The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

He giggled again; he could never take the complications of destiny quite seriously, and it was just possible, he thought, that a year without anxiety might save this man’s soul.

The night had been noisy, but now all was quiet. It was like an armistice with the guns silent on either side: you could imagine the whole world listening to what they had never heard before—peace.

But at the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery—that we were made in God’s image. God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge.

He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God’s image had thought out, and God’s image shook now, up and down on the mule’s back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and God’s image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats.

It was odd—this fury to deface, because, of course, you could never deface enough. If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures—you had to kill yourself among the graves.

But it was more than the half-caste he was leaving behind on the forest track: the mule stood sideways like a barrier, nodding a stupid head, between him and the place where he had been born. He felt like a man without a passport who is turned away from every harbour.

It was like a religious ceremony which had lost all meaning, but at which they still wore their best clothes. Sometimes a group of older women would join in the procession with a little more excitement and laughter, as if they retained some memory of how things used to go before all the books were lost.

Suddenly as a clock struck nine-thirty all the lights went out.

He had the grudging independence you find in countries where it is the right of a poor man to beg.

‘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?’

Are we in a time loop?

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.

‘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.

‘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 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.’

life has such irony. It was my painful duty to watch the priest who gave me that communion 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 prays for us. It is not everyone who earns a saint’s prayers.’

‘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.’

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.

‘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.

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 priest stood for a few seconds in the doorway of the hotel,

This was the town to which it had been his ambition to be promoted, leaving the right kind of debts behind at Concepción: he thought of the cathedral and Montez and a Monsignor 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 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.

‘If I ever offended you, José, forgive me. I was conceited, proud, overbearing—a bad priest. I always knew in my heart you were the better man.’

‘Go and die quickly. That’s your job,’

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 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.

‘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 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.

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.

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 featherweight 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.

‘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?

At the word ‘bastard’ his heart moved painfully, as when a man in love hears a stranger name a flower which is also the name of his 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.

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

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.

‘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.’

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.’

‘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 irrational affection for the inhabitants of this prison.

‘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.’

‘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 grief and repentance.

To commit so ugly a sin—it must count as murder—and to have no compensation in this world … He thought: it wouldn’t be fair. ‘Nobody here,’ a voice said, ‘wants their blood money.’

‘I had good books in my house,’

Ah. The mother

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.

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.

‘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.’

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Nothing in life was as ugly as death.