Graham Greene Read online

  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 with steel if he could, 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. He remembered the priest 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 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 house-keeper. That, of course, was the best solution of all, to [21] leave the living witness to the weakness of their faith. It showed the deception they had practised all these years. For if they really believed in heaven or hell, they wouldn't mind a little pain now, in return for what immensities. … The lieu­tenant, lying on his hard bed, in the damp hot dark, felt no sympathy at all with the weakness of the flesh.

  In the back room of the Academia Comercial a woman was reading to her family. Two small girls of six and ten sat on the edge of their bed, and a boy of fourteen leant against the wall with an expression of intense weariness.

  'Young Juan,' the mother read, 'from his earliest years was noted for his humility and piety. Other boys might be rough and revengeful; young Juan followed the precept of Our Lord and turned the other cheek. One day his father thought that he had told a lie and beat him: later he learnt that his son had told the truth, and he apologized to Juan. But Juan said to him: Dear father, just as Our Father in heaven has the right to chastise when he pleases ... '

  The boy rubbed his face impatiently against the whitewash and the mild voice droned on. The two little girls sat with beady intense eyes, drinking in the sweet piety.

  'We must not think that young Juan did not laugh and play like other children, though there were times when he would creep away with a holy picture-book to his father's cow­-house from the circle of his merry play-mates.'

  The boy squashed a beetle with his bare foot and thought gloomily that after all everything had an end-some day they would reach the last chapter and young Juan would die against a wall, shouting: Viva el Cristo Rey. But then, he supposed, there would be another book: they were smuggled in every month from Mexico City: if only the customs men had known where to look.

  'No, young Juan was a true young Mexican boy, and if he was more thoughtful than his fellows, he was also always the first when any play-acting was afoot. One year his class acted a little play before the bishop, based on the persecution of the Early Christians, and no one was more amused than Juan when he was chosen to play the part of Nero. And what comic spirit he put into his acting-this child, whose young manhood was [22] to be cut short by a ruler far worse than Nero. His class-mate, who later became Father Miguel Cerra, S.J., writes: None of us who were there will ever forget that day ... '

  One of the little girls licked her lips secretively. This was life.

  'The curtain rose on Juan wearing his mother's best bath­robe, a charcoal moustache, and a crown made from a tin biscuit-box. Even the good old bishop smiled when Juan strode to the front of the little home-made stage and began to declaim ...'

  The boy strangled a yawn against the whitewashed wall. He said wearily: Is he really a saint?

  He will be one day soon, when the Holy Father pleases.

  And are they all like that?

  Who?

  The martyrs.

  Yes. All.

  Even Padre José?

  Don't mention him, the mother said. How dare you? That despicable man. A traitor to God.

  He told me he was more of a martyr than the rest.

  I've told you many times not to speak to him. My dear child, oh, my dear child ...

  And the other one-the one who came to see us?

  No, he is not-exactly-like Juan.

  Is he despicable?

  No, no. Not despicable.

  The smallest girl said suddenly: He smelt funny.

  The mother went on reading: 'Did any premonition touch young Juan that night that he, too, in a few short years, would be numbered among the martyrs? We cannot say, but Father Miguel Cerra tells how that evening Juan spent longer than usual upon his knees, and when his class-mates teased him a little, as boys will ...

  The voice went on and on, mild and deliberate, inflexibly gentle: the small girls listened intently, framing in their minds little pious sentences with which to surprise their parents, and the boy yawned against the whitewash. Everything has an end.

  Presently the mother went in to her husband. She said: I am so worried about the boy.

  Why not about the girls? There is worry everywhere.

  [23] They are two little saints already. But the boy-he asks such questions-about that whisky priest. I wish we had never had him in the house.

  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 him her son to be baptized. She wanted him called Pedro-but he was so drunk that he took no notice at all and baptized the boy Carlota. Carlota.

  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 watched her with patience. He had more education than his wife: he could use a typewriter and knew the elements of book-keeping: once he had been to Mexico City: he could read a map. He knew the extent of their abandonment--the ten hours down-river to the port, the forty-two hours in the Gulf of 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.

  The old man sat on a packing-case in the little dry patio. He was very fat and short of breath: he panted a little as if after great exertion in the heat. Once he had been something of an astronomer and now he tried to pick out the [24] constellations, staring up into the night sky. He wore only a shirt and trousers: his feet were bare, but there remained something un­mistakably clerical in his manner. Forty years of the priesthood had branded him. There was complete silence over the town: everybody was asleep.

  The glittering worlds lay there in space like a promise-the world was not the universe. Somewhere Christ might not have died. He could not believe that to a watcher there this world could shine with such brilliance: it would roll heavily in space under its fog like a burning and abandoned ship. The whole globe was blanketed with his own
sin.

  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 Governors 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 hanged 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 than that-he was [25] like an obscene picture hung here every day to corrupt children with.

  He belched on his packing-case shaken by wind. José, what are you doing? You come to bed. There was never anything to do at all-no daily Office, no Masses, no confessions, and it was no good praying any longer at all: a prayer demanded an act and he had no intention of acting. He had lived for two years now in a continuous state of mortal sin with no one to hear his confession: nothing to do at all but sit and eat-eat far too much: she fed him and fattened him and preserved him like a prize boar. José. He began to hiccup with nerves at the thought of facing for the seven hundred and thirty-eighth time his harsh house-keeper-his wife. There she would be, lying in the big shameless bed that filled up half the room, a bony shadow within the mosquito tent, a lanky jaw and a short grey pigtail and an absurd bonnet. She thought she had a position to keep up: a government pensioner: the wife of the only married priest. She was proud of it. José. I'm-hic-coming, my love, he said, and lifted himself from the crate. Somebody somewhere laughed.

