The Power and the Glory

Ah, if you knew what a difference they would make.

The beggar was put out. He said: A man like me sometimes feels that he would do anything for a few pesos. Now that the lights were out all over town, they stood intimately in the shadow. He said: Can you blame me?

No, no. It would be the last thing I would do.

Everything he said seemed to feed the beggar's irritation. Sometimes, the beggar said, I feel as if I could kill …

That, of course, would be very wrong.

Would it be wrong if I got a man by the throat ...?

Well, a starving man has got the right to save himself, certainly.

The beggar watched with rage, while the other talked on as if he were considering a point of academic interest. In my case, of course, it would hardly be worth the risk. I possess [98] exactly fifteen pesos seventy-five centavos in the world. I haven't eaten myself for forty-eight hours.

Mother of God, the beggar said, you're as hard as a stone. Haven't you a heart?

The man in the drill suit suddenly giggled. The other said: You're lying. Why haven't you eaten-if you've got fifteen pesos?

You see, I want to spend them on drink.

What sort of drink?

The kind of drink a stranger doesn't know how to get in a place like this.

You mean spirits?

Yes-and wine.

The beggar came very close: his leg touched the leg of the other man: he put a hand upon the others sleeve. They might have been great friends or even brothers standing intimately together in the dark: even the lights in the houses were going out now, and the taxis which during the day waited half-way down the hill for fares who never seemed to come were already dispersing-a tail-lamp winked and went out past the police barracks. The beggar said: Man, this is your lucky day. How much would you pay me ...?

For some drink?

For an introduction to someone who could let you have a little brandy-real fine Vera Cruz brandy?

With a throat like mine, the man in drill explained, it's wine I really want.

Pulque or maguey-he's got everything.

Wine?

Quince wine?

I'd give everything I've got, the other swore solemnly and exactly, -except the centavos, that's to say-for some real genuine grape wine. Somewhere down the hill by the river a drum was beating: one, two, one, two: and the sound of marching feet kept a rough time-the soldiers-or the police-were going home to bed.

How much? the beggar repeated impatiently.

Well, I would give you the fifteen pesos and you would get the wine for what you cared to spend.

[99] You come with me.

They began to go down the hill: at the corner where one street ran up past the chemist's shop towards the barracks and another ran down to the hotel, the quay, the warehouse of the United Banana Company, the man in drill stopped. The police were marching up, rifles slung at ease. Wait a moment. Among them walked a half-caste with two fang-like teeth jutting out over his lip. The man in drill standing in the shadow watched him go by: once the mestizo turned his head and their eyes met. Then the police went by, up into the plaza. Let's go. Quickly.

The beggar said: They won't interfere with us. They're after bigger game.

What was that man doing with them, do you think?

Who knows? A hostage perhaps.

If he had been a hostage, they would have tied his hands, wouldn't they?

How do I know? He had the grudging independence you find in countries where it is the right of a poor man to beg. He said: Do you want the spirits or don't you?

I want wine.

I can't say he'll have this or that. You must take what comes.

He led the way down towards the river. He said: I don't even know if he's in town. The beetles were flocking out and covering the pavements: they popped under the feet like puffballs, and a sour green smell came up from the river. The white bust of a general glimmered in a tiny public garden, all hot paving and dust, and an electric dynamo throbbed on the ground-floor of the only hotel. Wide wooden stairs crawling with beetles ran up to the first floor. I've done my best, the beggar said; a man can't do more.

On the first floor a man dressed in formal dark trousers and a white skin-tight vest came out of a bedroom with a towel over his shoulder. He had a little grey aristocratic beard and he wore braces as well as a belt. Somewhere in the distance a pipe gurgled, and the beetles detonated against a bare globe. The beggar started talking earnestly, and once as he talked the light went off altogether and then flickered unsatisfactorily on again. The head of the stairs was littered with wicker rocking-chairs, [100] and on a big slate were chalked the names of the guests-three only far twenty rooms.

The beggar turned back to his companion. The gentleman, he said, is not in. The manager says so. Shall we wait for him?

Time to me is of no account.

They went into a big bare bedroom with a tiled floor. The little black iron bedstead was like something somebody has left behind by accident when moving out. They sat down on it side by side and waited, and the beetles came popping in through the gaps in the mosquito wire. He is a very important man, the beggar said. He is the cousin of the Governor-he can get anything for you, anything at all. But, of course, you must be introduced by someone he trusts.

And he trusts you?

I worked for him once. He added frankly: He has to trust me.

Does the Governor know?

Of course not. The Governor is a hard man.

Every now and then the water-pipes swallowed noisily. And why should he trust me?

Oh, anyone can tell a drinker. You'll have to come back for more. It's good stuff he sells. Better give me the fifteen pesos. He counted them carefully twice. He said: I'll get you a bottle of the best Vera Cruz brandy. You see if I don't. The light went off, and they sat on in the dark: the bed creaked as one of them shifted.

I don't want brandy, a voice said. At least not very much.

What do you want then? I told you-wine.

Wine's expensive.

Never mind that. Wine or nothing.

Quince wine?

No, no. French wine.

Sometimes he has California wine.

That would do.

Of course himself-he gets it for nothing. From the customs.

The dynamo began throbbing again below and the light came dimly on. The door opened and the manager beckoned the [101] beggar; a long conversation began. The man in the drill suit leant back on the bed: his chin was cut in several places where he had been shaving too closely: his face was hollow and ill-it gave the impression that he had once been plump and round-faced but had caved in. He had the appearance of a business man who had fallen on hard times.

The beggar came back. He said: The gentleman's busy, but he'll be back soon. The manager sent a boy to look for him.

Where is he?

He can't be interrupted. He's playing billiards with the Chief of Police. He came back to the bed, squashing two beetles under his naked feet. He said: This is a fine hotel. Where do you stay? You're a stranger, aren't you?

Oh, I'm just passing through.

This gentleman is very influential. It would be a good thing to offer him a drink. After all, you won't want to take it all away with you. You may as well drink here as anywhere else.

I should like to keep a little-to take home.

It's all one. I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.

All the same- Then the light went out again, and on the horizon the lightning bellied out like a curtain. The sound of thunder came through the mosquito-net from very far away like the noise you hear from the other end of a town when the Sunday bull-fight is on.

The beggar said confidentially: What's your trade?

Oh, I pick up what I can-where I can.

They sat in silence together listening to the sound of feet on the wooden stairs. The door opened, but they could see nothing. A voice swore resignedly and asked: Who's there? Then a match was struck and showed a large blue jaw and went out. The dynamo churned away and the light went on again. The stranger said wearily: Oh, it's you.

It's me.

He was a small man with a too large pasty face and he was dressed in a tight grey suit. A revolver bulged under his waistcoat. He said: I've got nothing for you. Nothing.

The beggar padded across the room and began to talk earnestly in a very low voice: once he gently squeezed with his bare toes the other's polished shoe. The man sighed and blew [102] out his cheeks and watched the bed closely as if he feared they had designs on it. He said sharply to the one in the drill suit: So you want some Vera Cruz brandy, do you? It's against the law.

Not brandy. I don't want brandy.

Isn't beer good enough for you?

He came fussily and authoritatively into the middle of the room, his shoes squeaking on the tiles-the Governor's cousin. I could have you arrested, he threatened.

The man in the drill suit cringed formally. He said: Of course, your Excellency ...

Do you think I've got nothing better to do than slake the thirst of every beggar who chooses ...

I would never have troubled you if this man had not …

The Governors cousin spat on the tiles.

But if your Excellency would rather that I went away …

He said sharply: I'm not a hard man. I always try to oblige my fellows ... when it's in my power and does no harm. I have a position, you understand. These drinks come to me quite legally.

Of course.

And I have to charge what they cost me.

Of course.

Otherwise I'd be a ruined man. He walked delicately to the bed as if his shoes were cramping him and began to unmake it. Are you a talker? he asked over his shoulder.

I know how to keep a secret.

I don't !t mind you telling-the right people. There was a large rent in the mattress: he pulled out a handful of straw and put in his fingers again. The man in drill gazed out with false indifference at the public garden, the dark mud-banks, and the masts of sailing-ships: the lightning flapped behind them, and the thunder came nearer.

There, said the Governor's cousin, I can spare you that. It's good stuff.

It wasn't really brandy I wanted.

You must take what comes.

Then I think I'd rather have my fifteen pesos back.

The Governor's cousin exclaimed sharply: Fifteen pesos! [103] The beggar began rapidly to explain that the gentleman wanted to buy a little wine as well as brandy: they began to argue fiercely by the bed in low voices about prices. The Governor's cousin said: Wine's very difficult to get. I can let you have two bottles of brandy.

One of brandy and one of ...

It's the best Vera Cruz brandy.

But I am a wine drinker ... you don't know how I long for wine. …

Wine costs me a great deal of money. How much more can you pay?

I have only seventy-five centavos left in the world.

I could let you have a bottle of tequila.

No, no.

Another fifty centavos then ... It will be a large bottle. He began to scrabble in the mattress again, pulling out straw. The beggar winked at the man in drill and made the motions of drawing a cork and filling a glass.

There, the Governor's cousin said, take it or leave it.

Oh, I will take it.

The Governors cousin suddenly lost his surliness. He rubbed his hands and said: A stuffy night. The rains are going to be early this year, I think.

Perhaps your Excellency would honour me by taking a glass of brandy to toast our business.

Well, well ... perhaps ... The beggar opened the door and called briskly for glasses.

It's a long time, the Governor's cousin said, since I had a glass of wine. Perhaps it would be more suitable for a toast.

Of course, the man in drill said, as your Excellency chooses. He watched the cork drawn with a look of painful anxiety. He said: If you will excuse me, I think I will have brandy, and smiled raggedly, with an effort, watching the wine level fall.

They toasted each other, all three sitting on the bed-the beggar drank brandy. The Governor's cousin said: I'm proud of this wine. It's good wine. The best California. The beggar winked and motioned and the man in drill said: One more glass, your Excellency-or I can recommend this brandy.

[104] It's good brandy-but I think another glass of wine. They refilled their glasses. The man in drill said: I'm going to take some of that wine back-to my mother. She loves a glass.

She couldn't do better, the Governor's cousin said, emptying his own. He said: So you have a mother?

Haven't we all?

Ah, you're lucky. Mine's dead. His hand strayed towards the bottle, grasped it. Sometimes I miss her. I called her 'my little friend.' He tilted the bottle. With your permission?

Of course, your Excellency, the other said hopelessly, taking a long draught of brandy. The beggar said: I too have a mother.

Who cares? the Governor's cousin said sharply. He leant back and the bed creaked. He said: I have often thought a mother is a better friend than a father. Her influence is towards peace, goodness, charity. … Always on the anniversary of her death I go to her grave-with flowers.

The man in drill caught a hiccup politely. He said: Ah, if I could too ...

But you said your mother was alive?

I thought that you were speaking of your grandmother.

How could I? I can't remember my grandmother.

Nor can I.

I can, the beggar said.

The Governors cousin said: You talk too much. Perhaps I could send him to have this wine wrapped up. ... For your Excellency's sake I mustn't be seen ...

Wait, wait. There's no hurry. You are very welcome here. Anything in this room is at your disposal. Have a glass of wine.

I think brandy ...

Then with your permission ... He tilted the bottle: a little of it splashed over onto the sheets. What were we talking about?

Our grandmothers.

I don't think it can have been that. I can't even remember mine. The earliest thing I can remember ...

The door opened. The manager said: The Chief of Police is coming up the stairs.

Excellent. Show him in.

Are you sure?

[105] Of course. He's a good fellow. He said to the others: But at billiards you can't trust him.

A large stout man in a singlet, white trousers, and a revolver-holster appeared in the doorway. The Governor's cousin said: Come in. Come in. How is your toothache? We were talking about our grandmothers. He said sharply to the beggar: Make room for the jefe.

The jefe stood in the doorway, watching them with dim embarrassment. He said: Well, well ...

Were having a little private party. Will you join us? It would be an honour.

The jefe's face suddenly lit up at the sight of the wine: Of course-a little beer never comes amiss.

That's right. Give the jefe a glass of beer. The beggar filled his own glass with wine and held it out. The jefe took his place upon the bed and drained the glass: then he took the bottle himself. He said: It's good beer. Very good beer. Is this the only bottle? The man in drill watched him with frigid anxiety.

I'm afraid the only bottle.

Salud!

And what, the Governor's cousin asked, were we talking about?

About the first thing you could remember, the beggar said. The first thing I can remember, the jefe began, with deliberation, -but this gentleman is not drinking.

I will have a little brandy.

Salud!

Salud!

