A novel by Graham Greene
“If she’s dying,” Mr Tench said, “there’s no point in a doctor seeing her.”
But the stranger had got up: unwillingly he had been summoned to an occasion he couldn’t pass by. He said sadly: “It always seems to happen. Like this.”
“You’ll have a job not to miss the boat.”
“I shall miss it,” he said. “I am meant to miss it” (22).
__________________________________________________________________________
The passage continues with both Mr Tench and the stranger’s admission that “she will be no more dying than I am,” as if to indicate the futility of the noble act. However, when Mr Tench replies, “You can do no good,” the stranger (the priest) challenges his remark. The passage is drenched in a sort of melancholy and acceptance allotted to this purpose, yet it cannot be more stressed that the stranger is aware of a strong sense of purpose.
“He had the kind of dwarfed dignity Mr Tench was accustomed to – the dignity of people afraid of a little pain and yet sitting down with some firmness in his chair” (23).
__________________________________________________________________________
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 experienced was vacancy – a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.
He lay down his shirt and breeches on the bed and blew out the candles. 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 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 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 (33-4).
__________________________________________________________________________
She said: “I would rather die.”
“Oh,” he said, “of course. That goes without saying. But we have to go on living” (38)
__________________________________________________________________________
Now they were both tired out and the mule simply sat down. The priest scrambled off and began to laugh. He was feeling happy. It is one of the strange discoveries a man makes 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.
He came cautiously out of the belt of trees into a marshy clearing: the whole state was like that, river and swamp and forest: he knelt down in the late sunlight and bathed his face in a brown pool which reflected back at him like a piece of glazed pottery the round, stubbly, and hollow features; they were so unexpected that he grinned at them – with the sly evasive untrustworthy smile of a man caught out. In the old days he often practised a gesture a long while in front of a glass so that he had come to know his own face as well as an actor does. It was a form of humility – his own natural face hadn’t seemed the right one. It was a buffoon’s face, good enough for mild jokes to women, but unsuitable at the altar rail. He had tried to change it – and indeed, he thought, indeed I have succeeded, they’ll never recognize me now, and the cause of his happiness came back to him like the taste of brandy, promising temporary relief from fear, loneliness, a lot of things. He was being driven by the presence of the soldiers to the very place where he most wanted to be. He had avoided it for six years, but now it wasn’t his fault – it was his duty to go there – it couldn’t count as sin. He went back to his mule and kicked it gently: “Up, mule, up” – a small gaunt man in torn peasant’s clothes going for the first time in many years, like any ordinary man, to his home.
In any case, even if he could have gone south and avoided the village, it was only one more surrender: the years behind him were littered with similar surrenders – feast-days and fast-days and days of abstinence had been first to go: then he had ceased to trouble more than occasionally about his breviary – and finally he had left it behind altogether at the port in one of his periodic attempts at escape. Then the altar stone went – too dangerous to carry with him. He had no business to say Mass without it: he was probably liable to suspension, but penalties of the ecclesiastical kind began to seem unreal in a state where the only penalty was the civil one of death. The routine of his life like a dam was cracked and forgetfulness came dribbling in, 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 whiskey priest – but every failure dropped out of sight and out of 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.
The mule splashed across the clearing and they entered the forest again. Now that he no longer despaired it didn’t mean, of course, that he wasn’t damned – it was simply that after a time the mystery became too great, a damned man putting God into the mouths of men: an odd sort of servant, that, for the devil. His mind was full of a simplified mythology: Michael dressed in armour slew a dragon, and the angels fell through space like comets with beautiful streaming hair because they were jealous, so one of the fathers had said, of what God intended for men – the enormous privilege of life – this life (81-3).
__________________________________________________________________________
He said gently, not looking at her, with the same embarrassed smile: “How’s Brigida?” His heart jumped at the name: a sin may have enormous consequences: it was six years since he had been – home.
“She’s as well as the rest of us. What did you expect?”
He had his satisfaction: it was connected with his crime: he had no business to feel pleasure at anything attached to that past. He said mechanically: “That’s good,” while his heart beat with its secret and appalling love. He said: “I’m very tired. The police were about near Zapata…”
“Why didn’t you make for Montecristo?”
He looked quickly up with anxiety. It wasn’t the welcome the he had expected: a small knot of people had gathered between the huts and watched him from a safe distance – there was a little decaying bandstand and a single stall for gaseosas – people had brought their chairs out for the evening. Nobody came forward to kiss his hand and ask his blessing. It was as if he had descended by means of his sin into the human struggles to learn other things besides despair and love, that a man can be unwelcomed even in his own home. He said: “The Red Shirts were there.”
“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 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 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 girls: a thin washed-out child – of five, six, seven? he couldn’t tell – and one who had been sharpened by hunger into an appearance of devilry and malice beyond her age. A young woman stared out of the child’s eyes. He watched them disperse again, saying nothing: they were strangers (84-6).
