The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. The hot wet river-port and the vultures lay in the wastepaper basket, and he picked them out. We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

‘Your teeth.’ One canine had gone, and the front teeth were yellow with tartar and carious. He said, ‘You want to pay attention to them.’ ‘What is the good?’ the stranger said. He held a small spot of brandy in his glass warily – as if it was an animal to which he gave shelter, but not trust. He had the air, in his hollowness and neglect, of somebody of no account who had been beaten up incidentally, by ill-health or restlessness. He sat on the very edge of the rocking-chair, with his small attaché case balanced on his knee and the brandy staved off with guilty affection.

‘Drink up,’ Mr Tench encouraged him (it wasn’t his brandy). ‘It will do you good.’ The man’s dark suit and sloping shoulders reminded him uncomfortably of a coffin, and death was in his carious mouth already.

The stranger said in a low voice, ‘It is awful.’ Mr Tench examined his companion again with surprise. He sat there like a black question mark, ready to go, ready to stay, poised on his chair. He looked disreputable in his grey three-days’ beard, and weak: somebody you could command to do anything. He said, ‘I mean the world. The way things happen.’ ‘Drink up your brandy.’

‘You’ll have a job not to miss the boat.’ ‘I shall miss it,’ he said. ‘I am meant to miss it.’ He was shaken by a tiny rage. ‘Give me my brandy.’ He took a long pull at it, with his eyes on the impassive child, the baked street, the vultures moving in the sky like indigestion spots. ‘But if she’s dying . . .’ Mr Tench said. ‘I know these people. She will be no more dying than I am.’ ‘You can do no good.’

It had been good to talk to a stranger, Mr Tench thought, going back into his room, locking the door behind him (one never knew). Loneliness faced him there, vacancy. But he was as accustomed to both as to his own face in the glass. He sat down in the rocking-chair and moved up and down, creating a faint breeze in the heavy air. A narrow column of ants moved across the room to the little patch on the floor where the stranger had spilt some brandy: they milled in it, then moved on in an orderly line to the opposite wall and disappeared. Down in the river the General Obregon whistled twice, he didn’t know why.

It didn’t matter so much after all: a little additional pain was hardly noticeable in the huge abandonment. On the General Obregon a faint breeze became evident: banana plantations on either side, a few wireless aerials on a point, the port slipped behind. When you looked back you could not have told that it had ever existed at all. The wide Atlantic opened up; the great grey cylindrical waves lifted the bows, and the hobbled turkeys shifted on the deck. The captain stood in the tiny deck-house with a toothpick in his hair. The land went backward at a low even roll, and the dark came quite suddenly, with a sky of low and brilliant stars. One oil-lamp was lit in the bows, and the girl whom Mr Tench had spotted from the bank began to sing gently – a melancholy, sentimental, and contented song about a rose which had been stained with true love’s blood. There was an enormous sense of freedom and air upon the gulf with the low tropical shoreline buried in darkness as deeply as any mummy in a tomb. I am happy, the young girl said to herself without considering why, I am happy.

A smell of damp came up all round him; it was as if this part of the world had never been dried in the flame when the world spun off into space: it had absorbed only the mist and cloud of those awful regions. He began to pray, bouncing up and down to the lurching slithering mule’s stride, with his brandied tongue: ‘Let me be caught soon. . . . Let me be caught.’ He had tried to escape, but he was like the King of a West African tribe, the slave of his people, who may not even lie down in case the winds should fail.

‘There,’ the chief said. A large number of people sat round a table: young girls in white muslin: older women with untidy hair and harassed expressions: a few men peered shyly and solicitously out of the background. All the faces were made up of small dots. It was a newspaper photograph of a first communion party taken years ago; a youngish man in a Roman collar sat among the women. You could imagine him petted with small delicacies, preserved for their use in the stifling atmosphere of intimacy and respect. He sat there, plump, with protuberant eyes, bubbling with harmless feminine jokes. ‘It was taken years ago.’