The first thing I can remember with any distinctness is my first communion. Ah, the thrill of the soul, my parents round me ...

How many parents, then, have you got?

Two, of course.

They could not have been around you-you would have needed at least four-ha, ha.

Salud!

Salud!

No, but as I was saying-life has such irony. It was my painful duty to watch the priest who gave me that communion [106] shot-an old man. I am not ashamed to say that I wept. The comfort is that he is probably a saint and that he prayed for us. It is not everyone who earns a saint's prayers.

An unusual way ...

But then life is mysterious.

Salud!

The man in drill said: A glass of brandy, jefe?

''There is so little left in this bottle that I may as well ...

I was very anxious to take a little back for my mother.

Oh, a drop like this. It would be an insult to take it. Just the dregs. He turned it up over his glass and chuckled: If you can talk of beer having dregs. Then he stopped with the bottle held over the glass and said with astonishment: Why, man, you're crying. All three watched the man in drill with their mouths a little open. He said: It always takes me like this-brandy. Forgive me, gentlemen. I get drunk very easily and then I see ...

See what?

Oh. I don't know, all the hope of the world draining away.

Man, you're a poet.

The beggar said: A poet is the soul of his country. Lightning filled the windows like a white sheet, and thunder crashed suddenly overhead. The one globe flickered and faded up near the ceiling. This is bad news for my men, the jefe said, stamping on a beetle which had crawled too near.

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.

[107] 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 call it?

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 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.

[108] 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 onto 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 or 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?

[109] 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 Concepcion: he thought of the cathedral and Montez and a canon 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 fronton 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 down-hill 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 a window, a small dark withered face, like one of the preserved heads tourists buy. He came up to the grille and said: Padre José?

[110] Over there. A second face appeared behind the other's shoulder, lit uncertainly by a candle-flame, then a third: 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? …

Oh, 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 [111] 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 others face: it didn't even reach, 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 really 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 [112] in which poultry is 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 [113] open hand he struck the sentry on the ear. He said: You're asleep. March as if you had 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 said.

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 white-wash-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 the priest 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 over on a butcher's counter: a big torn ear: a [114] 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. An appalling smell lay on the air and somebody in the absolute darkness wept.

The priest lingered on the threshold trying to see; the lumpy blackness seemed to shift and stir. 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're 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 in feeble horror: 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 Three

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 like smoke. 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. Forty miles, superstition said. Half-way to the sea, or half-way to the mountains. He felt around with his foot, trying to find [115] 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 said, 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 with horror 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.

He had moved perhaps six feet from the grille, and his eyes began to distinguish heads-perhaps the sky was clearing: they hung around him like gourds. A voice said: Who are you? He made no reply, feeling panic, edging in: suddenly he found himself against the back wall: the stone was wet against his hand-the cell could not have been more than twelve feet deep. He found he could just sit down if he kept his feet drawn up under him. An old man lay slumped against his shoulder: he told his age from the feather-weight lightness of the bones, the feeble uneven flutter of the breath. He was either somebody close to birth or death-and he could hardly be a child in this place. He said suddenly: Is that you, Catarina? and his breath went out in a long patient sigh, as if he had been waiting for a long while and could afford to wait a lot longer.

The priest said: No. Not Catarina. When he spoke everybody became suddenly silent, listening, as if what he said had importance: then the voices and movements began again. But the sound of his own voice, the sense of communication with a neighbour, calmed him.

You wouldn't be, the old man said. I didn't really think you were. She'll never come.

Is she your wife?

[116] What's that you're saying? I haven't got a wife.

Catarina.

She's my daughter. Everybody was listening again: except the two invisible people who were concerned only in their hooded and cramped pleasure.

Perhaps they won't allow her here.

She'll never try, the old hopeless voice pronounced with absolute conviction. The priest's feet began to ache, drawn up under his haunches. He said: If she loves you ... Somewhere across the huddle of dark shapes the woman cried again-that finished cry of protest and abandonment and pleasure.

It's the priests who've done it, the old man said.

The priests?

The priests.

Why the priests?

The priests.

A low voice near his knees said: The old man's crazy. What's the use of asking him questions?

Is that you, Catarina? He added: I don't really believe it, you know. It's just a question.

Now I've got something to complain about, the voice went on. A mans got to defend his honour. You'll admit that, won't you?

I don't know anything about honour.

I was in the cantina and the man I'm telling you about came up to me and said: 'Your mother's a whore.' Well, I couldn't do anything about it: he'd got his gun on him. All I could do was wait. He drank too much beer-I knew he would-and when he was staggering I followed him out. I had a bottle and I smashed it against a wall. You see, I hadn't got my gun. His family's got influence with the jefe or I'd never be here.

It's a terrible thing to kill a man.

You talk like a priest.

It was the priests who did it, the old man said. You're right, there.

What does he mean?

What does it matter what an old man like that means? I'd like to tell you about something else. …

A woman's voice said: They took the child away from him.

[117] Why?

It was a bastard. They acted quite correctly.

At the word bastard his heart moved painfully: it was as when a man in love hears a stranger name a flower which is also the name of a woman. Bastard: the word filled him with miserable happiness. It brought his own child nearer: he could see her under the tree by the rubbish-dump, unguarded. He repeated Bastard? as he might have repeated her name-with tenderness disguised as indifference.

They said he was no fit father. But, of course, when the priests fled, she had to go to him. Where else could she go? It was like a happy ending until she said: Of course she hated him. They'd taught her about things. He could imagine the small set mouth of an educated woman. What was she doing here?

Why is he in prison?

He had a crucifix.

The stench from the pail got worse all the time: the night stood round them like a wall, without ventilation, and he could hear somebody making water, drumming on the tin sides. He said: They had no business ...

They were doing what was right, of course. It was a mortal sin.

No right to make her hate him.

They know what's right.

He said: They were bad priests to do a thing like that. The sin was over. It was their duty to teach-well, love.

You don't know what's right. The priests know.

He said after a moment's hesitation, very distinctly: I am a priest.

It was like the end: there was no need to hope any longer. The ten years' hunt was over at last. There was silence all round him. This place was very like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love: it stank to heaven; but he realized that after all it was possible to find peace there, when you knew for certain that the time was short.

A priest? the woman said at last.

Yes.

Do they know?

Not yet.

[118] He could feel a hand fumbling at his sleeve. A voice said: You shouldn't have told us. Father, there are all sorts here. Murderers ...

The voice which had described the crime to him said: You've no cause to abuse me. Because I kill a man it doesn't mean ... Whispering started everywhere. The voice said bitterly: I'm not an informer just because when a man says: 'Your mother's a whore ...'

The priest said: There's no need for anyone to inform on me. That would be a sin. When it's daylight they'll discover for themselves.

They'll shoot you, father, the woman's voice said.

Yes.

Are you afraid?

Yes. Of course.

A new voice spoke, in the corner from which the sounds of pleasure had come. It said roughly and obstinately: A man isn't afraid of a thing like that.

No? the priest said.

A bit of pain. What do you expect? It has to come.

All the same, the priest said, I am afraid.

Toothache is worse.

We can't all be brave men.

The voice said with contempt: You believers are all the same. Christianity makes you cowards.

Yes. Perhaps you are right. You see I am a bad priest and a bad man. To die in a state of mortal sin -he gave an uneasy chuckle- it makes you think.

There. It's as I say. Believing in God makes cowards. The voice was triumphant, as if it had proved something.

So then? the priest said.

Better not to believe-and be a brave man.

I see-yes. And, of course, if one believed the Governor did not exist or the jefe, if we could pretend that this prison was not a prison at all but a garden, how brave we could be then.

That's just foolishness.

But when we found that the prison was a prison, and the Governor up there in the square undoubtedly existed, well, it wouldn't much matter if we'd been brave for an hour or two.

[119] Nobody could say that this prison was not a prison.

No? You don't think so? I can see you don't listen to the politicians. His feet were giving him great pain: he had cramp in the soles, but he could bring no pressure on the muscles to relieve them. It was not yet midnight: the hours of darkness stretched ahead interminably.

The woman said suddenly: Think. We have a martyr here ...

The priest giggled: he couldn't stop himself. He said: I don't think martyrs are like this. He became suddenly serious, remembering Maria's words-it wouldn't be a good thing to bring mockery on the Church. He said: Martyrs are holy men. It is wrong to think that just because one dies ... no. I tell you I am in a state of mortal sin. I have done things I couldn't talk to you about: I could only whisper them in the confessional. Everybody, when he spoke, listened attentively to him as if he were addressing them in church: he wondered where the inevitable Judas was sitting now, but he wasn't aware of Judas as he had been in the forest hut. He was moved by an enormous and irrational affection for the inhabitants of this prison. A phrase came to him: God so loved the world ... He said: My children, you must never think the holy martyrs are like me. You have a name for me. Oh, I've heard you use it before now. I am a whisky priest. I am in here now because they found a bottle of brandy in my pocket. He tried to move his feet from under him: the cramp had passed: now they were lifeless: all feeling gone. Oh, well, let them stay. He wouldn't have to use them often again.

The old man was muttering, and the priest's thoughts went back to Brigida. The knowledge of the world lay in her like the dark explicable spot in an X-ray photograph: he longed-with a breathless feeling in the breast-to save her, but he knew the surgeon's decision-the ill was incurable.

The woman's voice said pleadingly: A little drink, father ... it's not so important. He wondered why she was here-probably for having a holy picture in her house. She had the tiresome intent note of a pious woman. They were extraordinarily foolish over pictures. Why not burn them? One didn't need a picture. … He said sternly: Oh, I am not only a drunkard. He had always been worried by the fate of pious [120] women: as much as politicians, they fed on illusion: he was frightened for them. They came to death so often in a state of invincible complacency, full of uncharity. It was one's duty, if one could, to rob them of their sentimental notions of what was good ... He said in hard accents: I have a child.

What a worthy woman she was! her voice pleaded in the darkness: he couldn't catch what she said, but it was something about the Good Thief. He said: My child, the thief repented. I haven't repented. He remembered her coming into the hut, the dark malicious knowing look with the sunlight at her back. He said: I don't know how to repent. That was true: he had lost the faculty. He couldn't say to himself that he wished his sin had never existed, because the sin seemed to him now so unimportant- and he loved the fruit of it. He needed a confessor to draw his mind slowly down the drab passages which led to horror, grief, and repentance.

The woman was silent now: he wondered whether after all he had been too harsh with her. If it helped her faith to believe that he was a martyr ... but he rejected the idea: one was pledged to truth. He shifted an inch or two on his hams and said: What time does it get light?

Four ... five ... a man replied. How can we tell, father? We haven't clocks.

Have you been here long?

Three weeks.

Are you kept here all day?

Oh, no. They let us out to clean the yard.

He thought: That is when I shall be discovered-unless it's earlier: for surely one of these people will betray me first. A long train of thought began, which led him to announce after a while: They are offering a reward for me. Five hundred, six hundred pesos, I'm not sure. Then he was silent again. He couldn't urge any man to inform against him-that would be tempting him to sin-but at the same time if there was an informer here, there was no reason why the wretched creature should be bilked of his reward. To commit so ugly a sin-it must count as murder-and to have no compensation in this world ... He thought simply: it wouldn't be fair.

Nobody here, a voice said, wants their blood money. Again he was touched by an extraordinary affection. He was [121] just one criminal among a herd of criminals ... he had a sense of companionship which he had never received in the old days when pious people came kissing his black cotton glove.

The pious woman's voice leapt hysterically out at him: It is so stupid to tell them that. You don't know the sort of wretches who are here, father. Thieves, murderers …

Well, an angry voice said, why are you here?

I had good books in my house, she announced, with unbearable pride. He had done nothing to shake her complacency. He said: They are everywhere. It's no different here.

Good books?

He giggled. No, no. Thieves, murderers ... Oh, well, my child, if you had more experience you would know there are worse things to be. The old man seemed to be uneasily asleep: his head lay sideways against the priest's shoulder, and he muttered angrily. God knows, it had never been easy to move in this place, but the difficulty seemed to increase as the night wore on and limbs stiffened. He couldn't twitch his shoulder now without waking the old man to another night of suffering. Well, he thought, it was my kind who robbed him: it's only fair to be made a little uncomfortable. … He sat silent and rigid against the damp wall, with his dead feet like leprosy under his haunches. The mosquitoes droned on: it was no good defending yourself by striking at the air: they pervaded the whole place like an element. Somebody as well as the old man had somewhere fallen asleep and was snoring, a curious note of satisfaction, as though he had eaten and drunk well at a good dinner and was now taking a snooze. … The priest tried to calculate the hour: how much time had passed since he had met the beggar in the plaza? It was probably not long after midnight: there would be hours more of this.