__________________________________________________________________________
He gave a little yapping cry like dog’s – the absurd shorthand of grief. The old-young child laughed. He said: “Why don’t they catch me? The fools. Why don’t they catch me?” The little girl laughed again: he stared at her sightlessly, as if he could hear the sound, but couldn’t see the face. Happiness was dead again before it had had time to breathe; he was like a woman with a stillborn child – bury it quickly and forget and begin again. Perhaps the next would live (87).
__________________________________________________________________________
He thought: If I go, I shall meet other priests: I shall go to confession: I shall feel contrition and be forgiven: eternal life will begin for me all over again. The Church taught that it was every man’s first duty to save his own soul. The simplest ideas of hell and heaven moved in his brain: life without books, without contact with educated men, had peeled away from his memory everything but the simplest outline of the mystery (88-9).
__________________________________________________________________________
If he left them, they would be safe: and they would be free from his example: he was the only priest the children could remember. It was from him they would take their ideas of the faith. But it was from him too they took God – in their mouths. When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. Wasn’t it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake, even if they were corrupted by his example? He was shaken with the enormity of the problem: he lay with his hands over his eyes: nowhere, in all the wide flat marshy land, was there a single person he could consult. He raised the brandy bottle to his mouth.
He said shyly: “And Brigida…is she…well?”
“You saw her just now.”
“No.” He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t recognized her. It was making light of his mortal sin: you couldn’t do a thing like that and then not even recognize…
“Yes, she was there.” Maria went to the door and called: “Brigida, Brigida,” and the priest turned on his side and watched her come in out of the outside landscape of terror and lust – that small malicious child who had laughed at him.
“Go and speak to the father,” Maria said. “Go on.”
He made an attempt to hide the brandy bottle, but there was nowhere…he tried to minimize it in his hands, watching her, feeling the shock of human love.
“She knows her catechism,” Maria said, “but she won’t say it….”
The child stood there, watching him with acuteness and contempt. They had spent no love in her conception: just fear and despair and half a bottle of brandy and the sense of loneliness had driven him to an act which horrified him – and this scared shamefaced overpowering love was the result. He said: “Why not? Why won’t you say it?” taking quick secret glances, never meeting her gaze, feeling his heart pounding in his breast unevenly, like an old donkey engine, with the balked desire to save her from – everything.
“Why should I?”
“God wishes it.”
“How do you know?”
He was aware of an immense load of responsibility; it was indistinguishable from love. This, he thought, must be what all parents feel: ordinary men go through life like this crossing their fingers, praying against pain, afraid (89-90).
__________________________________________________________________________
He caught a look in the child’s eyes which frightened him – it was again as if a grown woman was there before her time, making her plans, aware of far too much. It was like seeing his own mortal sin look back at him, without contrition (91).
__________________________________________________________________________
He was astonished and 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 if a whole world had ended (93-4).
__________________________________________________________________________
He said: “One of the fathers had told us that joy always depends on pain. Pain is part of joy. We are hungry and then think how we enjoy our food at last. We are thirsty…:” He stopped suddenly, with his eyes glancing away into the shadows, expecting the cruel laugh that never came. He said: “We deny ourselves so that we can enjoy. You have heard of rich men in the north who eat salted foods, so that they can be thirsty – for what they call the cocktail. Before the marriage, too, there is the long betrothal….” Again he stopped. He felt his own unworthiness like a weight at the back of the tongue. There was a smell of hot wax from where the candle drooped in the immense nocturnal heat: people shifted on the hard floor in the shadows. The smell of unwashed human beings warred with the wax. He cried out stubbornly in a voice of authority: “That is why I tell you that heaven is here; this is a part of heaven just as pain is a part of pleasure.” He said: “Pray that you will suffer more and more and more. Never get tired of suffering. The police watching you, the soldiers gathering taxes, the beating you always get from the jefe because you are too poor to pay, smallpox and fever, hunger…that is all part of heaven – the preparation. Perhaps without them – who can tell? – you wouldn’t enjoy heaven so much. Heaven would not be complete. And heaven. What is heaven?” Literary phrases from what seemed now to be another life altogether – the strict quiet life of the seminary – became confused on his tongue: the names of precious stones: Jerusalem the golden. But these people had never seen gold.
He went rather stumblingly on: “Heaven is where there is no jefe, no unjust laws, no taxes, no soldiers, and no hunger. Your children do not die in heaven.” The door of the hut opened and a man slipped in. There was whispering out of range of the candlelight. “You will never be afraid there – or unsafe. There are no Red Shirts. Nobody grows old. The crops never fail. Oh, it is easy to say all the things that there will not be in heaven: what is there is God. That is more difficult. Our words are made to describe what we know with our senses. We say ‘light,’ but we are thinking only of the sun, ‘love’…” It was not easy to concentrate: the police were not far away. That man had probably brought news. “That means perhaps a child…” The door opened again: he could see another day drawn across like a grey slate outside. A voice whispered urgently to him: “Father.”
“Yes?”
“The police are on the way: they are only a mile off, coming through the forest.”
