The priest is strongly opposed to such an attitude: not only because of church policy, but also out of deep personal conviction. It’s his duty, he says, and the duty of all the fortunate, to do something to improve the lot of the dispossessed. They have to be saved from destitution in order to develop a sense of dignity and decency, which will serve as a basis on which to build the other virtues. His defense of this position is implacable; he’s not trying to impress his interlocutors, but he does, or at least reduces them to silence. Far from being a flight or a distraction from charity, his house is a monument to that queen and crown of divine virtues. It is designed to make charity perfect. In a way, it’s a practical, active monument, a silent, efficient machine for producing charity.
But these theoretical reflections become less frequent as the work of filling the house intensifies. As the pieces of furniture arrive, they occupy a provisional place before being shifted to another; their arrangements keep altering in a game of trial and error that resembles the evolution of species. The interior landscape is gradually stabilized. When the curtains are hung, it is as if light were being installed as well, in the form of weightless receptacles of air. Now the work continues into the night, with the hanging of chandeliers, the placement of candlesticks and lamps, the dance of the shadows renewing and transforming the beauties of the day.
The priest feels that the voyage to the center is accelerating when the household items, which he refers to humorously as the “party decorations,” begin to arrive in crates and containers, piling up like new pharaonic pyramids. Vases, tablecloths, paintings, tableware, ornaments. The systematic provision of wide variety continues. China and crystal alternate with rustic crockery, silver cutlery with dark bronze. There is a suitable cup or glass on a shelf somewhere for every conceivable hot or cold drink; there is a vase, Ming or other, to show every kind of flower to its best effect. Ostentation is, of course, to be avoided. But that’s tricky, because concealing it only magnifies the effect. The money spent so far, though it comes to a very large sum, is a trifle compared to what is yet to be spent on works of art: paintings by old masters, hung in elegant isolation, given places of honor, or almost hidden, as if the visitor were being invited to search them out; watercolors in certain bedrooms, delicate representations of plants, or seascapes, or mountains, or little household scenes from days gone by; old engravings; and the silent presence of sculptures, half hidden behind armchairs, illuminating a corner or setting off a view through open doors. The folding panels of the decorative screens, their movement stilled, burst with flowers, stags, or flying bodhisattvas.
The aesthetic aspect is no more than that: an aspect. And there are others to attend to: mattresses, bedclothes, heaters, cleaning equipment, supplies for the kitchens and the bathrooms. When the priest takes possession of a consignment of Brazilian soap, and runs his fingers along the edge of a cake, appreciating its verdant Amazonian smoothness, he feels that he is very close to that center where life is happening already. And he comes even closer when he puts bouquets of fresh flowers in the vases, and food in the pantry. . And closer still, or so he feels, when he begins to fill the library shelves. He doesn’t want his successor to subtract, for the purchase of books, so much as a peso from the funds to be used in fulfilling his sacred duty to assist the poor, so he buys enough reading material to last a lifetime. Choosing isn’t difficult: classics, encyclopedias, novels, poetry, history, science. Arranging the thousands of volumes, he loses himself in daydreams about the future reader, and as he anticipates his tastes, his interests, his progression from one book to another, his reactions to this or that novel, to a line from a favorite poet or a philosopher’s argument, he forms a clearer picture of the man for whom he is working, and feels that he can see him already, wearing the halo of sanctity prepared by his predecessor, adored by his parishioners upon whom he showers gifts of the purest, most abundant charity, keeping nothing back for himself (because all his needs have been met).
But the future has not arrived, not by a long way. Well before the completion of the house, the priest began work on its surroundings, which are at least as important, in his eyes, as the edifice itself. The planting of the gardens, under the supervision of expert landscape architects, began at the same time as the digging of the foundations. And now that the house is furnished and ready, he turns his attention to the outside. From the splendid curved staircases at the rear of the building, a formal French garden will stretch away for two hundred yards: carefully clipped pyramidal box plants, paths of fragrant herbs, flower beds, little round-topped trees alternating with statues, and, in the middle of the central roundabout, an imposing fountain with a profusion of crisscrossing jets and a large group of sculpted figures visible through the spray and the rainbows. Two long arbors open their arches like wings, giving onto the grounds proper, with their hectares of lawn, copses of exotic trees, bamboo thickets, flower-lined paths that wind among knolls made from earth dug up for the artificial lake, rocks transported from faraway places to create picturesque crags, and densely wooded tracts with undergrowth. Birds gladden these wild corners, and the priest populates the lake with carp, pike, and silvery trout.
Busy with these open-air tasks, he finds that he has more time, not because there is less work, but because the time of the plant kingdom, to which he attunes himself, is bountiful. Daylong walks on the thousand paths of the grounds compensate him now for the reclusion he imposed on himself while attending to the needs of the house. He stops here and there to admire a flower or a mushroom, to hear the trilling of a bird or meditate on the example of the laborious ant. And he is delighted to catch glimpses of the dream palace he has built, displaying its various aspects when seen from different angles, or modestly veiled and revealed by foliage.
But walkers naturally tend to range farther afield, and one day he reaches the outer edges of the grounds and continues until he comes to the houses (so to speak) of his parishioners. He is horrified by what he sees. He has been isolated for a long time, absorbed in his work, and although he has kept these poor people in mind as an objective or a mission, their concrete reality has become hazy. Now, with a shudder of surprise, he realizes that time has been passing for the poor as well, with devastating effects. Suspicious gazes, as dark as the shadows they inhabit, emerge from the black holes of the huts, along with the stench of human and animal cohabitation. Women aged by deprivation, physical abuse, and constant childbearing run away to hide their ragged clothing and their bare feet, gnarled by cold. Naked children with bulging bellies and fearful wide-open eyes watch him pass. The old (which, here, means people over forty) display the signs of their decrepitude: paralysis, blindness, dementia of various kinds. Sickness reigns, and those it doesn’t kill are not strengthened by the ordeal, quite the contrary. Full of shame, the men avoid his gaze. Groans of suffering, tubercular coughs, and wails of mourning are the only music in these places of affliction. It seems to him that the conditions have worsened abysmally, although an exact comparison is impossible because so much time has passed since his last assessment and he has been so preoccupied with other problems in the meantime that his memories are rather confused. Reasonably, he reflects that, however it is measured, poverty is always poverty.
The shock caused by this vision, in contrast with the recent experience of seeing his work (the house) visibly there in a concrete, realized form, if not completely finished, makes him stop and think. It’s true that for the price of just one of the expensive pieces of furniture in the house, one of the Bokhara rugs, a single painting or statue, even a single fork crafted by a Florentine silversmith, a whole neighborhood of decent little dwellings could be built, with sewage and heating. In his heart of hearts, he knows that he is doing the right thing, but he wonders if in the eyes of the world he might appear to be egotistical. . Egotistical, him? Everything he’s done has been for someone else. His bowels writhe at the thought of that monstrous accusation. And an evil or mischievous inner spirit tempts him to even greater self-mortification, for fear that, of all people, his successor, the beneficiary of all his efforts, might reprove him on precisely those grounds. . And yet, in the depths of the anxiety provoked by this speculation, he finds the way out: he has never intended to explain himself, for example by leaving a message for his successor; the true nature of his work is not to be disclosed; all its merit shall remain a secret between himself and God. What does imperfect human justice matter? But he backs away from these thoughts, not wanting to fall into the trap of sanctimonious pride or the temptation of martyrdom.