It was, of course, the end, but at the same time you had to be prepared for everything, even escape. If God intended him to escape he could snatch him away from in front of a firing squad. But God was merciful: there was only one reason, surely, which would make Him refuse His peace-if there was any peace-that he could still be of use in saving a soul, his own or another's. But what good could he do now? They had him on the run: he dared not enter a village in case somebody else should pay with his life: perhaps a man who was in mortal [122] sin and unrepentant: it was impossible to say what souls might not be lost simply because he was obstinate and proud and wouldn't admit defeat. He couldn't even say Mass any longer -he had no wine. It had all gone down the dry gullet of the Chief of Police. It was-appallingly-complicated. He was still afraid of death; he would be more afraid of death yet when the morning came, but it was beginning to attract him by its simplicity.

The pious woman was whispering to him: she must have somehow edged her way nearer: she was saying: Father, will you hear my confession?

My dear child, here! It's quite impossible. Where would be the secrecy?

It's been so long ...

Say an act of contrition for your sins. You must trust God, my dear, to make allowances ...

I wouldn't mind suffering …

Well, you are here.

That's nothing. In the morning my sister will have raised the money for my fine.

Somewhere against the far wall pleasure began again: it was unmistakable: the movements, the breathlessness, and then the cry. The pious woman said aloud with fury: Why won't they stop it? The brutes, the animals!

What's the good of your saying an act of contrition now in this state of mind?

But the ugliness ...

Don't believe that. It's dangerous. Because suddenly we discover that our sins have so much beauty.

Beauty, she said with disgust. Here. In this cell. With strangers all round.

Such a lot of beauty. Saints talk about the beauty of suffering. Well, we are not saints, you and I. Suffering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding and pain. That is beautiful in that corner-to them. It needs a lot of learning to see things with a saint's eye: a saint gets a subtle taste for beauty and can look down on poor ignorant palates like theirs. But we can't afford to.

It's a mortal sin.

[123] We don't know. It may be. But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know-from experience-how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and ...

Again the cry came, an expression of intolerable pleasure. The woman said: Stop them. It's a scandal. He felt fingers on his knee, grasping, digging. He said: We're all fellow prisoners. I want drink at this moment more than anything, more than God. That's a sin too.

Now, the woman said, I can see you're a bad priest. I wouldn't believe it before. I do now. You sympathize with these animals. If your bishop heard you ...

Ah, he's a very long way off.

He thought of the old man now-in the capital: living in one of those ugly comfortable pious houses, full of images and holy pictures, saying Mass on Sundays at one of the cathedral altars.

When I get out of here, I shall write ...

He couldn't help laughing: she had no sense of change at all. He said: If he gets the letter he'll be interested-to hear I'm alive. But again he became serious. It was more difficult to feel pity for her than for the half-caste who a week ago had tagged him through the forest; but her case might be worse. He had so much excuse-poverty and fever and innumerable humiliations. He said: Try not to be angry. Pray for me instead.

The sooner you are dead the better.

He couldn't see her in the darkness, but there were plenty of faces he could remember from the old days which fitted the voice. When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity ... that was a quality God's image carried with it ... when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination. He began again to feel an enormous responsibility for this pious woman. You and Padre José, she said. It's people like you who make people mock-at real religion. She had, after all, as many excuses as the half-caste. He saw the kind of salon in [124] which she spent her days, with the rocking-chair and the family photographs, meeting no one. He said gently: You are not married, are you?

Why do you want to know?

And you never had a vocation?

They wouldn't believe it, she said bitterly.

He thought: Poor woman, she's had nothing, nothing at all. If only one could find the right word ... he leant hopelessly back, moving carefully so as not to wake the old man. But the right words never came to him. He was more out of touch with her kind than he had ever been: he would have known what to say to her in the old days, feeling no pity at all, speaking with half a mind a platitude or two. Now he felt useless: he was a criminal and ought only to talk to criminals: he had done wrong again, trying to break down her complacency. He might just as well have let her go on thinking him a martyr.

His eyes closed and immediately he began to dream. He was being pursued: he stood outside a door banging on it, begging for admission, but nobody answered-there was a word, a password, which would save him, but he had forgotten it. He tried desperately at random-cheese and child, California, excellency, milk, Vera Cruz. His feet had gone to sleep and he knelt outside the door. Then he knew why he wanted to get in: he wasn't being pursued after all: that was a mistake. His child lay beside him bleeding to death and this was a doctor's s house. He banged on the door and shouted: Even if I can't think of the right word, haven't you a heart? The child was dying and looked up at him with middle-aged complacent wisdom. She said: You animal, and he woke again crying. He couldn't have slept for more than a few seconds because the woman was still talking about the vocation the nuns had refused to recognize. He said: That made you suffer, didn't it? To suffer like that-perhaps it was better than being a nun and happy, and immediately after he had spoken he thought: A silly remark, what does it mean? Why can't I find something to say to her which she could remember? He gave up the effort: this place was very like the world elsewhere: people snatched at causes of pleasure and pride in cramped and disagreeable surroundings: there was no time to do anything worth doing, and always one dreamed of escape ...

[125] He didn't sleep again: he was striking yet another bargain with God. This time, if he escaped from the prison, he would escape altogether. He would go north, over the border. His escape was so improbable that, if it happened, it couldn't be anything else but a sign-an indication that he was doing more harm by his example than good by his occasional confessions. The old man moved against his shoulder and the night just stayed around them. The darkness was always the same and there were no clocks-there was nothing to indicate time passing. The only punctuation of the night was the sound of urination.

Suddenly, he realized that he could see a face, and then another: he had begun to forget that it would ever be another day, just as one forgets that one will ever die. It comes suddenly on one in a screeching brake or a whistle in the air, the knowledge that time moves and comes to an end. All the voices slowly became faces-there were no surprises: the confessional teaches you to recognize the shape of a voice-the loose lip or the weak chin and the false candour of the too straightforward eyes. He saw the pious woman a few feet away-uneasily dreaming with her prim mouth open, showing strong teeth like tombs: the old man: the boaster in the corner, and his woman asleep untidily across his knees. Now that the day was at last here, he was the only one awake, except for a small Indian boy who squatted cross-legged near the door with an expression of interested happiness, as if he had never known such friendly company. Over the courtyard the whitewash became visible upon the opposite wall. He began formally to pay his farewell to the world: he couldn't put any heart into it. His corruption was less evident to his sense than his death. One bullet, he thought, is almost certain to go directly through the heart-a squad must contain one accurate marksman. Life would go out in a fraction of a second (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory-or for ever. For some reason he thought of a man he had once shrived who was on the point of death with cancer-his relatives had had [126] to mule their faces, the smell of the rotting interior was so appalling. He wasn't a saint. Nothing in life was as ugly as death.

A voice in the yard called: Montez: He sat on upon his dead feet; he thought automatically: This suit isn't good for much more : it was smeared and fouled by the cell floor and his fellow prisoners: he had obtained it at great risk in a store down by the river, pretending to be a small farmer with ideas above his station. Then he remembered he wouldn't need it much longer-it came with an odd shock, like locking the door of one's house for the last time. The voice repeated impatiently: Montez.

He remembered that that, for the moment, was his name. He looked up from his ruined suit and saw the sergeant unlocking the cell door. Here, Montez. He let the old man's head fall gently back against the sweating wall and tried to stand up, but his feet crumpled like pastry. Do you want to sleep all day? the sergeant complained testily: something had irritated him: he wasn't as friendly as he had been the night before. He let out a kick at a sleeping man and beat on the cell door: Come on. Wake up, all of you. Out into the yard. Only the Indian boy obeyed, sliding unobtrusively out, with his look of alien happiness. The sergeant complained: The dirty hounds. Do they want us to wash them? You, Montez. Life began to return painfully to his feet. He managed to reach the door.

The yard had come sluggishly to life. A queue of men were bathing their faces at a single tap; a man in a vest and pants sat on the ground hugging a rifle. Get out into the yard and wash, the sergeant yelled at them, but when the priest stepped out he snapped at him: Not you, Montez.

Not me.

We've got other plans for you, the sergeant said.

The priest stood waiting while his fellow prisoners filed out into the yard. One by one they went past him: he looked at their feet and not their faces, standing like a temptation at the door. Nobody said a word: a woman's feet went draggingly by in black worn low-heeled shoes. He whispered without looking up: Pray for me.

[127] What's that you said, Montez?

He couldn't think of a lie: he felt as if ten years had exhausted his whole stock of deceit.

What's that you said?

The shoes had stopped moving. The woman's voice said: He was begging. She added mercilessly: He ought to have more sense. I've nothing for him. Then she went on, flatfooted, into the yard.

Did you sleep well, Montez? the sergeant badgered him.

Not very well.

What do you expect? the sergeant said. It'll teach you to like brandy too well, won't it?

Yes. He wondered how much longer all these preliminaries would take.

Well, if you spend all your money on brandy, you've got to do a bit of work in return for a night's lodging. Fetch the pails out of the cells and mind you don't spill them-this place stinks enough as it is.

Where do I take them to?

The sergeant pointed to the door of the excusado beyond the tap. Report to me when you've finished that, he said, and went bellowing orders back into the yard.

The priest bent down and took the pail: it was full and very heavy: he went bowed with the weight across the yard: sweat got into his eyes. He wiped them free and saw one behind another in the washing queue faces he knew-the hostages. There was Miguel, whom he had seen taken away: he remembered the mother screaming out and the lieutenant's tired anger and the sun coming up. They saw him at the same time: he put down the heavy pail and looked at them. Not to recognize them would have been like a hint, a claim, a demand to them to go on suffering and let him escape. Miguel had been beaten up: there was a sore under his eye-flies buzzed round it as they buzz round a mule's raw flank. Then the queue moved on: they looked at the ground and passed him: strangers took their place. He prayed silently: O God, send them someone more worthwhile to suffer for. It seemed to him a damnable mockery that they should sacrifice themselves for a whisky priest with a bastard child. The soldier sat in his pants with his gun [128] between his knees paring his nails and biting off the loose skin. In an odd way he felt abandoned because they had shown no sign of recognition.

The excusado was a cesspool with two planks across it on which a man could stand. He emptied the pail and went back across the yard to the row of cells. There were six: one by one he took the pails: once he had to stop and retch: splash, splash, to and fro across the yard. He came to the last cell. It wasn't empty: a man lay back against the wall: the early sun just reached his feet. Flies buzzed around a mound of vomit on the floor. The eyes opened and watched the priest stooping over the pail: two fangs protruded. ...

The priest moved quickly and splashed the floor. The half-caste said in that too-familiar nagging tone: Wait a moment. You cant do that in here. He explained proudly: I'm not a prisoner. I'm a guest. The priest made a motion of apology (he was afraid to speak) and moved again. Wait a moment, the half-caste commanded him again. Come here.

The priest stood stubbornly, half-turned away, near the door. Come here, the half-caste said. You're a prisoner, aren't you?-and I'm a guest-of the Governor. Do you want me to shout for a policeman? Then do as you're told: come here. It seemed as if God were deciding ... finally. He came, pail in hand, and stood beside the large flat naked foot, and the half-caste looked up at him from the shadow of the wall, asking him sharply and anxiously: What are you doing here?

Cleaning up.

You know what I mean.

I was caught with a bottle of brandy, the priest said, trying to roughen his voice.

I know you, the half-caste said, I couldn't believe my eyes, but when you speak ...

I don't think …

That priest's voice, the half-caste said with disgust. He was like a dog of a different breed: he couldn't help his hackles' rising. The big toe moved plumply and inimically. The priest put down the pail. He argued hopelessly: You're drunk.

Beer, beer, the half-caste said, nothing but beer. They [129] promised me the best of everything, but you can't trust them. Don't I know the jefe's got his own brandy locked away?

I must empty the pail.

If you move, I'll shout. I've got so many things to think about, the half-caste complained bitterly. The priest waited: there was nothing else to do: he was at the man's mercy-a silly phrase, for those malarial eyes had never known what mercy is. He was saved at any rate from the indignity of pleading.

You see, the mestizo carefully explained, I'm comfortable here. His yellow toes curled luxuriously beside the vomit. Good food, beer, company, and this roof doesn't leak. You don't have to tell me what'll happen after-they'll kick me out like a dog, like a dog. He became shrill and indignant. What have they got you here for? That's what I want to know. It looks crooked to me. It's my job, isn't it, to find you? Who's going to have the reward if they've got you already? The jefe, I shouldn't wonder, or that bastard sergeant. He brooded unhappily: You can't trust a soul these days.

