Monsignor Quixote Read online

  They killed one bottle of wine while they waited and a second with their meal, but when the Mayor suggested that they complete the Holy Trinity, Father Quixote refused. He said he was tired, the siesta had done him no good, but these were excuses – it was really his dream that weighed on him. He longed to communicate it, though Sancho would never understand the distress it had caused him. If only he had been at home . . . and yet what difference would that have made? Teresa would have said, ‘It was only a dream, father,’ and Father Herrera . . . It was an odd thing, but he knew that he could never communicate with Father Herrera on anything which touched the religion they were supposed to share. Father Herrera was in favour of the new Mass, and one evening at the end of a rather silent dinner Father Quixote had been unwise enough to tell him how at the end of Mass he had the habit of silently speaking the words of St John’s Gospel which had been removed from the Liturgy.

  ‘Ah, poetry,’ Father Herrera had replied with a note of disapproval.

  ‘You don’t like St John?’

  ‘The Gospel which goes by his name is not one of my favourites. I prefer St Matthew.’

  Father Quixote had found himself in a reckless mood that evening and he felt sure that an account of their conversation would be sent next day to the bishop. Alas! Too late. A monsignor can only be demoted by the Pope himself. He had answered, ‘I have always thought that the Gospel of St Matthew could be distinguished from the others as the Gospel of fear.’

  ‘Why? What an extraordinary idea, monsignor.’

  ‘In St Matthew there are fifteen references to Hell.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘To govern by fear . . . surely God can leave that to Stalin or Hitler. I believe in the virtue of courage. I don’t believe in the virtue of cowardice.’

  ‘A child has to be educated through discipline. And we are all children, monsignor.’

  ‘I don’t think a loving parent would educate by fear.’

  ‘I hope this is not what you teach your parishioners.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t teach them. They teach me.’

  ‘Hell is not the monopoly of St Matthew, monsignor. Do you feel the same about the other Gospels?’

  ‘There’s quite a big difference.’ Father Quixote hesitated, for he realized that now he was really on dangerous ground.

  ‘What difference?’ Perhaps Father Herrera was hoping for a truly heretical reply which could be reported – of course by the proper channels – to Rome.

  Father Quixote told Father Herrera what he had told the Mayor. ‘In St Mark there are only two references to Hell. (Of course, he had his own speciality – he was the Apostle of pity.) In St Luke three references – he is the great storyteller. From him come most of the great parables. And St John – they say now that it’s the oldest Gospel of all – older than St Mark . . . It’s very strange.’ He hesitated.

  ‘Well, what about St John?’

  ‘There’s not one reference to Hell in his Gospel.’

  ‘But surely, monsignor, you are not questioning the existence of Hell?’

  ‘I believe from obedience, but not with the heart.’

  Like a full stop it was the end of the conversation.

  Father Quixote put on the brake in their dark and dreary street.

  ‘The sooner we leave here the better,’ the Mayor said. ‘To think that we could have slept comfortably at the Palace.’

  A door opened as they passed up the stairs and the candlelight from an inner room showed the suspicious and scared face of the old woman.

  ‘Why on earth does she look so frightened?’ the Mayor asked.

  ‘Perhaps our fear is catching,’ Father Quixote said. As quickly as possible he slipped underneath the sheets half-undressed, but the Mayor took his time. He was more careful in folding his trousers and his jacket than Father Quixote, but he kept on his shirt and his underpants as though he too was prepared for some emergency.

  ‘What on earth do you have in your pocket?’ he asked, shifting Father Quixote’s jacket.

  ‘Oh, that’s Jone on Moral Theology. I put it in my pocket at the last moment.’

  ‘What a book to bring on a holiday!’

  ‘Well, I saw you had put in the car a book of Lenin’s essays and something by Marx.’

  ‘I thought I would lend them to you for your instruction.’

  ‘Well, I’ll lend you Jone, if you like, for yours.’

  ‘It might at least send me to sleep,’ the Mayor said and extracted the small green book from Father Quixote’s pocket.

