"This is a holy city, Sancho."
"You feel at home here, don't you? Here in the library are all your books of chivalry in their first editions, mouldering away in old calf. I doubt if any student draws one out to blow the dust away."
"How lucky you were to study here, Sancho."
"Lucky? I'm not so sure of that. I feel very much an exile now. Perhaps we should have travelled east towards the home I've never known. To the future, not to the past. Not to the home I left."
"You went through this very doorway to your lectures. I'm trying to imagine the young Sancho. . ."
"They were not lectures by Father Heribert Jone."
"Wasn't there at least one professor whom you were prepared to listen to?"
"Oh yes. In those days I still had a half-belief. A complete believer I could never have listened to for long, but there was one professor with a half-belief and I listened to him for two years. Perhaps I would have lasted longer at Salamanca if he had stayed, but he went into exile -- as he had already done years before. He wasn't a Communist, I doubt if he was a Socialist, but he couldn't swallow the Generalissimo. So here we've come to see what's left of him."
In a very small square, above folds of rumpled green-black stone, an aggressive head with a pointed beard stared upwards at the shutters of a little house. "That's where he died," Sancho said, "in a room up there sitting with a friend before a charcoal burner to keep him warm. His friend saw suddenly that one of his slippers was on fire and yet Unamuno had not stirred. You can still see the stigmata of the burnt shoe in the wooden floor."
"Unamuno." Father Quixote repeated the name and looked up with respect at the face of stone, the hooded eyes expressing the fierceness and the arrogance of individual thought.
"You know how he loved your ancestor and studied his life. If he had lived in those days perhaps he would have followed the Don on the mule called Dapple instead of Sancho. Many priests gave a sigh of relief when they heard of his death. Perhaps even the Pope in Rome felt easier without him. And Franco too, of course, if he was intelligent enough to recognize the strength of his enemy. In a sense he was my enemy too for he kept me in the Church for several years with that half-belief of his which for a while I could share."
"And now you have a complete belief, don't you? In the prophet Marx. You don't have to think for yourself any more. Isaiah has spoken. You are in the hands of future history. How happy you must be with your complete belief. There's only one thing you will ever lack -- the dignity of despair." Father Quixote spoke with an unaccustomed anger -- or was it, he wondered, envy?
"Have I complete belief?" Sancho asked. "Sometimes I wonder. The ghost of my professor haunts me. I dream I am sitting in his lecture room and he is reading to us from one of his own books. I hear him saying, 'There is a muffled voice, a voice of uncertainty which whispers in the ears of the believer. Who knows? Without this uncertainty how could we live?' "
"He wrote that?"
"Yes."
They returned to Rocinante.
"Where do we go from here, Sancho?"
"We go to the cemetery. You will find his tomb rather different from the Generalissimo's."
It was a rough road out to the cemetery on the extreme edge of the city -- not a smooth road for a hearse to travel. The body, Father Quixote thought as Rocinante groaned when the gears changed, would have had a good shaking up before it reached the quiet ground, but as he soon discovered there had been no quiet ground left for a new body -- the earth was fully occupied by the proud tombs of generations before. At the gates they were given a number, as in the cloakroom of a museum or a restaurant, and they walked down the long white wall in which boxes of the dead had been inserted until they reached number 340.
"I prefer this to the Generalissimo's mountain," Sancho said. "When I am alone, I sleep more easily in a small bed."
As they walked back to the car Sancho asked, "Did you say a prayer?"
"Of course."
The same prayer as you said for the Generalissimo?"
"There's only one prayer we need say for anyone dead."
"So you'd say it for Stalin?"
"Of course."
"And for Hitler?"
"There are degrees of evil, Sancho -- and of good. We can try to discriminate between the living, but with the dead we can't discriminate. They all have the same need of our prayer."
VII
HOW IN SALAMANCA MONSIGNOR
QUIXOTE CONTINUED HIS STUDIES
The hotel in which they lodged in Salamanca was in a little grey side street. It seemed quiet and friendly to Father Quixote. His knowledge of hotels was necessarily limited, but there were several things about this hotel which particularly pleased him and he expressed his pleasure to Sancho when they were alone and he was sitting on Sancho's bed on the first floor. Father Quixote had been lodged on the third, "where it will be quieter" the manageress had told him.
"The patrona was truly welcoming," Father Quixote said, "unlike that poor old woman in Madrid, and what a large staff of charming young women for so small a hotel."
"In a university city," Sancho said, "there are always a lot of customers."
"And the establishment is so clean. Did you notice how outside every room on the way up to the third floor there was a pile of linen? They must change the linen every evening after the time of siesta. I liked to see too when we arrived the real family atmosphere -- all the staff sitting down to an early supper with the patrona at the head of the table ladling out the soup. Really, she was just like a mother with her daughters."
"She was very impressed at meeting a monsignor."
"And did you notice how she quite forgot to give us a ficha to fill in? All she was concerned with was our comfort. I found it very moving."
There was a knock on the door. A girl entered with a bottle of champagne in an ice-bucket. She gave Father Quixote a nervous smile and got out of the room again quickly.
"Did you order this, Sancho?"
"No, no. I don't care for champagne. But it's the custom of the house."
"Perhaps we ought to drink a little just to show that we appreciate their kindness."
"Oh, it will be included in the bill. So will their kindness be."
"Don't be a cynic, Sancho. That was a very sweet smile the girl gave us. One can't pay for a smile like that."
"Well, I'll open it if you like. It won't be so good as our manchegan wine." Sancho began a long struggle between the cork and his thumb, turning his back on Father Quixote for fear of shooting him with the cork. Father Quixote took the opportunity to roam around the room. He said, "What a good idea. They provide a foot-bath."
"What do you mean, a foot-bath? This damned cork won't come out."
"I see a little book of Marx on your bed. May I borrow it to read before I sleep?"
"Of course. It's The Communist Manifesto I recommended to you. Much easier to read than Das Kapital. I don't think they mean us to drink the champagne. The damned cork won't come out. They'll charge for it just the same."