And there's a Red Shirt, the priest said.

A Red Shirt?

He really caught me.

Mother of God, the mestizo said, and they'll all have the ear of the Governor. He looked beseechingly up. He said: You're an educated man. Advise me.

The priest said: It would be murder, a mortal sin.

I don't mean that. I mean about the reward. You see, as long as they don't know, well, I'm comfortable here. A man deserves a few weeks' holiday. And you can't escape far, can you? It would be better, wouldn't it, to catch you out of here? In the town somewhere? I mean nobody else could claim ... He said furiously: A poor man has so much to think about.

I dare say, the priest said, they'd give you something even here.

Something, the mestizo said, levering himself up against the wall; why shouldn't I have it all?

What's going on in here? the sergeant said. He stood in the doorway, in the sunlight, looking in.

[130] The priest said slowly: He wanted me to clean up his vomit. I said you hadn't told me ...

Oh, he's a guest, the sergeant said. He's got to be treated right. You do as he says.

The mestizo smirked. He said: And another bottle of beer, sergeant?

Not yet, the sergeant said. You've got to look round the town first.

The priest picked up the pail and went back across the yard, leaving them arguing. He felt as if a gun were levelled at his back: he went into the excusado and emptied the pail: then came out again into the sun-the gun was levelled at his breast. The two men stood in the cell door talking. He walked across the yard: they watched him come. The sergeant said to the mestizo: You say you're bilious and can't see properly this morning. You clean up your own vomit then. If you don't do your job ... Behind the sergeant's back the mestizo gave him a cunning and unreassuring wink. Now that the immediate fear was over, he felt only regret. God had decided. He had to go on with life, go on making decisions, acting on his own advice, making plans. …

It took him another half-hour to finish cleaning the cells, throwing a bucket of water over each floor; he watched the pious woman disappear-as if for ever-through the archway to where her sister waited with the fine: they were both tied up in black shawls like something bought in the market, something hard and dry and second-hand. Then he reported again to the sergeant, who inspected the cells and criticized his work and ordered him to throw more water down, and then suddenly got tired of the whole business and told him he could go to the jefe for permission to leave. So he waited another hour on the bench outside the jefe's door, watching the sentry move lackadaisically to and fro in the hot sun.

And when at last a policeman led him in, it wasn't the jefe who sat at the desk, but the lieutenant. The priest stood not far from his own portrait on the wall and waited. Once he glanced quickly and nervously up at the old scrumpled newspaper cutting and thought with relief: It's not very like me now. What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days-and yet in those days he had been comparatively [131] innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins-impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity-cut off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone: now in his corruption he had learnt ...

Well, the lieutenant said, has he cleaned up the cells? He didn't take his eyes from his papers. He said: Tell the sergeant I want two dozen men with properly cleaned rifles-within two minutes. He looked abstractedly up at the priest and said: Well, what are you waiting for?

For permission, Excellency, to go away.

I am not an excellency. Learn to call things by their right names. He said sharply: Have you been here before?

Never.

Your name is Montez. I seem to come across too many people of that name in these days. Relations of yours? He sat watching him closely, as if memory were beginning to work.

The priest said hurriedly: My cousin was shot at Concepcion.

That was not my fault.

I only meant-we were much alike. Our fathers were twins. Not half an hour between them. I thought your Excellency seemed to think ...

As I remember him, he was quite different. A tall thin man ... narrow shoulders ...

The priest said hurriedly: Perhaps only to the family eye …

But then I only saw him once. It was almost as if the lieutenant had something on his conscience, as he sat with his dark Indian-blooded hands restless on the pages, brooding. ... He said: Where are you going?

God knows.

You are all alike, you people. You never learn the truth-that God knows nothing. Some tiny scrap of life like a grain of smut went racing across the page in front of him: he pressed his finger down on it and said: You had no money for your fine? and watched another smut edge out between the leaves, scurrying for refuge: in this heat there was no end to life.

No.

How will you live?

[132] Some work perhaps ...

You are getting too old for work. He put his hand suddenly in his pocket and pulled out a five-peso piece. There, he said. Get out of here, and don't let me see your face again. Mind that.

The priest held the coin in his fist-the price of a Mass. He said with astonishment: You're a good man.

Chapter Four

IT WAS still very early in the morning when he crossed the river, and came dripping up the other bank. He wouldn't have expected anybody to be about. The bungalow, the tin-roofed shed, the flag-staff: he had an idea that all Englishmen lowered their flags at sunset and sang God Save the King. He came carefully round the comer of the shed and the door gave to his pressure. He was inside in the dark where he had been before: how many weeks ago? He had no idea. He only remembered that then the rains were a long way off: now they were beginning to break. In another week only an aeroplane would be able to cross the mountains.

He felt around him with his foot: he was so hungry that even a few bananas would be better than nothing-he had had no food for two days-but there was none here, none at all. He must have arrived on a day when the crop had gone downriver. He stood just inside the door trying to remember what the child had told him-the Morse code, her window: across the dead-white dusty yard the mosquito wire caught the sun. He was reminded suddenly of an empty larder. He began to listen anxiously: there wasn't a sound anywhere-the day here hadn't yet begun with that first sleepy slap of a shoe on a cement floor, the claws of a dog scratching as it stretched, the knock-knock of a hand on a door. There was just nothing, nothing at all.

What was the time? How many hours of light had there [133] been? It was impossible to tell: time was elastic: it stretched to snapping-point. 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 was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew 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 spread-eagled: 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 a window-perhaps this was the child's room. Everything has been removed from it except the useless or the broken. There was a cardboard box full of torn [134] 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: small fingers of crudely coloured liquid lay in some of them. There were medicines for headaches, stomach-aches, medicine 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 is 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 waste-paper 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 wrong, crossed [135] out, and rewritten) 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 buzzard. He read on: If five men took three days to mow a meadow of four acres five rods, 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 scrumpled 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 muzzle, 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.

[136] 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?-that had been left deliberately for this mongrel; he could imagine the child remembering that, 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 muzzle. 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 again 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 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 [137] priest had won: he had his bone. The bitch no longer tried to growl.

The priest tore off some of the 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: she would eat the bone itself. He dropped it under her muzzle 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 onto 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 Coral Fellows filled up in ink ... for proficiency in English [138] Composition, Third Grade. There was an obscure coat-of-arms, which seemed to include a griffin and an 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 buzzard 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. He read:

I come 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 buzzard 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 [139] daughter, O my daughter. The words seemed to contain all that he felt himself of repentance, longing, and unhappy love.

It was the oddest 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 thunderbreaks 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 stop-watch 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.

[140] 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 half-caste 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 [141] 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 he 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.

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 that of a child who 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 [142] 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: he 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 [143] 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 like a constriction which prevented their escape: he could feel his prayers like undigested food heavy in his body, unable to escape.

When he had finished he lifted up the body and carried it back into the hut like a piece of furniture-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 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: 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 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: [144] 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 her 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 had only 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 seemed never to tire. A day and a night brought them out of the [145] marshes to the foot-hills: 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 lifeless 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 marks 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, dogged 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 onto a wide plateau covered with short grass: an odd 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 [146] 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 quiet 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 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: 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 [147] 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 the 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 all the way because he wanted to kill the mother as well as the child: he was sentimental that way. 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 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 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 somebody, 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 still 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?

[148] 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 motorcars. 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 scrumpled 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 that 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 [149] 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: Father So-and-so, 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 onto a long slope of grass. There were lights and huts, below, and up here 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.

His dream was full of a jangle of cheerful noise.

PART III

Chapter One

THE middle-aged woman sat on the veranda darning socks: she wore pince-nez and she had kicked off her shoes for comfort. Mr. Lehr, her brother, read a New York magazine-it was three weeks old, but that didn't really matter. the whole scene was like peace.

Just help yourself to water, Miss Lehr said, when you want it.

A huge earthenware jar stood in a cool corner with a ladle and a tumbler. Don't you have to boil the water? the priest asked.

Oh, no, our water's fresh and clean, Miss Lehr said primly, as if she couldn't answer for anybody else's.

Best water in the state, her brother said. The shiny magazine leaves crackled as they turned, covered with photographs of big clean-shaven mastiff jowls-Senators and Congressmen. Pasture stretched away beyond the garden fence, undulating gently towards the next mountain range, and a tulipan tree blossomed and faded daily at the gate.

You certainly are looking better, father, Miss Lehr said. They both spoke rather guttural English with slight American accents-Mr. Lehr had left Germany when he was a boy to escape military service: he had a shrewd lined idealistic face. You needed to be shrewd in this country if you were going to retain any ideals at all: he was cunning in the defence of the good life.

Oh, Mr. Lehr said. He only needed to rest up a few days. He was quite incurious about this man whom his foreman had brought in on a mule in a state of collapse three days before. All he knew the priest had told him: that was another thing this country taught you-never to ask questions or to look ahead.

Soon I can go on, the priest said.

[154] You don't have to hurry, Miss Lehr said, turning over her brother's sock, looking for holes.

It's so quiet here.

Oh, Mr. Lehr said, we've had our troubles. He turned a page and said: That Senator Huey Long-they ought to control him. It doesn't do any good insulting other countries.

Haven't they tried to take your land away?

The idealistic face turned his way: it wore a look of innocent craft. Oh, I gave them as much as they asked for-five hundred acres of barren land. I saved a lot on taxes. I never could get anything to grow there. He nodded towards the veranda posts. That was the last real trouble. See the bullet-holes. Villas men.

The priest got up again and drank more water: he wasn't very thirsty: he was satisfying a sense of luxury. He asked: How long will it take me to get to Las Casas?

You could do it in four days, Mr. Lehr said.

Not in his condition, Miss Lehr said. Six

It will seem so strange, the priest said. A city with churches, a university ...

Of course, Mr. Lehr said, my sister and I are Lutherans. We don't hold with your church, father. Too much luxury, it seems to me, while the people starve.

Miss Lehr said: Now, dear, it isn't the father's fault.

Luxury? the priest said: he stood by the earthenware jar, glass in hand, trying to collect his thoughts, staring out over the long and peaceful grassy slopes. You mean ...? Perhaps Mr. Lehr was right: he had lived very easily once, and here he was, already settling down to idleness again.

All the gold leaf in the churches.

It's often just paint, you know, the priest murmured conciliatingly. He thought: Yes, three days and I've done nothing. Nothing, and he looked down at his feet elegantly shod in a pair of Mr. Lehr's shoes, his legs in Mr. Lehr's spare trousers. Mr. Lehr said: He won't mind my speaking my mind. We're all Christians here.

Of course. I like to hear ...

It seems to me you people make a lot of fuss about inessentials.

Yes? You mean ...

[155] Fasting ... fish on Friday ...

Yes, he remembered like something in his childhood that there had been a time when he had observed these rules. He said: After all, Mr. Lehr, you're a German. A great military nation.

I was never a soldier. I disapprove ...

Yes, of course, but still you understand-discipline is necessary. Drills may be no good in battle, but they form the character. Otherwise you get-well, people like me. He looked down with sudden hatred at the shoes-they were like the badge of a deserter. People like me, he repeated with fury.

There was a good deal of embarrassment: Miss Lehr began to say something: Why, father ... but Mr. Lehr forestalled her, laying down the magazine and its load of well-shaved politicians. He said in his German-American voice, with its guttural precision: Well, I guess it's time for a bath now. Will you be coming, father? and the priest obediently followed him into their common bedroom. He took off Mr. Lehr's clothes and put on Mr. Lehr's mackintosh and followed Mr. Lehr barefoot across the veranda and the field beyond. The day before he had asked apprehensively: Are there no snakes? and Mr. Lehr had grunted contemptuously that if there were any snakes they'd pretty soon get out of the way. Mr. Lehr and his sister had combined to drive out savagery by simply ignoring anything that conflicted with an ordinary German-American homestead. It was, in its way, an admirable way of life.

At the bottom of the field there was a little shallow stream running over brown pebbles. Mr. Lehr took off his dressing-gown and lay down flat on his back: there was something upright and idealistic even in the thin elderly legs with their scrawny muscles. Tiny fishes played over his chest and made little tugs at his nipples undisturbed: this was the skeleton of the youth who had disapproved of militarism to the point of flight: presently he sat up and began carefully to soap his lean thighs. The priest afterwards took the soap and followed suit. He felt it was expected of him, though he couldn't help thinking it was a waste of time. Sweat cleaned you as effectively as water. But this was the race which had invented the proverb that cleanliness was next to godliness-cleanliness, not purity.

