The Power and the Glory

  ‘I remember,’ the priest said, ‘that you told me you’d never forget my face.’

  ‘And I haven’t,’ the man put in triumphantly, ‘or I wouldn’t be here, would I? Listen, father, I’ll admit a lot. You don’t know how a reward will tempt a poor man like me. And when you wouldn’t trust me, I thought, well, if that’s how he feels – I’ll show him. But I’m a good Catholic, father, and when a dying man wants a priest . . .’

  They climbed the long slope of Mr Lehr’s pastures which led to the next range of hills. The air was still fresh, at six in the morning, at three thousand feet; up there tonight it would be very cold – they had another six thousand feet to climb. The priest said uneasily, ‘Why should I put my head in your noose?’ It was too absurd.

  ‘Look, father.’ The half-caste was holding up a scrap of paper: the familiar writing caught the priest’s attention – the large deliberate handwriting of a child. The paper had been used to wrap up food; it was smeared and greasy. He read, ‘The Prince of Denmark is wondering whether he should kill himself or not, whether it is better to go on suffering all the doubts about his father, or by one blow . . .’

  ‘Not that, father, on the other side. That’s nothing.’

  The priest turned the paper and read a single phrase written in English in blunt pencil: ‘For Christ’s sake, father . . .’ The mule, unbeaten, lapsed into a slow heavy walk; the priest made no attempt to urge it on: this piece of paper left no doubt whatever.

  He asked, ‘How did this come to you?’

  ‘It was this way, father. I was with the police when they shot him. It was in a village the other side. He picked up a child to act as a screen, but, of course, the soldiers didn’t pay any attention. It was only an Indian. They were both shot, but he escaped.’

  ‘Then how . . . ?’

  ‘It was this way, father.’ He positively prattled. It appeared that he was afraid of the lieutenant, who resented the fact that the priest had escaped, and so he planned to slip across the border, out of reach. He got his chance at night, and on the way – it was probably on this side of the state line, but who knew where one state began or another ended? – he came on the American. He had been shot in the stomach . . .

  ‘How could he have escaped then?’

  ‘Oh, father, he is a man of superhuman strength. He was dying, he wanted a priest . . .’

  ‘How did he tell you that?’

  ‘It only needed two words, father.’ Then, to prove the story, the man had found enough strength to write this note, and so . . . the story had as many holes in it as a sieve. But what remained was this note, like a memorial stone you couldn’t overlook.

  The half-caste bridled angrily again. ‘You don’t trust me, father.’

  ‘Oh no,’ the priest said. ‘I don’t trust you.’

  ‘You think I’m lying.’

  ‘Most of it is lies.’

  He pulled the mule up and sat thinking, facing south. He was quite certain that this was a trap – probably the half-caste had suggested it – but it was a fact that the American was there, dying. He thought of the deserted banana station where something had happened and the Indian child lay dead on the maize: there was no question at all that he was needed. A man with all that on his soul . . . The oddest thing of all was that he felt quite cheerful; he had never really believed in this peace. He had dreamed of it so often on the other side that now it meant no more to him than a dream. He began to whistle a tune – something he had heard somewhere once. ‘I found a rose in my field’: it was time he woke up. It wouldn’t really have been a good dream – that confession in Las Casas when he would have had to admit, as well as everything else, that he had denied confession to a dying man.

  He asked, ‘Will the man still be alive?’

  ‘I think so, father,’ the half-caste caught him eagerly up.

  ‘How far is it?’

  ‘Four – five hours, father.’

  ‘You can take it in turns to ride the other mule.’

  The priest turned his mule back and called out to the guide. The man dismounted and stood inertly there, while he explained. The only remark he made was to the half-caste, motioning him into the saddle, ‘Be careful of that saddle-bag. The father’s brandy’s there.’

  They rode slowly back: Miss Lehr was at her gate. She said, ‘You forgot the sandwiches, father.’

  ‘Oh yes. Thank you.’ He stole a quick look round – it didn’t mean a thing to him. He said, ‘Is Mr Lehr still asleep?’

