'Dear friend,' I read, 'I write to you because I loved your mother and in these last hours I want to communicate with her son. My hours are limited: I expect any moment that knock upon the door. They can hardly ring the bell, for the electricity as usual is off. The American Ambassador is about to come back and Baron Samedi will surely pay a little tribute in return. It happens like that all over the world. A few Communists can always be found, like Jews and Catholics. Chiang Kai-shek, the heroic defender of Formosa, fed us, you remember, into the boilers of railway-engines. God knows for what medical research Papa Doc may find me useful. I only ask you to remember ce si gros neg. Do you remember that evening when Mrs Smith accused me of being a Marxist? Accused is too strong a word. She is a kind woman who hates injustice. Yet I have grown to dislike the word
"Marxist". It is used so often to describe only a particular economic plan. I believe of course in that economic plan - in certain cases and in certain times, here in Haiti, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in India. But Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism - remember I was born a Catholic too - is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politique. We are humanists, you and I. You won't admit it perhaps, but you are the son of your mother and you once took the dangerous journey which we all have to take before the end. Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate. I know you and love you well, and I am writing this letter with some care because it may be the last chance I have of communicating with you. It may never reach you, but I am sending it by what I believe to be a safe hand - though there is no guarantee of that in the wild world we live in now (I do not mean my poor insignificant little Haiti). I implore you - a knock on the door may not allow me to finish this sentence, so take it as the last request of a dying man - if you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?'
I remembered Martha saying, 'You are a prêtre manqué.' How strangely one must appear to other people. I had left involvement behind me, I was certain, in the College of the Visitation: I had dropped it like the roulette-token in the offertory. I had felt myself not merely incapable of love
- many are incapable of that, but even of guilt. There were no heights and no abysses in my world - I saw myself on a great plain, walking and walking on the interminable flats. Once I might have taken a different direction, but it was too late now. When I was a boy the fathers of the Visitation had told me that one test of a belief was this: that a man was ready to die for it. So Doctor Magiot thought too, but for what belief did Jones die?
Perhaps, under the circumstances, it was only natural that I should dream of Jones. He lay among the dry rocks on the flat plain beside me and he said, 'Don't ask me to find water. I can't. I'm tired, Brown, tired. After the seven hundredth performance I sometimes dry up on my lines - and I've only two.'
I said to him, 'Why are you dying, Jones?'
'It's in my part, old man, it's in my part. But I've got this comic line - you should hear the whole theatre laugh when I say it. The ladies in particular.'
'What is it?'
'That's the trouble. I've forgotten it.'
'Jones, you must remember.'
'I've got it now. I have to say - just look at these bloody rocks - "This is a good place," and everyone laughs till the tears come. Then you say, "To hold the bastards up?" and I reply, "I didn't mean that." '
The ringing of the telephone woke me - I had overslept. The call came, so far as I could make out, from Mr Fernandez who was summoning me to my first assignment.
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