[156] All the same, one did feel an enormous luxury lying there in the little cold stream while the sun flattened. ... He thought of the prison cell with the old man and the pious woman, the half-caste lying across the hut door, the dead child and the abandoned station. He thought with shame of his daughter left to her knowledge and her ignorance by the rubbish-dump. He had no right to such luxury.

Mr. Lehr said: Would you mind-the soap?

He had heaved over on his face, and now he set to work on his back.

The priest said: I think perhaps I should tell you-tomorrow I am saying Mass in the village. Would you prefer me to leave your house? I do not wish to make trouble for you.

Mr. Lehr splashed seriously, cleaning himself. He said: Oh, they won't bother me. But you had better be careful. You know, of course, that it's against the law.

Yes, the priest said. I know that.

A priest I knew was fined four hundred pesos. He couldn't pay and they sent him to prison for a week. What are you smiling at?

Only because it seems so-peaceful-here. Prison for a week.

Well, I've always heard you people get your own back when it comes to collections. Would you like the soap?

No, thank you. I have finished.

'We'd better be drying ourselves then. Miss Lehr likes to have her bath before sunset.

As they came back to the bungalow in single file they met Miss Lehr, very bulky under her dressing-gown. She asked mechanically, like a clock with a very gentle chime: Is the water nice today? and her brother answered, as he must have answered a thousand times: Pleasantly cool, dear, and she slopped down across the grass in bedroom slippers, stooping slightly with short sight.

If you wouldn't mind, Mr. Lehr said, shutting the bedroom door, staying in here till Miss Lehr comes back. One can see the stream-you understand-from the front of the house. He began to dress, tall and bony and a little stiff. Two brass bedsteads, a single chair and a wardrobe, the room was monastic, [157] except that there was no cross-no inessentials as Mr. Lehr would have put it. But there was a Bible. It lay on the floor beside one of the beds in a black oilskin cover. When the priest had finished dressing he opened it.

On the fly-leaf there was a label which stated that the book was furnished by the Gideons. It went on: A Bible in Every Hotel Guest Room. Winning Commercial Men for Christ. Good News. There was then a list of texts. The priest read with some astonishment:

If you are in trouble read Psalm 34.

If trade is poor Psalm 37.

If very prosperous I Corinthians, x, xii.

If overcome and backsliding James I. Hosea xiv: 4-9.

If tired of sin Psalm 51. Luke xviii: 9-14.

If you desire peace, power, and plenty John xiv.

If you are lonesome and discouraged Psalms 23 and 27.

If you are losing confidence in men I Corinthians, xiii.

If you desire peaceful slumbers Psalm 121.

He couldn't help wondering how it had got here-with its ugly type and its over-simple explanations-into a hacienda in Southern Mexico. Mr. Lehr turned away from his mirror with a big coarse hairbrush in his hand and explained carefully: My sister ran a hotel once. For drummers. She sold it to join me when my wife died, and she brought one of those from the hotel. You wouldn't understand that, father. You don't like people to read the Bible. He was on the defensive all the time about his faith, as if he was perpetually conscious of some friction, like that of an ill-fitting shoe.

The priest said: Is your wife buried here?

In the paddock, Mr. Lehr said bluntly. He stood listening, brush in hand, to the gentle footsteps outside. That's Miss Lehr, he said, come up from her bath. We can go out now.

[158] The priest got off Mr. Lehr's old horse when he reached the church and threw the rein over a bush. This was his first visit to the village since the night he collapsed beside the wall. The village ran down below him in the dusk: tin-roofed bungalows and mud huts faced each other over a single wide grass-grown street. A few lamps had been lit and fire was being carried round among the poorest huts. He walked slowly, conscious of peace and safety. The first man he saw took off his hat and knelt and kissed the priest's hand.

What is your name? the priest asked.

Pedro, father.

Good night, Pedro.

Is there to be Mass in the morning, father?

Yes. There is to be Mass.

He passed the rural school. The schoolmaster sat on the step: a plump young man with dark brown eyes and horn-rimmed glasses. When he saw the priest coming he looked ostentatiously away. He was the law-abiding element: he wouldn't recognize criminals. He began to talk pedantically and priggishly to someone behind him-something about the infant class. A woman kissed the priest's hand: it was odd to be wanted again: not to feel himself the carrier of death. She said: Father, will you hear our confessions?

He said: Yes. Yes. In Señor Lehr's barn. Before the Mass. I will be there at five. As soon as it is light.

There are so many of us, father ...

Well, tonight too then. ... At eight.

And, father, there are many children to be baptized. There has not been a priest for three years.

I am going to be here for two more days.

What will you charge, father?

Well-two pesos is the usual charge. He thought: I must hire two mules and a guide. It will cost me fifty pesos to reach Las Casas. Five pesos for the Mass-that left forty-five.

We are very poor here, father, she haggled gently. I have four children myself. Eight pesos is a lot of money.

Four children are a lot of children-if the priest was here only three years ago.

He could hear authority, the old parish intonation coming back into his voice-as if the last years had been a dream and [159] he had never really been away from the guilds, the Children of Mary, and the daily Mass. He said sharply: How many children are there here-unbaptized?

Perhaps a hundred, father.

He made calculations: there was no need to arrive in Las Casas then as a beggar: he could buy a decent suit of clothes, find a respectable lodging, settle down. ... He said: You must pay one peso fifty a head.

One peso, father. We are very poor.

One peso fifty. A voice from years back said firmly into his ear: they don't value what they don't pay for. It was the old priest he had succeeded at Concepcion. He had explained to him: they will always tell you they are poor, starving, but they will always have a little store of money buried somewhere, in a pot. The priest said: You must bring the money-and the children-to Señor Lehr's barn tomorrow, at two in the afternoon.

She said: Yes, father. She seemed quite satisfied: she had brought him down by fifty centavos a head. The priest went on. Say a hundred children, he was thinking, that means a hundred and sixty pesos with tomorrow's Mass. Perhaps I can get the mules and the guide for forty pesos. Señor Lehr will give me food for six days. I shall have a hundred and twenty pesos left. After all these years, it was like wealth. He felt respect all the way up the street: men took off their hats as he passed: it was as if he had got back to the days before the persecution. He could feel the old life hardening round him like a habit, a stony case which held his head high and dictated the way he walked, and even formed his words. A voice from the cantina said: Father.

The man was very fat, with three commercial chins: he wore a waistcoat in spite of the great heat, and a watch-chain. Yes? the priest said. Behind the man's head stood bottles of mineral water, beer, spirits. ... The priest came in out of the dusty street to the heat of the lamp. He said: What is it? with his new-old manner of authority and impatience.

I thought, father, you might be in need of a little sacramental wine.

Perhaps ... but you will have to give me credit.

A priest's credit, father, is always good enough for me. I [160] am a religious man myself. This is a religious place. No doubt you will be holding a baptism. He leant avidly forward with a respectful and impertinent manner, as if they were two people with the same ideas, educated men.

Perhaps ...

He smiled understandingly. Between people like ourselves, he seemed to indicate, there is no need of anything explicit: we understand each other's thoughts. He said: In the old days, when the church was open, I was treasurer to the Guild of the Blessed Sacrament. Oh, I am a good Catholic, father. The people, of course, are very ignorant. He said: Would you perhaps honour me by taking a glass of brandy? He was in his way quite sincere.

The priest said doubtfully: It is kind ... The two glasses were already filled: he remembered the last drink he had had, sitting on the bed in the dark, listening to the Chief of Police, and seeing, as the light went on, the last wine drain away. ... The memory was like a hand, pulling away the case, exposing him. The smell of brandy dried his mouth. He thought: What a play-actor I am. I have no business here, among good people. He turned the glass in his hand, and all the other glasses turned too: he remembered the dentist talking of his children, and Maria unearthing the bottle of spirits she had kept for him-the whisky priest.

He took a reluctant drink. It's good brandy, father, the man said.

Yes. Good brandy.

I could let you have a dozen bottles for sixty pesos.

Where would I find sixty pesos? He thought: in some ways it was better over there, across the border. Fear and death were not the worst things. It was sometimes a mistake for life to go on.

I wouldn't make a profit out of you, father. Fifty pesos.

Fifty, sixty. It's all the same to me.

Go on. Have another glass, father. It's good brandy. The man leant engagingly forward across the counter and said: Why not half a dozen, father, for twenty-four pesos? He said slyly: After all, father-there are the baptisms.

It was appalling how easily one forgot and went back: he could still hear his own voice speaking in the street with the [161] Concepcion accent-unchanged by mortal sin and unrepentance and desertion. The brandy was musty on the tongue with his own corruption. God might forgive cowardice and passion, but was it possible to forgive the habit of piety? He remembered the woman in the prison and how impossible it had been to shake her complacency: it seemed to him that he was another of the same kind. He drank the brandy down like damnation: men like the half-caste could be saved: salvation could strike like lightning at the evil heart, but the habit of piety excluded everything but the evening prayer and the Guild meeting and the feel of humble lips on your gloved hand.

Las Casas is a fine town, father. They say you can hear Mass every day.

This was another pious person. There were a lot of them about in the world. He was pouring a little more brandy, but going carefully-not too much. He said: When you get there, father, look up a compadre of mine in Guadalupe street. He has the cantina nearest the church-a good man. Treasurer of the Guild of the Blessed Sacrament-just like I was in this place in the good days. He'll see you get what you want cheap. Now, what about some bottles for the journey?

The priest drank. There was no point in not drinking. He had the habit now-like piety and the parish voice. He said: Three bottles. For eleven pesos. Keep them for me here. He finished what was left and went back into the street: the lamps were lit in windows and the wide street stretched like a prairie in between. He stumbled in a hole and felt a hand upon his sleeve. Ah, Pedro. That was the name, wasn't it? Thank you, Pedro.

At your service, father.

The church stood in the darkness like a block of ice: it was melting away in the heat. The roof had fallen in in one place, a coign above the doorway had crumbled. The priest took a quick sideways look at Pedro, holding his breath in case it smelt of brandy, but he could see only the outlines of the face. He said-with a feeling of cunning as though he were cheating a greedy prompter inside his own heart: Tell the people, Pedro, that I only want one peso for the baptisms. … There would still be enough for the brandy then, even if he arrived in Las Casa like a beggar. There was silence for as long as two [162] seconds and then the wily village voice began to answer him: We are poor, father. One peso is a lot of money. I-for example-I have three children. Say seventy-five centavos, father.

Miss Lehr stretched out her feet in their easy slippers and the beetles came up over the veranda from the dark outside. She said: In Pittsburgh once ... Her brother was asleep with an ancient newspaper across his knee: the mail had come in. The priest gave a little sympathetic giggle as in the old days; it was a try-out which didn't come off. Miss Lehr stopped and sniffed. Funny. I thought I smelt-spirits.

The priest held his breath, leaning back in the rocking-chair. He thought: How quiet it is, how safe. He remembered townspeople who couldn't sleep in country places because of the silence: silence can be like noise, dinning against the ear-drums.

What was I saying, father?

In Pittsburgh once ...

Of course. In Pittsburgh ... I was waiting for the train. You see I had nothing to read: books are so expensive. So I thought I'd buy a paper-any paper: the news is just the same. But when I opened it-it was called something like Police News. I never knew such dreadful things were printed. Of course, I didn't read more than a few lines. I think it was the most dreadful thing that's ever happened to me. It ... well, it opened my eyes.

Yes.

I've never told Mr. Lehr. He wouldn't think the same of me, I do believe, if he knew.

But there was nothing wrong ...

It's knowing, isn't it ...?

Somewhere a long way off a bird of some kind called: the lamp on the table began to smoke, and Miss Lehr leant over and turned down the wick: it was as if the only light for miles around was lowered. The brandy returned on his palate: it was like the smell of ether that reminds a man of a recent operation before he's used to life: it tied him to another state of being. He didn't yet belong to this deep tranquillity: he told himself-in time it will be all right, I shall pull up, I only ordered three bottles this time. They will be the last I'll ever [163] drink, I won't need drink there-he knew he lied. Mr. Lehr woke suddenly and said: As I was saying ...

You were saying nothing, dear. You were asleep.

Oh, no, we were talking about that scoundrel Hoover.

I don't think so, dear. Not for a long while.

Well, Mr. Lehr said, it's been a long day. The father will be tired too ... after all that confessing, he added with slight distaste.

There had been a continuous stream of penitents from eight to ten-two hours of the worst evil a small place like this could produce after three years. It hadn't amounted to very much-a city would have made a better show-or would it? There isn't much a man can do. Drunkenness, adultery, uncleanness: he sat there tasting the brandy all the while, sitting on a rocking-chair in a horse-box, not looking at the face of the one who knelt at his side. The others had waited, kneeling in an empty stall-Mr. Lehr's stable had been depopulated these last few years. He had only one old horse left, which blew windily in the dark as the sins came whispering out.