  He lifted little pink eyes like those of a pig conscious of the slaughter-room. A high child's voice said: José. He stared in a bewildered way around the patio. At a barred window oppo­site, three children watched him with deep gravity. He turned his back and took a step or two towards his door, moving very slowly because of his bulk. José, somebody squeaked again, José. He looked back over his shoulder and caught the faces out in expressions of wild glee: his little pink eyes showed no anger-he had no right to be angry: he moved his mouth into a ragged and baffled, disintegrated smile, and as if that sign of weakness gave them all the license they needed, they squealed back at him without disguise: José, José. Come to bed, José. Their little shameless voices filled the patio, and he smiled humbly and sketched small gestures for silence, and there was no respect anywhere left for him in his home, in the town, in the whole abandoned star.

  Chapter Three

  CAPTAIN FELLOWS sang loudly to himself, while the little motor chugged in the bows of the canoe. His big sun­burned face was like the map of a mountain region-patches of varying brown with two small lakes that were his eyes. He composed his songs as he went, and his voice was quite tuneless. Going home, going home, the food will be good for m-e-e. I don't like the food in the bloody citee. He turned out of the main stream into a tributary: a few alligators lay on the sandy margin. I don't like your snouts, O trouts. I don't like your snouts, O trouts. He was a happy man.

  The banana plantations came down on either bank: his voice boomed under the hard sun: that and the churr of the motor were the only sounds anywhere-he was completely alone. He was borne up on a big tide of boyish joy-doing a mans job, the heart of the wild: he felt no responsibility for anyone. In only one other country had he felt more happy, and that was in war-time France, in the ravaged landscape of trenches. The tributary corkscrewed farther into the marshy overgrown state, and a buzzard lay spread out in the sky. Captain Fellows opened a tin box and ate a sandwich-food never tasted so good as out of doors. A monkey made a sudden chatter at him as he went by, and Captain Fellows felt happily at one with nature-a wide shallow kinship with all the world moved with the blood­stream through the veins: he was at home anywhere. The artful little devil, he thought, the artful little devil. He began to sing again-somebody else's words a little jumbled in his friendly unretentive memory. Give to me the life I love, bread I dip in the river, under the wide and starry sky, the hunter's home from the sea. The plantations petered out, and far behind the mountains came into view, heavy black lines drawn low-down across the sky. A few bungalows rose out of the mud. He was home. A very slight cloud marred his happiness.

  He thought: After all, a man likes to be welcomed.

  He walked up to his bungalow: it was distinguished from [27] the others which lay along the bank by a tiled roof, a flagpost 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-it was not she he had expected. 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. Where's Coral?

  She's with the policeman, Mrs. Fellows said.

  I hoped she'd meet me, he said, roaming aimlessly about the little, inferior room, full of boot-trees, while his brain caught up with her. Policeman? What policeman?

  He came last night and Coral let him sleep on the veranda. He's looking for somebody, she says.

  What an extraordinary thing! Here?

  He's not an ordinary policeman. He's an officer. He left his men in the village-Coral says.

  I do think you ought to be up, he said. I mean-these fellows, you can't trust them. He felt no conviction when he added: She's just a kid.

  I tell you I had fever, Mrs. Fellows wailed. I felt so terribly ill.

  You'll be all right. just a touch of the sun. You'll see­-now I'm home.

  [28] I had such a headache. I couldn't read or sew. And then this man ...

  Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round. She dressed up her fear, so that she could look at it-in the form of fever, rats, unemploy­ment. The real thing was taboo-death coming nearer every year in the strange place: everybody packing up and leaving, while she stayed in a cemetery no one visited, in a big above­ground tomb.

  He said: I suppose I ought to go and see the man.

  He sat down on the bed and put his hand upon her arm. They had something in common-a kind of diffidence. He said absent-mindedly: That dago secretary of the boss has gone.

  Where?

  West. He could feel her arm go stiff: she strai
ned away from him towards the wall. He had touched the taboo-he shared it, the bond was broken, he couldn't tell why. Headache, darling?

  Hadn't you better see the man?

  Oh, yes, yes. I'll be off. But he didn't stir: it was the child who came to him

  She stood in the doorway watching them with a look of immense responsibility. Before her serious gaze they became a boy you couldn't trust and a ghost you could almost puff away: a piece of frightened air. She was very young-about thirteen-and at that age you are not afraid of many things, age and death, all the things which may turn up, snake-bite and fever and rats and a bad smell. Life hadn't got at her yet: she had a false air of impregnability. But she had been reduced already, as it were, to the smallest terms-everything was there but on the thinnest lines. That was what the sun did to a child, reduced it to a framework. The gold bangle on the bony wrist was like a padlock on a canvas door a fist could break. She said: I told the policeman you were home.

  Oh, yes, yes, Captain Fellows said. Got a kiss for your old father?

  She came solemnly across the room and kissed him formally upon the forehead-he could feel the lack of meaning. She had other things to think about. She said: I told cook that mother would not be getting up for dinner.

  [29] I think you ought to make the effort, dear, Captain Fellows said.

  Why? Coral said.

  Oh well ...

  Coral said: I want to talk to you alone. Mrs. Fellows shifted inside her tent-just so she could be certain Coral would arrange the final evacuation. Common sense was a horrifying quality she had never possessed: it was common sense which said: The dead can't hear or She can't know now or Tin flowers are more practical.

  I don't understand, Captain Fellows said uneasily, why your mother shouldn't hear.

  She wouldn't want to go. It would only scare her.