  ‘Shall I wake him?’

  ‘No, no. But you will thank him for his hospitality?’

  ‘Yes. And perhaps, father, in a few years we shall see you again? As you said.’ She looked curiously at the half-caste, and he stared back through his yellow insulting eyes.

  The priest said, ‘It’s possible,’ glancing away with a sly secretive smile.

  ‘Well, good-bye, father. You’d better be off, hadn’t you? The sun’s getting high.’

  ‘Good-bye, my dear Miss Lehr.’ The mestizo slashed impatiently at his mule and stirred it into action.

  ‘Not that way, my man,’ Miss Lehr called.

  ‘I have to pay a visit first,’ the priest explained, and breaking into an uncomfortable trot he bobbed down behind the mestizo’s mule towards the village. They passed the whitewashed church – that too belonged to a dream. Life didn’t contain churches. The long untidy village street opened ahead of them. The schoolmaster was at his door and waved an ironic greeting, malicious and horn-rimmed. ‘Well, father, off with your spoils?’

  The priest stopped his mule. He said to the half-caste, ‘Really . . . I had forgotten . . .’

  ‘You did well out of the baptisms,’ the schoolmaster said. ‘It pays to wait a few years, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Come on, father,’ the half-caste urged him. ‘Don’t listen to him.’ He spat. ‘He’s a bad man.’

  The priest said, ‘You know the people here better than anyone. If I leave a gift, will you spend it on things that do no harm – I mean food, blankets – not books?’

  ‘They need food more than books.’

  ‘I have forty-five pesos here . . .’

  The mestizo wailed, ‘Father, what are you doing . . . ?’

  ‘Conscience money?’ the schoolmaster said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All the same, of course I thank you. It’s good to see a priest with a conscience. It’s a stage in evolution,’ he said, his glasses flashing in the sunlight, a plump embittered figure in front of his tin-roofed shack, an exile.

  They passed the last houses, the cemetery, and began to climb. ‘Why, father, why?’ the half-caste protested.

  ‘He’s not a bad man, he does his best, and I shan’t need money again, shall I?’ the priest asked, and for quite a while they rode without speaking, while the sun came blindingly out, and the mules’ shoulders strained on the steep rocky paths, and the priest began to whistle again – ‘I have a rose’ – the only tune he knew. Once the half-caste started a complaint about something, ‘The trouble with you, father, is . . .’ but it petered out before it was defined because there wasn’t really anything to complain about as they rode steadily north towards the border.

  ‘Hungry?’ the priest asked at last.

  The half-caste muttered something that sounded angry or derisive.

  ‘Take a sandwich,’ the priest said, opening Miss Lehr’s packet.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘There,’ the half-caste said, with a sort of whinny of triumph, as though he had lain innocently all these seven hours under the suspicion of lying. He pointed across the barranca to a group of Indian huts on a peninsula of rock jutting out across the chasm. They were perhaps two hundred yards away, but it would take another hour at least to reach them, winding down a thousand feet and up another thousand.

  The priest sat on his mule watching intently; he could see no movement anywhere. Even the look-out, the little platform of twigs built on a mound above the huts, was empty. He said, ‘
There doesn’t seem to be anybody about.’ He was back in the atmosphere of desertion.

  ‘Well,’ the half-caste said, ‘you didn’t expect anybody, did you? Except him. He’s there. You’ll soon find that.’

  ‘Where are the Indians?’

  ‘There you go again,’ the man complained. ‘Suspicion. Always suspicion. How should I know where the Indians are? I told you he was quite alone, didn’t I?’

  The priest dismounted. ‘What are you doing now?’ the half-caste cried despairingly.

  ‘We shan’t need the mules any more. They can be taken back.’

  ‘Not need them? How are you going to get away from here?’

  ‘Oh,’ the priest said, ‘I won’t have to think about that, will I?’ He counted out forty pesos and said to the muleteer, ‘I hired you for Las Casas. Well, this is your good luck. Six days’ pay.’

  ‘You don’t want me any more, father?’

  ‘No, I think you’d better get away from here quickly. Leave you-know-what behind.’