  Father Quixote lay on his back and listened to his companion turning the pages. Once the Mayor gave a yap of laughter. Father Quixote could remember nothing funny in Jone, but then it was forty years since he had read his Moral Theology. Sleep continued to escape him, while the terrible dream of his siesta stayed with him like a cheap tune in the head.

  He had dreamt that Christ had been saved from the Cross by the legion of angels to which on an earlier occasion the Devil had told Him that He could appeal. So there was no final agony, no heavy stone which had to be rolled away, no discovery of an empty tomb. Father Quixote stood there watching on Golgotha as Christ stepped down from the Cross triumphant and acclaimed. The Roman soldiers, even the Centurion, knelt in His honour, and the people of Jerusalem poured up the hill to worship Him. The disciples clustered happily around. His mother smiled through her tears of joy. There was no ambiguity, no room for doubt and no room for faith at all. The whole world knew with certainty that Christ was the Son of God.

  It was only a dream, of course it was only a dream, but none the less Father Quixote had felt on waking the chill of despair felt by a man who realizes suddenly that he has taken up a profession which is of use to no one, who must continue to live in a kind of Saharan desert without doubt or faith, where everyone is certain that the same belief is true. He had found himself whispering, ‘God save me from such a belief.’ Then he heard the Mayor turn restlessly on the bed beside him, and he added without thought, ‘Save him too from belief,’ and only then he fell asleep again.

  3

  The old woman was waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs. There was a crack in the wood on the bottom step and Father Quixote stumbled and nearly fell. The old woman crossed herself and began to gabble at him, waving a piece of paper.

  ‘What does she want?’ the Mayor asked.

  ‘Our name and address and where we’ve come from and where we are going.’

  ‘That’s not a hotel ficha. It’s just a piece of paper out of a notebook.’

  The gabble continued, rising in tone and threatening to become a scream.

  ‘I can’t understand a word,’ the Mayor said.

  ‘You don’t have the practice of listening which I have in the confessional. She says she’s been in trouble before now with the police for not having a record of her guests. Communists they were, she says, and they were wanted men.’

  ‘Why didn’t she make us do it when we arrived?’

  ‘She thought we wouldn’t take the room and then she forgot. Lend me a pen. It’s not worth a fuss.’

  ‘One guest is enough. Especially when he’s a priest. And don’t forget to put in “Monsignor”.’

  ‘Where shall I say we are going?’

  ‘Write Barcelona.’

  ‘You never said anything about Barcelona.’

  ‘Who knows? We might go there. Your ancestor did. Anyway, I have never believed in confiding anything to the police.’

  Father Quixote reluctantly obeyed. Would Father Jone have taken this for a lie? He remembered that Father Jone had divided lies rather oddly into malicious, officious and jocose lies. This lie wasn’t malicious, and it certainly wasn’t jocose. Officious lies are told for one’s own or another’s advantage. He saw no advantage to anyone in a mis-statement. Perhaps it wasn’t a lie at all. It was even possible that their wanderings might one day take them to Barcelona.

  V

  HOW MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE

 
AND SANCHO VISIT A HOLY SITE

  1

  ‘You want to go north?’ Father Quixote asked. ‘I thought perhaps we might at least take a little turn in the direction of Barcelona.’

  ‘I am guiding you,’ the Mayor said, ‘to such a holy site that I feel sure you will want to say your prayers there. Follow the road towards Salamanca until I tell you when to turn off.’

  Something in the way he spoke gave Father Quixote cause for uneasiness. He fell silent and his dream came back to him. He said, ‘Sancho, do you really believe that one day all the world will be Communist?’

  ‘I believe that, yes. I shan’t see the day, of course.’

