The Honorary Consul (31 page)

       Aquino waved his spoon and demanded the instant death ol Charley Fortnum. "They have killed Diego."

       To gel awa> 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?"

       "They say when the wound's serious people feel very little."

       "And my wound will be the most serious of all."

       "Yes."

       "Clara will feel the pain longer than me. I wish it could be the other way round."

       ***

       They were still arguing in the outer room when Doctor Plarr returned. Aquino was saying, "But what does he know of the situation? He is safe in Córdoba or..." He checked himself and looked up at Doctor Plarr.

       "Don't worry," Doctor Plarr said, "I am not likely to survive you. Unless you give up this insane idea. You still have time to escape."

       "And £. dmit failure," Aquino said, "to all the world."

       "You used to be a poet. Were you afraid to admit it when a poem failed?"

       "My poems were never published," Aquino said. "No one knew when I failed. My poems were never read out on the radio. There were 110 questions asked about them in the British Parliament."

       "It's your damn 'machismo' again, isn't it? Who invented 'machismo'? A gang of ruffians like Pizarro and Cortes. Can't any of you for a moment escape your bloody history? You haven't learned a thing, have you, from Cervantes? He had his fill of 'machismo' at Lepanto."

       Father Rivas said, "Aquino is right. We cannot afford to fail. Once before our people released a man rather than kill him—he was a Paraguayan Consul, the General cared no more about his life than Fortnum's, and when it came to the point we were not prepared to kill. If we are weak again like that, no threat of death will be of any use on this continent. Until more ruthless men than we are begin to kill a great many more. I do not want to be responsible for the deaths which will follow our failure."

       "You have a complicated conscience," Doctor Plarr said. "Will you pity God for those murders too?"

       "You have no idea, have you, what I meant?"

       "No. I was never taught anything about pitying God by the Jesuits in Asunción. Not that I remember."

       "Perhaps you would have more faith now if you had remembered a little more."

       "Mine's a busy life, Léon, trying to cure the sick. I can't leave that to God."

       "Oh, you may be right. I have always had far too much time. Two Masses on a Sunday. A few feast days. Confessions twice a week. It was mostly the old women who came—and of course the children. The children were forced to come. They were beaten if they did not come, and anyway I gave them sweets. Not as a reward. The bad child received just as many sweets as the good one. I only wanted to make them feel happy while they knelt in that stuffy box. And when.1 gave them a penance I tried to make it a game we played together, a reward not a punishment. And they sucked their sweets while they said a Hail Mary. I could be happy too, for as long as I was with them. I was never happy with then- fathers—or their mothers. I don't know why. Perhaps if I had had a child myself..."

       "It's a long journey you've made, Léon, since you left Asunción."

       "It was not. such an innocent life there as you think. Once a child of eight told me he had drowned his baby sister in the Paraná. People thought she had slipped off the cliff. He told me she used to eat too much and there was less for him. Less mandioca!"

       "Did you give him a sweet?"

       "Yes. And three Hail Marys for a penance."

       Pablo went out on guard in his turn, taking Miguel's place. Marta served the Guaraní with stew and cleaned the other plates. She said, "Father, tomorrow is Sunday. Surely you could say a Mass for us on that day?"

       "It is more than three years since I last said a Mass. I doubt if I can even remember the words."

       "I have a missal, Father."

       "Read the Mass to yourself then, Marta. It will serve just as well."

       "You heard what they said on the radio. The soldiers are searching for us now. It may be the last Mass we shall ever hear. And there is Diego—you must say a Mass for him."

       "I have no right to say a Mass. When I married you, Marta, I excommunicated myself."

       "No one knows you married me."

       "'I' know."

       "Father Pedro used to sleep with women. Everyone in Asunción knew that. And he said Mass every Sunday."

       "He did not marry, Marta. He could go to confession and sin again and go to confession. I am not responsible for his conscience."

       "You seem to suffer from an odd lot of scruples, Léon," Doctor Plarr said, "for a man who plans to murder."

       "Yes. Perhaps they are not scruples—only superstitions. You see if I took the Host I would still half believe I was taking His body. Anyway it's a useless argument. There is no wine."

       "Oh but there is, Father," Marta said. "I found an empty medicine bottle in the rubbish dump and when I was in the town I filled it at a cantina."

       "You think of everything," Father Rivas said sadly.

       "Father, you know I have wanted all these years to hear you say Mass again and to see the people praying with you. Of course it will not be the same without the beautiful vestments. If only you had kept them with you."

       "They did not belong to me, Marta. Anyway vestments are not the Mass. Do you think the Apostles wore vestments? How I hated wearing them when the people in front of me were all in rags. I was glad to turn my back on them and forget them and see only the altar and the candles—but the money for the candles would have fed half the people there."

       "You are wrong, Father. We were all glad to see you in those vestments. They were so beautiful, all the scarlet and the gold embroidery."

       "Yes. I suppose they helped you escape from everything for a little while, but to me they were the clothes of a convict."

       "But, Father, you won't listen to the Archbishop's rules? You will say a Mass for us tomorrow?"

       "Suppose what they say is true and I am damning myself?"

       "The good God would never damn a man like you, Father. But poor Diego, Jose's wife... all of us... we need you to speak to God for us."

