He came cautiously out of the belt of trees into a marshy clearing. The whole state was like that, river and swamp and forest. He knelt down in the late sunlight and bathed his face in a brown pool which reflected back at him like a piece of glazed pottery the round, stubbly and hollow features. They were so unexpected that he grinned at them – with the shy evasive untrustworthy smile of a man caught out. In the old days he often practised a gesture a long while in front of a glass so that he had come to know his own face as well as an actor does. It was a form of humility – his own natural face hadn’t seemed the right one. It was a buffoon’s face, good enough for mild jokes to women, but unsuitable at the altar-rail. He had tried to change it – and indeed, he thought, indeed I have succeeded, they’ll never recognize me now, and the cause of his happiness came back to him like the taste of brandy, promising temporary relief from fear, loneliness, a lot of things. He was being driven by the presence of soldiers to the very place where he most wanted to be. He had avoided it for six years, but now it wasn’t his fault – it was his duty to go there – it couldn’t count as sin. He went back to his mule and kicked it gently, ‘Up, mule, up,’ a small gaunt man in torn peasant’s clothes going for the first time in many years, like any ordinary man, to his home.
In any case, even if he could have gone south and avoided the village, it was only one more surrender. The years behind him were littered with similar surrenders – feast days and fast days and days of abstinence had been the first to go: then he had ceased to trouble more than occasionally about his breviary – and finally he had left it behind altogether at the port in one of his periodic attempts at escape. Then the altar stone went – too dangerous to carry with him. He had no business to say Mass without it; he was probably liable to suspension, but penalties of the ecclesiastical kind began to seem unreal in a state where the only penalty was the civil one of death. The routine of his life like a dam was cracked and forgetfulness came dribbling through, wiping out this and that. Five years ago he had given way to despair – the unforgivable sin – and he was going back now to the scene of his despair with a curious lightening of the heart. For he had got over despair too. He was a bad priest, he knew it. They had a word for his kind – a whisky priest, but every failure dropped out of sight and mind: somewhere they accumulated in secret – the rubble of his failures. One day they would choke up, he supposed, altogether the source of grace. Until then he carried on, with spells of fear, weariness, with a shamefaced lightness of heart.
The mule splashed across the clearing and they entered the forest again. Now that he no longer despaired it didn’t mean, of course, that he wasn’t damned – it was simply that after a time the mystery became too great, a damned man putting God into the mouths of men: an odd sort of servant, that, for the devil. His mind was full of a simplified mythology: Michael dressed in armour slew a dragon, and the angels fell through space like comets with beautiful streaming hair because they were jealous, so one of the Fathers had said, of what God intended for men – the enormous privilege of life – this life.
There were signs of cultivation; stumps of trees and the ashes of fires where the ground was being cleared for a crop. He stopped beating the mule on; he felt a curious shyness . . . A woman came out of a hut and watched him lagging up the path on the tired mule. The tiny village, not more than two dozen huts round a dusty plaza, was made to pattern, but it was a pattern which lay close to his heart. He felt secure – he was confident of a welcome, confident that in this place there would be at least one person he could trust not to betray him to the police. When he was quite close the mule sat down again – this time he had to roll on the ground to escape. He picked himself up and the woman watched him as if he were an enemy. ‘Ah, Maria,’ he said, ‘and how are you?’
‘Well,’ she exclaimed, ‘it is you, father?’
He didn’t look directly at her: his eyes were sly and cautious. He said, ‘You didn’t recognize me?’
‘You’ve changed.’ She looked him up and down with a kind of contempt. She said, ‘When did you get those clothes, father?’
‘A week ago.’
‘What did you do with yours?’
‘I gave them in exchange.’
‘Why? They were good clothes.’
‘They were very ragged – and conspicuous.’
‘I’d have mended them and hidden them away. It’s a waste. You look like a common man.’