  ‘The victory of the proletariat will be complete?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All the world will be like Russia?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. Russia is not yet Communist. It has only advanced along the road to Communism further than other countries.’ He put a friendly hand against Father Quixote’s mouth. ‘Don’t you, a Catholic, start talking to me about human rights and I promise that I won’t talk to you about the Inquisition. If Spain had been entirely Catholic, of course, there would have been no Inquisition – but the Church had to defend herself against enemies. In a war there is always injustice. Men will always have to choose a lesser evil and the lesser evil may mean the state, the prison camp, yes, if you like to say it, the psychiatric hospital. The state or the Church is on the defensive, but when we arrive at Communism, the state will wither away. Just as, if your Church had been successful in making a Catholic world, the Holy Office would have withered away.’

  ‘Suppose Communism arrives and you are still alive.’

  ‘That’s an impossibility.’

  ‘Well, imagine you had a great-great-grandson of the same character as yours and he lived to see the end of the state. No injustice, no inequality – how would he spend his life, Sancho?’

  ‘Working for the common good.’

  ‘You certainly have faith, Sancho, great faith in the future. But he would have no faith. The future would be there before his eyes. Can a man live without faith?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean – without faith. There will always be things for a man to do. The discovery of new energy. And disease – there will always be disease to fight.’

  ‘Are you sure? Medicine is making great strides. I feel sorry for your great-great-grandson, Sancho. It seems to me that he may have nothing to hope for except death.’

  The Mayor smiled. ‘Perhaps we shall even conquer death with transplants.’

  ‘God forbid,’ Father Quixote said. ‘Then he would be living in a desert without end. No doubt. No faith. I would prefer him to have what we call a happy death.’

  ‘What do you mean by a happy death?’

  ‘I mean the hope of something further.’

  ‘The beatific vision and all that nonsense? Believing in some life eternal?’

  ‘No. Not necessarily believing. We can’t always believe. Just having faith. Like you have, Sancho. Oh, Sancho, Sancho, it’s an awful thing not to have doubts. Suppose all Marx wrote was proved to be absolute truth and Lenin’s works too.’

  ‘I’d be glad, of course.’

  ‘I wonder.’

  They drove for a while in silence. Suddenly Sancho gave the same yapping laugh that Father Quixote had heard in the night.

  ‘What is it, Sancho?’

  ‘Last night before I slept I was reading your Jone and his Moral Theology. I had forgotten that onanism contained such a rich variety of sins. I had thought of it as just another word for masturbation.’

  ‘A very common mistake. But you should have known better, Sancho. You told me you studied at Salamanca.’

  ‘Yes. And I remembered last night how we all used to laugh when we came to onanism.’

  ‘I had forgotten Jone was so funny.’

  ‘Let me remind you of his remarks on coitus interruptus. That is one of the forms of onanism according to Jone, but in his view it is not a sin if done on account of some unforeseen necessity, for example (it’s Jone’s own example) the arrival of a third person on the scene. Well, one of my fellow students, Diego, knew a very rich and pious stockbroker. His name comes back to me – Márquez. He had a big estate across the river from Salamanca, not far from where the Vincentians have their monastery. I wonder if he is still alive. Well, if he is, birth control will no longer be a problem – he must be over eighty. But certainly it was a terrible problem to him in those days, for he was a great stickler for the rules of the Church. It was lucky for him that the Church had altered the rules about usury, for there’s a lot of usury in stockbroking. It’s funny, isn’t it, but the Church can alter its mind about what concerns money much more easily than it can about what concerns sex?’

  ‘You have your unalterable dogmas too.’

  ‘Yes. But with us the dogmas which are the most impossible to alter are just those that deal with money. We don’t worry about coitus interruptus, only about the means of production – I don’t mean sexually. Please, at the next turning, take the road to the left. Now do you see ahead the high rocky hill with a great cross on top? That’s where we are going.’

  ‘Then it is a holy site. I thought you were making fun of me.’

