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            "Suppose Communism arrives and you are still alive."

            "That's an impossibility."

            "Well, imagine you had a great-great-grandson of the same character as yours and he lived to see the end of the state. No injustice, no inequality -- how would he spend his life, Sancho?"

            "Working for the common good."

            "You certainly have faith, Sancho, great faith in the future. But he would have no faith. The future would be there before his eyes. Can a man live without faith?"

            "I don't know what you mean -- without faith. There will always be things for a man to do. The discovery of new energy. And disease -- there will always be disease to fight."

            "Are you sure? Medicine is making great strides. I feel sorry for your great-great-grandson, Sancho. It seems to me that he may have nothing to hope for except death."

            The Mayor smiled. "Perhaps we shall even conquer death with transplants."

            "God forbid," Father Quixote said. "Then he would be living in a desert without end. No doubt. No faith. I would prefer him to have what we call a happy death."

            "What do you mean by a happy death?"

            "I mean the hope of something further."

            "The beatific vision and all that nonsense? Believing in some life eternal?"

            "No. Not necessarily believing. We can't always believe. Just having faith. Like you have, Sancho. Oh, Sancho, Sancho, it's an awful thing not to have doubts. Suppose all Marx wrote was proved to be absolute truth and Lenin's works too."

            "I"d be glad, of course."

            "I wonder."

            They drove for a while in silence. Suddenly Sancho gave the same yapping laugh that Father Quixote had heard in the night.

            "What is it, Sancho?"

            "Last night before I slept I was reading your Jone and his Moral Theology. I had forgotten that onanism contained such a rich variety of sins. I had thought of it as just another word for masturbation."

            "A very common mistake. But you should have known better, Sancho. You told me you studied at Salamanca."

            "Yes. And I remembered last night how we all used to laugh when we came to onanism."

            "I had forgotten Jone was so funny."

            "Let me remind you of his remarks on coitus interruptus. That is one of the forms of onanism according to Jone, but in his view it is not a sin if done on account of some unforeseen necessity, for example (it's Jone's own example) the arrival of a third person on the scene. Well, one of my fellow students, Diego, knew a very rich and pious stockbroker. His name comes back to me -- Márquez. He had a big estate across the river from Salamanca, not far from where the Vincentians have their monastery. I wonder if he is still alive. Well, if he is, birth control will no longer be a problem -- he must be over eighty. But certainly it was a terrible problem to him in those days, for he was a great stickler for the rules of the Church. It was lucky for him that the Church had altered the rules about usury, for there's a lot of usury in stockbroking. It's funny, isn't it, but the Church can alter its mind about what concerns money much more easily than it can about what concerns sex?"

            "You have your unalterable dogmas too."

            "Yes. But with us the dogmas which are the most impossible to alter are just those that deal with money. We don't worry about coitus interruptus, only about the means of production -- I don't mean sexually. Please, at the next turning, take the road to the left. Now do you see ahead the high rocky hill with a great cross on top? That's where we are going."

            "Then it is a holy site. I thought you were making fun of me."

            "No, no, monsignor. I am too fond of you for that. What was I talking about? Oh, I remember. Señor Márquez and his terrible problem. He had five children. He really felt he had done his duty to the Church, but his wife was terribly fecund and he enjoyed sex. He could have taken a mistress, but I don't think Jone would allow birth control even in adultery. What you call natural birth control and what I call unnatural had consistently failed him. Perhaps the thermometers in Spain have been falsified under clerical influence. Well, my friend Diego mentioned to him -- I'm afraid in a frivolous moment -- that coitus interruptus was permissible according to the rule of Jone. By the way what sort of priest was Jone?"

            "He was a German. I don't think he was a secular; they are most of them too busy to be moral theologians."

            "Márquez listened to Diego, and the next time Diego went to his house he found that a butler had been installed. This surprised him, for Márquez was a mean man who did little entertaining apart from an occasional father from the Vincentian monastery, and two maid servants, a nurse and a cook were quite enough for the household. After dinner Márquez invited Diego to his study for a glass of brandy, and this surprised Diego too. "I have to thank you," Márquez told him, "for you have made my life much easier for me. I have been reading Father Jone with great care. I admit that I didn't quite trust what you told me, but I have obtained a copy in Spanish from the Vincentians, and there it certainly is with the imprimatur of the Archbishop of Madrid and Nihil Obstat from the Censor Deputatus -- the arrival of a third person does make a coitus interruptus permissible "

            " 'How does that help you?' Diego asked.

            " 'You see I have hired a butler, and I have trained him very carefully. When a bell in my bedroom rings twice in the pantry he takes up position outside the bedroom door and waits. I try not to keep him waiting too long, but with advancing age I'm afraid that I sometimes keep him there for a quarter of an hour or more before the next signal -- a prolonged peal of the bell in the passage itself. That is when I feel unable to contain myself much longer. The butler opens the door immediately and at this arrival of a third person I withdraw at once from the body of my wife. You can't think how Jone has simplified life for me. Now I don't have to go to confession more than once in three months for very venial little matters.' "

            "You are mocking me," Father Quixote said.

            "Not a bit of it. I find Jone a much more interesting and amusing writer than I did when I was a student. Unfortunately in this particular case there was a snag and Diego was unkind enough to point it out. "You read Jone carelessly," Diego told Márquez. "Jone qualified the arrival of a third person by classing it as 'an unforeseen necessity'. I'm afraid in your case the butler's arrival has been only too well foreseen." Poor Márquez was shattered. Oh, you can't beat those moral theologians. They get the better of you every time with their quibbles. It's better not to listen to them at all. I would like for your sake to clear your shelves of all those old books. Remember what the Canon said to your noble ancestor. 'Nor is it reasonable for a man like yourself, possessed of your understanding, your reputation and your talents, to accept all the extravagant absurdities in these ridiculous books of chivalry as really true.' "