The Power and the Glory

“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 forever.”

“You know," the chief said, "you've got something there.”

He stood with his hand on his holster and watched the brown intent patient eyes: it was for these he was fighting. He would eliminate from their childhood everything which had made him miserable, all that was poor, superstitious, and corrupt. They deserved nothing less than the truth-a vacant universe and a cooling world, the right to be happy in any way they chose. He was quite prepared to make a massacre for their sakes-first the Church and then the foreigner and then the politician-even his own chief would one day have to go. He wanted to begin the world again with them, in a desert.

“You had no money for your fine?” […]

“No.”

“How will you live?”

“Some work perhaps...”

“You are getting too old for work.” He put his hand suddenly in his pocket and pulled out a five-peso piece. “There,” he said. “Get out of here, and don't let me see your face again. Mind that.”

The priest held the coin in his fist-the price of a Mass. He said with astonishment: “You're a good man.”

The brandy was musty on the tongue with his own corruption. God might forgive cowardice and passion, but was it possible to forgive the habit of piety? He remembered the woman in the prison and how impossible it had been to shake her complacency: it seemed to him that he was another of the same kind. He drank the brandy down like damnation: men like the half-caste could be saved: salvation could strike like lightning at the evil heart, but the habit of piety excluded everything but the evening prayer and the Guild meeting and the feel of humble lips on your gloved hand.

He could hear the half-caste panting after him: his wind was bad: they had probably let him have far too much beer in the capital, and the priest thought, with an odd touch of contemptuous affection, of how much had happened to them both since that first encounter in a village of which he didn't even know the name: the half-caste lying there in the hot noonday rocking his hammock with one naked yellow toe. If he had been asleep at that moment, this wouldn't have happened. It was really shocking bad luck for the poor devil that he was to be burdened with a sin of such magnitude.

The lieutenant rode for a little while in silence: they came to the cemetery, full of chipped angels, and passed the great portico with its black letters: Silencio. He said: “All right. You can have him.” He wouldn't look at the cemetery as they went by-there was the wall where the prisoners were shot. The road went steeply down-hill towards the river: on the right, where the cathedral had been, the iron swings stood empty in the hot afternoon. There was a sense of desolation everywhere, more of it than in the mountains because a lot of life had once existed here. The lieutenant thought: No pulse, no breath, no heart-beat, but it's still life-we've only got to find a name for it. A small boy watched them pass: he called out to the lieutenant: “Lieutenant, have you got him?” and the lieutenant dimly remembered the face—one day in the plaza—a broken bottle, and he tried to smile back, an odd sour grimace, without triumph or hope. One had to begin again with that.

“If you would let me come in,” the man said with an odd frightened smile, and suddenly lowering his voice he said to the boy: “I am a priest."

“You?” the boy exclaimed.

“Yes,” he said gently. “My name is Father—” But the boy had already swung the door open and put his lips to his hand before the other could give himself a name.