As they set off he said, "I was a little foolish last night, Sancho."
"I thought you spoke very well."
"I did make you understand, perhaps, a little about the Trinity?"
"Understand, yes. Believe, no."
"Then will you please forget the half bottle? It was a mistake that I should never have made."
"I will remember only the full three bottles, friend."
IV
HOW SANCHO IN HIS TURN
CAST NEW LIGHT ON AN OLD FAITH
1
Perhaps, light though the wine had been, it was the three and a half bottles which made them next day travel for a while in silence. At last Sancho remarked, "We shall feel better after a good lunch."
"Ah, poor Teresa," Father Quixote said. "I hope Father Herrera will appreciate her steaks."
"What is so wonderful about her steaks?"
Father Quixote made no reply. He had guarded the secret from the Bishop of Motopo: he would certainly guard her secret from the Mayor.
The road curved. For an inexplicable reason Rocinante put on a spurt of speed instead of slowing down and nearly bumped into a sheep. The road ahead was full of its companions. They were like a disturbed sea of small frothing waves.
"You may as well sleep a bit more," the Mayor said. "We shall never get through this." A dog came charging back to round up the delinquent. "Sheep are stupid beasts," the Mayor exclaimed with venom. "I have never understood why the founder of your faith should have compared them with ourselves. 'Feed my sheep.' Oh yes, perhaps after all like other good men he was a cynic. 'Feed them well, make them fat, so that they can be eaten in their turn.' 'The Lord is my shepherd.' But if we are sheep why in heaven's name should we trust our shepherd? He's going to guard us from wolves all right, oh yes, but only so that he can sell us later to the butcher."
Father Quixote took the breviary from his pocket and began ostentatiously to read, but he had fallen on a singularly dull and unmeaning passage which quite failed to exclude the words of the Mayor, words which pained him.
"And he actually preferred sheep to goats," the Mayor said. "What a silly, sentimental preference that is. The goat has all the uses that a sheep has and in addition many of the virtues of a cow. The sheep gives wool all right -- but the goat gives its skin in man's service. The sheep provides mutton, but personally I would rather eat kid. And the goat, like the cow, provides milk and cheese. A sheep's cheese is fit only for Frenchmen."
Father Quixote raised his eyes and saw the way was clear at last. He put away his breviary and started Rocinante on the road again. "The man without faith cannot blaspheme," he said as much to himself as to the Mayor. But he thought: All the same, why sheep? Why did He in His infinite wisdom choose the symbol of sheep? It was not a question that had been answered by any of the old theologians whom he kept on the shelves in El Toboso: not even by St Francis de Sales, informative as he was about the elephant and the kestrel, the spider and the bee and the partridge. Certainly the question had not been raised in the Catecismo de la Doctrina Cristiana by that holy man Antonio Claret, a former Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba, which he had read as a child -- though he seemed to remember that a shepherd and his lambs had figured among the illustrations. He said irrelevantly, "Children have a great love for lambs."
"And goats," the Mayor said. "Don't you remember the little goat carts of our childhood? Where are all those goats now? Condemned to the eternal flames?" He looked at his watch. "I suggest that before we buy your purple socks we give ourselves a good lunch at Botin's."
"I hope it's not a very expensive restaurant, Sancho."
"Don't worry. On this occasion you're my guest. The sucking-pigs are famous there -- we won't have to eat any of the good shepherd's lambs, which are such a favourite in our country. Botin's was a restaurant very much favoured by the secret police in the days of Franco."
"God rest his soul," Father Quixote said quickly.
"I wish I believed in damnation," the Mayor replied, "for I would certainly put him -- as I am sure Dante would have done -- in the lowest depths."
"I suspect human judgement, even Dante's," Father Quixote said. "It's not the same as the judgement of God."
"I expect you would put him in Paradise?"
"I've never said that, Sancho. I don't deny that he did many wrong things."
"Ah, but there's that convenient escape you've invented -- Purgatory."
"I've invented nothing -- neither Hell nor Purgatory."
"Forgive me, father. I meant of course your Church."
"The Church depends on written authority as your Party depends on Marx and Lenin."
"But you believe your books are the word of God."
"Be fair, Sancho. Do you not think -- except sometimes at night when you can't sleep -- that Marx and Lenin are as infallible as -- well, Matthew and Mark?"
"And when you can't sleep, monsignor?"
"The idea of Hell has sometimes disturbed my sleeplessness. Perhaps that same night in your room you are thinking of Stalin and the camps. Was Stalin -- or Lenin -- necessarily right? Perhaps you are asking that question at the same moment when I am asking myself whether it is possible. . . how can a merciful and loving God. . .? Oh, I cling to my old books, but I have my doubts too. The other night -- because of something Teresa said to me in the kitchen about the heat of her stove -- I reread all the Gospels. Do you know that St Matthew mentions Hell fifteen times in fifty-two pages of my bible and St John not once? St Mark twice in thirty-one pages and St Luke three times in fifty-two. Well, of course, St Matthew was a tax collector, poor man, and he probably believed in the efficacy of punishment, but it made me wonder. . ."
"And how right you were."
"I hope -- friend -- that you sometimes doubt too. It's human to doubt."
"I try not to doubt," the Mayor said.
"Oh, so do I. So do I. In that we are certainly alike."
The Mayor put his hand for a moment on Father Quixote's shoulder, and Father Quixote could feel the electricity of affection in the touch. It's odd, he thought, as he steered Rocinante with undue caution round a curve, how sharing a sense of doubt can bring men together perhaps even more than sharing a faith. The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference: the doubter fights only with himself.
"The thought of the sucking-pig at Botin's," the Mayor said, "reminds me of that pretty fable of the Prodigal Son. Of course I realize the difference, for in that story I think it was a calf the father slaughtered -- yes, a fatted calf. I hope our sucking-pig will be as well fattened."
"A very beautiful parable," Father Quixote said with a note of defiance. He felt uneasy about what was to come.
"Yes, it begins beautifully," said the Mayor. "There is this very bourgeois household, a father and two sons. One might describe the father as a rich Russian kulak who regards his peasants as so many souls whom he owns."