He smiled, looking at the ground, while she chided him like a housekeeper: it was just as in the old days when there was a presbytery and meetings of the Children of Mary and all the guilds and gossip of a parish, except of course that . . . He said gently, not looking at her, with the same embarrassed smile, ‘How’s Brigitta?’ His heart jumped at the name: a sin may have enormous consequences: it was six years since he had been – home.
‘She’s as well as the rest of us. What did you expect?’
He had his satisfaction, but it was connected with his crime; he had no business to feel pleasure at anything attached to that past. He said mechanically, ‘That’s good,’ while his heart beat with its secret love. He said, ‘I’m very tired. The police were about near Zapata . . .’
‘Why didn’t you make for Monte Cristo?’
He looked quickly up with anxiety. It wasn’t the welcome that he had expected; a small knot of people had gathered between the huts and watched him from a safe distance – there was a little decaying bandstand and a single stall for gaseosas – people had brought their chairs out for the evening. Nobody came forward to kiss his hand and ask his blessing. It was as if he had descended by means of his sin into the human struggle to learn other things besides despair and love, that a man can be unwelcome even in his own home. He said, ‘The Red Shirts were there.’
‘Well, father,’ the woman said, ‘we can’t turn you away. You’d better come along.’ He followed her meekly, tripping once in the long peon’s trousers, with the happiness wiped off his face and the smile somehow left behind like the survivor of a wreck. There were seven or eight men, two women, half a dozen children: he came among them like a beggar. He couldn’t help remembering the last time . . . the excitement, the gourds of spirit brought out of holes in the ground . . . his guilt had still been fresh, yet how he had been welcomed. It was as if he had returned to them in their vicious prison as one of themselves – an émigré who comes back to his native place enriched.
‘This is the father,’ the woman said. Perhaps it was only that they hadn’t recognized him, he thought, and waited for their greetings. They came forward one by one and kissed his hand and then stood back and watched him. He said, ‘I am glad to see you . . .’ he was going to say ‘my children’, but then it seemed to him that only the childless man has the right to call strangers his children. The real children were coming up now to kiss his hand, one by one, under the pressure of their parents. They were too young to remember the old days when the priests dressed in black and wore Roman collars and had soft superior patronizing hands; he could see they were mystified at the show of respect to a peasant like their parents. He didn’t look at them directly, but he was watching them closely all the same. Two were girls – a thin washed-out child – of five, six, seven? he couldn’t tell, and one who had been sharpened by hunger into an appearance of devilry and malice beyond her age. A young woman stared out of the child’s eyes. He watched them disperse again, saying nothing: they were strangers.
One of the men said, ‘Will you be here long, father?’
He said, ‘I thought, perhaps . . . I could rest . . . a few days.’
One of the other men said, ‘Couldn’t you go a bit farther north, father, to Pueblito?’
‘We’ve been travelling for twelve hours, the mule and I.’
The woman suddenly spoke for him, angrily, ‘Of course he’ll stay here tonight. It’s the least we can do.’
He said, ‘I’ll say Mass for you in the morning,’ as if he were offering them a bribe, but it might almost have been sto
len money from their expressions of shyness and unwillingness.
Somebody said, ‘If you don’t mind, father, very early . . . in the night perhaps.’
‘What is the matter with you all?’ he asked. ‘Why should you be afraid?’
‘Haven’t you heard . . . ?’
‘Heard?’
‘They are taking hostages now – from all the villages where they think you’ve been. And if people don’t tell . . . somebody is shot . . . and then they take another hostage. It happened in Concepción.’
‘Concepción?’ One of his lids began to twitch up and down, up and down. He said, ‘Who?’ They looked at him stupidly. He said furiously, ‘Who did they murder?’
‘Pedro Montez.’
He gave a little yapping cry like a dog’s – the absurd shorthand of grief. The old-young child laughed. He said, ‘Why don’t they catch me? The fools. Why don’t they catch me?’ The little girl laughed again; he stared at her sightlessly, as if he could hear the sound but couldn’t see the face. Happiness was dead again before it had had time to breathe; he was like a woman with a stillborn child – bury it quickly and forget and begin again. Perhaps the next would live.
