"There is nothing about kulaks or souls in the parable."
"The story you have read has been probably a little corrected and slanted here and there by the ecclesiastical censors."
"What do you mean?"
"It could have been told so differently and perhaps it was. Here is this young man who by some beneficent trick of heredity has grown up against all odds with a hatred of inherited wealth. Perhaps Christ had Job in mind. Christ was nearer in time to the author of Job than you are to your great ancestor, the Don. Job, you remember, was obscenely rich. He owned seven thousand sheep and three thousand camels. The son feels stifled by his bourgeois surroundings -- perhaps even by the kind of furniture and the kind of pictures on the walls, of fat kulaks sitting down to their Sabbath meal, a sad contrast with the poverty he sees around him. He has to escape -- anywhere. So he demands his share of the inheritance which will come to his brother and himself on their father's death and he leaves home."
"And squanders his inheritance in riotous living," Father Quixote interrupted.
"Ah, that is the official version. My version is that he was so disgusted by the bourgeois world in which he had been brought up that he got rid of his wealth in the quickest way possible -- perhaps he even gave it away and in a Tolstoyian gesture he became a peasant."
"But he came home."
"Yes, his courage failed him. He felt very alone on that pig farm. There was no branch of the Party to which he could look for help. Das Kapital had not yet been written, so he was unable to situate himself in the class struggle. Is it any wonder that he wavered for a time, poor boy?"
"Only for a time? How do you make that out?"
"The story in your version is cut short rather abruptly, isn't it? By the ecclesiastical censors undoubtedly, even perhaps by Matthew, the tax collector. Oh, he is welcomed home, that's true enough, a fatted calf is served, he is probably happy for a few days, but then he feels again the same oppressive atmosphere of bourgeois materialism that drove him from home. His father tries to express his love, but the furniture is still hideous, false Louis Quinze or whatever was the equivalent in those days, the same pictures of good living are on the walls, he is shocked more than ever by the servility of the servants and the luxury of the food, and he begins to remember the companionship he found in the poverty of the pig farm."
"I thought you said there was no Party branch and that he felt very alone."
"Yes, I exaggerated. He did have one friend, and he remembered the words of this old bearded peasant who had helped him carry the swill to the pigs, he began to brood on them -- the words, I mean, not the pigs -- back in the luxurious bed in which his bones yearned for the hard earth of his hut on the farm. After all, three thousand camels might well be enough to revolt a sensitive man."
"You have a wonderful imagination, Sancho, even when you are sober. What on earth did the old peasant say?"
"He told him that every state in which private ownership of the land and means of production exists, in which capital dominates, however democratic it may claim to be, is a capitalist state, a machine invented and used by the capitalists to keep the working class in subjection."
"Your story begins to sound almost as dull as my breviary."
"Dull? Do you call that dull? I'm quoting Lenin himself. Don't you see that the first idea of the class struggle is being lodged by that old peasant (I see him with a beard and whiskers like Karl Marx's) in the mind of the Prodigal Son?"
"And what does he do?"
"After a week of disillusion he leaves home at dawn (a red dawn) to find again the pig farm and the old bearded peasant, determined now to play his part in the proletarian struggle. The old bearded peasant sees him coming from a distance and, running up, he throws his arms around his neck and kisses him, and the Prodigal Son says, "Father, I have sinned, I am not worthy to be called your son." "
"The ending sounds familiar," Father Quixote said. "And I'm glad you left in the pigs."
"Talking of pigs, couldn't you drive a little faster? I don't think we are averaging more than thirty kilometres an hour."
"That's Rocinante's favourite speed. She's a very old car and I can't make her strain -- not at her age."
"We are being passed by every car on the road."
"What does it matter? Her ancestor never got up to thirty kilometres an hour."
"And your ancestor never got further in his travels than Barcelona."
"What of it? He remained almost in hailing distance of La Mancha, but his mind travelled very far. And so did Sancho's."
"I don't know about my mind, but my belly feels as though we had been a week on the road. The sausages and the cheese are a distant memory now."
It was a little after two when they mounted the stairs to Botin's. Sancho gave the order for two portions of sucking-pig and a bottle of the Marques de Murrieta's red wine. "I'm surprised that you favour the aristocracy," Father Quixote remarked.
"They can be temporarily accepted for the good of the Party, like a priest."
"Even a priest?"
"Yes. A certain indisputable authority who shall be nameless --" he gave a hasty glance towards the tables on either side -- "wrote that atheist propaganda in certain circumstances may be both unnecessary and harmful."
"Was it really Lenin who wrote that?"
"Yes, yes, of course, but better not use that name here, father. One never knows. I told you the kind of people who used to come here in the days of our lamented leader. A leopard doesn't change his spots."
"Then why did you bring me here?"
"Because it's the best place for sucking-pig. Anyway your collar makes you a partial protection. You will be even more so when you've got your purple socks and your purple. . ."
He was interrupted by the sucking-pig -- indeed, for a while there was no opportunity to speak except by signs, which could hardly have been misinterpreted by any secret policeman: for example, the raising of a fork in honour of the Marques de Murrieta.
The Mayor gave a sigh of satisfaction. "Have you ever eaten a better sucking-pig?"
"I have never before eaten a sucking-pig," Father Quixote replied with a certain sense of shame.
"What do you eat at home?"
"Usually a steak -- I've told you Teresa is very good with steaks."
"The butcher is a reactionary and a dishonest man."
"His horse steaks are excellent." The forbidden word had slipped out before he could stop it.
2
Perhaps it was only the wine which gave Father Quixote the worldly strength to resist the Mayor. The Mayor wished to take rooms in the Palace Hotel and to pay for them himself, but one sight of the glittering, crowded hall was enough for Father Quixote. "How can you, a Communist. . .?"
"The Party has never forbidden us to take advantage of bourgeois comfort so long as it lasts. And surely here if anywhere we can best study our enemies. Besides, this hotel is nothing, I believe, compared with the new hotel in Moscow which they have built in the Red Square. Communism is not against comfort, even what you might call luxury, so long as the worker benefits in the long run. However, if you wish to be uncomfortable and mortify yourself. . .?"