“Well!” shouted Father Quintana in a flash of good humor. “Wouldn’t I have been better off losing my faith and avoiding all that anguish? No sir, because then I wouldn’t have fought for independence. It’s as simple as that. I would have let myself be beaten in the first fight. My faith in the nation that I want, free, without slaves, without the horrible need for thousands and thousands of bottom dogs, ignorant, dying of hunger, all this, Baltasar, would not have been possible without my faith in God. You may have your own formula. This is mine. I’m not asking you to believe as I do. I’m not that simple. I am asking you to complicate your own secular faith. You’ve come from far, far away, and this continent is very large. But we have two things in common. We understand each other because we speak Spanish. And, like it or not, we’ve had three centuries of Catholic, Christian culture, marked by the symbols, values, follies, the crimes and the dreams of Christianity in the New World. I know fellows like you: they’ve all passed through here; you’ve already seen them, although the ones you saw were a bit more beaten up than you, like the lawyers, scribes, authors of laws and proclamations in my own company. I’ve talked with all of you for ten years. You have given me the education which, sadly, I never had. My parents were mule drivers from the coast. I was in a religious seminary when I was young, and now that I’m grown up, I’m in the secular seminar with all of you. But let’s get on with it. I’m not foretelling anything — I have it right under my nose, as pugged and battered as it may be. All of you would like to put an end to that past which seems unjust and absurd to you, to forget it. Yes, how good it would have been to be founded by Montesquieu instead of Torquemada. But it didn’t happen that way. Do we want now to be Europeans, modern, rich, governed by the spirit of the laws and the universal rights of man? Well, let me tell you that nothing like that will ever happen unless we carry the corpse of our past with us. What I’m asking you is that we not sacrifice anything, son, not the magic of the Indians, not the theology of the Christians, not the reason of our European contemporaries. It would be better if we gathered up everything we are in order to go on being and to be, finally, something better. Don’t let yourself be divided and dazzled by a single idea, Baltasar. Put all your ideas on one side of the balance, then put everything that negates them on the other, and then you’ll be closer to the truth. Work counter to your secular faith, brother. Put next to it my divine faith, but as ballast, weight, contrast, and a part of your secularism. I do the same thing, working from my faith, with yours … Take me into account more, much more tomorrow than today, and think seriously that if I not only joined but forwarded the revolution until the end, it was so that history would not leave the Church behind—my church. See to it that you don’t leave your own church of romantic, anticlerical philosophers behind. I don’t want to find out ten years from now that you became just one more man made sick by frustrated Utopias, by betrayed ideals. And don’t think I don’t thank you all for your skepticism, my good company of lawyers. But I have what you lack, let me say it with forgiveness and humility. I had to burn the midnight oil reading St. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, St. Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus. Rousseau and Voltaire are a corrective for me, even an emetic. But you modern fellows, what will you use as a corrective for what you’ve learned? Experience, of course. But experience without ideas does not become a destiny, a soul … And what is the soul, St. Thomas wonders, but the form of the body? Think about it and you’ll see that that’s no paradox: the soul is the form of the body. Without the soul, the body would not last, would begin instantly to stink and disintegrate … Give soul to your body, Baltasar, and let’s hope we see each other again in ten years … Bah, perhaps tomorrow I’ll be captured, and perhaps that’s why I felt the need to talk with you today. I want you to think about me when you hear about my end. I also want you to take charge of my memory.”
The priest was silent for a long time, and later Baltasar Bustos chastised himself for what, with time, he came to see as a cowardice that ratified the worst aspects of his character, argumentative without nobility, envious of what he wasn’t, abusive toward the weak, tempted to humiliate anyone he thought inferior … He did not fool himself later. But in that moment, when Quintana stopped talking, he thought he was acting as the priest had asked him to after giving over to him his soul, while, in his blindness, Baltasar Bustos thought the priest was only giving him a lesson.
“I was wondering, as I listened to you, what bothered me most in you — the solitary, chaste priest or the promiscuous priest with children of his own.”
Quintana tried to penetrate with his eyes the grating that separated them, so that Baltasar would realize the priest was hurt, silenced by a sudden shock more than by overwhelming fatigue.
“Do you want to fight with me?”
“You asked me to be combative. I can imagine that one fine day the Pope will lift the excommunication and you will think that everything you did was useless, a failure…”
“Forgive me, I don’t follow your line of thought…”
“I mean that I hope you aren’t alive when the Church forgives you and says ‘I was mistaken.’”
“The deed of trying to do something good is sufficient unto itself.”
“Even if it fails.”
“For God’s sake, Baltasar, don’t get lost in all this. All I wanted to tell you is that you and I resemble each other. We are both fighting for our souls, although you confuse the soul with matter. It’s of no importance. You may be right. The soul is the form of the body. But you and I … Later, those who fight for money and power will come. That’s what I fear. That will be the nation’s failure. And then you and I — or what you and I leave in this world — should help the thieves and the ambitious to recover their souls. That would be my answer to those who forgive me two hundred years from now.”
“But you, in part, agree with them.” Baltasar tied to guess at the look on Quintana’s mistreated face, turned into gridwork and made even uglier by the grating on the confessional door. “You have been lascivious, a hypocrite, and a seducer…”
“Do you know what the word devil means?” asked the priest, with his eyes lowered and his brow severe. “My problem is that I have not been exempt from the temptations of the flesh. Yours, on the other hand, is that you will not be exempt from the temptations of the soul. Devil means liar.”
“See, you judge me with the same severity with which you have been judged…”
“Ah, and it also means accuser. I want you to know how they are going to judge me, Baltasar. They are going to humiliate me on my knees before the bishop. They are going to repeat the excommunication and the anathemas. Then they will deliver me to the secular authorities. They will shoot me in the back and then again, down on my knees. I will be decapitated, brother. They will put my head in an iron cage in the public square of Veracruz. I shall be an example for all those who feel the temptation to rebel…”