was all the food they had.
The way was very steep – so steep that he had to turn and go down backwards; on either side trees grew perpendicularly out of the grey rock, and five hundred feet below the path climbed up again. He began to sweat and he had an appalling thirst, and when the rain came it was at first a kind of relief. He stayed where he was, hunched back against a boulder. There was no shelter before he reached the bottom of the barranca, and it hardly seemed worth while to make that effort. He was shivering now more or less continuously, and the ache seemed no longer inside his head – it was something outside, almost anything, a noise, a thought, a smell. The senses were jumbled up together. At one moment the ache was like a tiresome voice explaining to him that he had taken the wrong path. He remembered a map he had once seen of the two adjoining states. The state from which he was escaping was peppered with villages – in the hot marshy land people bred as readily as mosquitoes, but in the next state – in the north-west corner – there was hardly anything but blank white paper. You’re on that blank paper now, the ache told him. But there’s a path, he argued wearily. Oh, a path, the ache said, a path may take you fifty miles before it reaches anywhere at all: you know you won’t last that distance. There’s just white paper all around.
At another time the ache was a face. He became convinced that the American was watching him – he had a skin all over spots like a newspaper photograph. Apparently he had followed them because he wanted to kill the mother as well as the child: he was sentimental in that respect. It was necessary to do something. The rain was like a curtain behind which almost anything might happen. He thought: I shouldn’t have left her alone like that. God forgive me. I have no sense of responsibility: what can you expect of a whisky priest? and he struggled to his feet and began to climb back towards the plateau. He was tormented by ideas; it wasn’t only the woman: he was responsible for the American as well: the two faces – his own and the gunman’s – were hanging together on the police station wall, as if they were brothers in a family portrait gallery. You didn’t put temptation in a brother’s way.
Shivering and sweating and soaked with rain he came up over the edge of the plateau. There was nobody there – a dead child was not someone, just a useless object abandoned at the foot of one of the crosses. The mother had gone home. She had done what she wanted to do. The surprise lifted him, as it were, out of his fever before it dropped him back again. A small lump of sugar – all that was left – lay by the child’s mouth – in case a miracle should happen or for the spirit to eat? The priest bent down with an obscure sense of shame and took it: the dead child couldn’t growl back at him like a broken dog: but who was he to disbelieve in miracles? He hesitated, while the rain poured down; then he put the sugar in his mouth. If God chose to give back life, couldn’t He give food as well?
Immediately he began to eat, the fever returned: the sugar stuck in his throat: he felt an appalling thirst. Crouching down he tried to lick some water from the uneven ground; he even sucked at his soaked trousers. The child lay under the streaming rain like a dark heap of cattle dung. The priest moved away again, back to the edge of the plateau and down the barranca side; it was loneliness he felt now – even the face had gone, he was moving alone across that blank white sheet, going deeper every moment into the abandoned land.
Somewhere, in some direction, there were towns, of course: go far enough and you reached the coast, the Pacific, the railway track to Guatemala; there were roads there and motor-cars. He hadn’t seen a railway train for ten years. He could imagine the black line following the coast along the map, and he could see the fifty, hundred miles of unknown country. That was where he was: he had escaped too completely from men. Nature would kill him now.
All the same, he went on; there was no point in going back towards the deserted village, the banana station with its dying mongrel and its shoe-horn. There was nothing you could do except put one foot forward and then the other, scrambling down and then scrambling up; from the top of the barranca, when the rain passed on, there was nothing to see except a huge crumpled land, forest and mountain, with the grey wet veil moving over. He looked once and never looked again. It was too like watching despair.
It must have been hours later that he ceased to climb. It was evening and forest; monkeys crashed invisibly among the trees with an effect of clumsiness and recklessness, and what were probably snakes hissed away like match-flames through the grass. He wasn’t afraid of them. They were a form of life, and he could feel life retreating from him all the time. It wasn’t only people who were going, even the animals and the reptiles moved away; presently he would be left alone with nothing but his own breath. He began to recite to himself, ‘O God, I have loved the beauty of Thy house,’ and the smell of soaked and rotting leaves and the hot night and the darkness made him believe t
hat he was in a mine shaft, going down into the earth to bury himself. Presently he would find his grave.
When a man came towards him carrying a gun he did nothing at all. The man approached cautiously; you didn’t expect to find another person underground. He said, ‘Who are you?’ with his gun ready.
The priest gave his name to a stranger for the first time in ten years because he was tired and there seemed no object in going on living.
‘A priest?’ the man asked, with astonishment. ‘Where have you come from?’
The fever lifted again: a little reality seeped back. He said, ‘It is all right. I will not bring you any trouble. I am going on.’ He screwed up all his remaining energy and walked on. A puzzled face penetrated his fever and receded: there were going to be no more hostages, he assured himself aloud. Footsteps followed him, he was like a dangerous man you see safely off an estate before you go home. He repeated aloud, ‘It is all right. I am not staying here. I want nothing.’
‘Father . . .’ the voice said, humbly and anxiously.
‘I will go right away.’ He tried to run and came suddenly out of the forest on to a long slope of grass. There were lights and huts below, and up there at the edge of the forest a big whitewashed building – a barracks? were there soldiers? He said, ‘If I have been seen I will give myself up. I assure you no one shall get into trouble because of me.’
‘Father . . .’ He was racked with his headache, he stumbled and put his hand against the wall for support. He felt immeasurably tired. He asked, ‘The barracks?’
‘Father,’ the voice said, puzzled and worried, ‘it is our church.’
‘A church?’ The priest ran his hands incredulously over the wall like a blind man trying to recognize a particular house, but he was too tired to feel anything at all. He heard the man with the gun babbling out of sight, ‘Such an honour, father. The bell must be rung . . .’ and he sat down suddenly on the rain-drenched grass, and leaning his head against the white wall, he fell asleep, with home behind his shoulder-blades.