‘He looks like all the rest,’ the lieutenant said. It was obscure, but you could read into the smudgy photograph a well-shaved, well-powdered jowl much too developed for his age. The good things of life had come to him too early – the respect of his contemporaries, a safe livelihood. The trite religious word upon the tongue, the joke to ease the way, the ready acceptance of other people’s homage . . . a happy man. A natural hatred as between dog and dog stirred in the lieutenant’s bowels. ‘We’ve shot him half a dozen times,’ he said.

The lieutenant walked home through the shuttered town. All his life had lain here: the Syndicate of Workers and Peasants had once been a school. He had helped to wipe out that unhappy memory. The whole town was changed: the cement playground up the hill near the cemetery where iron swings stood like gallows in the moony darkness was the site of the cathedral. The new children would have new memories: nothing would ever be as it was. There was something of a priest in his intent observant walk – a theologian going back over the errors of the past to destroy them again. He reached his own lodging. The houses were all one-storeyed, whitewashed, built round small patios, with a well and a few flowers. The windows on the street were barred. Inside the lieutenant’s room there was a bed made of old packing-cases with a straw mat laid on top, a cushion and a sheet. There was a picture of the President on the wall, a calendar, and on the tiled floor a table and a rocking-chair. In the light of a candle it looked as comfortless as a prison or a monastic cell. The lieutenant sat down upon his bed and began to take off his boots. It was the hour of prayer. Black-beetles exploded against the walls like crackers. More than a dozen crawled over the tiles with injured wings. It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had ex...

He lay down in his shirt and breeches on the bed and blew out the candle. Heat stood in the room like an enemy. But he believed against the evidence of his senses in the cold empty ether spaces. A radio was playing somewhere: music from Mexico City, or perhaps even from London or New York, filtered into this obscure neglected state. It seemed to him like a weakness: this was his own land, and he would have walled it in if he could with steel until he had eradicated from it everything which reminded him of how it had once appeared to a miserable child. He wanted to destroy everything: to be alone without any memories at all. Life began five years ago. The lieutenant lay on his back with his eyes open while the beetles detonated on the ceiling.

the Red Shirts had shot against the wall of the cemetery up the hill, another little fat man with popping eyes. He was a monsignor, and he thought that would protect him. He had a sort of contempt for the lower clergy, and right up to the last he was explaining his rank. Only at the very end had he remembered his prayers. He knelt down and they had given him time for a short act of contrition. The lieutenant had watched: he wasn’t directly concerned. Altogether they had shot about five priests – two or three had escaped, the bishop was safely in Mexico City, and one man had conformed to the Governor’s law that all priests must marry. He lived now near the river with his housekeeper. That, of course, was the best solution of all, to leave the living witness to the weakness of their faith. It showed the deception they had practised all these years. For if they rea...

‘They would have caught him if we hadn’t, and then he would have been one of your martyrs. They would write a book about him and you would read it to the children.’ ‘That man – never.’ ‘Well, after all,’ her husband said, ‘he carries on. I don’t believe all that they write in these books. We are all human.’ ‘You know what I heard today? About a poor woman who took to him her son to be baptized. She wanted him called Pedro – but he was drunk that he took no notice at all and baptized the boy Brigitta. Brigitta!’ ‘Well, it’s a good saint’s name.’ ‘There are times,’ the mother said, ‘when I lose all patience with you. And now the boy has been talking to Padre José.’ ‘This is a small town,’ her husband said. ‘And there is no use pretending. We have been abandoned here. We must get along as best we can. As for the Church – the Church is Padre José and the whisky priest – I don’t know of any other. If we don’t like the Church, well, we must leave it.’

