The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

He said, ‘One of the Fathers has told us that joy always depends on pain. Pain is part of joy. We are hungry and then think how we enjoy our food at last. We are thirsty …’ He stopped suddenly, with his eyes glancing away into the shadows, expecting the cruel laugh that did not come. He said, ‘We deny ourselves so that we can enjoy. You have heard of rich men in the north who eat salted foods, so that they can be thirsty—for what they call the cocktail. Before the marriage, too, there is the long betrothal …’ Again he stopped. He felt his own unworthiness like a weight at the back of the tongue. There was a smell of hot wax from where a candle drooped in the nocturnal heat; people shifted on the hard floor in the shadows. The smell of unwashed human beings warred with the wax. He cried out stubbornly in a voice of authority, ‘That is why I tell you that heaven is here: this is a part of heaven just as pain is a part of pleasure.’ He said, ‘Pray that you will suffer more and more and more. Never get tired of suffering. The police watching you, the soldiers gathering taxes, the beating you always get from the jefe because you are too poor to pay, smallpox and fever, hunger … that is all part of heaven—the preparation. Perhaps without them, who can tell, you wouldn’t enjoy heaven so much. Heaven would not be complete. And heaven. What is heaven?’ Literary phrases from what seemed now to be another life altogether—the strict quiet life of the seminary—became confused on his to...