  ‘No, no, monsignor. I am too fond of you for that. What was I talking about? Oh, I remember. Señor Márquez and his terrible problem. He had five children. He really felt he had done his duty to the Church, but his wife was terribly fecund and he enjoyed sex. He could have taken a mistress, but I don’t think Jone would allow birth control even in adultery. What you call natural birth control and what I call unnatural had consistently failed him. Perhaps the thermometers in Spain have been falsified under clerical influence. Well, my friend Diego mentioned to him – I’m afraid in a frivolous moment – that coitus interruptus was permissible according to the rule of Jone. By the way what sort of priest was Jone?’

  ‘He was a German. I don’t think he was a secular; they are most of them too busy to be moral theologians.’

  ‘Márquez listened to Diego, and the next time Diego went to his house he found that a butler had been installed. This surprised him, for Márquez was a mean man who did little entertaining apart from an occasional father from the Vincentian monastery, and two maid servants, a nurse and a cook were quite enough for the household. After dinner Márquez invited Diego to his study for a glass of brandy, and this surprised Diego too. “I have to thank you,” Márquez told him, “for you have made my life much easier for me. I have been reading Father Jone with great care. I admit that I didn’t quite trust what you told me, but I have obtained a copy in Spanish from the Vincentians, and there it certainly is with the imprimatur of the Archbishop of Madrid and Nihil Obstat from the Censor Deputatus – the arrival of a third person does make a coitus interruptus permissible.”

  ‘“How does that help you?” Diego asked.

  ‘“You see I have hired a butler, and I have trained him very carefully. When a bell in my bedroom rings twice in the pantry he takes up position outside the bedroom door and waits. I try not to keep him waiting too long, but with advancing age I’m afraid that I sometimes keep him there for a quarter of an hour or more before the next signal – a prolonged peal of the bell in the passage itself. That is when I feel unable to contain myself much longer. The butler opens the door immediately and at this arrival of a third person I withdraw at once from the body of my wife. You can’t think how Jone has simplified life for me. Now I don’t have to go to confession more than once in three months for very venial little matters.”’

  ‘You are mocking me,’ Father Quixote said.

  ‘Not a bit of it. I find Jone a much more interesting and amusing writer than I did when I was a student. Unfortunately in this particular case there was a snag and Diego was unkind enough to point it out. “You read Jone carelessly,” Diego told Márquez. “Jone qualified the arrival of a third person by classing it as ‘an unforeseen necessity’. I’m afraid in your case
the butler’s arrival has been only too well foreseen.” Poor Márquez was shattered. Oh, you can’t beat those moral theologians. They get the better of you every time with their quibbles. It’s better not to listen to them at all. I would like for your sake to clear your shelves of all those old books. Remember what the Canon said to your noble ancestor. “Nor is it reasonable for a man like yourself, possessed of your understanding, your reputation and your talents, to accept all the extravagant absurdities in these ridiculous books of chivalry as really true.”’

  The Mayor stopped speaking and glanced sideways at Father Quixote. He said, ‘Your face has certainly something in common with that of your ancestor. If I am Sancho you are surely the Monsignor of the Sorrowful Countenance.’

  ‘You can mock me as much as you like, Sancho. What makes me sad is when you mock my books, for they mean more to me than myself. They are all the faith I have and all the hope.’

  ‘In return for Father Jone I will lend you Father Lenin. Perhaps he will give you hope too.’

  ‘Hope in this world perhaps, but I have a greater hunger – and not for myself alone. For you, Sancho, and all our world. I know I’m a poor priest errant, travelling God knows where. I know that there are absurdities in some of my books as there were in the books of chivalry my ancestor collected. That didn’t mean that all chivalry was absurd. Whatever absurdities you can dig out of my books I still have faith . . .’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘In a historic fact. That Christ died on the Cross and rose again.’

  ‘The greatest absurdity of all.’

  ‘It’s an absurd world or we wouldn’t be here together.’

  They had reached the height of the Guadarrama, a hard climb for Rocinante, and now they descended towards a valley under a high sombre hill which was surmounted by the huge heavy cross which must have been nearly a hundred and fifty metres high: they could see ahead of them a park full of cars – rich Cadillacs and little Seats. The Seat owners had put up folding tables by their cars for a picnic.