‘You see, father,’ one of the men said, ‘why . . .’
He felt as a guilty man does before his judges. He said ‘Would you rather that I was like . . . like Padre José in the capital . . . you have heard of him . . . ?’
They said unconvincingly, ‘Of course not that, father.’
He said, ‘What am I saying now? It’s not what you want or what I want.’ He continued sharply, with authority, ‘I will sleep now . . . You can wake me an hour before dawn . . . half an hour to hear your confessions . . . then Mass, and I will be gone.’
But where? There wouldn’t be a village in the state to which he wouldn’t be an unwelcome danger now.
The woman said, ‘This way, father.’
He followed her into a small room where all the furniture had been made out of packing-cases – a chair, a bed of boards tacked together and covered with a straw mat, a crate on which a cloth had been laid and on the cloth an oil-lamp. He said, ‘I don’t want to turn anybody out of here.’
‘It’s mine.’
He looked at her doubtfully. ‘Where will you sleep?’ He was afraid of claims. He watched her covertly: was this all there was in marriage, this evasion and suspicion and lack of ease? When people confessed to him in terms of passion, was this all they meant – the hard bed and the busy woman and the not talking about the past?
‘When you are gone.’
The light flattened out behind the forest and the long shadows of the trees pointed towards the door. He lay down upon the bed, and the woman busied herself somewhere out of sight: he could hear her scratching at the earth floor. He couldn’t sleep. Had it become his duty then to run away? He had tried to escape several times, but he had always been prevented . . . now they wanted him to go. Nobody would stop him, saying a woman was ill or a man dying. He was a sickness now.
‘Maria,’ he said. ‘Maria, what are you doing?’
‘I have saved a little brandy for you.’
He thought: if I go, I shall meet other priests: I shall go to confession: I shall feel contrition and be forgiven: eternal life will begin for me all over again. The Church taught that it was every man’s first duty to save his own soul. The simple ideas of hell and heaven moved in his brain; life without books, without contact with educated men, had peeled away from his memory everything but the simplest outline of the mystery.
‘There,’ the woman said. She carried a small medicine bottle filled with spirit.
If he left them, they would be safe, and they would be free from his example. He was the only priest the children could remember: it was from him they would take their ideas of the faith. But it was from him too they took God – in their mouths. When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. Wasn’t it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake? even if they were corrupted by his example? He was shaken with the enormity of the problem. He lay with his hands over his eyes: nowhere, in all the wide flat marshy land, was there a single person he could consult. He raised the brandy to his mouth.
He said shyly, ‘And Brigitta . . . is she . . . well?’
‘You saw her just now.’
‘No.’ He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t recognized her. It was making light of his mortal sin: you couldn’t do a thing like that and then not even recognize . . .
‘Yes, she was there.’ Maria went to the door and called, ‘Brigitta, Brigitta,’ and the priest turned on his side and watched her come in out of the outside landscape of terror and lust – that small malicious child who had laughed at him.
‘Go and speak to the father,’ Maria said. ‘Go on.’
He made an attempt to hide the brandy bottle, but there was nowhere . . . he tried to minimize it in his hands, watching her, feeling the shock of human love.
‘She knows her catechism,’ Maria said, ‘but she won’t say it . . .’
The child stood there, watching him with acuteness and contempt. They had spent no love in her conception: just fear and despair and half a bottle of brandy and the sense of loneliness had driven him to an act which horrified him – and this scared shame-faced overpowering love was the result. He said, ‘Why not? Why won’t you say it?’ taking quick secret glances, never meeting her gaze, feeling his heart pound in his breast unevenly, like an old donkey engine, with the baulked desire to save her from – everything.
‘Why should I?’
‘God wishes it.’
‘How do you know?’