How many times?

Twelve, father. Perhaps more, and the horse blew. It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin-only the hard and careful man and the saint are free of it. These people went out of the stable clean: he was the only one left who hadn't repented, confessed, and been absolved. He wanted to say to this man: Love is not wrong, but love should be happy and open-it is only wrong when it is secret, unhappy ... it can be more unhappy than anything but the loss of God. It is the loss of God. You don't need a penance, my child, you have suffered quite enough, and to this other: Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed. But the habit of the confessional reasserted itself: it was as if he was back in the little stuffy wooden boxlike coffin in which men bury their uncleanness with their priest. He said: Mortal sin ... danger ... self-control, as if those words meant anything at all. He said: Say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys.

He said wearily: Drink is only the beginning … He [164] found he had no lesson he could draw against even that common vice except himself smelling of brandy in the stable. He gave out the penance quickly, harshly, mechanically. The man would go away, saying: A bad priest, feeling no encouragement, no interest. …

He said: Those laws were made for man. The Church doesn't expect ... if you can't fast, you must eat, that's all. The old woman prattled on and on, while the penitents stirred restlessly in the next stall and the horse whinnied, prattled of abstinence days broken, of evening prayers curtailed. Suddenly, without warning, with an odd sense of homesickness, he thought of the hostages in the prison yard, waiting at the water-tap, not looking at him-the suffering and the endurance which went on everywhere the other side of the mountains. He interrupted the woman savagely: Why don't you confess properly to me? I'm not interested in your fish supply or in how sleepy you are at night ... remember your real sins.

But I'm a good woman, father, she squeaked at him with astonishment.

Then what are you doing here, keeping away the bad people? He said: Have you any love for anyone but yourself?

I love God, father, she said haughtily. He took a quick look at her in the light of the candle burning on the floor-the hard old raisin eyes under the black shawl-another of the pious-like himself.

How do you know? Loving God isn't any different from loving a man-or a child. It's wanting to be with Him, to be near Him. He made a hopeless gesture with his hands. It's wanting to protect Him from yourself.

When the last penitent had gone away he walked back across the yard to the bungalow: he could see the lamp burning, and Miss Lehr knitting, and he could smell the grass in the paddock, wet with the first rains. It ought to be possible for a man to be happy here, if he were not so tied to fear and suffering-unhappiness too can become a habit like piety. Perhaps it was his duty to break it, his duty to discover peace. He felt an immense envy of all those people who had confessed to him and been absolved. In six days, he told himself, in Las Casas, I too ... but he couldn't believe that anyone anywhere would rid [165] him of his heavy heart. Even when he drank he felt bound to his sin by love. It was easier to get rid of hate.

Miss Lehr said: Sit down, father. You must be tired. I've never held, of course, with confession. Nor has Mr. Lehr.

No?

I don't know how you can stand sitting there, listening to all the horrible things. ... I remember in Pittsburgh once ...

The two mules had been brought in overnight, so that he could start early immediately after Mass-the second that he had said in Mr. Lehr's barn. His guide was sleeping somewhere, probably with the mules, a thin nervous creature, who had never been to Las Casas: he simply knew the route by hearsay. Miss Lehr had insisted the night before that she must call him, although he woke of his own accord before it was light. He lay in bed and heard the alarm go off in another room-dinning like a telephone; and presently he heard the slop-slop of Miss Lehr's s bedroom slippers in the passage outside and a knock-knock on the door. Mr. Lehr slept on undisturbed upon his back with the thin rectitude of a bishop upon a tomb.

The priest had lain down in his clothes and he opened the door before Miss Lehr had time to get away: she gave a small squeal of dismay, a bunchy figure in a hairnet.

Excuse me.

Oh, it's quite all right. How long will Mass take, father?

There will be a great many communicants. Perhaps three-quarters of an hour.

I will have some coffee ready for you-and sandwiches.

You must not bother.

Oh, we can't send you away hungry.

She followed him to the door, standing a little behind him, so as not to be seen by anything or anybody in the wide empty early world. The grey light uncurled across the pastures: at the gate the tulipan tree bloomed for yet another day: very far off, beyond the little stream where he had bathed, the people were walking up from the village on the way to Mr. Lehr's barn; they were too small at that distance to be human. He had a sense of expectant happiness all round him, waiting for him to take part, like an audience of children at a cinema or a [166] rodeo: he was aware of how happy he might have been if he had left nothing behind him across the range except a few bad memories. A man should always prefer peace to violence, and he was going towards peace.

You have been very good to me, Miss Lehr.

How odd it had seemed at first to be treated as a guest, not as a criminal or a bad priest. These were heretics-it never occurred to them that he was not a good man: they hadn't the prying insight of fellow Catholics.

We've enjoyed having you, father. But you'll be glad to be away. Las Casas is a fine city. A very moral place, as Mr. Lehr always says. If you meet Father Quintana you must remember us to him-he was here three years ago.

A bell began to ring: they had brought the church bell down from the tower and hung it outside Mr. Lehr's s barn: it sounded like any Sunday anywhere.

I've sometimes wished, Miss Lehr said, that I could go to church.

Why not?

Mr. Lehr wouldn't like it. He's very strict. But it happens so seldom nowadays-I don't suppose there'll be another service now for another three years.

I will come back before then.

Oh, no, Miss Lehr said. You won't do that. It's a hard journey and Las Casas is a fine city. They have electric light in the streets: there are two hotels. Father Quintana promised to come back-but there are Christians everywhere, aren't there? Why should he come back here? It isn't even as if we were really badly off.

A little group of Indians passed the gate: gnarled tiny creatures of the Stone Age: the men in short smocks walked with long poles, and the women with black plaits and knocked-about faces carried their babies on their backs. The Indians have heard you are here, Miss Lehr said. They've walked fifty miles-I shouldn't be surprised.

They stopped at the gate and watched him: when he looked at them they went down on their knees and crossed themselves-the strange elaborate mosaic touching the nose and ears and chin. My brother gets so angry, Miss Lehr said, if he sees [167] somebody go on his knees to a priest-but I don't see that it does any harm.

Round the corner of the house the mules were stamping-the guide must have brought them out to give them their maize: they were slow feeders, you had to give them a long start. It was time to begin Mass and be gone. He could smell the early morning-the world was still fresh and green, and in the village below the pastures a few dogs barked. The alarm clock tick-tocked in Miss Lehr's hand. He said: I must be going now. He felt an odd reluctance to leave Miss Lehr and the house and the brother sleeping in the inside room. He was aware of a mixture of tenderness and dependence. When a man wakes after a dangerous operation he puts a special value upon the first face he sees as the anaesthetic wears away.

He had no vestments, but the Masses in this village were nearer to the old parish days than any he had known in the last eight years-there was no fear of interruption: no hurried taking of the sacraments as the police approached. There was even an altar stone brought from the locked church. But because it was so peaceful he was all the more aware of his own sin as he prepared to take the Elements- Let not the participation of Thy Body, O Lord Jesus Christ, which I, though unworthy, presume to receive, turn to my judgment and condemnation. A virtuous man can almost cease to believe in Hell: but he carried Hell about with him. Sometimes at night he dreamed of it. Domine, non sum dignus ... domine, non sum dignus. ... Evil ran like malaria in his veins. He remembered a dream he had of a big grassy arena lined with the statues of saints-but the saints were alive, they turned their eyes this way and that, waiting for something. He waited, too, with an awful expectancy: bearded Peters and Pauls, with Bibles pressed to their breasts, watched some entrance behind his back he couldn't see-it had the menace of a beast. Then a marimba began to play, tinkly and repetitive, a firework exploded, and Christ danced into the arena-danced and postured with a bleeding painted face, up and down, up and down, grimacing like a prostitute, smiling and suggestive. He woke with the sense of complete despair that a man might feel finding the only money he possessed was counterfeit.

[168] ... and we saw His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. Mass was over.

In three days, he told himself, I shall be in Las Casas: I shall have confessed and been absolved-and the thought of the child on the rubbish-heap came automatically back to him with painful love. What was the good of confession when you loved the result of your crime?

The people knelt as he made his way down the barn: he saw the little group of Indians: women whose children he had baptized: Pedro: the man from the cantina was there too, kneeling with his face buried in his plump hands, a chain of beads falling between the fingers. He looked a good man: perhaps he was a good man: perhaps, the priest thought, I have lost the faculty of judging-perhaps that woman in prison was the best person there. A horse cried in the early morning, tethered to a tree, and all the freshness of the morning came in through the open door.

Two men waited beside the mules: the guide was adjusting a stirrup and beside him, scratching under the armpit, awaiting his coming with a doubtful and defensive smile, stood the half-caste. He was like the small pain that reminds a man of his sickness, or perhaps like the unexpected memory which proves that love after all isn't dead. Well, the priest said, I didn't expect you here.

No, father, of course not. He scratched and smiled.

Have you brought the soldiers with you?

What things you do say, father, he protested with a callow giggle. Behind him, across the yard and through an open door, the priest could see Miss Lehr putting up his sandwiches: she had dressed, but she still wore her hairnet. She was wrapping the sandwiches carefully in grease-proof paper, and her sedate movements had a curious effect of unreality. It was the half-caste who was real. He said: What trick are you playing now? Had he perhaps bribed his guide to lead him back across the border? He could believe almost anything of that man.

You shouldn't say things like that, father.

Miss Lehr passed out of sight, with the soundlessness of a dream.

No?

[169] I'm here, father, the man seemed to take a long breath for his surprising stilted statement, on an errand of mercy. The guide finished with one mule and began on the next, shortening the already short Mexican stirrup; the priest giggled nervously. An errand of mercy?

Well, father, you're the only priest this side of Las Casas, and the man's dying …

What man?

The Yankee.

What are you talking about?

The one the police wanted. He robbed a bank. You know the one I mean.

He wouldn't need me, the priest said impatiently, remembering the photograph on the peeling wall, watching the first communion party.

Oh, he's a good Catholic, father. Scratching under his armpit, he didn't look at the priest. He's dying, and you and I wouldn't like to have on our conscience what that man ...

We shall be lucky if we haven't worse.

What do you mean, father?

The priest said: He's only killed and robbed. He hasn't betrayed his friends.

Holy Mother of God. I've never ...

We both have, the priest said. He turned to the guide. Are the mules ready?

Yes, father.

We'll start then. He had forgotten Miss Lehr completely: the other world had stretched a hand across the border, and he was again in the atmosphere of flight.

Where are you going? the half-caste said.

To Las Casas. He climbed stiffly onto his mule. The half-caste held onto his stirrup-leather, and he was reminded of their first meeting: there was the same mixture of complaint, appeal, abuse. You're a fine priest, he wailed up at him. Your bishop ought to hear of this. A man's dying, wants to confess, and just because you want to get to the city ...

Why do you think me such a fool? the priest said. I know why you've come. You're the only one they've got who can recognize me, and they can't follow me into this state. Now [170] if I ask you where this American is, you'll tell me-I know-you don't have to speak-that he's just the other side.

Oh, no, father, you're wrong there. He's just this side.

A mile or two makes no difference. Nobody here's likely to bring an action ...

It's an awful thing, father, the half-caste said, never to be believed. just because once-well, I admit it-

The priest kicked his mule into motion: they passed out of Mr. Lehr's yard and turned south: the half-caste trotted at his stirrup.

I remember, the priest said, that you said 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 into 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 felt the trap close again, irrevocably.

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 [171] 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: he was after the reward. 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 had to admit, as well as everything else, that he had refused confession to a man dying in mortal sin.

[172] He said: 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 bobbled 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 said. Don't listen to him. He spat. He's a bad man.

[173] 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 Two

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 [174] 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 hoofs. 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 hoofs 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 [175] didn't even know the name: the half-caste lying there in the hot noonday rocking his hammock with one naked yellow toe. 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 caught himself up. 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. You may be a saint for all I know, 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 both good. We both need courage, don't we?

Drink, father? the half-caste said 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, [176] 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 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 wont 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, up-hill, 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.

[177] 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 hiccupped once and knotted his hands behind his back to stop their trembling. He had been glad in a way to turn away 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 appearance 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 his ear said in English: Beat it, father. Outside the door, in the heavy 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.

[178] 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 it had 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 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 is 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 said, 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 ...?

Maybe.

I know what you want to tell me. I know it, do you understand? Let that be. Remember you are dying. Don't depend too much on God's mercy. He has given you this chance: He may [179] not give you another. What sort of a life have you led all these years? Does it seem so grand now? You've killed a lot of people-that's about all. Anybody can do that for a while, and then he is killed too. Just as you are killed. Nothing left except pain.

