More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Once for five minutes seven years ago they had been lovers—if you could give that name to a relationship in which she had never used his baptismal name: to her it was just an incident, a scratch which heals completely in the healthy flesh: she was even proud of having been the priest’s woman. He alone carried a wound, as though a whole world had died.
‘One of the Fathers has told us that joy always depends on pain. Pain is part of joy.
He felt his own unworthiness like a weight at the back of the tongue.
He felt humbled by the pain ordinary men bore voluntarily; his pain was forced on him.
Heaven must contain just such scared and dutiful and hunger-lined faces. For a matter of seconds he felt an immense satisfaction that he could talk of suffering to them now without hypocrisy—it is hard for the sleek and well-fed priest to praise poverty.
‘You’re fools if you still believe what the priests tell you. All they want is your money. What has God ever done for you? Have you got enough to eat? Have your children got enough to eat? Instead of food they talk to you about heaven. Oh, everything will be fine after you are dead, they say. I tell you—everything will be fine when they are dead, and you must help.’
He felt an enormous temptation to throw himself in front of the lieutenant and declare himself—‘I am the one you want.’ Would they shoot him out of hand? A delusive promise of peace tempted him.
Death was not the end of pain—to believe in peace was a kind of heresy.
‘Why won’t you trust me? I don’t want any of you to die. In my eyes—can’t you understand—you are worth far more than he is. I want to give you’—he made a gesture with his hands which was valueless, because no one saw him—‘everything.’
‘My case, Maria? Where’s my case?’ ‘It’s too dangerous to carry that around any more,’ Maria said. ‘How else can I take the wine?’ ‘There isn’t any wine.’ ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘I’m not going to bring trouble on you and everyone else. I’ve broken the bottle. Even if it brings a curse …’
‘Don’t you understand, father? We don’t want you any more.’ ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I understand. But it’s not what you want—or I want …’
‘Suppose you die. You’ll be a martyr, won’t you? What kind of a martyr do you think you’ll be? It’s enough to make people mock.’ That had never occurred to him—that anybody would consider him a martyr. He said, ‘It’s difficult. Very difficult. I’ll think about it. I wouldn’t want the Church to be mocked …’
Kate liked this
‘And the child,’ he said, ‘you’re a good woman, Maria. I mean—you’ll try and bring her up well … as a Christian.’ ‘She’ll never be good for anything, you can see that.’ ‘She can’t be very bad—at her age,’ he implored her. ‘She’ll go on the way she’s begun.’
Allie and 1 other person liked this
he felt that there wasn’t a soul in the place who wasn’t watching him with satisfaction—the trouble-maker who for obscure and superstitious reasons they preferred not to betray to the police. He felt envious of the unknown gringo whom they wouldn’t hesitate to trap—he at any rate had no burden of gratitude to carry round with him.
He was appalled again by her maturity, as she whipped up a smile from a large and varied stock.
She sat there on the trunk of the tree by the rubbish-tip with an effect of abandonment. The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit. She was without protection—she had no grace, no charm to plead for her;
Every child was born with some kind of knowledge of love, he thought; they took it with the milk at the breast; but on parents and friends depended the kind of love they knew—the saving or the damning kind. Lust too was a kind of love. He saw her fixed in her life like a fly in amber—Maria’s hand raised to strike: Pedro talking prematurely in the dusk: and the police beating the forest—violence everywhere.
He was a man who was supposed to save souls. It had seemed quite simple once, preaching at Benediction, organizing the guilds, having coffee with elderly ladies behind barred windows, blessing new houses with a little incense, wearing black gloves … It was as easy as saving money: now it was a mystery. He was aware of his own desperate inadequacy.
One mustn’t have human affections—or rather one must love every soul as if it were one’s own child. The passion to protect must extend itself over a world—but he felt it tethered and aching like a hobbled animal to the tree trunk. He turned his mule south.
What he wanted now was wine. Without it he was useless;
But he wasn’t ready yet for the final surrender—every small surrender had to be paid for in a further endurance, and now he felt the need of somehow ransoming his child. He would stay another month, another year … Jogging up and down on the mule he tried to bribe God with promises of firmness.
All these years there had been two places to which he could always return and rest safely in hiding—one had been Concepción, his old parish, and that was closed to him now: the other was Carmen, where he had been born and where his parents were buried.
It was the general condition of life that made for suspicion.
‘You talk like a priest.’ He came quickly awake, but under the tall dark trees he could see nothing. He said, ‘What nonsense you talk.’ ‘I am a very good Christian,’ the man said, stroking the priest’s foot. ‘I dare say. I wish I were.’ ‘Ah, you ought to be able to tell which people you can trust.’ He spat in a comradely way. ‘I have nothing to trust anyone with,’ the priest said. ‘Except these trousers—they are very torn. And this mule—it isn’t a good mule; you can see for yourself.’
‘You don’t trust me. Just because I am a man who likes to do a good turn to strangers, because I try to be a Christian, you don’t trust me.’
In one fist he still carried the ball of paper salvaged from his case—a man must retain some sentimental relics if he is to live at all. The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety.
‘I could easily find out, couldn’t I?’ the half-caste said. ‘I’d just have to say—father, hear my confession. You couldn’t refuse a man in mortal sin.’ The priest said nothing, waiting for the demand to come: the hand which held the papers twitched.
He was determined not to sleep—the man had some plan. His conscience ceased to accuse him of uncharity. He knew. He was in the presence of Judas.
it seemed to him a good thing that the world’s traitor should be made a figure of fun. It was too easy otherwise to idealize him as a man who fought with God—a Prometheus, a noble victim in a hopeless war.
Now that his case was gone, it was the only evidence left that life had ever been different: he carried it with him as a charm, because if life had been like that once, it might be so again.
we mustn’t rest on our laurels, and I confess I have got plans you may find a little startling. You already think me a man, I know, of inordinate ambitions—well, I want Concepción to have a better school—and that means a better presbytery too, of course. We are a big parish and the priest has a position to keep up. I’m not thinking of myself but of the Church. And we shall not stop there—though it will take a good many years, I’m afraid, even in a place the size of Concepción, to raise the money for that.’
An energetic priest was always known by his debts.
It was not, like some more intellectual priests, that he was over-scrupulous: he had been simply filled with an overwhelming sense of God. At the Elevation of the Host you could see his hands trembling—he was not like St Thomas who needed to put his hands into the wounds in order to believe: the wounds bled anew for him over every altar. Once Padre José had said to him in a burst of confidence, ‘Every time … I have such fear.’
Kate liked this
This was pride, devilish pride, lying here offering his shirt to the man who wanted to betray him.
pride—the sin by which the angels fell.
I am a proud, lustful, greedy man. I have loved authority too much. These people are martyrs—protecting me with their own lives. They deserve a martyr to care for them—not a man like me, who loves all the wrong things. Perhaps I had better escape—if I tell people how it is over here, perhaps they will send a good man with a fire of love …’ As usual his self-confession dwindled away into the practical problem—what am I to do?
The awful jumble of the gross, the trivial, and the grotesque shot up between the two yellow fangs, and the hand on the priest’s ankle shook and shook with the fever.
He had an immense self-importance; he was unable to picture a world of which he was only a typical part—a world of treachery, violence, and lust in which his shame was altogether insignificant.
Christ had died for this man too: how could he pretend with his pride and lust and cowardice to be any more worthy of that death than the half-caste? This man intended to betray him for money which he needed, and he had betrayed God for what? Not even for real lust.
One of the oddest things about the world these days was that there were no clocks—you could go a year without hearing one strike. They went with the churches, and you were left with the grey slow dawns and the precipitate nights as the only measurements of time.