       Father Rivas said, "All right. I will say Mass. For your sake, Marta. I have done very little for you in these years. You have given me love and all I have given you has been a great deal of danger and a dirt floor to lie on. I will say Mass as soon as it is light if the soldiers give us enough time. Have we any bread left?"

       "Yes, Father."

       A sense of some obscure grievance moved Doctor Plarr. He said, "You don't believe yourself in all this mumbojumbo, Léon. You are fooling them like you fooled that child who killed his sister. You want to hand them sweets at Communion to comfort them before you murder Charley Fortnum. I've seen with my own eyes things just as bad as any you've listened to in the confessional, but I can't be pacified with sweets. I have seen a child born without hands and feet. I would have killed it if I had been left alone with it, but the parents watched me too closely—they wanted to keep that bloody broken torso alive. The Jesuits used to tell us it was our duty to love God. A duty to love a God who produces that abortion? It's like the duty of a German to love Hitler. Isn't it better not to believe in that horror up there sitting in the clouds of heaven than pretend to love him?"

       "It may be better not to breathe, but all the same I cannot help breathing. Some men, I think, are condemned to belief by a judge just as they are condemned to prison. They have no choice. No escape. They have been put behind the bars for life."

       " 'I see my father only through the bars,'" Aquino quoted with a sort of glum self-satisfaction.

       "So here I sit on the floor of my prison cell," Father Rivas said, "and I try to make some sense of things. I am no theologian, I was bottom in most of my classes, but I have always wanted to understand what you call the horror and why I cannot stop loving it. Just like the parents who loved that poor bloody torso. Oh, He seems ugly enough I grant you, but then I am ugly too and yet Marta loves me. In my first prison—I mean in the seminary—there were lots of books in which I could read all about the love of God, but they were of no help to me. Not one of the Fathers was of any use to me. Because they never touched on the horror—you are quite right to call it that. They saw no problem. They just sat comfortably down in the presence of the horror like the old Archbishop at the General's table and they talked about man's responsibility and Free Will. Free Will was the excuse for everything. It was God's alibi. They had never read Freud. Evil was made by man or Satan. It was simple that way. But I could never believe in Satan. It was much easier to believe that God was evil."

       Marta exclaimed, "Father, you do not know what you are saying."

       "I am not talking as a priest now, Marta. A man has the right to think aloud to his wife. Even a madman, and perhaps I am a little mad. Perhaps those years in Asunción in the 'barrio' have turned my brain, so here I am waiting to kill an innocent man..."

       "You are not mad, Léon," Aquino said. "You have come to your senses. We will make a good Marxist of you yet. Of course God is evil, God is capitalism. Lay up treasures in heaven—they will bring you a hundred percent interest for eternity."

       "I believe in the evil of God," Father Rivas said, "but I believe in His goodness too. He made us in His image—that is the old legend. Eduardo, you know well how many truths in medicine lay in old legends. It was not a modern laboratory which first discovered the use of a snake's venom. And old women used the mold on overripe oranges long before penicillin. So I too believe in an old legend which is almost forgotten. He made us in His image—and so our evil is His evil too. How could I love God if He were not like me? Divided like me. Tempted like me. If I love a dog it is only because I can see something human in a dog. I can feel his fear and his gratitude and even his treachery. He dreams in his sleep like I do. I doubt if I could ever love a toad—though sometimes, when I have touched a toad's skin, I am reminded of the skin of an old man who has spent a rough poor life in the fields, and I wonder..."

       "I find my disbelief a lot easier to understand than your kind of belief. If your God is evil..."

       "I have had more than two years in hiding," Father Rivas said, "and we have to travel light. There is no room in our packs for books of theology. Only Marta has kept a missal. I have lost mine. Sometimes I have been able to find a paperback novel—like the one I have been reading. A detective story. That sort of life leaves a lot of time to think and perhaps Marta may be right and my thoughts are turning wild. But I can see no other way to believe in God. The God I believe in must be responsible for all the evil as well as for all the saints. He has to be a God made in our image with a night side as well as a day side. When you speak of the horror, Eduardo, you are speaking of the night side of God. I believe the time will come when the night side will wither away, like your communist state, Aquino, and we shall see only the simple daylight of the good God. You believe in evolution, Eduardo, even though sometimes whole generations of men slip backward to the beasts. It is a long struggle and a long suffering, evolution, and I believe God is suffering the same evolution that we are, but perhaps with more pain."

       "I am not so sure of evolution," Doctor Plarr said, "not since we managed to produce Hitler and Stalin in one generation. Suppose the night side of God swallows up the day side altogether? Suppose it is the good side which withers away. If I believed what you believe, I would sometimes think that had happened already."

       "But I believe in Christ," Father Rivas said, "I believe in the Cross and the Redemption. The Redemption of God as well as of Man. I believe that the day side of God, in one moment of happy creation, produced perfect goodness, as a man might paint one perfect picture. God's intention for once was completely fulfilled so that the night side can never win more than a little victory here and there. With our help. Because the evolution of God depends on our evolution. Every evil act of ours strengthens His night side, and every good one helps His day side. We belong to Him and He belongs to us. But now at least we can be sure where evolution will end one day—it will end in a goodness like Christ's. It is a terrible process all the same and the God I believe in suffers as we suffer while He struggles against Himself—against His evil side."

       "Is killing Charley Fortnum going to help his evolution?"

       "No. I pray all the time I shall not have to kill him."