“But when you left the Church you began to hate it, didn’t you?”
“I have told you-I never left the Church. Mine is only a separation, Eduardo, a separation by mutual consent, not a divorce. I shall never belong wholly to anyone else. Not even to Marta.”
“Even a separation brings hate often enough,” Doctor Plarr said. “I have seen it happen many times among my patients in this damned country where no one is allowed a divorce.”
“It will never happen in my case. Even if I cannot love, I see no reason to hate. I can never forget that long honeymoon in the seminary when I was so happy. Now, if I feel any emotion for the Church, it is regret, not hate. I think she could have used me easily for a good purpose if she had understood a little better. I mean about the world as it is.”
The radio murmured on, and they listened with ears alert for the time signal. In the room of mud, which might well have been some primitive aboveground tomb prepared for a whole family, Doctor Plarr no longer felt the least desire to torment Leon Rivas. If there was anyone he wanted to torment, it was himself. He thought: whatever we may pretend to each other, we have both given up hope. That is why we can talk like the friends we used to be. I have reached a premature old age when I can no longer mock a man for his beliefs, however absurd. I can only envy them.
Curiosity after a while drove him to speak. He remembered how at his first Communion in Asunción, dressed like a diminutive monk with a rope round his waist, he had believed-something, though now he could not remember what.
“It’s a long time,” he told Leon, “since I listened to a priest. I thought you taught that the Church was infallible like Christ.”
“Christ was a man,” Father Rivas said, “even if some of us believe that he was God as well. It was not the God the Romans killed, but a man. A carpenter from Nazareth. Some of the rules He laid down were only the rules of a good man. A man who lived in his own province, in his own particular day. He had no idea of the kind of world we would be living in now. Render unto Caesar, but when our Caesar uses napalm and fragmentation bombs… The Church lives in time too. Only sometimes, for a short while, for some people-I am not one of them-I am not a man of vision-I think perhaps-but how can I explain to you when I believe so little myself?—I think sometimes the memory of that man, that carpenter, can lift a few people out of the temporary Church of these terrible years, when the Archbishop sits down to dinner with the General, into the great Church beyond our time and place, and then… those lucky ones… they have no words to describe the beauty of that Church.”
“I don’t understand a word you say, Leon. You used to explain things more clearly. Even the Trinity.”
“Forgive me. It is such a very long time since I read the right sort of books.”
“You haven’t the right audience either. I feel no more interested in the Church now than I feel in Marxism. The Bible is as unreadable to me as Das Kapital. Only sometimes, like a bad habit, I find myself using that crude word God. Last night…”
“Any word one uses from habit means nothing at all.”
“All the same, when you shoot Fortnum in the back of the head, are you sure you won’t have a moment’s fear of old Jehovah and His anger? ‘Thou shalt not commit murder.’ “
“If I kill him it will be God’s fault as much as mine.”
“God’s fault?”
“He made me what I am now. He will have loaded the gun and steadied my hand.”
“I thought the Church teaches that He’s love?”
“Was it love which sent six million Jews to the gas ovens? You are a doctor, you must often have seen intolerable pain-a child dying of meningitis. Is that love? It was not love which cut off Aquino’s fingers. The police stations where such things happen… He created them.”
“I have never heard a priest blame God for things like that before.”
“I don’t blame Him. I pity Him,” Father Rivas said, and the time signal struck faintly in the dark.
“Pity God?”
The priest put his fingers on the dial. For a moment he hesitated to turn it. Yes, Doctor Plarr thought, there is always something to be said for remaining ignorant of the worst. I have never told a cancer patient yet that’ there is no hope any longer.
A voice said as indifferently as if it were reading out a list of prices on the stock exchange, “The following communiqué has been issued from police headquarters. ‘At seventeen hours yesterday a man who refused to give his name was arrested while attempting to board the ferry to the Chaco shore. He attempted to escape by plunging into the river, but he was shot by police officers. His body was recovered. It proved to be that of a lorry driver employed at the Bergman orange-canning factory. He had been absent from work since last Monday, the day before the kidnapping of the British Consul. His name was Diego Corredo and his age was thirty-five. Unmarried. His identification is believed to be an important step toward tracing the other members of the gang. It is thought that the kidnappers have not left the province, and an intensive search is now in progress. The commander of the 9th Infantry Brigade has put a parachute company at the disposal of the police.’”
Doctor Plarr said, “Lucky for you he was not interrogated. I doubt if Perez would have many scruples at this stage.”
It was Pablo who answered. “They will discover soon enough who his friends were. I was employed at the same factory until a year ago. Everyone knew we were good friends.” The man on the radio was talking again about the Argentinian football team. There had been a riot with twenty injured when they played in Barcelona.
Father Rivas woke Miguel and sent him out to relieve Aquino, and when Aquino returned, the old arguments, broke out anew. Marta had cooked the anonymous stew which she had served for two days now. Doctor Plarr wondered whether Father Rivas had endured the same meal every day of his married life, but probably it was no worse than he had been accustomed to eat in the poor barrio of Asunción.
Aquino waved his spoon and demanded the instant death ol Charley Fortnum. “They have killed Diego.”
To get away from them awhile Doctor Plarr carried a plate of stew into the other room. Charley Fortnum looked at it with distaste. “I could do with a nice grilled chop, he said, “but I suppose they are afraid I would use a knife to escape.”
“We are all eating the same thing,” Doctor Plarr said. “I only wish Humphries was here. It might give him an even greater appetite for the goulash at the Italian Club.”
” ‘Whatever the crime, the same meal’s served to all.’”
“A quotation?”
“One of that fellow Aquino’s poems. Is there any news?”
“The man called Diego tried to escape to the Chaco, but the police shot him.”
“Ten little nigger boys and then there were nine. Will I be the next to go?”
“I don’t think so. You are the only card they have left to gambit with. Even if the police discover this hideout they’ll be afraid to attack it while you are alive.”
“I doubt if they would bother much about me.”
“Colonel Perez will bother about his career.”
“Are you as scared as I am, Ted?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I have a bit more hope. Or perhaps I have less to lose.”
“Yes. That’s true. You’re lucky. You haven’t Clara and the baby to worry about.”
“No.”
“You know about these things, Ted. Will there be much pain?”