The pious woman was whispering to him: she must have somehow edged her way nearer: she was saying: Father, will you hear my confession?
My dear child, here! It's quite impossible. Where would be the secrecy?
It's been so long ...
Say an act of contrition for your sins. You must trust God, my dear, to make allowances ...
I wouldn't mind suffering …
Well, you are here.
That's nothing. In the morning my sister will have raised the money for my fine.
Somewhere against the far wall pleasure began again: it was unmistakable: the movements, the breathlessness, and then the cry. The pious woman said aloud with fury: Why won't they stop it? The brutes, the animals!
What's the good of your saying an act of contrition now in this state of mind?
But the ugliness ...
Don't believe that. It's dangerous. Because suddenly we discover that our sins have so much beauty.
Beauty, she said with disgust. Here. In this cell. With strangers all round.
Such a lot of beauty. Saints talk about the beauty of suffering. Well, we are not saints, you and I. Suffering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding and pain. That is beautiful in that corner-to them. It needs a lot of learning to see things with a saint's eye: a saint gets a subtle taste for beauty and can look down on poor ignorant palates like theirs. But we can't afford to.
It's a mortal sin.
[123] We don't know. It may be. But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know-from experience-how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and ...
Again the cry came, an expression of intolerable pleasure. The woman said: Stop them. It's a scandal. He felt fingers on his knee, grasping, digging. He said: We're all fellow prisoners. I want drink at this moment more than anything, more than God. That's a sin too.
Now, the woman said, I can see you're a bad priest. I wouldn't believe it before. I do now. You sympathize with these animals. If your bishop heard you ...
Ah, he's a very long way off.
He thought of the old man now-in the capitaclass="underline" living in one of those ugly comfortable pious houses, full of images and holy pictures, saying Mass on Sundays at one of the cathedral altars.
When I get out of here, I shall write ...
He couldn't help laughing: she had no sense of change at all. He said: If he gets the letter he'll be interested-to hear I'm alive. But again he became serious. It was more difficult to feel pity for her than for the half-caste who a week ago had tagged him through the forest; but her case might be worse. He had so much excuse-poverty and fever and innumerable humiliations. He said: Try not to be angry. Pray for me instead.
The sooner you are dead the better.
He couldn't see her in the darkness, but there were plenty of faces he could remember from the old days which fitted the voice. When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity ... that was a quality God's image carried with it ... when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination. He began again to feel an enormous responsibility for this pious woman. You and Padre José, she said. It's people like you who make people mock-at real religion. She had, after all, as many excuses as the half-caste. He saw the kind of salon in [124] which she spent her days, with the rocking-chair and the family photographs, meeting no one. He said gently: You are not married, are you?
Why do you want to know?
And you never had a vocation?
They wouldn't believe it, she said bitterly.
He thought: Poor woman, she's had nothing, nothing at all. If only one could find the right word ... he leant hopelessly back, moving carefully so as not to wake the old man. But the right words never came to him. He was more out of touch with her kind than he had ever been: he would have known what to say to her in the old days, feeling no pity at all, speaking with half a mind a platitude or two. Now he felt useless: he was a criminal and ought only to talk to criminals: he had done wrong again, trying to break down her complacency. He might just as well have let her go on thinking him a martyr.
His eyes closed and immediately he began to dream. He was being pursued: he stood outside a door banging on it, begging for admission, but nobody answered-there was a word, a password, which would save him, but he had forgotten it. He tried desperately at random-cheese and child, California, excellency, milk, Vera Cruz. His feet had gone to sleep and he knelt outside the door. Then he knew why he wanted to get in: he wasn't being pursued after alclass="underline" that was a mistake. His child lay beside him bleeding to death and this was a doctor's s house. He banged on the door and shouted: Even if I can't think of the right word, haven't you a heart? The child was dying and looked up at him with middle-aged complacent wisdom. She said: You animal, and he woke again crying. He couldn't have slept for more than a few seconds because the woman was still talking about the vocation the nuns had refused to recognize. He said: That made you suffer, didn't it? To suffer like that-perhaps it was better than being a nun and happy, and immediately after he had spoken he thought: A silly remark, what does it mean? Why can't I find something to say to her which she could remember? He gave up the effort: this place was very like the world elsewhere: people snatched at causes of pleasure and pride in cramped and disagreeable surroundings: there was no time to do anything worth doing, and always one dreamed of escape ...
[125] He didn't sleep again: he was striking yet another bargain with God. This time, if he escaped from the prison, he would escape altogether. He would go north, over the border. His escape was so improbable that, if it happened, it couldn't be anything else but a sign-an indication that he was doing more harm by his example than good by his occasional confessions. The old man moved against his shoulder and the night just stayed around them. The darkness was always the same and there were no clocks-there was nothing to indicate time passing. The only punctuation of the night was the sound of urination.
Suddenly, he realized that he could see a face, and then another: he had begun to forget that it would ever be another day, just as one forgets that one will ever die. It comes suddenly on one in a screeching brake or a whistle in the air, the knowledge that time moves and comes to an end. All the voices slowly became faces-there were no surprises: the confessional teaches you to recognize the shape of a voice-the loose lip or the weak chin and the false candour of the too straightforward eyes. He saw the pious woman a few feet away-uneasily dreaming with her prim mouth open, showing strong teeth like tombs: the old man: the boaster in the corner, and his woman asleep untidily across his knees. Now that the day was at last here, he was the only one awake, except for a small Indian boy who squatted cross-legged near the door with an expression of interested happiness, as if he had never known such friendly company. Over the courtyard the whitewash became visible upon the opposite wall. He began formally to pay his farewell to the world: he couldn't put any heart into it. His corruption was less evident to his sense than his death. One bullet, he thought, is almost certain to go directly through the heart-a squad must contain one accurate marksman. Life would go out in a fraction of a second (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory-or for ever. For some reason he thought of a man he had once shrived who was on the point of death with cancer-his relatives had had [126] to mule their faces, the smell of the rotting interior was so appalling. He wasn't a saint. Nothing in life was as ugly as death.