Father.

Yes? The priest gave an impatient sigh, leaning closer. He hoped for a moment that at last he had got the man started on some meagre train of sorrow.

You take my gun, father. See what I mean? Under my arm

I haven't any use for a gun.

Oh, yes, you have. The man detached one hand from his stomach and began to move it slowly up his body. So much effort: it was unbearable to watch. The priest said sharply: Lie still. It's not there. He could see the holster empty under the armpit: it was the first definite indication that they and the half-caste were not alone.

Bastards, the man said, and his hand lay wearily where it had got to, over his heart; he imitated the prudish attitude of a female statue: one hand over the breast and one upon the stomach. It was very hot in the hut: the heavy light of the storm lay over them.

Listen, father ... The priest sat hopelessly at the man's side: nothing now would shift that violent brain towards peace: once, hours ago perhaps, when he wrote the message-but the chance had come and gone. He was whispering now something about a knife. There was a legend believed by many criminals that dead eyes held the picture of what they had last seen-a Christian could believe that the soul did the same, held absolution and peace at the final moment, after a lifetime of the most hideous crime: or sometimes pious men died suddenly in brothels unabsolved and what had seemed a good life went out with the permanent stamp on it of impurity. He had heard men talk of the unfairness of a deathbed repentance-as if it was an easy thing to break the habit of a life whether to do good or evil. One suspected the good of the life that ended badly-or the viciousness that ended well. He made another desperate attempt. He said: You believed once. Try and understand-his is your chance. At the last moment. Like [180] the thief. You have murdered men-children perhaps, he added, remembering the little black heap under the cross. But that need not be so important. It only belongs to this life, a few years-it's over already. You can drop it all here, in this hut, and go on for ever ... He felt sadness and longing at the vaguest idea of a life he couldn't lead himself ... words like peace, glory, love.

Father, the voice said urgently, you let me be. You look after yourself. You take my knife ... The hand began its weary march again-this time towards the hip. The knees crooked up in an attempt to roll over, and then the whole body gave up the effort, the ghost, everything.

The priest hurriedly whispered the words of conditional absolution, in case, for one second before it crossed the border, the spirit had repented-but it was more likely that it had gone over still seeking its knife, bent on vicarious violence. He prayed: O merciful God, after all he was thinking of me, it was for my sake ... but he prayed without conviction. At the best, it was only one criminal trying to aid the escape of another-whichever way you looked, there wasn't much merit in either of them.

Chapter Three

A VOICE said: Well, have you finished now?

The priest got up and made a small scared gesture of assent. He recognized the police officer who had given him money at the prison, a dark smart figure in the doorway with the storm-light glinting on his leggings. He had one hand on his revolver and he frowned sourly in at the dead gunman. You didn't expect to see me, he said.

Oh, but I did, the priest said. I must thank you-

Thank me, what for?

For letting me stay alone with him.

I am not a barbarian, the officer said. Will you come out now, please? It's no use at all your trying to escape. You can [181] see that, he added, as the priest emerged and looked round at the dozen armed men who surrounded the hut.

I've had enough of escaping, he said. The half-caste was no longer in sight: the heavy clouds were piling up the sky: they made the real mountains look like little bright toys below them. He sighed and giggled nervously. What a lot of trouble I had getting across those mountains, and now ... here I am ...

I never believed you would return.

Oh, well, lieutenant, you know how it is. Even a coward has a sense of duty. The cool fresh wind which sometimes blows across before a storm breaks touched his skin. He said with badly affected ease: Are you going to shoot me now?

The lieutenant said again sharply: I am not a barbarian. You will be tried ... properly.

What for?

For treason.

I have to go all the way back there?

Yes. Unless you try to escape. He kept his hand on his gun as if he didn't trust the priest a yard. He said: I could swear that somewhere …

Oh, yes, the priest said. You have seen me twice. When you took a hostage from my village ... you asked my child: 'Who is he?' She said: 'My father,' and you let me go. Suddenly the mountains ceased to exist: it was as if somebody had dashed a handful of water into their faces.

Quick, the lieutenant said, into that hut. He called out to one of the men. Bring us some boxes so that we can sit. The two of them joined the dead man in the hut as the storm came up all round them. A soldier dripping with rain carried in two packing-cases. A candle, the lieutenant said. He sat down on one of the cases and took out his revolver. He said: Sit down, there, away from the door, where I can see you. The soldier lit a candle and stuck it in its own wax on the hard earth floor, and the priest sat down, close to the American: huddled up in his attempt to get at his knife he gave an effect of wanting to reach his companion, to have a word or two in private. …They looked two of a kind, dirty and unshaved: the lieutenant seemed to belong to a different class altogether. He said with contempt: So you have a child?

Yes, the priest said.

[182] You-a priest.

You mustn't think they are all like me. He watched the candlelight blink on the bright buttons. He said: There are good priests and bad priests. It is just that I am a bad priest.

Then perhaps we will be doing your Church a service …

Yes.

The lieutenant looked sharply up as if he thought he was being mocked. He said: You told me twice. That I had seen you twice.

Yes, I was in prison. And you gave me money.

I remember. He said furiously: What an appalling mockery! To have had you and then to let you go. Why, we lost two men looking for you. They'd be alive today. … The candle sizzled as the drops of rain came through the roof. This American wasn't worth two lives. He did no real harm.

The rain poured ceaselessly down. They sat in silence. Suddenly the lieutenant said: Keep your hand away from your pocket.

I was only feeling for a pack of cards. I thought perhaps it would help to pass the time ...

I don't play cards, the lieutenant said harshly.

No, no. Not a game. Just a few tricks I can show you. May I?

All right. If you wish to.

Mr. Lehr had given him an old pack of cards. The priest said: Here, you see, are three cards. The ace, the king, and the Jack. Now -he spread them fanwise out on the floor -tell me which is the ace.

This, of course, the lieutenant said grudgingly, showing no interest.

But you are wrong, the priest said, turning it up. That is the jack.

The lieutenant said contemptuously: A game for gamblers-or children.

There is another trick, the priest said, called Fly-Away Jack. I cut the pack into three-so. And I take this jack of hearts and I put it into the centre pack-so. Now I tap the three packs -his face lit up as he spoke: it was such a long time since he had handled cards: he forgot the storm, the dead man, and the stubborn unfriendly face opposite him- I say: [183] 'Fly away, Jack' -he cut the left-hand pack in half and disclosed the jack- and there he is.

Of course there are two jacks.

See for yourself. Unwillingly the lieutenant leant forward and inspected the centre pack. He said: I suppose you tell the Indians that that is a miracle of God.

Oh, no, the priest giggled. I learnt it from an Indian. He was the richest man in his village. Do you wonder, with such a hand? No, I used to show the tricks at any entertainments we had in the parish-for the guilds, you know.

A look of physical disgust crossed the lieutenant's face. He said: I remember those guilds.

When you were a boy?

I was old enough to know ...

Yes?

The trickery. He broke out furiously with one hand on his gun, as though it had crossed his mind that it would be better to eliminate this beast, now, at this instant, for ever. What an excuse it all was, what a fake. Sell all and give to the poor-that was the lesson, wasn't it?-and Señora So-and-so, the druggist's wife, would say the family wasn't really deserving of charity, and Señor This, That, and the Other would say that if they starved, what else did they deserve, they were Socialists anyway, and the priest-you-would notice who had done his Easter duty and paid his Easter offering. His voice rose-a policeman looked into the hut anxiously-and withdrew again through the lashing rain. The Church was poor, the priest was poor, therefore everyone should sell all and give to the Church.

The priest said: You are so right. He added quickly: Wrong, too, of course.

How do you mean? the lieutenant asked savagely. Right? Won't you even defend ...?

I felt at once that you were a good man when you gave me money at the prison.

The lieutenant said: I only listen to you because you have no hope. No hope at all. Nothing you say will make any difference.

No.

He had no intention of angering the police officer, but he [184] had had very little practice the last eight years in talking to any but a few peasants and Indians. Now something in his tone infuriated the lieutenant. He said: You're a danger. That's why we kill you. I have nothing against you, you understand, as a man.

Of course not. It's God you're against. I'm the sort of man you shut up every day-and give money to.

No, I don't fight against a fiction.

But I'm not worth fighting, am I? You've said so. A liar, a drunkard. That man's worth a bullet more than I am.

It's your ideas. The lieutenant sweated a little in the hot steamy air. He said: You are so cunning, you people. But tell me this-what have you ever done in Mexico for us? Have you ever told a landlord he shouldn't beat his peon-oh, yes, I know, in the confessional perhaps, and it's your duty, isn't it, to forget it at once? You come out and have dinner with him and it's your duty not to know that he has murdered a peasant. That's all finished. He's left it behind in your box.

Go on, the priest said. He sat on the packing-case with his hands on his knees and his head bent: he couldn't, though he tried, keep all his mind on what the lieutenant was saying. He was thinking-forty-eight hours to the capital. Today is Sunday. Perhaps on Wednesday I shall be dead. He felt it as a treachery that he was more afraid of the pain of the bullets than of what came after.

Well, we have ideas too, the lieutenant was saying. No more money for saying prayers, no more money for building places to say prayers in. We'll give people food instead, teach them to read, give them books. We'll see they don't suffer.

But if they want to suffer ...

A man may want to rape a woman. Are we to allow it because he wants to? Suffering is wrong.

And you suffer all the time, the priest commented, watching the sour Indian face behind the candle-flame. He said: It sounds fine, doesn't it? Does the jefe feel like that too?

Oh, we have our bad men.

And what happens afterwards? I mean after everybody has got enough to eat and can read the right books-the books you let them read?

[185] Nothing. Death's a fact. We don't try to alter facts.

We agree about a lot of things, the priest said, idly dealing out his cards. We have facts, too, we don't try to alter-that the world's unhappy whether you are rich or poor-unless you are a saint, and there aren't many of those. It's not worth bothering too much about a little pain here. There's one belief we both of us have-that it will all be much the same in a hundred years. He fumbled, trying to shuffle, and bent the cards: his hands were not steady.

All the same, you're worried now about a little pain, the lieutenant said maliciously, watching his fingers.

But I'm not a saint, the priest said. I'm not even a brave man. He looked apprehensively up: light was coming back: the candle was no longer necessary. It would soon be clear enough to start the long journey back. He felt a desire to go on talking, to delay even by a few minutes the decision to start. He said: That's another difference between us. It's no good your working for your end unless you're a good man yourself. And there won't always be good men in your party. Then you'll have all the old starvation, beating, get-rich-anyhow. But it doesn't matter so much my being a coward-and all the rest. I can put God into a mans mouth just the same-and I can give him God's pardon. It wouldn't make any difference to that if every priest in the Church was like me.

That's another thing I don't understand, the lieutenant said, why you-of all people-should have stayed when the others ran.

They didn't all run, the priest said.

But why did you stay?

Once, the priest said, I asked myself that. The fact is, a man isn't presented suddenly with two courses to follow. One good and one bad. He gets caught up. The first year-well, I didn't believe there was really any cause to run. Churches have been burnt before now. You know how often. It doesn't mean much. I thought I'd stay till next month, say, and see if things were better. Then-oh, you don't know how time can slip by. It was quite light again now: the afternoon rain was over: life had to go on. A policeman passed the entrance of the hut and looked in curiously at the pair of them. Do you know I [186] suddenly realized that I was the only priest left for miles around? The law which made priests marry finished them. They went: they were quite right to go. There was one priest in particular-who had always disapproved of me. I have a tongue, you know, and it used to wag. He said-quite rightly-that I wasn't a firm character. He escaped. It felt-you'll laugh at this-just as it did at school when a bully I had been afraid of-for years-got too old for any more teaching and was turned out. You see, I didn't have to think about anybody's opinion any more. The peoples-they didn't worry me. They liked me. He gave a weak smile, sideways, towards the humped Yankee.

Go on, the lieutenant said moodily.

You'll know all there is to know about me, at this rate, the priest said, with a nervous giggle, by the time I get to, well, prison.

It's just as well. To know an enemy, I mean.