He knew the extent of their abandonment – the ten hours down-river to the port, the forty-two hours on the Gulf to Vera Cruz – that was one way out. To the north the swamps and rivers petering out against the mountains which divided them from the next state. And on the other side no roads – only mule-tracks and an occasional unreliable plane: Indian villages and the huts of herds: two hundred miles away, the Pacific. She said, ‘I would rather die.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘of course. That goes without saying. But we have to go on living.’

A woman called from the only room he possessed, ‘José, José.’ He crouched like a galley-slave at the sound; his eyes left the sky, and the constellations fled upwards: the beetles crawled over the patio. ‘José, José.’ He thought with envy of the men who had died: it was over so soon. They were taken up there to the cemetery and shot against the wall: in two minutes life was extinct. And they called that martyrdom. Here life went on and on; he was only sixty-two. He might live to ninety. Twenty-eight years – that immeasurable period between his birth and his first parish: all childhood and youth and the seminary lay there.

‘José. Come to bed.’ He shivered: he knew that he was a buffoon. An old man who married was grotesque enough, but an old priest. . . . He stood outside himself and wondered whether he was even fit for hell. He was just a fat old impotent man mocked and taunted between the sheets.

But then he remembered the gift he had been given which nobody could take away. That was what made him worthy of damnation – the power he still had of turning the wafer into the flesh and blood of God. He was a sacrilege. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he defiled God. Some mad renegade Catholic, puffed up with the Governor’s politics, had once broken into a church (in the days when there were still churches) and seized the Host. He had spat on it, trampled it, and then the people had got him and hung him as they did the stuffed Judas on Holy Thursday from the belfry. He wasn’t so bad a man, Padre José thought – he would be forgiven, he was just a politician; but he himself, he was worse t...

He walked up to his bungalow; it was distinguished from the others which lay along the bank by a tiled roof, a flag-post without a flag, a plate on the door with the title ‘Central American Banana Company’. Two hammocks were strung up on the veranda, but there was nobody about. Captain Fellows knew where to find his wife. He burst boisterously through a door and shouted, ‘Daddy’s home.’ A scared thin face peeked at him through a mosquito-net; his boots ground peace into the floor; Mrs Fellows flinched away into the white muslin tent. He said, ‘Pleased to see me, Trix?’ and she drew rapidly on her face the outline of her frightened welcome. It was like a trick you do with a blackboard. Draw a dog in one line without lifting the chalk – and the answer, of course, is a sausage. ‘I’m glad to be home,’ Captain Fellows said, and he believed it. It was his one firm conviction – that he really felt the correct emotions of love and joy and grief and hate. He had always been a good man at zero hour. ‘All well at the office?’ ‘Fine,’ Fellows said, ‘fine.’ ‘I had a bit of fever yesterday.’ ‘Ah, you need looking after. You’ll be all right now,’ he said vaguely, ‘that I’m home.’ He shied merrily away from the subject of fever – clapping his hands, a big laugh, while she trembled in her tent.

The lieutenant stood there like a little dark menacing question-mark in the sun: his attitude seemed to indicate that he wouldn’t even accept the benefit of shade from a foreigner. But he had used a hammock; that, Captain Fellows supposed, he must have regarded as a requisition. ‘Have a glass of gaseosa?’ ‘No. No, thank you.’ ‘Well,’ Captain Fellows said, ‘I can’t offer you anything else, can I? It’s treason to drink spirits.’ The lieutenant suddenly turned on his heel as if he could no longer bear the sight of them and strode away along the path which led to the village: his gaiters and his pistol-holster winked in the sunlight. When he had gone some way they could see him pause and spit; he had not been discourteous, he had waited till he supposed that they no longer watched him before he got rid of his hatred and contempt for a different way of life, for ease, safety, toleration, and complacency. ‘I wouldn’t want to be up against him,’ Captain Fellows said. ‘Of course he doesn’t trust us.’ ‘They don’t trust anyone.’ ‘I think,’ Coral said, ‘he smelt a rat.’ ‘They smell them everywhere.’

