The boy squashed a beetle with his bare foot and thought gloomily that after all everything had an end-some day they would reach the last chapter and young Juan would die against a wall, shouting: Viva el Cristo Rey. But then, he supposed, there would be another book: they were smuggled in every month from Mexico City: if only the customs men had known where to look.
'No, young Juan was a true young Mexican boy, and if he was more thoughtful than his fellows, he was also always the first when any play-acting was afoot. One year his class acted a little play before the bishop, based on the persecution of the Early Christians, and no one was more amused than Juan when he was chosen to play the part of Nero. And what comic spirit he put into his acting-this child, whose young manhood was [22] to be cut short by a ruler far worse than Nero. His class-mate, who later became Father Miguel Cerra, S.J., writes: None of us who were there will ever forget that day ... '
One of the little girls licked her lips secretively. This was life.
'The curtain rose on Juan wearing his mother's best bathrobe, a charcoal moustache, and a crown made from a tin biscuit-box. Even the good old bishop smiled when Juan strode to the front of the little home-made stage and began to declaim ...'
The boy strangled a yawn against the whitewashed wall. He said wearily: Is he really a saint?
He will be one day soon, when the Holy Father pleases.
And are they all like that?
Who?
The martyrs.
Yes. All.
Even Padre José?
Don't mention him, the mother said. How dare you? That despicable man. A traitor to God.
He told me he was more of a martyr than the rest.
I've told you many times not to speak to him. My dear child, oh, my dear child ...
And the other one-the one who came to see us?
No, he is not-exactly-like Juan.
Is he despicable?
No, no. Not despicable.
The smallest girl said suddenly: He smelt funny.
The mother went on reading: 'Did any premonition touch young Juan that night that he, too, in a few short years, would be numbered among the martyrs? We cannot say, but Father Miguel Cerra tells how that evening Juan spent longer than usual upon his knees, and when his class-mates teased him a little, as boys will ...
The voice went on and on, mild and deliberate, inflexibly gentle: the small girls listened intently, framing in their minds little pious sentences with which to surprise their parents, and the boy yawned against the whitewash. Everything has an end.
Presently the mother went in to her husband. She said: I am so worried about the boy.
Why not about the girls? There is worry everywhere.
[23] They are two little saints already. But the boy-he asks such questions-about that whisky priest. I wish we had never had him in the house.
They would have caught him if we hadn't, and then he would have been one of your martyrs. They would write a book about him and you would read it to the children.
That man-never.
Well, after all, her husband said, he carries on. I don't believe all that they write in these books. We are all human. You know what I heard today? About a poor woman who took him her son to be baptized. She wanted him called Pedro-but he was so drunk that he took no notice at all and baptized the boy Carlota. Carlota.
Well, it's a good saint's name.
There are times, the mother said, when I lose all patience with you. And now the boy has been talking to Padre José.
This is a small town, her husband said. And there is no use pretending. We have been abandoned here. We must get along as best we can. As for the Church-the Church is Padre José and the whisky priest-I don't know of any other. If we don't like the Church, well, we must leave it.
He watched her with patience. He had more education than his wife: he could use a typewriter and knew the elements of book-keeping: once he had been to Mexico City: he could read a map. He knew the extent of their abandonment--the ten hours down-river to the port, the forty-two hours in the Gulf of Vera Cruz-that was one way out. To the north the swamps and rivers petering out against the mountains which divided them from the next state. And on the other side no roads-only mule-tracks and an occasional unreliable plane: Indian villages and the huts of herds: two hundred miles away the Pacific.
She said: I would rather die.
Oh, he said, of course. That goes without saying. But we have to go on living.
The old man sat on a packing-case in the little dry patio. He was very fat and short of breath: he panted a little as if after great exertion in the heat. Once he had been something of an astronomer and now he tried to pick out the [24] constellations, staring up into the night sky. He wore only a shirt and trousers: his feet were bare, but there remained something unmistakably clerical in his manner. Forty years of the priesthood had branded him. There was complete silence over the town: everybody was asleep.
The glittering worlds lay there in space like a promise-the world was not the universe. Somewhere Christ might not have died. He could not believe that to a watcher there this world could shine with such brilliance: it would roll heavily in space under its fog like a burning and abandoned ship. The whole globe was blanketed with his own sin.
A woman called from the only room he possessed: José, José. He crouched like a galley-slave at the sound: his eyes left the sky, and the constellations fled upwards: the beetles crawled over the patio. José, José. He thought with envy of the men who had died: it was over so soon. They were taken up there to the cemetery and shot against the walclass="underline" in two minutes life was extinct. And they called that martyrdom. Here life went on and on: he was only sixty-two. He might live to ninety. Twenty-eight years-that immeasurable period between his birth and his first parish: all childhood and youth and the seminary lay there.
José. Come to bed. He shivered: he knew that he was a buffoon. An old man who married was grotesque enough, but an old priest ... He stood outside himself and wondered whether he was even fit for hell. He was just a fat old impotent man mocked and taunted between the sheets. But then he remembered the gift he had been given which nobody could take away. That was what made him worthy of damnation-the power he still had of turning the wafer into the flesh and blood of God. He was a sacrilege. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he defiled God. Some mad renegade Catholic, puffed up with the Governors politics, had once broken into a church (in the days when there were still churches) and seized the Host. He had spat on it, trampled it, and then the people had got him and hanged him as they did the stuffed Judas on Holy Thursday from the belfry. He wasn't so bad a man, Padre José thought-he would be forgiven, he was just a politician, but he himself, he was worse than that-he was [25] like an obscene picture hung here every day to corrupt children with.
He belched on his packing-case shaken by wind. José, what are you doing? You come to bed. There was never anything to do at all-no daily Office, no Masses, no confessions, and it was no good praying any longer at alclass="underline" a prayer demanded an act and he had no intention of acting. He had lived for two years now in a continuous state of mortal sin with no one to hear his confession: nothing to do at all but sit and eat-eat far too much: she fed him and fattened him and preserved him like a prize boar. José. He began to hiccup with nerves at the thought of facing for the seven hundred and thirty-eighth time his harsh house-keeper-his wife. There she would be, lying in the big shameless bed that filled up half the room, a bony shadow within the mosquito tent, a lanky jaw and a short grey pigtail and an absurd bonnet. She thought she had a position to keep up: a government pensioner: the wife of the only married priest. She was proud of it. José. I'm-hic-coming, my love, he said, and lifted himself from the crate. Somebody somewhere laughed.
He lifted little pink eyes like those of a pig conscious of the slaughter-room. A high child's voice said: José. He stared in a bewildered way around the patio. At a barred window opposite, three children watched him with deep gravity. He turned his back and took a step or two towards his door, moving very slowly because of his bulk. José, somebody squeaked again, José. He looked back over his shoulder and caught the faces out in expressions of wild glee: his little pink eyes showed no anger-he had no right to be angry: he moved his mouth into a ragged and baffled, disintegrated smile, and as if that sign of weakness gave them all the license they needed, they squealed back at him without disguise: José, José. Come to bed, José. Their little shameless voices filled the patio, and he smiled humbly and sketched small gestures for silence, and there was no respect anywhere left for him in his home, in the town, in the whole abandoned star.