The power and the glory Read Online Free PDF Page A

Cerra, S.J., writes: "None of us who were there will ever forget that day..." ' "

One of the little girls licked her lips secretively. This was life.

" 'The curtain rose on Juan wearing his mother's best bathrobe, a charcoal moustache, and a crown made from a tin biscuit-box. Even the good old bishop smiled when Juan strode to the front of the little home-made stage and began to declaim...' "

The boy strangled a yawn against the whitewashed wall. He said wearily: "Is he really a saint?"

"He will be one day soon, when the Holy Father pleases."

"And are they all like that?"

"Who?"

"The martyrs."

"Yes. All."

"Even Padre José?"

"Don't mention him," the mother said. "How dare you? That despicable man. A traitor to God."

"He told me he was more of a martyr than the rest."

"I've told you many times not to speak to him. My dear child, oh, my dear child..."

"And the other one-the one who came to see us?"

"No, he is not-exactly-like Juan."

"Is he despicable?"

"No, no. Not despicable."

The smallest girl said suddenly: "He smelt funny."

The mother went on reading: "'Did any premonition touch young Juan that night that he, too, in a few short years, would be numbered among the martyrs? We cannot say, but Father Miguel Cerra tells how that evening Juan spent longer than usual upon his knees, and when his class-mates teased him a little, as boys will..."

The voice went on and on, mild and deliberate, inflexibly gentle: the small girls listened intently, framing in their minds little pious sentences with which to surprise their parents, and the boy yawned against the whitewash. Everything has an end.

Presently the mother went in to her husband. She said: "I am so worried about the boy."

"Why not about the girls? There is worry everywhere."

"They are two little saints already. But the boy-he asks such questions-about that whisky priest. I wish we had never had him in the house."

"They would have caught him if we hadn't, and then he would have been one of your martyrs. They would write a book about him and you would read it to the children."

"That man-never."

"Well, after all," her husband said, "he carries on. I don't believe all that they write in these books. We are all human." "You know what I heard today? About a poor woman who took him her son to be baptized. She wanted him called Pedro-but he was so drunk that he took no notice at all and baptized the boy Carlota. Carlota."

"Well, it's a good saint's name."

"There are times," the mother said, "when I lose all patience with you. And now the boy has been talking to Padre José."

"This is a small town," her husband said. "And there is no use pretending. We have been abandoned here. We must get along as best we can. As for the Church-the Church is Padre José and the whisky priest-I don't know of any other. If we don't like the Church, well, we must leave it."

He watched her with patience. He had more education than his wife: he could use a typewriter and knew the elements of book-keeping: once he had been to Mexico City: he could read a map. He knew the extent of their abandonment--the ten hours down-river to the port, the forty-two hours in the Gulf of Vera Cruz-that was one way out. To the north the swamps and rivers petering out against the mountains which divided them from the next state. And on the other side no roads-only mule-tracks and an occasional unreliable plane: Indian villages and the huts of herds: two hundred miles away the Pacific.

She said: "I would rather die."

"Oh," he said, "of course. That goes without saying. But we have to go on living."

The old man sat on a packing-case in the little dry patio. He was very fat and short of breath: he panted a little as if after great exertion in the heat. Once he had been something of an astronomer and now he tried to pick out the constellations, staring up into the night sky. He wore only a shirt and trousers: his feet were bare, but there remained something unmistakably clerical in his manner.