Captain Fellows was touched with fear; he was aware of an inordinate love which robbed him of authority. You cannot control what you love – you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead. He closed his eyes – he was a happy man – and hummed a tune.

‘What a religion,’ Captain Fellows said. ‘Begging for brandy. Shameless.’ ‘But you drink it sometimes.’ ‘My dear,’ Captain Fellows said, ‘when you are older you’ll understand the difference between drinking a little brandy after dinner and – well, needing it.’

‘But can’t you,’ she said logically, ‘just give yourself up?’ He had answers as plain and understandable as her questions. He said, ‘There’s the pain. To choose pain like that – it’s not possible. And it’s my duty not to be caught. You see, my bishop is no longer here.’ Curious pedantries moved him. ‘This is my parish.’ He found a tortilla and began to eat ravenously. She said solemnly, ‘It’s a problem.’ She could hear a gurgle as he drank out of the bottle. He said, ‘I try to remember how happy I was once.’ A firefly lit his face like a torch and then went out – a tramp’s face: what could ever have made it happy? He said, ‘In Mexico City now they are saying Benediction. The Bishop’s there. . . . Do you imagine he ever thinks . . . ? They don’t even know I’m alive.’ She said, ‘Of course you could – renounce.’ ‘I don’t understand.’ ‘Renounce your faith,’ she explained, using the words of her European History.

‘What is it called?’ Luis asked. ‘A Colt .38.’ ‘How many bullets?’ ‘Six.’ ‘Have you killed somebody with it?’ ‘Not yet,’ the lieutenant said. They were breathless with interest. He stood with his hand on his holster and watched the brown intent patient eyes: it was for these he was fighting. He would eliminate from their childhood everything which had made him miserable, all that was poor, superstitious, and corrupt. They deserved nothing less than the truth – a vacant universe and a cooling world, the right to be happy in any way they chose. He was quite prepared to make a massacre for their sakes – first the Church and then the foreigner and then the politician – even his own chief would one day have to go. He wanted to begin the world again with them, in a desert.

The priest scrambled off and began to laugh. He was feeling happy. It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

The routine of his life like a dam was cracked and forgetfulness came dribbling through, wiping out this and that. Five years ago he had given way to despair – the unforgivable sin – and he was going back now to the scene of his despair with a curious lightening of the heart. For he had got over despair too. He was a bad priest, he knew it. They had a word for his kind – a whisky priest, but every failure dropped out of sight and mind: somewhere they accumulated in secret – the rubble of his failures. One day they would choke up, he supposed, altogether the source of grace. Until then he carried on, with spells of fear, weariness, with a shamefaced lightness of heart.

‘Well, father,’ the woman said, ‘we can’t turn you away. You’d better come along.’ He followed her meekly, tripping once in the long peon’s trousers, with the happiness wiped off his face and the smile somehow left behind like the survivor of a wreck. There were seven or eight men, two women, half a dozen children: he came among them like a beggar. He couldn’t help remembering the last time . . . the excitement, the gourds of spirit brought out of holes in the ground . . . his guilt had still been fresh, yet how he had been welcomed. It was as if he had returned to them in their vicious prison as one of themselves – an émigré who comes back to his native place enriched. ‘This is the father,’ the woman said. Perhaps it was only that they hadn’t recognized him, he thought, and waited for their greetings. They came forward one by one and kissed his hand and then stood back and watched him. He said, ‘I am glad to see you . . .’ he was going to say ‘my children’, but then it seemed to him that only the childless man has the right to call strangers his children. The real children were coming up now to kiss his hand, one by one, under the pressure of their parents. They were too young to remember the old days when the priests dressed in black and wore Roman collars and had soft superior patronizing hands; he could see they were mystified at the show of respect to a peasant like their parents. He didn’t look at them directly, but he was watching them closely all the same. Two were...

He was astonished and a bit relieved by her resilience. 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.