That other priest was right. It was when he left I began to go to pieces. One thing went after another. I got careless about my duties. I began to drink. It would have been much better, I think, if I had gone too. Because pride was at work all the time. Not love of God. He sat bowed on the packing-case, a small plump man in Mr. Lehr's cast-off clothes. He said: Pride was what made the angels fall. Pride's the worst thing of all. I thought I was a fine fellow to have stayed when the others had gone. And then I thought I was so grand I could make my own rules. I gave up fasting, daily Mass. I neglected my prayers-and one day because I was drunk and lonely-well, you know how it was, I got a child. It was all pride. Just pride because I'd stayed. I wasn't any use, but I stayed. At least, not much use. I'd got so that I didn't have a hundred communicants a month. If I'd gone I'd have given God to twelve times that number. It's a mistake one makes-to think just because a thing is difficult or dangerous ... He made a flapping motion with his hands.

The lieutenant said in a tone of fury: Well, you're going to be a martyr-you've got that satisfaction.

Oh, no. Martyrs are not like me. They don't think all the time-if I had drunk more brandy I shouldn't be so afraid.

The lieutenant said sharply to a man in the entrance: Well, what is it? What are you hanging round for?

[187] The storm's over, lieutenant. We wondered when we were to start.

We start immediately.

He got up and put back the pistol in his holster. He said: Get a horse ready for the prisoner. And have some men dig a grave quickly for the Yankee.

The priest put the cards in his pocket and stood up. He said: You have listened very patiently ...

I am not afraid, the lieutenant said, of other people's ideas.

Outside the ground was steaming after the rain: the mist rose nearly to their knees: the horses stood ready. The priest mounted, but before they had time to move a voice made the priest turn-the same sullen whine he had heard so often. Father. It was the half-caste.

Well, well, the priest said. You again.

Oh, I know what you're thinking, the half-caste said. There's not much charity in you, father. You thought all along I was going to betray you.

Go, the lieutenant said sharply. You've done your job. May I have one word, lieutenant? the priest asked. You're a good man, father, the mestizo cut quickly in, but you think the worst of people. I just want your blessing, that's all.

What is the good? You can't sell a blessing, the priest said. It's just because we won't see each other again. And I didn't want you to go off there thinking ill things ... You are so superstitious, the priest said. You think my blessing will be like a blinker over God's eyes. I can't stop Him knowing all about it. Much better go home and pray. Then if He gives you grace to feel sorry, give away the money. …

What money, father? The half-caste shook his stirrup angrily. What money? There you go again ...

The priest sighed. He felt empty with the ordeal. Fear can be more tiring than a long monotonous ride. He said: I'll pray for you, and beat his horse into position beside the lieutenant's.

And I'll pray for you, father, the half-caste announced complacently. Once the priest looked back as his horse poised for the steep descent between the rocks. The half-caste stood [188] alone among the huts, his mouth a little open, showing the two long fangs. He might have been snapped in the act of shouting some complaint or some claim-that he was a good Catholic perhaps: one hand scratched under the armpit. The priest waved his hand: he bore no grudge because he expected nothing else of anything human and he had one cause at least of satisfaction-that yellow and unreliable face would be absent at the death.

You're a man of education, the lieutenant said. He lay across the entrance of the hut with his head on his rolled cape and his revolver by his side. It was night, but neither man could sleep. The priest, when he shifted, groaned a little with stiffness and cramp: the lieutenant was in a hurry to get home, and they had ridden till midnight. They were down off the hills and in the marshy plain. Soon the whole state would be subdivided by swamp. The rains had really begun.

I'm not that. My father was a storekeeper.

I mean, you've been abroad. You can talk like a Yankee. You've had schooling.

Yes.'

I've had to think things out for myself. But there are some things which you don't have to learn in a school. That there are rich and poor. He said in a low voice: I've shot three hostages because of you. Poor men. It made me hate your guts.

Yes, the priest admitted, and tried to stand to ease the cramp in his right thigh. The lieutenant sat quickly up, gun in band. What are you doing?

Nothing. Just cramp. That's all. He lay down again with a groan.

The lieutenant said: Those men I shot. They were my own people. I wanted to give them the whole world.

Well, who knows? Perhaps that's what you did.

The lieutenant spat suddenly, viciously, as if something unclean had got upon his tongue. He said: You always have answers, which mean nothing.

I was never any good at books, the priest said. I haven't any memory. But there was one thing always puzzled me about men like yourself. You hate the rich and love the poor. Isn't that right?

[189] Yes.

Well, if I hated you, I wouldn't want to bring up my child to be like you. It's not sense.

That's just twisting ...

Perhaps it is. I've never got your ideas straight. We've always said the poor are blessed and the rich are going to find it hard to get into heaven. Why should we make it hard for the poor man too? Oh, I know we are told to give to the poor, to see they are not hungry-hunger can make a man do evil just as much as money can. But why should we give the poor power? It's better to let him die in dirt and wake in heaven-so long as we don't push his face in the dirt.

I hate your reasons, the lieutenant said. I don't want reasons. If you see somebody in pain, people like you reason and reason. You say-perhaps pain's a good thing, perhaps he'll be better for it one day. I want to let my heart speak.

At the end of a gun.

Yes. At the end of a gun.

Oh, well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart's an untrustworthy beast. The mind is too, but it doesn't talk about love. Love. And a girl puts her head under water or a child's strangled, and the heart all the time says love, love.

They lay quiet for a while in the hut. The priest thought the lieutenant was asleep until he spoke again. You never talk straight. You say one thing to me-but to another man, or a woman, you say: 'God is love.' But you think that stuff won't go down with me, so you say different things. Things you think I'll agree with.

Oh, the priest said, that's another thing altogether-God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us-God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark? Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.

You don't trust Him much, do you? He doesn't seem a grateful kind of God. If a man served me as well as you've served Him, well, I'd recommend him for promotion, see he [190] got a good pension ... if he was in pain, with cancer, I'd put a bullet through his head.

Listen, the priest said earnestly, leaning forward in the dark, pressing on a cramped foot, I'm not as dishonest as you think I am. Why do you think I tell people out of the pulpit that they're in danger of damnation if death catches them unawares? I'm not telling them fairy-stories I don't believe myself. I don't know a thing about the mercy of God: I don't know how awful the human heart looks to Him. But I do know this-that if there's ever been a single man in this state damned, then I'll be damned too. He said slowly: I wouldn't want it to be any different. I just want justice, that's all.

We'll be in before dark, the lieutenant said. Six men rode in front and six behind: sometimes, in the belts of forest between the arms of the river, they had to ride in single file. The lieutenant didn't speak much, and once when two of his men struck up a song about a fat shopkeeper and his woman, he told them savagely to be silent. It wasn't a very triumphal procession: the priest rode with a weak grin fixed on his face. It was like a mask he had stuck on, so that he could think quickly without anyone's noticing. What he thought about mostly was pain.

I suppose, the lieutenant said, scowling ahead, you're hoping for a miracle.

Excuse me. What did you say?

I said I suppose you're hoping for a miracle.

No.

You believe in them, don't you?

Yes. But not for me. I'm no more good to anyone, so why should God keep me alive?

I cant think how a man like you can believe in those things. The Indians, yes. Why, the first time they see an electric light they think it's a miracle.

And I dare say the first time you saw a man raised from the dead you might think so too. He giggled unconvincingly behind the smiling mask. Oh, it's funny, isn't it? It isn't a case of miracles not happening-it's just a case of people calling them something else. Can't you see the doctors round the dead man? He isn't breathing any more, his pulse has stopped, his [191] heart's not beating: he's dead. Then somebody gives him back his life, and they all-what's the expression?-reserve their opinion. They won't say it's a miracle, because that's a word they don't like. Then it happens again and again perhaps-because God's about on earth-and they say: there aren't miracles, it is simply that we have enlarged our conception of what life is. Now we know you can be alive without pulse, breath, heart-beats. And they invent a new word to describe that state of life, and they say science has again disproved a miracle. He giggled again. You cant get round them.

They were out of the forest track onto a hard beaten road, and the lieutenant dug in his spur and the whole cavalcade broke into a canter. They were nearly home now. The lieutenant said grudgingly: You aren't a bad fellow. If there's anything I can do for you ...

If you would give permission for me to confess ...

The first houses came into sight: little hard-baked houses of earth falling into ruin, a few classical pillars-just plaster over mud, and a dirty child playing in the rubble.

The lieutenant said: But there's no priest.

Padre José.

Oh, Padre José, the lieutenant said, with contempt, he's no good for you.

He's good enough for me. It's not likely I'd find a saint here, is it?

The lieutenant rode for a little while in silence: they came to the cemetery, full of chipped angels, and passed the great portico with its black letters: Silencio. He said: All right. You can have him. He wouldn't look at the cemetery as they went by-there was the wall where the prisoners were shot. The road went steeply down-hill towards the river: on the right, where the cathedral had been, the iron swings stood empty in the hot afternoon. There was a sense of desolation everywhere, more of it than in the mountains because a lot of life had once existed here. The lieutenant thought: No pulse, no breath, no heart-beat, but it's still life-we've only got to find a name for it. A small boy watched them pass: he called out to the lieutenant: Lieutenant, have you got him? and the lieutenant dimly remembered the face-one day in the [192] plaza-a broken bottle, and he tried to smile back, an odd sour grimace, without triumph or hope. One had to begin again with that.

Chapter Four

THE lieutenant waited till after dark and then he went himself. It would be dangerous to send another man because the news would be around the city in no time that Padre José had been permitted to carry out a religious duty in the prison. It was wiser not to let even the jefe know: one didn't trust one's superiors when one was more successful than they were. He knew the jefe wasn't pleased that he had brought the priest in-an escape would have been better from his point of view.

In the patio he could feel himself watched by a dozen eyes: the children clustered there ready to shout at Padre José if he appeared. He wished he had promised the priest nothing, but he was going to keep his word-because it would be a triumph for that old corrupt God-ridden world if it could show itself superior on any point-whether of courage, truthfulness, justice ...

Nobody answered his knock: he stood darkly in the patio like a petitioner. Then he knocked again, and a voice called: A moment. A moment.

Padre José put his face against the bars of his window and said: Who's there? He seemed to be fumbling at something near the ground.

Lieutenant of police.

Oh, Padre José squeaked. Excuse me. It is my trousers. In the dark. He seemed to heave at something and there was a sharp crack, as if his belt or braces had given way. Across the patio the children began to squeak: Padre José. Padre José. When he came to the door he wouldn't look at them, muttering tenderly: The little devils.

The lieutenant said: I want you to come up to the police station.

[193] But I've done nothing. Nothing. I've been so careful.

Padre José, the children squeaked.

He said imploringly: If it's anything about a burial, you've been misinformed. I wouldn't even say a prayer.

Padre José. Padre José.

The lieutenant turned and strode across the patio. He said furiously to the faces at the grille: Be quiet. Go to bed. At once. Do you hear me? They dropped out of sight one by one, but immediately the lieutenant's back was turned, they were there again watching.

Padre José said: Nobody can do anything with those children.

A woman's voice said: Where are you, José?

Here, my dear. It is the police.

A huge woman in a white night-dress came billowing out at them: it wasn't much after seven: perhaps she lived, the lieutenant thought, in that dress-perhaps she lived in bed. He said: Your husband, dwelling on the term with satisfaction, your husband is wanted at the station.

Who says so?

I do.

He's done nothing.

I was just saying, my dear ...

Be quiet. Leave the talking to me.

You can both stop jabbering, the lieutenant said. You're wanted at the station to see a man-a priest. He wants to confess.

To me?

Yes. There's no one else.

Poor man, Padre José said. His little pink eyes swept the patio. Poor man. He shifted uneasily, and took a furtive look at the sky where the constellations wheeled.

You won't go, the woman said.

It's against the law, isn't it? Padre José asked.

You needn't trouble about that.

Oh, we needn't, eh? the woman said. I can see through you. You don't want my husband to be let alone. You want to trick him. I know your work. You get people to ask him to say prayers-he's a kind man. But I'd have you remember this-he's a pensioner of the government.

[194] The lieutenant said slowly: This priest-he has been working for years secretly-for your Church. We've caught him and, of course, he'll be shot tomorrow. He's not a bad man and I told him he could see you. He seems to think it will do him good.

I know him, the woman interrupted, he's a drunkard. That's all he is.

Poor man, Padre José said. He tried to hide here once.

I promise you, the lieutenant said, nobody shall know.

Nobody know? the woman cackled. Why, it will be all over town. Look at those children there. They never leave José alone. She went on: There'll be no end to it-everybody will be wanting to confess, and the Governor will hear of it, and the pension will be stopped.

Perhaps, my dear, José said, it's my duty ...

You aren't a priest any more, the woman said, you're my husband. She used a coarse word. That's your duty now. The lieutenant listened to them with acid satisfaction. It was like rediscovering an old belief. He said: I can't wait here while you argue. Are you going to come with me?

He can't make you the woman said.

My dear, it's only that ... well ... I am a priest.