The other man’s eyes shifted. He had a frightened air. He shuffled two steps toward the door as though he were leaving the altar and was afraid of treading on the skirt of a soutane which was too long for him.
“You might stay and talk a bit,” Charley Fortnum said. “I feel more scared when I’m alone. I don’t mind telling you that. If one can’t talk to a priest who can one talk to? That Indian now… he sits there and stares at me and smiles. He wants to kill.”
“You are wrong, Seńor Fortnum. Miguel is a good man. He has no Spanish, that is all, and so he smiles just to show he is a friend. Try to sleep again.”
“I’ve had enough sleep. I want to talk to you.” The man made a gesture with his hands, and Charley Fortnum could imagine him in church, making his formal passes. “I have so many things to do.”
“I can always keep you here if I try.”
“No, no. I must go.”
“I can keep you here easily. I know the way.”
“I will come back presently, I promise.”
“All I have to say to keep you is-Father, please hear my confession.”
The man stayed stuck in the doorway with his back turned. His protruding ears stood out like little hands raised over an offering.
“Since my last confession, Father…” The man swung around and said angrily, “You must not joke about things like that. I will not listen to you if you joke…”
“But that’s no joke, Father. I’m not in a position to joke about anything at all. Surely every man has a lot to confess when it comes to dying.”
“My faculties have been taken away,” the other said in a stubborn voice. “You must know what that means if you are really a Catholic.”
“I seem to know the rules better than you, Father. You do not need faculties, not in an emergency-if there is no other priest available… there isn’t, is there? Your men would never let you bring one here…”
“There is no emergency-not yet.”
“All the same time is short… if I ask…”
The man reminded him again of a dog, a dog who has been reproved for a fault which he does not clearly understand. He began to plead, “Seńor Fortnum, I assure you there never will be an emergency… it will never be necessary…”
” ‘I am sorry and beg pardon’-that’s how I begin, isn’t it? It’s been the hell of a long time… I’ve been once to church in the last forty years… a while ago when I got married. I was damned if I’d go to confession though. It would have taken too long and I couldn’t keep the lady waiting.”
“Please, Seńor Fortnum, do not mock me.”
“I’m not mocking you, Father. Perhaps I’m mocking myself a bit. I can do that as long as the whisky lasts.” He added, “It really is a funny thing when you come to think of it. ‘I ask forgiveness of God through you, Father.’ That is the formula, isn’t it-and all the time you’ll have the gun ready. Don’t you think we ought to begin now? Before the gun is loaded. There are plenty of things I have on my mind.”
“I will not listen to you.” He made the gesture of putting his hands against the protruding ears. They flattened and sprang back.
Charley Fortnum said, “Oh, don’t worry, forget it. I was only half serious. What difference does it make anyway?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t believe a thing, Father. I would never have bothered to marry in a church if the law hadn’t forced me to. There was the question of money. For my wife, I mean. What was your intention, Father, when you married?” He added quickly, “Forgive me. I had no business to ask that.”
But the little man, it seemed, was not angry. The question even appeared to have an attraction for him. He came slowly across the floor with his mouth ajar, as though he were a starving man drawn irresistibly by the offer of bread. A little saliva hung at the corner of his mouth. He came and crouched down on the floor beside the coffin. He said in a low voice (he might have been kneeling in the confessional box himself), “I think it was anger and loneliness, Seńor Fortnum. I never meant any harm to her, poor woman.”
“I can understand the loneliness,” Charley Fortnum said, “I’ve suffered from that too. But why the anger? Who were you angry with?”
“The Church,” the man said and added with irony, “my Mother the Church.”
“I used to be angry with my father. He didn’t understand me, I thought, or care a nickel about me. I hated him. All the same I was bloody lonely when he died. And now”-he lifted his glass-“I even imitate him. Though he drank more than I do. All the same a father’s a father-I don’t see how you can be angry with Mother Church. I could never get angry with a fucking institution.”
“She is a sort of person too,” the man said, “they claim she is Christ on earth-I still half believe it even now. Someone like you-un Ingles-you are not able to understand how ashamed I felt of the things they made me read to people. I was a priest in the poor part of Asunción near the river. Have you noticed how the poor always cling close to the river? They do it here too, as though they plan one day to swim away, but they have no idea how to swim and there is nowhere to swim to for any of them. On Sunday I had to read to them out of the Gospels.”
Charley Fortnum listened with a little sympathy and a good deal of cunning. His life depended on this man, and it was vitally important for him to know what moved him. There might be some chord he could touch of fellow feeling. The man was speaking immoderately as a thirsty man drinks. Perhaps he had been unable to speak freely for a long time: perhaps this was the only way he could unburden himself to a man who was safely dying and would remember no more what he said than a priest in the confessional. Charley Fortnum asked, “What’s wrong with the Gospels, Father?”
“They make no sense,” the ex-priest said, “anyway not in Paraguay. ‘Sell all and give to the poor’-I had to read that out to them while the old Archbishop we had in those days was eating a fine fish from Iguazu and drinking a French wine with the General. Of course the people were not actually starving-you can keep them from starving on mandioca, and malnutrition is much safer for the rich than starvation. Starvation makes a man desperate. Malnutrition makes him too tired to raise a fist. The Americans understand that well-the aid they give us makes just that amount of difference. Our people do not starve-they wilt. The words used to stick on my lips-‘Suffer little children,’ and there the children sat in the front rows with their pot bellies and their navels sticking out like doorknobs. ‘It were better that a millstone were hung around his neck,’
‘He who gives to one of the least of these.’ Gives what? gives mandioca? and then I distributed the Host-it’s not so nourishing as a good chipá-and then I drank the wine. Wine! Which of these poor souls had ever tasted wine? Why could we not use water in the sacrament? He used it at Cana. Wasn’t there a beaker of water at the Last Supper He could have used instead?” To Charley Fortnum’s astonishment the doglike eyes were swollen with unshed tears.
The man said, “Oh, you must not think we are all of us bad Christians as I am. The Jesuits do what they can. But they are watched by the police. Their telephones are tapped. If anyone seems dangerous he is quickly pushed across the river. They do not kill him. The Yankees would not like a priest to be killed, and anyway we are not dangerous enough. I spoke in a sermon once about Father Torres who was shot with the guerrillas in Colombia. I only said that unlike Sodom the Church did sometimes produce one just man, so perhaps she would not be destroyed like Sodom. The police reported me to the Archbishop and the Archbishop forbade me to preach any more. Oh well, poor man, he was very old and the General liked him, and he “thought he was doing right, rendering to Caesar…”
“These things are a bit above my head, Father,” Charley Fortnum said, lying propped on his elbow on the coffin and looking down at the dark head which still showed the faint trace of a tonsure through the hair, like a prehistoric camp in a field seen from a plane. He interjected “Father” as often as he could: it was somehow reassuring. A father didn’t usually kill his son, although of course it had been a near miss in the case of Abraham. “I am not to blame, Father.”