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He couldn’t think of a lie; he felt as if ten years had exhausted his whole stock of deceit.
Oh 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.
It seemed as if God were deciding … finally.
he was at the man’s mercy—a silly phrase, for those malarial eyes had never known what mercy was.
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…
The priest stood not far from his own portrait on the wall and waited. Once he glanced quickly and nervously up at the old crumpled newspaper cutting and thought, 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 innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins—impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity—cut you 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…
It was almost as if the lieutenant had something on his conscience,
‘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?’ ‘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.’
He realized how much he had counted on this child. She was the only person who could help him without endangering herself.
This was what one meant by dawn—the noise of life. He waited for it—hungrily—in the doorway.
Unlike him, she retained a kind of hope. Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill. An animal never knows 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 spreadeagled. 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
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instinct is like a sense of duty—one can confuse it with loyalty very easily.
He felt as if he were clearing up after a death, deciding what would be too painful to keep.
There was a hint of heat and irritation in the crumpled 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.
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.
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 could imagine the child remembering, before she left with the sick mother and the stupid father: he had the impression that it was always she who had to think.
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: it would eat the bone itself. He dropped it and left the kitchen.
The little poetry he knew dealt mainly with agony, remorse, and hope. These verses ended on a philosophical note
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 daughter, O my daughter.’ The words seemed to contain all that he felt himself of repentance, longing and unhappy love.
It was an odd 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.
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.
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.
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 force or disease.
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 a child’s which lay completely quiet under his hand. In the doorway the moonlight showed the woman’s face indistinctly.
‘Americano.’ The child wore a kind of brown one-piece smock. He lifted it up to the neck: the child 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….
The gringo?
It was a mistake one easily made, to think that just because the eyes expressed nothing there was no grief.
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 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 a constriction which prevented their escape; he could feel his prayers weigh him down like undigested food.
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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, but 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 it was to draw quickly or to shoot directly from the pocket. That poor child … what responsibilities she had perhaps been forced to undertake.
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.
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.
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, clogged 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.
A 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.
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 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 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 that 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.
He thought: I shouldn’t have left her alone like that. God forgive me. I have no sense of 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 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.
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?
he had escaped too completely from men. Nature would kill him now.
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.
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.
‘Father,’ the voice said, puzzled and worried, ‘it is our church.’
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.