He was aware of an immense load of responsibility: it was indistinguishable from love. This, he thought, must be what all parents feel: ordinary men go through life like this crossing their fingers, praying against pain, afraid. . . . This is what we escape at no cost at all, sacrificing an unimportant motion of the body. For years, of course, he had been responsible for souls, but that was different . . . a lighter thing. You could trust God to make allowances, but you couldn’t trust smallpox, starvation, men . . . He said, ‘My dear,’ tightening his grip upon the brandy bottle . . . He had baptized her at his last visit: she had been like a rag doll with a wrinkled aged face – it had seemed unlikely that she would live long . . . He had felt nothing but a regret; it was difficult even to feel shame where no one blamed him. He was the only priest most of them had ever known – they took their standard of the priesthood from him. Even the women.
‘Are you the gringo?’
‘What gringo?’
The woman said, ‘The silly little creature. It’s because the police have been looking for a man.’ It seemed odd to hear of any other man they wanted but himself.
‘What has he done?’
‘He’s a Yankee. He murdered some people in the north.’
‘Why should he be here?’
‘They think he’s making for Quintana Roo – the chiceli plantations.’ It was where many criminals in Mexico ended up: you could work on a plantation and earn good money and nobody interfered.
‘Are you the gringo?’ the child repeated.
‘Do I look like a murderer?’
‘I don’t know.’
If he left the state, he would be leaving her too, abandoned. He said humbly to the woman, ‘Couldn’t I stay a few days here?’
‘It’s too dangerous, father.’
He caught the look in the child’s eyes which frightened him – it was again as if a grown woman was there before her time, making her plans, aware of far too much. It was like seeing his own mortal sin look back at him, without contrition. He tried to find some contact with the child and not the woman; he said, ‘My dear, tell me what games you play . . .’ The child sniggered. He turned his face quickly away and stared up at the roof, where a spider moved. He remembered a proverb – it came out of the recesses of his own childhood: his father had u
sed it – ‘The best smell is bread, the best savour salt, the best love that of children.’ It had been a happy childhood, except that he had been afraid of too many things, and had hated poverty like a crime; he had believed that when he was a priest he would be rich and proud – that was called having a vocation. He thought of the immeasurable distance a man travels – from the first whipping-top to this bed, on which he lay clasping the brandy. And to God it was only a moment. The child’s snigger and the first mortal sin lay together more closely than two blinks of the eye. He put out his hand as if he could drag her back by force from – something; but he was powerless. The man or the woman waiting to complete her corruption might not yet have been born. How could he guard her against the non-existent?
She started out of his reach and put her tongue out at him. The woman said, ‘You little devil you,’ and raised her hand.
‘No,’ the priest said. ‘No.’ He scrambled into a sitting position. ‘Don’t you dare . . .’
‘I’m her mother.’
‘We haven’t any right.’ He said to the child, ‘If only I had some cards I could show you a trick or two. You could teach your friends . . .’ He had never known how to talk to children except from the pulpit. She stared back at him with insolence. He asked, ‘Do you know how to send messages with taps – long, short, long . . . ?’
‘What on earth, father!’ the woman exclaimed.
‘It’s a game children play. I know.’ He said to the child, ‘Have you any friends?’
The child suddenly laughed again knowingly. The seven-year-old body was like a dwarf’s: it disguised an ugly maturity.
‘Get out of here,’ the woman said. ‘Get out before I teach you . . .’
She made a last impudent malicious gesture and was gone – perhaps for ever as far as he was concerned. You do not always say good-bye to those you love beside a deathbed, in an atmosphere of leisure and incense. He said, ‘I wonder what we can teach . . .’ He thought of his own death and her life going on; it might be his hell to watch her rejoining him gradually through the debasing years, sharing his weakness like tuberculosis. . . . He lay back on the bed and turned his head away from the draining light; he appeared to be sleeping, but he was wide awake. The woman busied herself with small jobs, and as the sun went down the mosquitoes came out, flashing through the air to their mark unerringly, like sailors’ knives.