Father Quixote had always been inquisitive in small ways. His greatest temptation in the confessional box was to ask unnecessary and even irrelevant questions. Now he couldn't resist opening a little square envelope which was lying on Sancho's bedside table -- it made him think of his childhood and the tiny letters his mother would sometimes leave for him to read before sleep.
There was an explosion, the cork cracked against the wall, and a fountain of champagne missed the glass. Sancho swore and turned. "What on earth are you doing, father?"
Father Quixote was blowing up a sausage-shaped balloon. He squeezed the end with his fingers. "How do you keep the air in?" he asked. "Surely there should be some sort of nozzle?" He began to blow again and the balloon exploded, less loudly though rather more sharply than the champagne bottle. "Oh dear, I'm so sorry, Sancho, I didn't mean to break your balloon. Was it a gift for a child?"
"No, father, it was a gift for the girl who brought the champagne. Don't worry. I've got several more." He added with a kind of anger, "Have you never seen a contraceptive before? No, I suppose you haven't."
"I don't understand. A contraceptive? But what can you do with a thing that size?"
"It wouldn't have been that size if you hadn't blown it up."
Father Quixote sank down on Sancho's bed. He asked, "Where have you brought me, Sancho?"
"To a house that I knew as a student. It's wonderful how these places survive. They are far more stable than dictatorships and war doesn't touch them -- even civil war."
"You should never have brought me here. A priest. . ."
"Don't worry. You won't be bothered in any way. I've explained things to the lady of the house. She understands."
"But why, Sancho, why?"
"I thought it was a good thing to avoid a hotel ficha for at least tonight. Those civil guards. . ."
"So we are hiding in a brothel?"
"Yes. You could put it that way."
A most unexpected sound came from the bed. It was the sound of strangled laughter.
Sancho said, "I don't believe I've ever heard you laugh before, father. What's so funny?"
"I'm sorry. It's really very wrong of me to laugh. But I just thought: What would the bishop say if he knew? A monsignor in a brothel. Well, why not? Christ mixed with publicans and sinners. All the same, I think I had better go upstairs and lock my door. But be prudent, dear Sancho, be prudent."
"That's what they're for -- those things you call balloons. For prudence. I suppose Father Heribert Jone would say that I am adding onanism to fornication."
"Please don't tell me, Sancho, don't ever tell me, about such things. They are private, they belong only to you, unless, of course, you wanted to confess."
"What penance would you give me, father, if I came to you in the morning?"
"It's odd, isn't it, but I have had very little practice in dealing with that kind of thing in El Toboso? I am afraid perhaps, that people are afraid to tell me of anything serious because they meet me every day in the street. You know -- of course you don't know -- I don't like the taste of tomatoes at all. But suppose Father Heribert Jone had written that it was a mortal sin to eat tomatoes and the old lady who lives next door to me came to me in the church to confess she had eaten a tomato. What penance would I give her? As I don't eat tomatoes myself I wouldn't even be able to imagine how deep her depravity might be. Of course a rule would have been broken. . . a rule. . . one can't avoid knowing that."
"You are avoiding my question, father, what penance. . .?"
"Perhaps one Our Father and one Hail Mary."
"Only one?"
"One, said properly, must surely be the equal of a hundred run off without thought. I don't see the point of numbers. We aren't in business as shopkeepers." He lifted himself heavily from the bed.
"Where are you going, father?"
"Off to read myself to sleep with prophet Marx. I wish I could say goodnight to you, Sancho, but I doubt whether yours will be what I would call a good night."
VIII
HOW MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE HAD
A CURIOUS ENCOUNTER IN
VALLADOLID
Sancho, there was no doubting it, was in a very morose mood. He showed himself unwilling to make any suggestion as to which road they should take out of Salamanca. It was as though he had been soured by the long night that he had spent in the house of his youth. How dangerous it always is to try to recapture in middle age a scene from one's youth, and perhaps he resented also the unusually high spirits shown by Father Quixote. For want of a more cogent reason for going anywhere Father Quixote suggested they take the road to Valladolid in order to see the house where the great biographer Cervantes had completed the life of his forebear. "Unless," he hesitated, "you think we may possibly encounter more windmills on that route?"
"They have more important things to think about than us."
"What?"
"Haven't you read the paper today? A general has been shot in Madrid."
"Who by?"
"In the old days they would have blamed it on the Communists. Thank God, now it's always the Basques and ETA."
"God rest his soul," Father Quixote said.
"You don't need to pity a general."
"I don't pity him. I never pity the dead. I envy them."
Sancho's mood remained. He spoke out only once during the next twenty kilometres and then it was to attack Father Quixote. "Why don't you speak up and say what you think?"
"Think about what?"
"Last night, of course."
"Oh, I'll tell you about last night when we have lunch. I was very pleased with the Marx you lent me. He was a really good man at heart, wasn't he? I was quite surprised by some of the things he wrote. No dull economics."
"I'm not talking about Marx. I'm talking about me."
"You? I hope you slept well?"
"You know perfectly well that I wasn't sleeping."
"My dear Sancho, don't tell me you lay awake all night long?"
"Not all night long, of course. But far too much of it. You know well enough what I was up to."
"I don't know anything."
"I told you clearly enough. Before you went to bed."
"Ah but, Sancho, I'm trained to forget what I'm told."
"It wasn't in the confessional."
"No, but it's very much easier if one is a priest to treat anything one is told as a confession. I never repeat what anybody tells me -- even to myself if possible."
Sancho grunted and fell silent. Father Quixote thought that he detected a sense of disappointment in his companion and felt a little guilty.
In a restaurant called the Valencia, off the Plaza Mayor, sitting in a little patio behind the bar and drinking a glass of white wine, he felt his high spirits begin to return. He had enjoyed the visit they had first paid to the house of Cervantes which had cost them fifty pesetas each (he wondered whether he might have enjoyed a free entry if he had given his name at the desk). Some of the furniture had actually belonged to the biographer; a letter in his own hand addressed to the King dealing with the tax on oil was hung on the white lime-washed wall which he could well imagine splashed with blood on that terrible night when the bleeding body of Don Caspar de Ezpeleta had been carried inside and Cervantes had been arrested on the false suspicion of having been an accomplice in his murder. "Of course he was let out on bail," Father Quixote told Sancho, "but think of going on with the Life of my ancestor under the weight of that threat. I sometimes wonder whether he had that night in mind when he wrote of how your ancestor, after he became governor of the island, ordered a youth to sleep a night in gaol and the youth replied, "You haven't enough power to make me sleep in prison." Perhaps those were the very words that the old man Cervantes used to the magistrate. "Suppose you order me to prison and put me in chains and shut me in a cell, all the same if I don't wish to sleep, you haven't the power to make me."