Quintana lowered his head, and Baltasar saw the tawny-colored cloth of his celebrated cap hiding his curly dark hair, which the priest revealed so as not to stand out from the other men in the encampment, but in so doing he revealed himself with more fanfare than if he’d proclaimed it aloud: only Anselmo Quintana wears a cap amid all these top hats worn by the lawyers and the red kerchiefs worn by the troops; thus, Anselmo Quintana is the man who does not use a cap to disguise himself but who, by the same token, does not wear frock coats or tie kerchiefs on his head and who stares intensely at two bottles in order to choose between good and bad alcohol just as he might choose between reason and the Church. But you can’t just choose God: God is, with or without the Church, reason, or believers. “That’s where I have concentrated my real rebellion,” the priest Anselmo continued. “I’m telling this to you, Baltasar, because you are like my younger brother in the world and you are also rebelling against its laws, but you remain open to new persuasions. My real rebellion was to suffer the Calvary of losing my Church but not my God … Imagine what went through my soul when I took up arms on the Gulf Coast, angry over the loss of my living. Imagine me pug-nosed and blind, just ten years ago, consumed with lust, in love with gambling, with women, a horse’s ass of a priest, with a troop of bastards scattered all over the place, a seducer of women who came to kneel next to me and who thought that, to receive my forgiveness, they had to give themselves to me, and from time to time I did not discourage them … I took up arms, my boy, being the kind of man I was, and then excommunication hits along with the rain of labels: apostate against the Holy Catholic religion, libertine, seditious, revolutionary, schismatic, implacable enemy of Christianity and of the state, deist, materialist, and atheist, guilty of divine and human treason, seducer, impenitent, lascivious, hypocrite, traitor to king and country. They didn’t omit a one, Baltasar. The Holy Inquisition did not omit a single crime. They threw all of them at my poor head, and every time an accusation struck me between the eyes, I would say, ‘They are right; they must be right. It’s true, I deserve this, and my poor, damned motive for rebelling makes me a criminal in all those other things, and that, too, must be true…’ But I think, brother Baltasar, that the Inquisition, as usual, went too far; they accused me of too many things, some right, others outlandish, and I said to myself then, ‘God cannot look on me with as much injustice as my judges. In God’s vocabulary there are probably few words for me, but there most certainly must be a dictionary common to Jesus Christ and His servant Anselmo Quintana. They throw so many words at me, but not enough that every week, from Thursday to Friday, you, Lord, cannot still speak, my Jesus, with the most lascivious, impenitent seducer among your servants…’
“The word is the only thing that links us when everything else becomes useless, treacherous, threatening. The word is the ultimate reality of Christ, His vigil among us, what allows us, without pride, to say, ‘I am like Him…’”
Quintana raised his voice as he said this, as if his faith could all be reduced to these few words, and Baltasar, in the half light of the confessional, saw through the grating not the fluttering earflaps of Father Anselmo Quintana’s cap but the head of Gabriela Cóo, crowned with clouds and weeds. He had to dispel that adorable vision because the voice of the priest continued, lower now, but more certain as welclass="underline" “From that time I only spoke with Him, but He was more severe than all my judges put together, because no one can fool Him. There are no little tricks with Him. God is the Supreme Being who knows all, even what we imagine about Him, and steals the march on us and imagines us first; and if we go about thinking that it depends on us to believe or not in Him, He steals the march on us once again and finds the way of telling us that He will go on believing in us no matter what happens, even if we abandon Him and deny Him. That is the voice I listened to during the night when my soul suffered tribulation because of the edicts of expulsion from the Church and the calls for me to repent: the voice of Christ saying to me, ‘I am going to go on believing in you, Anselmo Quintana, even if you are a seducer, lascivious, a libertine, a hypocrite, which you are; why deny it? But what you are not, Anselmo, my son, is an apostate, a heretic, an atheist, or a traitor to your country, that you are not…’
“‘Listen to me carefully, your God says to you: there is no way that I’m going to allow that lie to pass.’”
He raised his eyes to tell Baltasar that all he needed to hear from God’s voice were those words, to fight for ten years, “to not yield in my battle for my country or in my other struggle for the love and confidence of my Creator. Imagine what one thing would have been without the other — neither the nation nor God; that most certainly would have been my anguish, and they know it, which is why they call me a heretic, excommunicate me, and ask me to repent and come back to the sheepfold. But Jesus said to me, ‘Anselmo, my son, don’t be a comfortable Christian; make life hell for the Church and the king, because they adore tranquil Christians. I, on the other hand, adore rampaging Christians like you; you gain nothing by being a Catholic without problems, a simple believer, a man of faith who doesn’t even realize that faith is absurd and is faith and not reason because of that. Reason cannot be illogical; faith is and has to be, because you have to believe in me against all evidence, and if I were a logician, I wouldn’t be God. I wouldn’t have sacrificed myself. I would have accepted all the temptations in the desert and would be’—are you listening to me, Anselmo, my son, are you listening to me, brother Baltasar? — ‘the very same long-tailed, incorrigible Devil who invented the statement “I think, therefore I am.”’ What pretension! Not even my thoughts are my own, not even my very existence. I neither think nor exist alone. I share each word with God, with you, Baltasar, and each heartbeat as well. Then I learned something else, that it was my obligation, in the name of the simple people of this world, to be complicated; just ask yourself right now as I look at you and listen to you, if you aren’t too comfortable in your philosophy, because I think you are being very simple with your own secular faith in reason and progress. You are as foolishly devout as those women who grow old in churches, sweeping and lighting candles every single day. Please, Baltasar, always be a problem, be a problem for your Rousseau and your Montesquieu, and all your philosophers. Don’t let them pass through your soul without paying something at the spiritual customs house; don’t give your faith to any ruler, any secular state, any philosophy, any military or economic power without adding your confusion, your complication, your exceptions, your damned imagination that deforms all truths.