“I don’t know what the time is. I have no watch. Some time around eight I suppose. Perez will send in the Para’s then. What happens afterward, God knows.”
“God again! You can’t get away from the bloody word, can you? Perhaps I’ll go and listen awhile after all. It won’t do any harm. It’ll please him. I mean the priest. And there’s nothing else to do. If you’ll help me.”
He put his arm around Doctor Plarr’s shoulder. He weighed surprisingly light for his bulk-like a body filled only with air. He’s an old man, Doctor Plarr thought, he wouldn’t have had long to live anyway, and he remembered the night he had met him first, when he and Humphries lugged him protesting across the road to the Bolivar. He had weighed a lot heavier then. They made only two steps toward the door and then Charley Fortnum stopped dead in his tracks. “I can’t make it,” he said. “Why should I anyway? I wouldn’t want to curry favor at the last moment. Take me back to the whisky. That’s my sacrament.”
Doctor Plarr returned to the other room. He took up his stand near Aquino who sat on the ground, watching the motions of the priest with a look of suspicion. It was as though he feared that Father Rivas was laying some trap, planning a betrayal, as he moved to and fro by the table and made the secret signals with his hands. All Aquino’s poems were of death, Doctor Plarr remembered. He wasn’t going to be robbed of it now.
Father Rivas was reading the Gospel. He read it in Latin not in Spanish, and Doctor Plarr had long forgotten the little Latin he had once known. He kept his eye on Aquino while the voice ran rapidly on in the dead tongue. Perhaps they thought he was praying with his eyes lowered and a kind of prayer did enter his mind-or at least a wish, heavy with self-distrust, that if the moment came he would have the skill and determination to act quickly. If I had been with them over the border, he wondered, what would I have done when my father called for help in the police-station yard? Would I have gone back to him or escaped as they did?
Father Rivas reached the Canon of the Mass and the consecration of the bread. Marta was watching her man with an expression of pride. The priest lifted up the mate gourd and spoke the only phrases of the Mass which Doctor Plarr had for some reason never forgotten. “As often as you do these things you shall do them in memory of Me.” How many acts in a lifetime had he done in memory of something forgotten or almost forgotten?
The priest lowered the gourd. He knelt and rose quickly. He seemed to be whipping the Mass to its conclusion with impatience. He was like a herdsman driving his cattle toward the byre before a storm burst, but he had started home too late. The loudspeaker blared its message in the voice of Colonel Perez. “You have exactly one hour left to send the Consul out to us and save your lives.” Doctor Plarr saw Aquino’s left hand tighten on his gun. The voice went on, “I repeat you have one hour left. Send the Consul out and save your lives.”
“… who takes away the sins of the world, grant them eternal rest.”
Father Rivas began “Domine, non sum dignus.” Marta’s was the only voice which joined his. Doctor Plarr looked around seeking Pablo. The Negro knelt with bowed head by the back wall. Would it be possible, he wondered, before the Mass ended, while they were distracted by the ceremony, to seize Aquino’s gun and hold them up for long enough to enable Charley Fortnum to escape? I’d be saving all their lives, he thought, not only Charley’s. He looked back toward Aquino, and as though Aquino knew what was in his mind he shook his head.
Father Rivas took the kitchen cloth and began to clean the gourd, as punctiliously as though he were back in the parish church at Asunción.
“Ite missa est.”
The voice on the loudspeaker answered like a liturgical response, “You have fifty minutes left.”
“Father,” Pablo said. “The Mass is over. Better surrender now. Or let us vote again.”
“My vote is the same,” Aquino said.
“You are a priest, Father, you cannot kill,” Marta said.
Father Rivas held out the dishcloth. “Go into the yard and burn this. It will not be needed again.”
“It would be a mortal sin for you to kill him now, Father. After the Mass.”
“It is a mortal sin for anyone at any time. The best I can do is to ask for God’s mercy like anyone else.”
“Was that what you were doing up at the altar?” Doctor Plarr asked. He felt wearied out by all the arguments, by the slowness with which the short time left them dragged by.
“I was praying I would not have to kill him.”
“Posting a letter,” Doctor Plarr said. “I thought you didn’t believe in any reply to letters like that.”
“Perhaps I was hoping for a coincidence.”
The loudspeaker announced: “You have forty five minutes left.”
“If they would leave us alone…” Pablo complained.
“They want to break our nerve,” Aquino said.
Father Rivas left them abruptly. He carried his revolver with him.
Charley Fortnum lay on the coffin. His eyes were open and he stared up at the mud roof. “Have you come to liquidate me, Father?” he asked.
Father Rivas had a look of shyness or perhaps shame. He moved a few steps into the room. He said, “No. No. Not that. Not yet. I thought there might be something you needed.”
“I still have some whisky left.”
“You heard their loudspeaker. They will be coming for you soon.”
“And then you will kill me?”
“Those are my orders, Seńor Fortnum.”
“I thought a priest took his orders from the Church, Father. Oh, I forgot. You don’t belong any more, do you? All the same you were saying a Mass. I’m not much of a Catholic, but I didn’t feel inclined to attend it. It’s not exactly a holiday of obligation. Not for me.”
“I remembered you at the altar, Seńor Fortnum,” Father Rivas said with awkward formality, as though he were addressing a bourgeois parishioner. The phrase came from a language which had grown rusty during the last years.
“I’d rather you forgot me, Father.”
“I shall never be allowed to do that,” Father Rivas said.
Charley Fortnum noticed with surprise that the man was close to tears. He said, “What’s the matter, Father?”
“I never believed it would come to this. You see-if it had been the American Ambassador-they would have given way. And I would have saved ten men’s lives. I never believed I would have to take a life.”
“Why did they ever choose you as a leader?”
“El Tigre thought he could trust me.”
“Well, he can, can’t he?”
“I don’t know now. I don’t know.”
Does a condemned man always have to comfort his executioner? Charley Fortnum wondered. He said, “Is there anything I can do for you, Father?”
The man looked at him with an expression of hope, like a dog who thinks he has heard the word “walk.” He shuffled a step nearer. Charley Fortnum remembered the boy at school with protuberant ears whom Mason used to bully. He said, “I am sorry…” Sorry for what? For failing to be the American Ambassador?
The man said, “I know how hard it must be for you. Lying there. Waiting. Perhaps if you could prepare yourself a little… that might take your mind off…”
“You mean confess?”
“Yes.” He explained, “In an emergency… even I…”
“But I’m no good as a penitent, Father. I haven’t confessed in thirty years. Not since my first marriage anyway-which wasn’t a marriage. You’d better look to the others.”
“I have done all I can for them.”
“After such a long time… it’s impossible… I haven’t enough belief. I would be ashamed to speak all those pious words, Father, even if I remembered them.”