  The half-caste said excitedly, ‘We can’t walk all that way, father. Why, the man’s dying.’

  ‘We can go just as quickly on our own hooves. Now, friend, be off.’ The mestizo watched the mules pick their way along the narrow stony path with a look of wistful greed; they disappeared round a shoulder of rock – crack, crack, crack, the sound of their hooves contracted into silence.

  ‘Now,’ the priest said briskly, ‘we won’t delay any more,’ and he started down the path, with a small sack slung over his shoulder. He could hear the half-caste panting after him: his wind was bad. They had probably let him have far too much beer in the capital, and the priest thought, with an odd touch of contemptuous affection, of how much had happened to them both since that first encounter in a village of which he didn’t even know the name – the half-caste lying there in the hot noonday rocking his hammock with one naked yellow foot. If he had been asleep at that moment, this wouldn’t have happened. It was really shocking bad luck for the poor devil that he was to be burdened with a sin of such magnitude. The priest took a quick look back and saw the big toes protruding like slugs out of the dirty gym shoes; the man picked his way down, muttering all the time – his perpetual grievance didn’t help his wind. Poor man, the priest thought, he isn’t really bad enough . . .

  And he wasn’t strong enough either for this journey. By the time the priest had reached the bottom of the barranca he was fifty yards behind. The priest sat down on a boulder and mopped his forehead, and the half-caste began to complain long before he was down to his level, ‘There isn’t so much hurry as all that.’ It was almost as though the nearer he got to his treachery the greater the grievance against his victim became.

  ‘Didn’t you say he was dying?’ the priest asked.

  ‘Oh yes, dying, of course. But that can take a long time.’

  ‘The longer the better for all of us,’ the priest said. ‘Perhaps you are right. I’ll take a rest here.’

  But now, like a contrary child, the half-caste wanted to start again. He said, ‘You do nothing in moderation. Either you run or you sit.’

  ‘Can I do nothing right?’ the priest teased him, and then he put in sharply and shrewdly, ‘They will let me see him, I suppose?’

  ‘Of course,’ the half-caste said and immediately checked himself. ‘They, they? Who are you talking about now? First you complain that the place is empty, and then you talk of “they”.’ He said with tears in his voice, ‘You may be a good man, but why won’t you talk plainly, so that a man can understand you? It’s enough to make a man a bad Catholic.’

  The priest said, ‘You see this sack here. We don’t want to carry that any farther. It’s heavy. I think a little drink will do us both good. We both need courage, don’t we?’

  ‘Drink, father?’ the half-caste asked with excitement, and watched the priest unpack a bottle. He never took his eyes away while the priest drank. His two fangs stuck greedily out, quivering slightly on the lower lip. Then he too fastened on the mouth. ‘It’s illegal, I suppose,’ the priest said with a giggle, ‘on this side of the border – if we are on this side.’ He had another draw himself and handed it back: it was soon exhausted – he took the bottle and threw it at a rock and it exploded like shrapnel. The half-caste started. He said, ‘Be careful. People might think you’d got a gun.’

  ‘As for the rest,’ the priest said, ‘we won’t need that.’

  ‘You mean there’s more of it?’

  ‘Two more bottles – but we can’t drink any more in this heat. We’d better leave it here.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say it was heavy, father? I’ll carry it for you. You’ve only to ask me to do a thing. I’m willing. Only you just won’t ask.’

  They set off again uphill, the bottles clinking gently; the sun shone vertically down on the pair of them. It took them the best part of an hour to reach the top of the barranca. Then the watch-tower gaped over their path like an upper jaw and the tops of the huts appeared over the rocks above them. Indians do not build their settlements on a mule path; they prefer to stand aside and see who comes. The priest wondered how soon the police would appear; they were keeping very carefully hidden.

  ‘This way, father.’ The half-caste took the lead, scrambling away from the path up the rocks to the little plateau. He looked anxious, almost as if he had expected something to happen before this. There were about a dozen huts; they stood quiet, like tombs against the heavy sky. A storm was coming up.