This was what he was used to: the words not striking home, the hurried close, the expectation of pain coming between him and his faith. He said stubbornly: “Above all remember this – heaven is here.” Were they on horseback or on foot? If they were on foot, he had twenty minutes left to finish Mass and hide. “Here now, at this minute, your fear and my fear are part of heaven, where there will be no fear any more for ever.” He turned his back on them and began very quickly to recite the Credo. There was a time when he had approached the Canon of the Mass with actual physical dread – the first time he had consumed the body and blood of God in a state of mortal sin: but then life bred its excuses – it hadn’t after a while seemed to matter very much, whether he was damned or not, so long as these others…(94-6).
__________________________________________________________________________
The priest followed Maria into the hut. The bottle of brandy lay on the table: he touched it with his fingers – there wasn’t much left. He said: “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 cure…”
He said gently and sadly: “You mustn’t be superstitious. That was simply – wine. There’s nothing sacred in wine. Only it’s hard to get hold of here. That’s why I kept a store of it in Concepcion. But they’ve found that.”
“Now perhaps you’ll go – go away altogether. You’re no good any more to anyone,” she said fiercely. “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…”
She said savagely: “I know about things. I went to school. I’m not like these others – ignorant. I know you’re a bad priest. That time we were together – I bet that wasn’t all you’ve done. I’ve heard things, I can tell you. Do you think God wants you to stay and die – a whiskey priest like you?” He stood patiently in front of her, as he had stood in front of the lieutenant, listening. He hadn’t known she was capable of all this thought. She said: “Suppose you die. You’ll be a martyr, won’t you? What kind of martyr do you think you’ll make? It’s enough to make people mock” (106-7).
__________________________________________________________________________
He was appalled by her maturity…
He prayed silently: “O God, give me any kind of death – without contrition, in a state of sin – only save this child.”
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: not it was a mystery. He was aware of his own desperate inadequacy.
…”I would give my life, that’s nothing, my soul…my dear, my dear, try to understand that you are – so important” (109-111).
__________________________________________________________________________
Judas – 123 – “It was too easy otherwise to idealize him as a man who fought with God – a Prometheus, a noble victim in a hopeless war.”
__________________________________________________________________________
why unlike Jose – 127
__________________________________________________________________________
God’s image – 136
__________________________________________________________________________
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 really been much left (160).
__________________________________________________________________________
- weeps
172 - They were extraordinarily foolish over pictures. Why not burn them?
__________________________________________________________________________
God’s image – 177
__________________________________________________________________________
He began formally to pay his farewell to the world: he couldn’t put any heart into it….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 (180).
__________________________________________________________________________
He prayed silently: O God, send them someone more worthwhile to suffer for. It seemed to him a damnable mockery that they should sacrifice themselves for a whiskey priest with a bastard child (183).
__________________________________________________________________________
“For men may come and men may go. But I go on for ever."
shocked him, trite, untruth – buzzard
Jewels Five Words Long; A Treasury of English Verse – Coral Fellows
“‘Come back! Come back!’ he cried in grief
Across the stormy water,
‘And I’ll forgive your Highland chief –
My daughter, O my daughter.’”
…These words seemed to contain all that he felt himself of repentance, longing, and unhappy love (198-9).
__________________________________________________________________________
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 like a constriction which prevented their escape: he could feel his prayers like undigested food heavy in his body, unable to escape (205).
__________________________________________________________________________
faith could move mountains – God missed an opportunity 209
__________________________________________________________________________
Who was he to disbelieve in miracles (211)?
__________________________________________________________________________
It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin – only the hard and careful man and the saint are free of it. These people went out of the stable clean: he was the only one left who hadn’t repented, confessed, and been absolved. He wanted to say to this man: “Love is not wrong, but love should be happy and open – it is only wrong when it is secret, unhappy…it can be more unhappy than anything but the loss of God. It is the loss of God. You don’t need a penance, my child, you have suffered enough,” and to this other: “Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.” But the habit of the confessional reasserted itself: it was as if he was back in the little stuffy wooden boxlike coffin in which men bury their uncleanness with their priest. He said: “Mortal sin…danger…self-control,” as if those words meant anything at all. He said: “Say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys” (231-2).
__________________________________________________________________________
But because it was so peaceful he was all the more aware of his own sin as he prepared to take the Elements – “Let not the participation of Thy Body, O Lord Jesus Christ, which I, though unworthy, presume to receive, turn to my judgment and condemnation.” A virtuous man can almost cease to believe in Hell; but he carried Hell about him. Sometimes at night he dreamed of it…Domine, non sum dignus…domine, non sum dignus….Evil ran like malaria in his veins…(237)
__________________________________________________________________________
PRIDE - 264
__________________________________________________________________________
God is love – 268-9
__________________________________________________________________________
There aren’t miracles, it is simply that we have enlarged our conception of what life is (270).
__________________________________________________________________________
permission to confess – 271
__________________________________________________________________________
wow – 280-4
__________________________________________________________________________
295 – the great testing day has come
__________________________________________________________________________
296 – Because God had decided otherwise – Juan
No comments:
Post a Comment