Oh, they missed him, of course. It was just luck that he didn't catch the boat.
What happened to him?
They found his mule. The Governor says he must have him this month. Before the rains come.
[18] Where was his parish?
Concepcion and the villages round. But he left there years ago.
Is anything known?
He can pass as a gringo. He spent six years at some American seminary. I don't know what else. He was born in Carmen-the son of a storekeeper. Not that that helps.
They all look alike to me, the lieutenant said. Something you could almost have called horror moved him when he looked at the white muslin dresses-he remembered the smell of incense in the churches of his boyhood, the candles and the laciness and the self-esteem, the immense demands made from the altar steps by men who didn't know the meaning of sacrifice. The old peasants knelt there before the holy images with their arms held out in the attitude of the cross: tired by the long day's labour in the plantations, they squeezed out a further mortification. And the priest came round with the collecting-bag taking their centavos, abusing them for their small comforting sins, and sacrificing nothing at all in return-except a little sexual indulgence. And that was easy, the lieutenant thought. He himself felt no need of women. He said: We will catch him. It is only a question of time.
My tooth, the chief wailed again. He said: It poisons the whole of life. Today my biggest break was twenty-five.
You will have to change your dentist.
They are all the same.
The lieutenant took the photograph and pinned it on the wall. James Calver, bank robber and homicide, stared in harsh profile towards the first communion party. He is a man at any rate, the lieutenant said, with approval.
Who?
The gringo.
The chief said: You heard what he did in Houston. Got away with ten thousand dollars. Two C-men were shot.
G-men.
It's an honour-in a way-to deal with such people. He slapped furiously out at a mosquito.
A man like that, the lieutenant said, does no real harm. A few men dead. We all have to die. The money-somebody has to spend it. We do more good when we catch one of [19] these. He had the dignity of an idea, standing in the little whitewashed room in his polished boots and his venom. There was something disinterested in his ambition: a kind of virtue in his desire to catch the sleek respected guest of the first communion party.
The chief said mournfully: He must be devilishly cunning if he's been going on for years.
Anybody could do it, the lieutenant said. We haven't really troubled about them-unless they put themselves in our hands. Why, I could guarantee to fetch this man in, inside a month if …
If what?
If I had the power.
It's easy to talk, the chief said. What would you do?
This is a small state. Mountains on the north, the sea on the south. I'd beat it as you beat a street, house by house.
Oh, it sounds easy, the chief wailed indistinctly with his handkerchief against his mouth.
The lieutenant said suddenly: I will tell you what I'd do. I would take a man from every village in the state as a hostage. If the villagers didn't report the man when he came, the hostages would be shot-and then we'd take more.
A lot of them would die, of course.
Wouldn't it be worth it? the lieutenant said with a kind of exultation. To be rid of those people for ever.
You know, the chief said, you've got something there.
The lieutenant walked home through the shuttered town. All his life had lain here: the Syndicate of Workers and Peasants had once been a school. He had helped to wipe out that unhappy memory. The whole town was changed: the cement playground up the hill near the cemetery where iron swings stood like gallows in the moony darkness was the site of the cathedral. The new children would have new memories: nothing would ever be as it was. There was something of a priest in his intent observant walk- a theologian going back over the errors of the past to destroy them again.
He reached his own lodging. The houses were all one-storied, whitewashed, built round small patios, with a well and a few flowers. The windows on the street were barred. Inside [20] the lieutenant's room there was a bed made of old packing-cases with a straw mat laid on top, a cushion and a sheet. There was a picture of the President on the wall, a calendar, and on the tiled floor a table and a rocking-chair. In the light of a candle it looked as comfortless as a prison or a monastic cell.
The lieutenant sat down upon his bed and began to take off his boots. It was the hour of prayer. Black beetles exploded against the walls like crackers. More than a dozen crawled over the tiles with injured wings. It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy-a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.
He lay down in his shirt and breeches on the bed and blew out the candle. Heat stood in the room like an enemy. But he believed against the evidence of his senses in the cold empty ether spaces. A radio was playing somewhere: music from Mexico City, or perhaps even from London or New York, filtered into this obscure neglected state. It seemed to him like a weakness: this was his own land, and he would have walled it in with steel if he could, until he had eradicated from it everything which reminded him of how it had once appeared to a miserable child. He wanted to destroy everything: to be alone without any memories at all. Life began five years ago.
The lieutenant lay on his back with his eyes open while the beetles detonated on the ceiling. He remembered the priest the Red Shirts had shot against the wall of the cemetery up the hill, another little fat man with popping eyes. He was a monsignor, and he thought that would protect him: he had a sort of contempt for the lower clergy, and right up to the last he was explaining his rank. Only at the very end had he remembered his prayers. He knelt down and they had given him time for a short act of contrition. The lieutenant had watched: he wasn't t directly concerned. Altogether they had shot about five priests -two or three had escaped, the bishop was safely in Mexico City, and one man had conformed to the Governor's law that all priests must marry. He lived now near the river with his house-keeper. That, of course, was the best solution of all, to [21] leave the living witness to the weakness of their faith. It showed the deception they had practised all these years. For if they really believed in heaven or hell, they wouldn't mind a little pain now, in return for what immensities. … The lieutenant, lying on his hard bed, in the damp hot dark, felt no sympathy at all with the weakness of the flesh.
In the back room of the Academia Comercial a woman was reading to her family. Two small girls of six and ten sat on the edge of their bed, and a boy of fourteen leant against the wall with an expression of intense weariness.
'Young Juan,' the mother read, 'from his earliest years was noted for his humility and piety. Other boys might be rough and revengeful; young Juan followed the precept of Our Lord and turned the other cheek. One day his father thought that he had told a lie and beat him: later he learnt that his son had told the truth, and he apologized to Juan. But Juan said to him: Dear father, just as Our Father in heaven has the right to chastise when he pleases ... '
The boy rubbed his face impatiently against the whitewash and the mild voice droned on. The two little girls sat with beady intense eyes, drinking in the sweet piety.
'We must not think that young Juan did not laugh and play like other children, though there were times when he would creep away with a holy picture-book to his father's cow-house from the circle of his merry play-mates.'