  The priest felt a nervous impatience; he had walked into this trap, the least they could do was to close it quickly, finish everything off. He wondered whether they would suddenly shoot him down from one of the huts. He had come to the very edge of time: soon there would be no tomorrow and no yesterday, just existence going on for ever. He began to wish he had taken a little more brandy. His voice broke uncertainly when he said, ‘Well, we are here. Where is this Yankee?’

  ‘Oh yes, the Yankee,’ the half-caste said, jumping a little. It was as if for a moment he had forgotten the pretext. He stood there, gaping at the huts, wondering too. He said, ‘He was over there when I left him.’

  ‘Well, he couldn’t have moved, could he?’

  If it hadn’t been for that letter he would have doubted the very existence of the American – and if he hadn’t seen the dead child too, of course. He began to walk across the little silent clearing towards the hut: would they shoot him before he got to the entrance? It was like walking a plank blindfold: you didn’t know at what point you would step off into space for ever. He hiccuped once and knotted his hands behind his back to stop them trembling. He had been glad in a way to turn from Miss Lehr’s gate – he had never really believed that he would ever get back to parish work and the daily Mass and the careful appearances of piety, but all the same you needed to be a little drunk to die. He got to the door – not a sound anywhere; then a voice said, ‘Father.’

  He looked round. The mestizo stood in the clearing with his face contorted: the two fangs jumped and jumped; he looked frightened.

  ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘Nothing, father.’

  ‘Why did you call me?’

  ‘I said nothing,’ he lied.

  The priest turned and went in.

  The American was there all right. Whether he was alive was another matter. He lay on a straw mat with his eyes closed and his mouth open and his hands on his belly, like a child with stomach-ache. Pain alters a face – or else successful crime has its own falsity like politics or piety. He was hardly recognizable from the news picture on the police station wall; that was tougher, arrogant, a man who had made good. This was just a tramp’s face. Pain had exposed the nerves and given the face a kind of spurious intelligence.

  The priest knelt down and put his face near the man’s mouth, trying to hear the breathing. A heavy smell came up to him – a mixture of vomit and cigar smoke and stale drink; it would take more than a few lilies to hide this corruption. A very faint voice close to hi
s ear said in English, ‘Beat it, father.’ Outside the door, in the stormy sunlight, the mestizo stood, staring towards the hut, a little loose about the knees.

  ‘So you’re alive, are you?’ the priest said briskly. ‘Better hurry. You haven’t got long.’

  ‘Beat it, father.’

  ‘You wanted me, didn’t you? You’re a Catholic?’

  ‘Beat it,’ the voice whispered again, as if those were the only words it could remember of a lesson learnt some while ago.

  ‘Come now,’ the priest said. ‘How long is it since you went to confession?’

  The eyelids rolled up and astonished eyes looked up at him. The man said in a puzzled voice, ‘Ten years, I guess. What are you doing here anyway?’

  ‘You asked for a priest. Come now. Ten years is a long time.’

  ‘You got to beat it, father,’ the man said. He was remembering the lesson now; lying there flat on the mat with his hands folded on his stomach, any vitality that was left had accumulated in the brain: he was like a reptile crushed at one end. He said in a strange voice, ‘That bastard . . .’ The priest said furiously, ‘What sort of a confession is this? I make a five hours’ journey . . . and all I get out of you are evil words.’ It seemed to him horribly unfair that his uselessness should return with his danger – he couldn’t do anything for a man like this.

  ‘Listen, father . . .’ the man said.

  ‘I am listening.’

  ‘You beat it out of here quick. I didn’t know . . .’

  ‘I haven’t come all this way to talk about myself,’ the priest said. ‘The sooner your confession’s done, the sooner I will be gone.’

  ‘You don’t need to trouble about me. I’m through.’

  ‘You mean damned?’ the priest said angrily.

  ‘Sure. Damned,’ the man replied, licking blood away from his lips.

  ‘You listen to me,’ the priest said, leaning closer to the stale and nauseating smell, ‘I have come here to listen to your confession. Do you want to confess?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you when you wrote that note . . . ?’