What on earth, father! the woman exclaimed.
It's a game children play. I know. He said to the child: Have you any friends?
The child suddenly laughed again knowingly. The seven-year-old body was like a dwarf's: it disguised an ugly maturity.
Get out of here, the woman said. Get out before I teach you ...
She made a last impudent and malicious gesture and was gone-perhaps for ever as far as he was concerned. To those you love you do not always say good-bye beside a deathbed, in an atmosphere of leisure and incense. He said: I wonder what we can teach ... He thought of his own death and her life going on: it might be his hell to watch her rejoining him gradually through the debasing years, sharing his weakness like tuberculosis. ... He lay back on the bed and turned his head away from the draining light: he appeared to be sleeping, but he was wide awake. The woman busied herself with small jobs, and as the sun went down the mosquitoes came out, flashing through the air to their mark unerringly, like sailors' knives. Shall I put up a net, father?
No. It doesn't matter. He had had more fevers in the last [64] ten years than he could count: he had ceased to bother: they came and went and made no difference-they were part of his environment.
Presently she left the hut and he could hear her voice gossiping outside. He was astonished and a bit relieved by her resilience: once for five minutes seven years ago they had been lovers-if you could give that name to a relationship in which she had never used his baptismal name: to her it was just an incident, a scratch which heals completely in the healthy flesh: she was even proud of having been the priest's woman. He alone carried a wound, as if a whole world had ended.
It was dark outside: no sign yet of the dawn. Perhaps two dozen people sat on the earth floor of the largest hut while he preached to them. He couldn't see them with any distinctness: the candles on the packing-case smoked steadily upwards-the door was shut and there was no current of air. He was talking about heaven, standing between them and the candles in the ragged peon trousers and the torn shirt. They grunted and moved restlessly: he knew they were longing for the Mass to be over: they had awakened him very early, because there were rumours of police. …
He said: One of the fathers has told us that joy always depends on pain. Pain is part of joy. We are hungry and then think how we enjoy our food at last. We are thirsty ... He stopped suddenly, with his eyes glancing away into the shadows, expecting the cruel laugh that never came. He said: We deny ourselves so that we can enjoy. You have heard of rich men in the north who eat salted foods, so that they can be thirsty-for what they call the cocktail. Before the marriage, too, there is the long betrothal. … Again he stopped. He felt his own unworthiness like a weight at the back of the tongue. There was a smell of hot wax from where a candle drooped in the immense nocturnal heat: people shifted on the hard floor in the shadows. The smell of unwashed human beings warred with the wax. He cried out stubbornly in a voice of authority: That is why I tell you that heaven is here: this is a part of heaven just as pain is a part of pleasure. He said: Pray that you will suffer more and more and more. Never get tired of [65] suffering. The police watching you, the soldiers gathering taxes, the beating you always get from the jefe because you are too poor to pay, smallpox and fever, hunger ... that is all part of heaven-the preparation. Perhaps without them-who can tell?-you wouldn't enjoy heaven so much. Heaven would not be complete. And heaven. What is heaven? Literary phrases from what seemed now to be another life altogether-the strict quiet life of the seminary-became confused on his tongue: the names of precious stones: Jerusalem the golden. But these people had never seen gold.
He went rather stumblingly on: Heaven is where there is no jefe, no unjust laws, no taxes, no soldiers, and no hunger. Your children do not die in heaven. The door of the hut opened and a man slipped in. There was whispering out of range of the candlelight You will never be afraid there-or unsafe. There are no Red Shirts. Nobody grows old. The crops never fail. Oh, it is easy to say all the things that there will not be in heaven: what is there is God. That is more difficult. Our words are made to describe what we know with our senses. We say 'light,' but we are thinking only of the sun, 'love' ... It was not easy to concentrate: the police were not far away. That man had probably brought news. That means perhaps a child ... The door opened again: he could see another day drawn across like a grey slate outside. A voice whispered urgently to him: Father.
Yes?
The police are on the way: they are only a mile off, coming through the forest.
This was what he was used to: the words not striking home, the hurried close, the expectation of pain coming between him and his faith. He said stubbornly: Above all remember this-heaven is here. Were they on horseback or on foot? If they were on foot, he had twenty minutes left to finish Mass and hide. Here now, at this minute, your fear and my fear are part of heaven, where there will be no fear any more for ever. He turned his back on them and began very quickly to recite the Credo. There was a time when he had approached the Canon of the Mass with actual physical dread-the first time he had consumed the body and blood of God in a state of mortal sin: but [66] then life bred its excuses-it hadn't after a while seemed to matter very much, whether he was damned or not, so long as these others ...
He kissed the top of the packing-case and turned to bless ... in the inadequate light he could just see two men kneeling with their arms stretched out in the shape of a cross-they would keep that position until the consecration was over, one more mortification squeezed out of their harsh and painful lives. He felt humbled by the pain ordinary men bore voluntarily; his pain was forced on him. O Lord, I have loved the beauty of Thy house ... The candles smoked and the people shifted on their knees-an absurd happiness bobbed up in him again before anxiety returned: it was as if he had been permitted to look in from the outside at the population of heaven. Heaven must contain just such scared and dutiful and hunger-lined faces. For a matter of seconds he felt an immense satisfaction that he could talk of suffering to them now without hypocrisy-it is hard for the sleek and well-fed priest to praise poverty. He began the prayer for the living: the long list of the Apostles and Martyrs fell like footsteps-Comelii, Cypriani, Laurentii, Chrysologi-soon the police would reach the clearing where his mule had sat down under him and he had washed in the pool. The Latin words ran into each other on his hasty tongue: he could feel impatience all round him. He began the Consecration of the Host (he had finished the wafers long ago-it was a piece of bread from Maria 's oven); impatience abruptly died away: everything in time became a routine but this- Who the day before He suffered took Bread into His holy and venerable hands ... Whoever moved outside on the forest path, there was no movement here- Hoc est enfim Corpus Meum. He could hear the sigh of breaths released: God was here in the body for the first time in six years. When he raised the Host he could imagine the faces lifted like famished dogs'. He began the Consecration of the Wine-in a chipped cup. That was one more surrender-for two years he had carried a chalice round with him: once it would have cost him his life-if the police officer who opened his case had not been a Catholic. It may very well have cost the officer his life, if anybody had discovered the evasion-he didn't know: you went round making God knew [67] what martyrs-in Concepcion or elsewhere-when you yourself were without grace enough to die.
The Consecration was in silence: no bell rang. He knelt by the packing-case exhausted, without a prayer. Somebody opened the door: a voice whispered urgently: They're here. They couldn't have come on foot then, he thought vaguely. Somewhere in the absolute stillness of the dawn-it couldn't have been more than a quarter of a mile away-a horse whinnied.