That was one more surrender – for two years he had carried a chalice around with him; once it would have cost him his life, if the police officer who opened his case had not been a Catholic. It may very well have cost the officer his life, if anybody had discovered the evasion – he didn’t know; you went round making God knew what martyrs – in Concepción or elsewhere – when you yourself were without grace enough to die.

Presumably she had an idea – women were appallingly practical: they built new plans at once out of the ruins of the old.

The priest stood with his hands clasped in front of him: again death had been postponed. 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. Far up in the sky a vulture watched; they must appear from that height as two groups of carnivorous animals who might at any time break into conflict, and it waited there, a tiny black spot, for carrion. Death was not the end of pain – to believe in peace was a kind of heresy.

She said, ‘You . . . you . . .’ ‘Me?’ ‘You are the matter.’ He moved towards her with infinite caution, as if she were an animal who distrusted him. He felt weak with longing. He said, ‘My dear, why me . . . ?’ She said furiously, ‘They laugh at me.’ ‘Because of me?’ She said, ‘Everyone else has a father . . . who works.’ ‘I work too.’ ‘You’re a priest, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Pedro says you aren’t a man. You aren’t any good for women.’ She said, ‘I don’t know what he means.’ ‘I don’t suppose he knows himself.’ ‘Oh, yes he does,’ she said. ‘He’s ten. And I want to know. You’re going away, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes.’ He was appalled again by her maturity, as she whipped up a smile from a large and varied stock. She said, ‘Tell me –’ enticingly.

The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.

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.

He went down on his knees and pulled her to him, while she giggled and struggled to be free: ‘I love you. I am your father and I love you. Try to understand that.’ He held her tightly by the wrist and suddenly she stayed still, looking up at him. He said, ‘I would give my life, that’s nothing, my soul . . . my dear, my dear, try to understand that you are – so important.’ That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent. He said, ‘You must take care of yourself because you are so – necessary. The president up in the capital goes guarded by men with guns – but my child, you have all the angels of heaven –’ She stared back at him out of dark and unconscious eyes; he had a sense that he had come too late. He said, ‘Good-bye, my dear,’ and clumsily kissed her – a silly infatuated ageing man, who as soon as he released her and started padding back to the plaza could feel behind his hunched shoulders the whole vile world coming round the child to ruin her.

The dusk fell and then almost at once the dark. The mule moved yet more slowly. Noise broke out all round them; it was like a theatre when the curtain falls and behind in the wings and passages hubbub begins. Things you couldn’t put a name to – jaguars perhaps – cried in the undergrowth, monkeys moved in the upper boughs, and the mosquitoes hummed all round like sewing machines. ‘It’s thirsty walking,’ the man said. ‘Have you by any chance, señor, got a little drink . . . ?’ ‘No.’

How often the priest had heard the same confession – Man was so limited he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization – it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt. He said, ‘Why do you tell me all this?’

He carried around with him a clearer picture of Carmen than any other village or town in the state: the long slope of grass which led up from the river to the cemetery on a tiny hill where his parents were buried. The wall of the burial-ground had fallen in: one or two crosses had been smashed by enthusiasts: an angel had lost one of its stone wings, and what gravestones were left undamaged leant at an acute angle in the long marshy grass. One image of the Mother of God had lost ears and arms and stood like a pagan Venus over the grave of some rich forgotten timber merchant. 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.

‘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.’

‘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.

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 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 in which poultry are tied. ‘You can sit down,’ one of the men said, and pushed him in a co...

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.’

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. 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.

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: it wouldn’t be fair. ‘Nobody here,’ a voice said, ‘wants their blood money.’ Again he was touched by an extraordinary affection. He was just one criminal among a herd of criminals . . . He had a sense of companionship which he had never experienced in the old days when pious people came kissing his black cotton glove.

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.

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 to feel an overwhelming responsibility for this pious woman.

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 of 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 sat 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 in it. His corruption was less evident to his senses 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...

He wasn’t a saint. Nothing in life was as ugly as death.