He held the half-caste firmly in the saddle and walked on-his feet were bleeding, but they would soon harden. An odd stillness dropped over the forest, and welled up in mist from the ground. The night had been noisy, but now all was quiet. It was like an armistice with the guns silent on either side: you could imagine the whole world listening to what they had never heard before-peace.
A voice said: You are the priest, aren't you?
Yes. It was as if they had climbed out of their opposing trenches and met in No Man's Land among the wire to fraternize. He remembered stories of the European war how during the last years men had sometimes met-on an impulse-between the lines. Are you a German? they might have said, with incredulity at the similar face, or: Are you English?
Yes, he said again, and the mule plodded on. Sometimes, instructing children in the old days, he had been asked by some black lozenge-eyed Indian child: What is God like? and he would answer facilely with references to the father and the mother, or perhaps more ambitiously he would include brother and sister and try to give some idea of all loves and relationships combined in an immense and yet personal passion. ... But at the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery-that we were made in God's image-God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex. He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God's image had thought out: and God's image shook now, up and down on the mule's back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip; and [95] God's image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats. It must sometimes be a comfort to a soldier that the atrocities on either side were equaclass="underline" nobody was ever alone. He said: Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so hot? and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God's image.
The man didn't answer, as the mule's backbone slid him first to one side, then the other.
It isn't more than two leagues now, the priest said encouragingly-he had to make up his mind. He carried around with him a dearer picture of Carmen than of any other village or town in the state; the long slope of grass which led up from the river to the cemetery on a tiny hill of perhaps twenty feet where his parents were buried. The wall of the burial-ground had fallen in: one or two crosses had been smashed by enthusiasts: an angel had lost one of its stone wings, and what gravestones were left undamaged leant at an acute angle in the long marshy grass. One image of the Mother of God had lost ears and arms and stood like a pagan Venus over the grave of some rich, forgotten timber merchant. It was odd-this fury to deface, because, of course, you could never deface enough. If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures-you had to kill yourself among the graves.
He said: Are you strong enough to hold on? He took away his hand. The path divided-one way led to Carmen, the other west. He pushed the mule on, down the Carmen path, flogging at its haunches. He said: You'll be there in two hours, and stood watching the mule go on towards his home with the informer humped over the pommel.
The half-caste tried to sit upright. Where are you going?
You'll be my witness, the priest said. I haven't been in Carmen. But if you mention me-they'll give you food.
Why ... why ...? The half-caste tried to wrench round the mules head, but he hadn't enough strength: it just went on. The priest called out: Remember. I haven't been in Carmen. But where else now could he go? The conviction came to him that there was only one place in the whole state where there was no danger of an innocent man's being taken as a hostage-but he couldn't go there in these clothes. … The half-caste [96] held hard onto the pommel and swivelled his yellow eyes beseechingly: You wouldn't leave me here-alone. But it was more than the half-caste he was leaving behind on the forest track: the mule stood sideways like a barrier, nodding a stupid head, between him and the place where he had been born. He felt like a man without a passport who is turned away from every harbour.
The half-caste was calling after him: Call yourself a Christian. He had somehow managed to get himself upright. He began to shout abuse-a meaningless series of indecent words which petered out in the forest like the weak blows of a hammer. He whispered: If I see you again, you can't blame me. … Of course, he had every reason to be angry: he had lost seven hundred pesos. He shrieked hopelessly: I don't forget a face.
Chapter Two
THE YOUNG men and women walked round and round the plaza in the hot electric night: the men one way, the girls another, never speaking to each other. In the northern sky the lightning flapped. It was like a religious ceremony which had lost all meaning, but at which they still wore their best clothes. Sometimes a group of older women would join in the procession-with a little more excitement and laughter, as if they retained some memory of how things used to go before all the books were lost. A man with a gun on his hip watched from the Treasury steps, and a small withered soldier sat by the prison door with a gun between his knees, and the shadows of the palms pointed at him like a zariba of sabres. Lights were burning in a dentist's window, shining on the swivel chair and the red plush cushions and the glass for rinsing on its little stand and the child's chest-of-drawers full of fittings. Behind the wire-netted windows of the private houses grandmothers swung back and forth in rocking-chairs, among the family [97] photographs-nothing to do, nothing to say, with too many clothes on, sweating a little. This was the capital city of a state.
The man in the shabby drill suit watched it all from a bench. A squad of armed police went by to their quarters, walking out of step, carrying their rifles anyhow. The plaza was lit at each corner by dusters of three globes joined by ugly trailing overhead wires, and a beggar worked his way from seat to seat without success.
He sat down next the man in drill and started a long explanation. There was something confidential, and at the same time threatening in his manner. On every side the streets ran down towards the river and the port and the marshy plain. He said that he had a wife and so many children and that during the last few weeks they had eaten so little-he broke off and fingered the cloth of the other's drill suit. And how much, he said, did this cost?
You'd be surprised how little.
Suddenly as a clock struck nine-thirty all the lights went out. The beggar said: It's enough to make a man desperate. He looked this way and that as the parade drifted away down-hill. The man in drill got up, and the other got up too, tagging after him towards the edge of the plaza: his flat bare feet went slap, slap on the pavement. He said: A few pesos wouldn't make any difference to you. ...
Ah, if you knew what a difference they would make.
The beggar was put out. He said: A man like me sometimes feels that he would do anything for a few pesos. Now that the lights were out all over town, they stood intimately in the shadow. He said: Can you blame me?
No, no. It would be the last thing I would do.
Everything he said seemed to feed the beggar's irritation. Sometimes, the beggar said, I feel as if I could kill …
That, of course, would be very wrong.